Authored by: SilverWave on Saturday, June 23 2012 @ 02:50 AM EDT |
Windows Phone 8 sucker punches Windows Phone
fans
Quote:
The Windows Phone 8 schism is also very bad news for
Nokia -- which is desperately trying to shift existing Lumias, having killed the
Symbian cash-cow by giving Windows Phone a bear-hug. Who's going to buy a Lumia
900 or Lumia 800 now -- knowing full well these phones are being cut off from
the platform's future? Nokia has said it will be bringing some "visual
enhancements" to Lumia owners, but you can practically hear Stephen Elop
scrabbling around for loose change to fling in their direction.--- RMS:
The 4 Freedoms
0 run the program for any purpose
1 study the source code and change it
2 make copies and distribute them
3 publish modified versions
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Authored by: SilverWave on Saturday, June 23 2012 @ 03:05 AM EDT |
Nokia's Windows Phone "bear hug" is choking the Mighty
Finn --- RMS: The 4 Freedoms
0 run the program for any purpose
1 study the source code and change it
2 make copies and distribute them
3 publish modified versions
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Authored by: SilverWave on Saturday, June 23 2012 @ 03:56 AM EDT |
Last Sunday my Samsung Galaxy Note informed me that the 4.0.3 Android update,
AKA "Ice Cream Sandwich" was available.
I had bought the Note because of its fantastic screen, but also the promise from
Samsung to upgrade to ISC asap, and I was so pleased that they had delivered so
promptly.
The update was OTA and a huge 350mb but worked flawlessly.
Fantastic! Also tip of the hat to Orange as well, well done to all involved,
well done indeed.
---
RMS: The 4 Freedoms
0 run the program for any purpose
1 study the source code and change it
2 make copies and distribute them
3 publish modified versions
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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 23 2012 @ 06:36 AM EDT |
With prejudice.
"Apple is complaining that Motorola's phones as a whole
ripped off the iPhone as a whole," Posner wrote. "But
Motorola's desire to sell products that compete with the
iPhone is a separate harm -— and a perfectly legal one -— from
any harm caused by patent infringement."
...
Posner also said that Apple had not clearly demonstrated
that Motorola phones caused a loss of consumer goodwill
significant enough for an injunction.
"To suggest that it has suffered loss of market share, brand
recognition, or customer goodwill as a result of Motorola's
alleged infringement of the patent claims still in play in
this case is wild conjecture," Posner wrote.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/technology/ct-biz-
apple-motorola-suit,0,2544954.story
Hopefully an outbreak of sanity is upon us.
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Authored by: hardmath on Saturday, June 23 2012 @ 08:40 AM EDT |
Have you noticed the Google Doodle celebrating Turing's 100th birth
anniversary?
Initially it displays a counter, i.e. a visual depiction of a Turing machine
"tape" with symbols 0,1 and blank programmed to increment. It times
out after a bit if the mouse is not moved, but you can apparently get it to
count aribtrarily high (in binary).
However geekier types will enjoy the puzzles this Doodle offers. Click on the
green arrow under the tape at left and you'll be presented with a
"target" binary value at top, initialization of the Turing machine
tape to a slightly different value, and a "visual program" underneath
of icons that loop, shift, jump conditionally, and write cells.
The yellow icons are ones that you can alter (by clicking on them) to rewrite
the program. Clicking the green arrow executes the program, and when it
terminates, the tape is checked against the target to see if you succeeded in
matching it.
Solving a sequence of such puzzles fills in color of the Google logo, and when
all six letters are filled, your solutions are replayed and it jumps to the
usual search page, in this case for Alan Turing's 100th birth anniversary.
But if you go back to the Google Doodle, the problems do not repeat: they get
more complicated!
Help me before I completely turing doodle!
---
"Prolog is an efficient programming language because it is a very stupid theorem
prover." -- Richard O'Keefe[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Gringo_ on Saturday, June 23 2012 @ 09:48 AM EDT |
Here is an
article that suggests to me something I
hadn't
considered, and hadn't seen previous speculation
on...
The steps taken by Microsoft are rumored to
suggest
that the company will soon be manufacturing its own
mobile phones, something
that seems to be certain, following
its launch of Windows Surface tablets. This
will mean
dislodging itself from reliance on partnerships with other
companies
like Espoo, Finland-based Nokia, said the Nomura
analysts.
It makes sense to speculate that Microsoft might
want the
market for the Win8 ecosystem to itself. Undoubtedly
Microsoft has
been burning with envy at the sight of the
munificent margins Apple's total
control of their product
line has given them. I never held much to the theory
that
Microsoft wants to take over Nokia. Why take on that
baggage? Nokia's
glory days are over, and Nokia is now known
for making phones for losers
suckered in to serve as
beta testers for Microsoft. The Nokia brand name is
now
forever tarnished. Now Microsoft has Win8 and they don't
want to share, so
they sucker punch Nokia and leave them to
bleed to death.
