MediaStreams - Slashdot User

Submission + - Nokia Announces Profit Warning (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by

jones_supa

on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @03:25PM

jones_supa writes: "Shares in the Finnish phone maker Nokia plunged by 15% on Tuesday as the company warned that it may make no profit on phone sales in the quarter to the end of June, and that overall phone sales will be "substantially below" its earlier forecast of €6.1bn to €6.6bn. Carolina Milanesi, mobile phones analyst for the research company Gartner, said Tuesday's warnings could mark the low point for Nokia, which has not made a loss in its handset division for more than a decade."

Comment Cell Is Being Used Exactly How It Was Designed For (Score 2, Interesting) 124

by MediaStreams on Tuesday October 12, 2010 @08:19AM (#33868030) Attached to: IBM's Plans For the Cell Processor

Back in the early PS2 we would talk about what a next generation PS2 would look like. Those whiteboard diagrams looked almost identical to what Sony and IBM came up with.

The parallels between the PS2/EE/GS and PS3/Cell/RSX are almost identical:

Execution starts on the EE/PPU
Heavy/parallel computation task is spawned off to the VUs/SPUs
Light control code runs in parallel on the EE/PPU
As graphical elements become read to be rasterized they are spawned off to the GS/RSX

In a well running PS2/PS3 engine all three major areas are running full speed in parallel. Split memory architecture lets each area of the machine run at full speed without interfering with the rest of the system.

Kutagari and IBM did a masterful job. It was an obvious choice to build off the model of the most sucessful console architecture in history and the one all console developers had intimate knowledge of, the 145 million selling PS2.

Submission + - Devs Bet Big on Android Over Apple's iOS (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike on Monday September 27, 2010 @04:21PM

CWmike writes: A majority of mobile app developers see Android as the smart bet over the long run even as they vote for Apple's iOS in the short term, a survey conducted jointly by Appcelerator and IDC published Monday has found. The survey,, polled more than 2,300 developers who use Appcelerator's Titanium cross-platform compiler to produce iOS and Android native apps. Of the 2,300 polled, 59% said that Android had the 'best long-term outlook,' compared with just 35% who pegged Apple's iOS with that label. But three out of four said that iOS offers the best 'near-term' outlook, with 76% tagging Apple's operating system as the best revenue opportunity. 'This is an 'ah-ha' moment for developers,' said Scoot Schwartzhoff, vice president of marketing at Appcelerator.

Journal Journal: Oh, BURN: "Slashdot Struggles to Remain Relevant in The Social Web" 9

Journal by wowbagger on Friday July 30, 2010 @07:50AM

From the New York Times: Slashdot Struggles to Remain Relevant in The Social Web

Oh, feel the BURN!

One wonders when this will hit the front page, if at all.

Submission + - More issues with the iPhone 4, Proximity Sensor (tekgoblin.com)

Submitted by tekgoblin on Monday July 05, 2010 @03:38PM

tekgoblin writes: First we had issues with the iPhone 4 and its reception related to they way it was held. Now there are many users reporting a problem with the proximity sensor on the phone during a call. I have actually had the same issues with my new iPhone 4 as well. The problem occurs during a call when the phone is up against your ear, the sensor is supposed to turn off the screen. But users are reporting that the screen is staying lit thus causing accidental input.

Submission + - Shotwell - The F-Spot Replacement For Ubuntu (techdrivein.com) 2

Submitted by

climenole

on Sunday June 13, 2010 @11:45AM

climenole writes: "Finally! The much discussed about F-Spot vs Shotwell battle is over. The new default image organizer app for Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 is going to be Shotwell. This is a much needed change and F-Spot was simply not enough. Most of the times when I tried F-Spot, it just keeps crashing on me. Shotwell on a other hand feels a lot more solid and is better integrated with GNOME desktop. Shotwell is also completely devoid of Mono."

New LLVM Debugger Subproject Already Faster Than GDB 174

Posted by timothy on Thursday June 10, 2010 @03:38PM from the pop-will-eat-itself dept.

kthreadd writes "The LLVM project is now working on a debugger called LLDB that's already faster than GDB and could be a possible alternative in the future for C, C++, and Objective-C developers. With the ongoing success of Clang and other LLVM subprojects, are the days of GNU as the mainstream free and open development toolchain passé?" LLVM stands for Low Level Virtual Machine; Wikipedia as usual has a good explanation of the parent project.

Submission + - Microsoft Accuses Google Docs of Data Infidelity

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Saturday May 15, 2010 @10:16AM

Hugh Pickens writes: "For years Google has been pitching migrations from Microsoft Office to Google Docs arguing that Docs makes Office 2003 and 2007 better because users can store Microsoft Office documents in Google's cloud and share them in their original format. Now eWeek reports that Alex Payne, director of Microsoft's online product management team, says that moving files created with Office to Google Docs results in the loss of data fidelity including the loss of such data components as charts, styles, watermarks, fonts, tracked changes, and SmartArt. "They are claiming that an organization can use both seamlessly," Payne writes. "This just isn't the case." Meanwhile Google defended its original "Docs makes Office better" in a statement noting that it has made a lot of improvements to the Web editors in Docs with its recent refresh from last month and promised that functionality will only get better as Google integrates the DocVerse assets into Docs. "It says a lot about Microsoft's approach to customer lock-in that the company touts its proprietary document formats, which only Microsoft software can render with true fidelity, as the reason to avoid using other products," says a Google spokesperson."

