tigheig - Slashdot User

How the Internet Didn't Fail As Predicted 259

Posted by samzenpus on Monday March 08, 2010 @11:22AM from the series-of-popular-tubes dept.

Lord Byron Eee PC writes "Newsweek is carrying a navel-gazing piece on how wrong they were when in 1995 they published a story about how the Internet would fail. The original article states, 'Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.' The article continues to say that online shopping will never happen, that airline tickets won't be purchased over the web, and that newspapers have nothing to fear. It's an interesting look back at a time when the Internet was still a novelty and not yet a necessity."

Comment I just dropped their service (Score 5, Funny) 356

by tigheig on Monday February 15, 2010 @02:36PM (#31147482) Attached to: Comcast Shoots For New Image, Rebranding As Xfinity

... so does that make me an XCustomer?

Music By Natural Selection 164

Posted by samzenpus on Monday December 21, 2009 @02:57PM from the survival-of-the-grooviest dept.

maccallr writes "The DarwinTunes experiment needs you! Using an evolutionary algorithm and the ears of you the general public, we've been evolving a four bar loop that started out as pretty dismal primordial auditory soup and now after >27k ratings and 200 generations is sounding pretty good. Given that the only ingredients are sine waves, we're impressed. We got some coverage in the New Scientist CultureLab blog but now things have gone quiet and we'd really appreciate some Slashdotter idle time. We recently upped the maximum 'genome size' and we think that the music is already benefiting from the change."

MS To Offer Free Windows 7 Upgrade To Vista Users 417

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday February 11, 2009 @06:45PM from the you-get-what-you-pay-for dept.

crazyeyes writes "With Windows 7 set for release in Dec. 09, Microsoft is getting ready with their free upgrade program, which allows Vista users to switch to Windows 7 when it arrives. The folks at TechARP have consistently scored accurate scoops on Microsoft software releases. They have now revealed Microsoft's upgrade plans, schedules and even screenshots of the upgrade process."

A Step Toward an Invisibility Cloak 197

Posted by kdawson on Sunday January 18, 2009 @03:41PM from the can-you-see-me-now dept.

Technology Review has a writeup on the latest advance in the lab towards an invisibility cloak made of metamaterials, described this week in Science. We've been following this technology since the beginning. The breakthrough is software that lets researchers design materials that are both low-loss and wideband. "The cloak that the researchers built works with wavelengths of light ranging from about 1 to 18 gigahertz — a swath as broad as the visible spectrum. No one has yet made a cloaking device that works in the visible spectrum, and those metamaterials that have been fabricated tend to work only with narrow bands of light. But a cloak that made an object invisible to light of only one color would not be of much use. Similarly, a cloaking device can't afford to be lossy: if it lets just a little bit of light reflect off the object it's supposed to cloak, it's no longer effective. The cloak that Smith built is very low loss, successfully rerouting almost all the light that hits it."

Apple Bans iPhone App For Competing With Mail.app 464

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday September 21, 2008 @07:36AM from the forbidden-fruit dept.

recoiledsnake writes "Another submission has been rejected from the iPhone App Store, this time for 'duplicating the functionality of the iPhone Mail application.' The author claims that his application allows the user to log into their multiple web email accounts and that Apple seems to be confusing Gmail and Mail.app. This comes on the heels of Apple rejecting an application for competing with iTunes and rejecting other silly but harmless apps as being of 'limited utility.'" ComputerWorld has an update to the rejected Podcaster app mentioned above. It seems the developer has used Apple's "Ad Hoc" service to begin distributing the software despite the fact that they blocked it from the App Store.

Comment Yet another Killer (Score 5, Informative) 152

by tigheig on Saturday February 16, 2008 @09:46AM (#22445248) Attached to: Alienware Planning Android iPhone Killer?

If you read TFA you find that it's not even a rumor, it's entirely speculation based on the purchase of Alienware by Dell. It states that the argument for the Alienware phone is "overwhelming" based on the fact that the author thinks that Alienware is cool and is well known outside of us build-it-yourself PC geeks. TFA is accompanied by something labeled "First Pictures of Alienware Android Cell Phone" that is actually a GIF mockup drawn by a staff artist based on what they'd like it to look like. So now the Slashdot "killer" label is being applied to products that not only don't exist yet, but for which there's no objective evidence that anyone is even thinking about. Can we retire the "killer" now? It's become parody.

Alienware Planning Android iPhone Killer? 152

Posted by CmdrTaco on Saturday February 16, 2008 @09:20AM from the competition-means-better dept.

meteorit found a story about rumors of an Alienware phone based on Google's Android phone OS. As Dell has a history of bombing with handhelds, it would be interesting to try the Alienware brand instead. And I'm not exactly sure where they get off claiming that their drawings are the first pictures of the thing. Cheesy renderings designed explicitly for your website are not quite pictures of a product... they are artists impressions.

Intel to Sample Flash-killer PRAM This Year 78

Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday March 09, 2007 @07:27AM from the on-the-horizon dept.

Station writes "Intel's new phase-change memory technology (PRAM) will begin sampling this year. Samsung, IBM, and Hitachi are all working on phase-change memory as a successor to flash as it has a lower (~20ns) read latency than flash (50-90ns). 'Intel says they plan to ship the first PRAM modules as a straight-ahead NOR flash replacement so that they can work the kinks out of the design before trying to move it up the memory hierarchy. The company claims a much higher number of read-write cycles (100 million) than flash, as well as a potential 10 years' worth of data retention. NOR flash is typically used as program storage memory for mobile devices like cell phones, while more durable but slower NAND flash is used for mass storage in devices like the iPod nano.'"

Debian DPL Threatens to Leave SPI Over Sun Java 291

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday June 07, 2006 @02:42AM from the honeymoon-is-over dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A three-week-long flame war in debian-devel over the new Java Distribution License has culminated in Anthony Towns, the newly elected Debian Project Lead, offering to separate Debian from its legal representative, SPI. This came as a response to SPI member John Goerzen's objections to the Debian project's interaction with Sun's legal team around the new JDL license without review from SPI's lawyers."

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