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Feed Roundup - The Essentials

Australian sports get busy with copyright special pleading

The Register - 8 February, 2012 - 11:31
Chewing on the government's ear

Australia’s sports administrators, usually busy trying to steal each others’ audiences, have discovered the spirit of cooperation in the face of the Optus TV Now Federal Court decision.…

Categories: The Essentials

4G Phones Are Really Fast — At Draining Batteries

Slashdot - 8 February, 2012 - 11:11


Hugh Pickens writes "With Verizon's 4G network covering a good chunk of the country and AT&T gaining ground, more smartphone users have access to the fastest wireless service available. But because 4G coverage isn't truly continuous in many locations, users' batteries are taking a big hit with 4G, as phones spend an lot of battery power trying to hunt down a signal. 'You've got a situation where the phones are sending out their signals searching and searching for a 4G tower, and that eats up your battery,' says Carl Howe, a vice president for research firm Yankee Group. The spottiness of 4G stems at least in part from the measured approach carriers have taken to it, rolling out the service city by city. There are a few tricks 4G users can try to extend battery life such as turning off your 4G connection when you don't need the fastest speeds — when using email, for instance — or using a program such as JuiceDefender to search for apps you may have downloaded that you don't need to run all the time, and erase them."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: The Essentials

SGI to restructure (again) after fiscal Q2 loss

The Register - 8 February, 2012 - 09:30
Blame Europe, Xeon E5 product transitions

It is becoming more apparent why supercomputer and server maker Silicon Graphics' former president and CEO Mark Barrenechea decided to exit stage left back in December. While the company was growing gear sales, it was heading deeper into the red ink as old machines came off maintenance and new machines await their ramps this year.…

Categories: The Essentials

'App Economy' has created 466,000 US jobs

The Register - 8 February, 2012 - 09:15
Thanks to Apple, Google, Facebook...

Although Apple may be facing mounting criticism for outsourcing its manufacturing beyond US shores, creating 700,000 jobs in China and elsewhere, one tech-industry advocacy group claims that Apple, the Android ecosystem, Facebook, and lesser lights account for roughly 466,000 US jobs in what it calls the "App Economy".…

Categories: The Essentials

Ask Slashdot: Making JavaScript Tolerable For a Dyed-in-the-Wool C/C++/Java Guy?

Slashdot - 8 February, 2012 - 09:10


DocDyson writes "I'm a dyed-in-the-wool C/C++/Java developer with over 20 years of experience. I'm making a good living and having fun doing back-end Java work right now, but I strongly believe in being a generalist, so I'm finally trying to learn the HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript future of the Web. However, I find JavaScript's weak typing and dynamic nature difficult to adapt to because I'm so used to strongly-typed, compiled languages with lots of compile-time error-checking and help from the IDE. Does anyone out there who has made this transition have any tips in terms of the best tools and libraries to use to make JavaScript more palatable to us old-school developers?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: The Essentials

Laser boffins blast bits onto hard drive at 200Gb/sec

The Register - 8 February, 2012 - 08:51
Superheating drives forego magnetic write heads

A team of scientists have published a new way of using heat to store data magnetically, which could increase the speed of hard drives over a hundredfold.…

Categories: The Essentials

Should Next-Gen Game Consoles Be Upgradeable?

Slashdot - 8 February, 2012 - 08:30


MojoKid writes "Historically, console add-ons that boosted the performance of the primary unit haven't done well. Any attempt to upgrade a system's core performance risks bifurcating the user base and increases work developers must do to ensure that a game runs smoothly on both original and upgraded systems. The other reason is that a number of games rely on very specific hardware characteristics to ensure proper operation. In a PC, swapping a CPU with 256K of L2 for a chip with 512K of L2 is a non-issue assuming proper platform support. Existing software will automatically take advantage of the additional cache. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, allows programmers to lock specific cache blocks and use them for storing data from particular threads. In that case, expanding the amount of L2 cache risks breaking previous games because it changes the range of available cache addresses. The other side of the upgrade argument is that the Xbox 360 has been upgraded more effectively than any previous console; current high-end versions ship with more than 10x the storage of the original, as well as support for HDMI and integrated WiFi. It would also forestall the decline in comparative image quality between console and PC platforms."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: The Essentials

The making of a kid's app: Counting Box Pro

Boing Boing - 8 February, 2012 - 08:14


Last week, Tom Klimchak emailed me with a link to a counting box app he made for his son. He said he'd been inspired by Cory's post about Nathan's beautiful wooden cased Kid's Counting Box (above), so I asked Tom to write about how he developed the app and the things he learned while developing it. Here's his excellent essay -- Mark

Last summer I read about Nathan's Kid's Counting Box (above) on Boing Boing and MAKE at about the same time I was teaching myself how to create iPhone apps. I'd bought myself a Mac for Father's Day a few months before and I had a bunch of ideas for little apps and was trying to decide which to start when I read about the electronic counting box.


