parker - Slashdot User

Microsoft Should Dump Middlemen, Build Own Phones 262

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday July 28, 2010 @08:47AM from the i'll-do-it-myself dept.

suraj.sun writes "Microsoft has a long and illustrious history of operating system sales. The model has served the company well on the PC, but if it wants to make money in the phone market, it needs to start thinking like a consumer electronics company and start making its own phones."

Publishing a Commercial iPhone Game, Start To Finish 38

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 16, 2008 @02:04PM from the alger-would-be-proud dept.

Niklas Wahrman writes with this "motivational story on how a student and part-time developer was able to take an idea and turn it into an Android project and then port to iPhone for commercial release in less than a year. In the article, he focuses on how to get a game done — a problem many independent developers face. During the development of the game, Asterope, he took a lot of screenshots from many of the development stages that show how the game gradually came to life."

AT&T Slaps Family With a $19,370 Cell Phone Bill 725

Posted by timothy on Saturday September 06, 2008 @05:38PM from the hearts-and-minds dept.

theodp writes "Mama, don't let your babies send e-mail and photos from Vancouver. A Portland family racked up nearly $20,000 in charges on their AT&T bill after their son headed north to Vancouver and used a laptop with an AirCard twenty-one times to send photos and e-mails back home. The family said they wished they would have received some kind of warning before receiving their chock-full-of-international-fees 200-page bill in the mail for $19,370. Guess they didn't read the fine print in that 'Stay connected whether you are traveling across town, the US, or the world' AT&T AirCard pitch. Hey, at least it wasn't $85,000."

2008 Beijing Olympics as a Media Test-Bed 134

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday July 07, 2008 @04:45PM from the just-a-test-of-inconvenience dept.

CNN is reporting that NBC is using the 2008 Olympics in Beijing as a test-bed to understand how people are using different media platforms. "NBC has scheduled 3,600 hours of Olympics programming on its main network, along with Telemundo, USA, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNBC and Bravo. That's the equivalent of eight days of programming packed into each day. In addition, the company is planning to make 2,200 hours of streaming video available on NBCOlympics.com. Consumers may also get video on demand via their computer and Olympics content through their mobile phones."

Master Diebold Key Copied From Web Site 100

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday February 06, 2008 @01:25PM from the this-can't-be-real dept.

Harrington writes "In another stunning blow to the security and integrity of Diebold's electronic voting machines, someone has made a copy of the key which opens ALL Diebold e-voting machines from a picture on the company's own website. " Update: 02/06 17:40 GMT by Z : We previously discussed this story, early last year.

How Fast is Your Turnaround Time? 418

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tuesday November 13, 2007 @05:15PM from the never-fast-enough dept.

petrus.burdigala writes "I work for a mid-sized commercial software company (~20 Mloc) and we are frequently challenged by our supervisors to get fixes around the clock. Overall, we manage to get a 'bullet-proof' patch in about 4-5 weeks (from coding->QA->Build/Packaging->shipment), which I consider not so bad. But the other day, we got an urgent request from our support team to come up with a decent fix in 48 hours. I think they're a tiny bit unrealistic. So I wanted to get feedback from my peers: are we doing that bad? It takes months for other software vendors to issue zero-day exploit fixes, are our customers being unreasonable?"

Comment Bring Robotics to the Masses (Score 5, Interesting) 73

by parker on Thursday April 26, 2007 @01:30AM (#18880847) Attached to: Google, Intel, Microsoft Fund Robot Recipes

I contributed to TeRK while working on my MS at CMU.

The idea is to provide as simple of an interface to programming the robot as possible. You can write your own stuff directly on the hardware if you like (it's got a serial connection so it's easy to connect to). Or, you can take advantage of the layers of code and write something which runs on your PC... but still has access to things like values from the analog inputs and moving the motors -- all via 802.11. The project uses a lot of open source and the source code for all of the components is available. There is a lot of framework code written in C that runs on the Qwerk board itself, and it uses ICE to connect from the board to either a relay server or your PC. Then, for the people who don't like to program at all (or are just starting out), there is a lot of software, including a basic emulator of the board, mostly written in Java, that they can just run on Windows, Mac OS, or Linux.

During development, we took our PC app and a couple of Qwerks to a group of robotics hobbyists and they were floored by the kind of capability you can get for free with the Qwerk and all of the software that's already been written. Most of them wanted to find a way to incorporate the board into their own projects.

Anyway, the goal of the project is to have a wide appeal. I hope it can get a lot more people excited about what they can do, and all at a very low cost compared to other kits.

NASA Can't Pay for Killer Asteroid Hunt 398

Posted by Hemos on Tuesday March 06, 2007 @12:11PM from the anyone-raid-the-coffee-fund-money dept.

CGISecurity.com writes "NASA officials say the space agency is capable of finding nearly all the asteroids that might pose a devastating hit to Earth, but there isn't enough money to pay for the task so it won't get done. 'We know what to do, we just don't have the money,' said Simon 'Pete' Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center." But hey, it's just the potential end of the world, so nothing much to worry about there.

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