The headline on a Facebook-Intel announcement today is FB’s selection of Intel-based processors to beef up its infrastructure as the company expands. That’s good news for Intel. Facebook has become one of the most popular Web 2.0 sites/platforms on the Internet and people are starting to use it as a replacement for e-mail, photo- and […]
EDS said Thursday that shareholders have approved the HP acquisition of the IT services company. Internally, employees at EDS are concerned about layoffs.
According to a statement, 98.8 percent of EDS common stock was voted for the HP deal–that equates to 72.4 percent of the outstanding shares.
The HP purchase of EDS has been cleared by the […]
Oracle said today that it will acquire longtime partner Global Knowledge Software LLC, a provider of self-service training automation software. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.
GKS’s Personal Navigator product is resold as a component of Oracle’s User Productivity Kit, in use by more […]
Talk about anticlimactic: Billionaire investor and proxy war ninja Carl Icahn isn’t going to bother showing up to Yahoo’s shareholder meeting on Friday.
In a post, Icahn–newly muzzled courtesy of a deal he cut with Yahoo–writes:
I will not be attending. The proxy fight is over and it will not do shareholders or Yahoo! any good to […]
Forrester Research said today that it will acquire the smaller but well-recognized firm Jupiter Research for $23 million in cash, plus assumed liabilities. Jupiter, which has 82 employees and had revenues last year of about $14 million, will be wrapped into Forrester’s Marketing & Strategy Client Group. Last year, Forrester had revenues of $212 million. […]
It looks like foreign tourists are avoiding Beijing in droves. China originally expected 1.5 million visitors. Now that’s down to 450,000.
Still, that’s nearly 450,000 journalists coming to town. Everyone’s a reporter now, thanks to tiny electronics and the Web. Even tourists should regard themselves as such. And don’t think Beijing isn’t watching those who watch […]
Best Buy, Corning, Google and a bunch of other companies are dabbling in prediction markets for corporate decision making and there may even be a little return on investment given that traditional forecasting methods aren’t better.
Prediction markets are speculation hubs where traders predict future events. In the enterprise, prediction markets are a handy way to […]
It’s final. Satellite radio has been given the thumbs up to merge. That doesn’t mean that a satellite TV merger is around the corner, though. The dynamics of TV and radio are different - even though some of the tech’s competitive forces are standing on the sidelines of the satellite TV world.
Motorola posted a small profit excluding charges–a small victory, but enough to top Wall Street estimates calling for a loss of 3 cents a share. The company’s enterprise and networking business carried the quarter.
If you’re Motorola you’ll take what you can get. The company reported second quarter earnings of $4 million, or nil a share […]
Symantec’s strategy of selling security and storage together is apparently paying off as companies consolidate the number of vendors they use.
The security and storage management software company reported strong fiscal first quarter results (statement) as net income more than doubled from a year ago. Symantec reported first quarter earnings of $187 million, or 22 cents […]
Before, during, and after the introduction of the iPhone 3G, many people were hoping/asking/whining for a better camera in the iPhone. One with more than 2 megapixels, that is. Unfortunately, more megapixels wouldn’t have made the iPhone camera better. The extra pixels wouldn’t help with anything, in fact, and could even hurt under some circumstances.
Here’s why. Obviously, there are many cameras with a higher megapixel count that shoot better pictures than the iPhone. But giving the iPhone more megapixels won’t make it shoot better snapshots any more than buying an expensive car will make you rich. It’s the other way around: because these cameras have better lenses, they can get good mileage out of better image sensors. The first problem with the iPhone’s camera lens is that it can’t focus. Unless Apple has been successful in hiding the iPhone’s autofocus capability from all of us for the past year, the iPhone’s camera has a fixed lens. The iPhone’s lens must be able to produce a (reasonably) sharp image regardless of the distance between the phone and the subject, because it can’t adjust its focus. There are two ways to do this: be more liberal in what’s accepted as “sharp” and make the lens opening (aperture) smaller.
