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Comment 89.7% healthy battery (Score 1) 124

by ryanvanderzanden (#55997409) Attached to: Apple Will Soon Let Users Turn Off its iPhone-slowing Software
I read about this update just the other day, and I got to wondering "I wonder how aged the battery is in my 3 year old iPhone 6?" So I grabbed a copy of CoconutBattery and gave it a spin. Much to my surprise, after more than 900 charging cycles, my battery was nearly 90% of the original design capacity!

I could understand cranking up the power management to the extreme if my phone's battery was in really bad shape, or disabling certain features that won't run really well on an older device. But according to CB, my battery was surprisingly new-like all things considered. So this just leaves me feeling more certain that the slowdown was caused by more than simply my battery's health.

Comment App management UI is too 'fun' (Score 1) 285

I think the app management, specifically the act of killing off background apps, is just too enjoyable of a thing to do (swipe up to send bits to the nevermore).

The biggest problem my crazy brain finds with background apps is when I am looking to navigate between them. Every historically launched app is there 'in the way' such that I feel compelled to kill off everything but my most consistently used apps (mail, podcasts, browser, etc) so they're easily accessible.

I know that the suggested route here is to put these apps on my home screen (which I do), but I'm somewhat obsessive about keeping things clean there, and find it oddly more time consuming to close the app, hunt and peck through rows of icons than it is to double-tap, so I tend to rely on the app switching UI.

Feels like iOS should know enough to know which are my top used apps and to keep those 'in front' of the lesser used ones, in which case I may not feel so inclined to force quit everything to keep it 'clean'.

Or, split the app switching UI from the "this is where I go to kill apps in a fun and satisfying way" UI. :)
Mars

4-Billion-Pixel Panorama View From Curiosity Rover 101

Posted by samzenpus from the take-a-look dept.
A reader points out that there is a great new panorama made from shots from the Curiosity Rover. "Sweep your gaze around Gale Crater on Mars, where NASA's Curiosity rover is currently exploring, with this 4-billion-pixel panorama stitched together from 295 images. ...The entire image stretches 90,000 by 45,000 pixels and uses pictures taken by the rover's two MastCams. The best way to enjoy it is to go into fullscreen mode and slowly soak up the scenery — from the distant high edges of the crater to the enormous and looming Mount Sharp, the rover's eventual destination."
Movies

HDCP Master Key Is Legitimate; Blu-ray Is Cracked 1066

Posted by timothy from the maybe-now-I'll-want-a-player dept.
adeelarshad82 writes "Intel has confirmed that the leaked HDCP master key protecting millions of Blu-ray discs and devices that was posted to the Web this week is legitimate. The disclosure means, in effect, that all Blu-ray discs can now be unlocked and copied. HDCP (High Definition Content Protection), which was created by Intel and is administered by Digital Content Protection LLP, is the content encryption scheme that protects data, typically movies, as they pass across a DVI or an HDMI cable. According to an Intel official, the most likely scenario for a hacker would be to create a computer chip with the master key embedded it, that could be used to decode Blu-ray discs."
Crime

Burglary Ring Used Facebook Places To Find Targets 152

Posted by timothy from the my-younger-cousins-like-this-and-3-other-pages dept.
Kilrah_il writes "A burglary ring was caught in Nashua, NH due to the vigilance of an off-duty police officer. The group is credited with 50 acts of burglary, the targets chosen because they posted their absence from home on the Internet. '"Be careful of what you post on these social networking sites," said Capt. Ron Dickerson. "We know for a fact that some of these players, some of these criminals, were looking on these sites and identifying their targets through these social networking sites."' Well, I guess the prophecies came true."
Privacy

Salesforce Uses Chatter To Monitor Employees 82

Posted by timothy from the eavesdropping-on-their-own-eaves dept.
storagedude writes "At the launch of Chatter Mobile this week, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said he has been using the Facebook-like business service to monitor employee communications and identify a 'secret network' of employees who are influential in driving the business. Asked if employees felt like they were being spied on by Big Brother, Benioff replied, 'There are certain things appropriate in a business environment. We're not talking about a tea party, we're talking about how to get things fixed.' With 20,000 companies already using the three-month-old service, it is no doubt being put to similar use elsewhere. While Salesforce's use of Chatter to monitor employees appears to be legal, the issue underscores just how much social networks can be mined for information — even for things they weren't intended for."
Communications

Google Wave and the Difficulty of Radical Change 179

Posted by Soulskill from the maybe-that's-why-we-don't-have-flying-cars dept.
cedarhillbilly writes "An article by Matt Asay in the Register takes on Google Wave from the perspective of visionary change versus incremental change. He suggests that visionaries should focus on smaller transformations of our day-to-day lives rather than leapfrogging. 'Much as it may want to radically change the world for users and developers, radical change generally happens over time, through a series of incremental, unexceptional edits to existing technology and processes.' Perhaps Google sensed this when they famously said they were worried about having too many geniuses. Asay revisits the point that the open source development model necessarily builds on a community of contributors and users, and not the mad scientist in an ivory tower."
Mars

New Mars Rover Rolls For the First Time 100

Posted by Soulskill from the keep-them-doggies-rollin dept.
wooferhound writes "Like proud parents savoring their baby's very first steps, mission team members gathered in a gallery above a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to watch the Mars Curiosity rover roll for the first time. Engineers and technicians wore bunny suits while guiding Curiosity through its first steps, or more precisely, its first roll on the clean room floor. The rover moved forward and backward about 1 meter (3.3 feet). Mars Science Laboratory (aka Curiosity) is scheduled to launch in fall 2011 and land on the Red Planet in August 2012. Curiosity is the largest rover ever sent to Mars. It will carry 10 instruments that will help search an intriguing region of the Red Planet for two things: environments where life might have existed, and the capacity of those environments to preserve evidence of past life."
Iphone

An iPhone App Store That Apple Doesn't Control 144

Posted by Soulskill from the mr-jobs-tear-down-that-wall dept.
waderoush writes "Princeton's Ed Felten has criticized the iPhone and iPad as Disneyland-like 'walled gardens' and says there's no way the iTunes App Store can 'offer the scope and variety of apps that a less controlled environment can provide.' Now there's a central marketplace where developers can sell iPhone-optimized apps without going through Apple's gatekeepers. Launched today, it's called OpenAppMkt and it's a showcase for mobile Web apps — not just the type seen back in 2007-2008, before the advent of the App Store, but also for new games and other apps developed using HTML5/CSS/JavaScript (in some cases, the same apps compiled and sold as native iPhone apps). Xconomy has a behind-the-scenes interview with OpenAppMkt's creators, who say they're not out to compete with the native App Store, but that developers deserve new ways to reach users."

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