Submission + - Google Android Outsells Apple iPhone (nytimes.com)

Submitted by gollum123 on Monday May 10, 2010 @02:17PM

gollum123 writes: Smartphones based on Google’s Android mobile operating system have outsold Apple’s iPhone in the U.S. during the first quarter of 2010, according to a report by research firm The NPD Group. The data places Android, with 28 percent of the smartphone market, in second place behind RIM’s Blackberry smartphone market share of 36 percent. Apple now sits in third place with 21 percent. NPD points to a Verizon buy-one-get-one-free promotion for all of its smartphones as a major factor in the first quarter numbers. Verizon saw strong sales for the Motorola Droid and Droid Eris Android phones, as well as the Blackberry Curve, thanks to its promotional offer. Verizon launched a $100 million marketing campaign for the Droid when it hit the market in November 2009, which likely attributed to strong sales in the first quarter as well.

Submission + - Google Rolls Out First Flashified Chrome (conceivablytech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 04, 2010 @06:30PM

An anonymous reader writes: Take this, Apple. Google quietly released a new beta version of its Chrome browser, which not only blows its rivals out of the water as far as performance is concerned, but comes with half a dozen new features, including direct integration of Adobe Flash. First benchmarks show that the new beta is about 10% faster than the previous beta in the SunSpider and V8 benchmark, and about 30% faster than Chrome 4, which remains the fastest Javascript browser available today. Kudos to the Chrome team, the speed gains are truly amazing.

Comment 22 Million Android Phones A Year & Fastest Gro (Score 1) 664

by MediaStreams on Thursday April 15, 2010 @06:40PM (#31864940) Attached to: Apple Blocks Cartoonist From App Store

Months ago it was announced by Google that Android phones were selling at a rate of about 22 million a year already. And Android's marketshare has been doubling every quarter for the past year.

At the incredible rate Android is growing I have to imagine it is currently selling at a much higher rate than 22 million a year now.

Comment Amazing How Easy It Has Been For Microsoft (Score 2, Interesting) 215

by MediaStreams on Monday March 08, 2010 @11:13PM (#31409424) Attached to: Why Microsoft Can't Afford To Let Novell Die

When Novell sold out to Microsoft you had open source kooks falling all over each other to proclaim that they would go right on using Novell products and projects so they could brag about how 'open minded' they were to the rest of the world(who didn't give a shit one way or another).

You have to imagine the execs up in Redmond were just shaking their heads in disgust that they had disrupted the open source/Linux world with so little effort.

I don't think Microsoft is really actively wasting time with Ubuntu. They don't have to. Linux marketshare is going nowhere outside of statistical blips. They have Miguel de Icaza doing so much damage to desktop Linux adoption and application development with the Gnome/KDE split and the Mono fiasco that they surely must be entirely focused on Google and Apple(commercial companies run by grownups and staffed by competent people who put in 40+ hour a week work on the unglamorous work that goes into creating polished consumer ready software).

Google To Steal Office Web Apps' Thunder? 151

Posted by Soulskill on Monday March 08, 2010 @06:32PM from the slap-fight-underway dept.

Barence writes "Google has stepped up its assault on Microsoft's productivity software with the acquisition of a start-up company that allows Office users to edit and share their documents on the Web. The search giant has acquired DocVerse for an undisclosed sum. Product manager Jonathan Rochelle said DocVerse software makes it easier for users and businesses to move their existing PC documents to the cloud, and that Google 'fell in love with what they were doing to make that transition easier.' Microsoft said in an emailed statement that Google's acquisition of DocVerse acknowledges that customers want to use and collaborate with Office documents. 'Furthermore, it reinforces that customers are embracing Microsoft's long-stated strategy of software plus services, which combines rich client software with cloud services.'"

Quake 3 For Android 137

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday February 25, 2010 @03:53AM from the can-i-get-a-hell-yeah dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Over the last two months I ported Quake 3 to Android as a hobby project. It only took a few days to get the game working. More time was spent on tweaking the game experience. Right now the game runs at 25fps on a Motorola Milestone/Droid. 'Normally when you compile C/C++ code using the Android NDK, the compiler targets a generic ARMv5 CPU which uses software floating-point. Without any optimizations and audio Quake 3 runs at 22fps. Since Quake 3 uses a lot of floating-point calculations, I tried a better C-compiler (GCC 4.4.0 from Android GIT) which supports modern CPUs and Neon SIMD instructions. Quake 3 optimized for Cortex-A8 with Neon is about 15% faster without audio and 35% with audio compared to the generic ARMv5 build. Most likely the performance improvement compared to the ARMv5 build is not that big because the system libraries of the Milestone have been compiled with FPU support, so sin/cos/log/.. take advantage of the FPU.''

Debunking a Climate-Change Skeptic 807

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 23, 2010 @02:01AM from the so-many-notes-mister-mozart dept.

DJRumpy writes "The Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg won fame and fans by arguing that many of the alarms sounded by environmental activists and scientists — that species are going extinct at a dangerous rate, that forests are disappearing, that climate change could be catastrophic — are bogus. A big reason Lomborg was taken seriously is that both of his books, The Skeptical Environmentalist (in 2001) and Cool It (in 2007), have extensive references, giving a seemingly authoritative source for every one of his controversial assertions. So in a display of altruistic masochism that we should all be grateful for (just as we're grateful that some people are willing to be dairy farmers), author Howard Friel has checked every single citation in Cool It. The result is The Lomborg Deception, which is being published by Yale University Press next month. It reveals that Lomborg's work is 'a mirage,' writes biologist Thomas Lovejoy in the foreword. '[I]t is a house of cards. Friel has used real scholarship to reveal the flimsy nature' of Lomborg's work."

Slashdot Top Deals