Nokia wasn't
the only company blindsided by Microsoft's
recent announcements. All their
partners were equally
snubbed, and Microsoft isn't rushing out with press
releases
trying to patch things up. It's as if they don't care, and I
would
suggest that in fact they really don't. I think they
have grandiose visions of
competing head to head with Apple,
and the only way they can do that is with
full control of
the market and the product line. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: IMANAL_TOO on Saturday, June 23 2012 @ 02:57 PM EDT |
Intel releases 2,468 pages of technical details on their latest-generation
graphics. Phoronix.c
om writes:
"These documents cover the key registers for their
hardware and other information to benefit anyone wishing to get into low-level
graphics driver programming or just wanting to better understand how Intel's
latest graphics core works"
Is this substantially different from
some other actors? nVidia, how much have they released? What kind of measures
do we measure these measures with? Pages of code? Pages of specifications?
Number of free code, open source code, GPL code?
Applications?
--- ______
IMANAL
. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Gringo_ on Saturday, June 23 2012 @ 03:11 PM EDT |
Found this
fun video that
illustrates how Microsoft shamelessly plagiarized Apple's
iPad presentation style. I think Microsoft went so far as to
hire stooges to
whoop and applaud wildly on cue during their
Surface presentation. As if Steve
Ballmer could ever have the
charisma that Steve Jobs had, or Microsoft would
ever have
the adoring fans that Apple has...
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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 23 2012 @ 03:25 PM EDT |
[Moore = Congressional staffer Stephanie Moore, the "Democrat's chief counsel on
the House Judiciary Committee"]
Think about that for a second. That
entire sentence is so incredibly insulting. Millions of people spoke out against
bad legislation. The public spoke out, and Moore is so against the basic concept
of democracy that she has to claim that millions of people expressing their
political opinion is "poisoning the well." And how in the hell is "the
reliability of the internet at risk" because Congress failed to pass a
horrifically bad piece of legislation aimed at censoring sites one industry
didn't like? Please.
The report goes on to a bunch of additional insulting
comments from Moore towards the public, including the claim that "We don't know
what the numbers mean," regarding the number of people who contacted Congress on
January 18th.
Mike Masnick, Techdirt[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 24 2012 @ 02:24 AM EDT |
tractor beams !
Abstract
We show that
light guided in a planar dielectric slab geometry incorporating a biaxial medium
has lossless modes with group and phase velocities in opposite directions.
Particles in a vacuum gap inserted into the structure experience negative
radiation pressure: the particles are pulled by light rather than pushed by
it.
This effectively one-dimensional dielectric structure represents a new
geometry for achieving negative radiation pressure in a wide range of
frequencies with minimal loss. Moreover, this geometry provides a
straightforward platform for experimentally resolving the Abrahams-Minkowski
dilemma.
Jonathan Nemirovsky, Mikael C. Rechtsman, and Mordechai
Segev, Optics InfoBase[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- Prior Art? - Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 24 2012 @ 03:26 AM EDT
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Authored by: SpaceLifeForm on Sunday, June 24 2012 @ 11:12 AM EDT |
Link
In order to deal with UEFI, Ubuntu is dropping Grub 2
and plans to use Intel's efilinux loader with some modifications to add a
relatively simple menu interface.
---
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 24 2012 @ 05:02 PM EDT |
It has been reported on local radio that a hearing will be held in the US
District Court Alexandria
"later this week" on several motions pending in this
case. I don't have PACER access so can't tell
exactly what's happening.
However, elsewhere Retired Judge Joins Fight Against
DOJ’s
‘Outrageous’ Seizures in Megaupload Case
wired.com
The FBI has been ordered to start copying 150
terabytes of data - including 10 million emails - contained on the seized
computers belonging
to internet mogul Kim Dotcom.
In her ruling
released [June 15], chief High Court judge Justice Helen Winkelmann ordered that
the copying process begin as soon as possible.
FBI
agents sent cloned copies of computers seized from Kim Dotcom and his
Megaupload colleagues offshore just days after a judge said a court needed to
decide if the
agents were allowed to take the material, a court
heard.
Dotcom's lawyer Willy Akel said the FBI agents committed an
"illegal act" when they sent the 18
cloned computers and other items to the
United States by the courier company Fedex.
NZ Herald
and also
[PROPOSED] MOTION TO CHALLENGE THE SCOPE OF
PRETRIAL RESTRAINT OF ASSETS OF DEFENDANTS MEGAUPLOAD LIMITED, KIM DOTCOM,
MATHIAS ORTMANN, BRAM VAN DER KOLK & FINN BATATO AND MEMORANDUM OF LAW IN
SUPPORT THEREOF
Case 1:12-cr-00003-LO Document 96-2 pdf 45pp.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Gringo_ on Sunday, June 24 2012 @ 06:31 PM EDT |
Are you smarter than a chimp?
Ayumu is a 7-year-old chimpanzee... Can
you beat Ayumu in
this memory
test?
Inoue and Matsuzawa from Kyoto University
used
the 'limited-hold memory task' to show that their
chimps can out-perform
college students. Watch Ayumu, then
take the test below to see if your memory
is as good as a
chimp's!
I'm afraid I was thoroughly
defeated by the chimp. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 24 2012 @ 09:33 PM EDT |
link [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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