There was something completely captivating about a beautifully crafted wooden box that uses a bright electronic display for such a simple and pure purpose as adding or subtracting one number to another. That being said, I think I would have ignored the Counting Box article if not for the impressive looking craftsmanship. It would never have caught my attention if it was just an LED display in a plastic project box, but the wood surface with the rounded joints just captured my imagination.

I was one of those kids that loved to press the equal sign on the calculator over and over, watching the total slowly grow larger. My own 4-year-old son is the same way. As much as I loved the idea of making a Counting Box of my own I knew that my electronic and woodshop skills really weren't up to par for such an ambitious project.

I showed the box to my son and he said it looked "cool" and that put the gears in motion. I pieced together a simple little app in about 10 minutes that would add 1 or subtract 1 from a total and handed the iPhone to my son. He immediately grasped the concept and began hitting the green button like crazy, being fascinated whenever the leading digit changed. He was still playing and asking questions about the numbers 20 minutes later, so I figured it was something worth pursuing.

It was a neat little app, but it didn't have the same feel of wonder as a real wood Counting Box that you can hold in your hand. So I started working on the graphics. I originally tried a brushed steel background, but it looked like a weird alien calculator. I went back to the wood box theme.

Software is obviously different from tangible objects. There are limitations and advantages to each. I found that that a little turn dial doesn't work very well on a flat glass iPhone screen. Buttons work, dials don't.

Instead, I created a second window that shows the increment/decrement number and control that with arrow buttons. This also allows me to go beyond adding up single digits. Yes, it goes to 11. In fact, you can change the increment amount up to 100! If my son wants to add or subtract by 20 each time then he can. I also added a Zero button and have an option to allow negative numbers. Because it was all software it proved to be much easier (or so I imagine) than wiring up different circuits for minor function changes. When I saw my son getting bored pressing the increment buttons up to 100 I created a keystroke repeat which would kick in if he held the button down for several seconds.

I also noticed that if the red and green buttons didn't click and depress like real arcade machine buttons it seemed to throw off the experience. There was a missing tactile experience. But it isn't just all graphics. Acoustical design is just as important as seeing the buttons depress and spring back. These are things we take for granted, but every click and blip had to be designed and created by someone. I actually spent an alarming amount of time just walking around my house pressing in various buttons on appliances and paying attention to how they sounded. Now all the buttons depress and click at various and appropriate sound levels.

My wife didn't like the original wood background I'd mocked up, so I created a few different ones for her to choose from. They all looked pretty decent, so I decided to add a "design" component to the app where you could choose your background, number color and screen color of your own personal Counting Box. I tried to make all the colors and sounds as realistic as possible. I know there's a whole school of thought that says you should never create software to emulate real world devices but it seemed to add so much more warmth and interest and even familiarity to the app in the end.

I actually have some programming and scripting experience, but my last real computer science class was learning how to write Pascal on a VAX machine. Instead of trying to teach myself Objective C for the next 30 years I instead downloaded the free version of GameSalad. It doesn't require you to know a lick of code and it's great for projects like this. It probably only took me about 8 - 10 hours to create the things from start to finish (spread over 3 months!) with most of the work being play testing and graphic design.

It was an incredibly fun experience and one which our entire family shared. I'm probably going to create an iPad version soon, though I'm a little worried about the spacing of the buttons being too big for a child's hands. Software is great, but it can't change the physical size of the hardware it's run on. Maybe the Kindle Fire's small screen would lend itself to this a little better. If anyone has any other suggestions, I'd love to hear them. There's a fine line between overloading an app with features and making it easy enough for someone to use.

Counting Box Pro is 99 cents in the iTunes store

Categories: The Essentials

Three Tibetan herders burn themselves alive in protest

Boing Boing - 8 February, 2012 - 08:05
The crisis among ethnic Tibetans in Sichuan Province continues: "three livestock herders set themselves on fire to protest what they saw as political and religious repression at the hands of the Chinese authorities," reports the New York Times, bringing the total number of such self-immolations over the past year to 19, "an unprecedented wave of self-inflicted violence among the tiny ethnic minority in China."

