Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Cellphones

How Apple's App Review Is Sabotaging the iPhone 509

Posted by kdawson from the race-to-the-bottom dept.
snydeq writes to recommend Peter Wayner's inside look at the frustration iPhone developers face from Apple when attempting to distribute their apps through the iPhone App Store. Wayner's long piece is an extended analogy comparing Apple to the worst of Soviet-era bureaucracy. "Determined simply to dump an HTML version of his book into UIWebView and offer two versions through the App Store, Wayner endures four months of inexplicable silences, mixed messages, and almost whimsical rejections from Apple — the kind of frustration and uncertainty Wayner believes is fast transforming Apple's regulated marketplace into a hotbed of bottom-feeding mediocrity. 'Developers are afraid to risk serious development time on the platform as long as anonymous gatekeepers are able to delay projects by weeks and months with some seemingly random flick of a finger,' Wayner writes of his experience. 'It's one thing to delay a homebrew project like mine, but it's another thing to shut down a team of developers burning real cash. Apple should be worried when real programmers shrug off the rejections by saying, "It's just a hobby."'"
Censorship

Five Technologies Iran Is Using To Censor the Net 122

Posted by kdawson from the many-mice-and-one-big-cat dept.
alphadogg sends in a Network World piece on the unexpectedly effective technologies Iran is now employing to thwart their citizens' access to the Net. "While the government's initial efforts to censor the Internet were blunt and often ineffective, it has started employing more sophisticated tools to thwart dissidents' attempts to communicate with each other and the outside world. Iranian dissidents are not alone in their struggle, however, as several sympathetic hacker groups have been working to keep them online. One such group is NedaNet, whose mission is to 'help the Iranian people by setting up networks of proxy severs, anonymizers, and any other appropriate technologies that can enable them to communicate and organize.' NedaNet project coordinator Morgan Sennhauser, who has just written a paper detailing the Iranian government's latest efforts to thwart hackers (PDF), says that the government's actions have been surprisingly robust and have challenged hackers in ways that the Chinese government's efforts at censorship have not."
Businesses

Reasons To Hesitate On Zer01's Unlimited Mobile Offer 122

Posted by timothy from the past-performance-no-guarantee-but-it's-a-big-hint dept.
alphadogg writes with an excerpt from Network World that might save you some money: "Imagine downloading a two-hour HD movie in three minutes to your new cell phone, then plugging the phone into your TV to watch the film. Make unlimited phone calls, surf online as much as you like and send unlimited text messaging for $70 a month, without a contract. Sign up to sell the same service to other people and get $10 a month for each person you sell to. That's what a group of related companies including Zer01 Mobile, Buzzirk, Global Verge and Unified Technologies Group are promoting heavily online and at industry trade shows. The offer is attractive enough to garner coverage in top business and technology publications, at least one positive review from an analyst and even a 'best in show' award from a magazine at the CTIA wireless industry trade show earlier this year. Does it all sound too good to be true? If so, that's because it probably is. What little information is available about the services is technically inconsistent, and doesn't match up with public records."

Comment find the edges? but size is useful and easy? (Score 1) 291

by with a 'c' (#28723721) Attached to: Choosing Better-Quality JPEG Images With Software?
Assuming you can find similar images programmatically you can probably use size to get a good guess. Alternately I know there are algorithms to find edges. Edges are where most jpeg artifacts show up. If you could then look at the gradient from the edges smooth ones will likely be the better image.
Science

Repulsive Force Discovered In Light 176

Posted by kdawson from the push-me-pull-you dept.
Aurispector writes in with news that the Yale team that recently discovered an attractive force between two light beams in waveguides has now found a corresponding repulsive force. "'This completes the picture,' [team lead Hong] Tang said. 'We've shown that this is indeed a bipolar light force with both an attractive and repulsive component.' The attractive and repulsive light forces Tang's team discovered are separate from the force created by light's radiation pressure, which pushes against an object as light shines on it. Instead, they push out or pull in sideways from the direction the light travels. Previously, the engineers used the attractive force they discovered to move components on the silicon chip in one direction, such as pulling on a nanoscale switch to open it, but were unable to push it in the opposite direction. Using both forces means they can now have complete control and can manipulate components in both directions. 'We've demonstrated that these are tunable forces we can engineer,' Tang said."

Comment Death of the Macintosh (Score 4, Interesting) 213

by with a 'c' (#28676145) Attached to: What To Expect From Apple's Rumored MacPad

The Mac Pad has some possibility to be real simply because you would have to be blind to not see that the end of the Macintosh as a basic consumer device is coming. Anyone that went to WWDC can tell you the focus was entirely on iPhone OS.

The Macintosh will still be around as high end media creation devices and servers. Think of iPhone, Touch and potential MacPad or new consumer devices as media consumption devices. They will have basic editing ability (see iLife and iWork) but that's it. Who really needs a quad quad xenon to play MP3s and watch videos. Also look at the game market on iPhone OS. That's where the money is and that's where Apple is going.

NASA Plans To De-Orbit ISS In 2016 554

Posted by CmdrTaco from the everybody-duck dept.
NewbieV writes "The international space station is by far the largest spacecraft ever built by earthlings. Circling the Earth every 90 minutes, it often passes over North America and is visible from the ground when night has fallen but the station, up high, is still bathed in sunlight. After more than a decade of construction, it is nearing completion and finally has a full crew of six astronauts. The last components should be installed by the end of next year. And then? 'In the first quarter of 2016, we'll prep and de-orbit the spacecraft,' says NASA's space station program manager, Michael T. Suffredini."
The Internet

ISS Launches First Permanent Node of "Interplanetary Internet" 121

Posted by timothy from the wake-me-up-when-the-terminator-gets-here dept.
schliz writes "Researchers developing the 'Interplanetary Internet' have launched its first permanent node in space via a payload aboard the International Space Station. The network is based on a new communications protocol called Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN). It will be tested heavily this month, and could give astronauts direct Internet access within a year. The Interplanetary Internet is the brainchild of Vint Cerf ('father of the Internet'), among others. Last year, NASA tested the technology on the Deep Impact spacecraft." Update: 07/13 20:01 GMT by KD : If by "permanent" we mean seven years.

Slashdot Top Deals

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. -- Thomas Edison

Close