Categories: The Essentials

Hong Kongers protest over end to all-you-can-eat tariffs

The Register - 8 February, 2012 - 08:03
SmarTone on the receiving end of user fury

Hong Kong dwellers have staged a mini-protest outside one of the stores of SmarTone against the cellco's response to new rules from the local regulator which will force all network operators to scrap unlimited data tariffs.…

Categories: The Essentials

New Yorker long-read on gay student who killed himself after his roommate webcam-spied on him

Boing Boing - 8 February, 2012 - 08:02
"That September, Tyler Clementi and Ravi were freshman roommates at Rutgers University, in a dormitory three miles from the courtroom. A few weeks into the semester, Ravi and another new student, Molly Wei, used a webcam to secretly watch Clementi in an embrace with a young man. Ravi gossiped about him on Twitter: 'I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.' Two days later, Ravi tried to set up another viewing. The day after that, Clementi committed suicide by jumping from the George Washington Bridge." From The Story of a Suicide, in the New Yorker.

Categories: The Essentials

History Repeats Itself: KDP Select Is Amazon.com's 'Payback For Playback'

Slashdot - 8 February, 2012 - 07:50


New submitter brennanw writes "Anyone who was active on mp3.com during the late 90s/early 2000's will find Amazon.com's KDP Select awfully familiar: authors who make their works exclusive to Amazon compete for a pool of money. Any time someone 'borrows' one of their books, they get a cut of a monthly sum (700K in January, 600K for February) based on how many of their books were checked out vs. how many other author's books were checked out. This is almost identical to the 'Payback for Playback' service MP3.com provided musicians a little over a decade ago. Payback for Playback effectively destroyed the original MP3.com artist community, and I don't think KDP Select is going to be much different for the self-publishing community that is growing on Amazon."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: The Essentials

"What breast cancer is, and is not"

Boing Boing - 8 February, 2012 - 07:43

[Video Link]

The Komen kerfuffle that inspired this video may soon pass from the headlines, but for people living with the disease, breast cancer—and the fight for dignity, survival, and a cure— is forever. I now count myself among them.

I watched this video many times this weekend, while recovering from the most recent round of chemotherapy. The video was created by Linda Burger, identified in various news accounts as a 56-year-old woman who lives in Las Vegas, NV.

"Linda in Las Vegas," you are my hero. Thank you.

Categories: The Essentials

Apps for Kids interview

Boing Boing - 8 February, 2012 - 07:32

Libsyn kindly featured Apps for Kids as its "Rockin' New Podcast" of the week, and interviewed me about it. Why did you start podcasting?

I started Apps for Kids because my 8-year-old daughter Jane and I like to play games on the iPhone and iPad together. We have a lot of fun checking out new apps, and then seeing if we can beat each other's high scores. My friends who have kids of their own were always asking Jane and me what apps they should download, and so I thought maybe we should share that advice to a larger audience. So we started Apps for Kids, and people seem to really like it Rockin' New libsyn Podcasts: Apps For Kids



Categories: The Essentials

The Amish Project

Boing Boing - 8 February, 2012 - 07:29

[Video Link] A young man disconnects from the "cloud" for 90 days, on a mission to reboot his connection with the world and the people he loves in it. (via Joe Sabia)

Categories: The Essentials

Higgs Signal Gains Strength

Slashdot - 8 February, 2012 - 07:26


ananyo writes "Today the two main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, submitted the results of their latest analyses. The new papers (here here and here) boost the case for December's announcement of a possible Higgs signal. Physicists working on the In the case of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay, and that allows them to boost their Higgs signal from 2.5 sigma to 3.1 sigma. Taken together with data from the other detector, ATLAS, Higgs' overall signal now unofficially stands at about 4.3 sigma."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: The Essentials

New Fedora boss pushes for the clouds

The Register - 8 February, 2012 - 07:24
Robyn Bergeron takes the reins

Red Hat has appointed former Fedora program manager Robyn Bergeron to that distro's next project leader – and she has plans to make the operating system more focused on cloud services.…

Categories: The Essentials

Koala food may power US Defence force

The Register - 8 February, 2012 - 07:15
US Navy bigwig boosting biofuel in Queensland visit

Koalas might soon face a food shortage if the US Department of Defence pursues its interest in Australian research for the creation of biofuels from local flora.…

Categories: The Essentials

Black atheist group calls for ‘Day Of Solidarity’ during Black history month

Boing Boing - 8 February, 2012 - 07:14

[Video Link]

Members of the Black skeptics organization African Americans For Humanism (AAH) are planning events on Feb. 26 in six major U.S. cities, "targeting African-Americans who have privately or openly questioned their faith." The group holds religion responsible for “many of the problems plaguing the African American community” and promotes “rational and scientific methods of inquiry” that include “positive thinking, the sharing of ideas, and enlightened self-interest.”

Categories: The Essentials
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