Apple managed to strike a fairly reasonable balance here: the iPhone takes pictures that are within the sharpness range expected from a 2 megapixel camera, while the aperture is a respectable f/2.8. If Apple were to use a higher resolution image sensor with the same lens, the pictures wouldn’t be any sharper—and 2MP sharpness in a 5MP camera is just not acceptable. The other option would be to reduce the size of the lens opening, but that way, the amount of light that reaches the sensor is reduced and the iPhone would have an even harder time taking decent photos under dim lighting.
The other problem is that the more megapixels that are crammed in the same size sensor, the smaller those pixels get. Since individual pixels are gathering less light, many will be “underexposed” and produce a lot more noise (see long explanation and examples.). That’s the last thing that the iPhone’s camera needs. And, some would argue that the iPhone doesn’t have enough flash memory to store lots of high-megapixel photos. But I’d think that Apple would be happy to solve that particular problem by selling would-be iPhone photographers a higher-capacity camera phone.
So 2 megapixels is just fine, thank you—until such time that Apple manages to shoehorn an autofocus lens into the iPhone, thereby removing the need to control focus with the aperture. (Yes, the Nokia N95 has autofocus, but it’s also nearly twice as thick as the iPhone.) The software that determines the white balance, on the other hand, can use some work. )
via http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/06/18/more-iphone-camera-megapixels-would-be-worse-not-better
If you’ve jailbroken your iPhone running the 2.0 firmware, you’ve currently just got the Cydia application for installing new apps, not the old, familiar Installer app that was the far more ‘mainstream’ option up through firmware 1.1.4.
Good news if you’re hankering for Installer though - an update last week on the RiP Dev blog sounds very positive:
Hi folks! Many of you are wondering what’s up with Installer 4. No, we haven’t slowed down the work on it, and are currently in the final stages of hooking the GUI to the back-end. We will be contacting the authors of the major repositories in a few days to invite them into the testing process and to prepare for the upcoming repository changes.
Installer Kicks App Store’s Arse?
So hopefully we are not far off seeing Installer released for iPhone 2.0 - and it’s looking awfully good in the preview screenshots like the one above. Check out more of them HERE.
After having spent a few weeks with the App Store now, I have to say the content of it (i.e. the number of cool apps) is very impressive. But … the performance, the actual working of the App Store is not so great. I’d say Installer kicked its butt in working solidly and just doing its job reliably.
I say that because I just can’t recall Installer crashing very much, if at all. The App Store (on both a V1 and a 3G model) is much more flaky, for me at least. It regularly crashes and individual installs hang up for ridiculous amounts of time, with no ability to stop or pause them. When an install would fail on Installer it would fail quickly and decisively, would announce its failure, and let you retry or just get on with something else.
Apple get lots of things very, very right on the iPhone - no doubt about that, but in this area, I think they could still learn a thing or five from the guys who develop Installer …
via http://justanotheriphoneblog.com/wordpress/2008/07/30/installer-for-iphone-20-coming-soon-better-than-app-store/#more-4085
Everyone knows that it’s hard to get your hands on an iPhone 3G these days. But that’s to be understood. After all, with a worldwide release, the iPhone is in serious demand, pulling Apple stock a bit thin. Even so, the 16GB model is running out much quicker than all other models.
My basic assumption is that people are merely going after the largest capacity possible because they know the iPhone 3G cannot be updated. Even though it costs more, gadget hungry consumers are definitely favoring the 16GB model, as per the iPhone availability tool.
If you haven’t gotten an iPhone 3G of your very own yet, sit tight. Keep your eye on the availability tool and you’ll get one, especially with Apple’s new ticket system.
Notable headlines:
Ed Bott: Suddenly, 64-bit Windows is mainstream
Dear Adobe, can we please have a 64-bit Flash player?
Larry Dignan: JavaFX SDK preview launches: Can Sun play the RIA game?
Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft launches new search home page; refreshes Live Mesh preview
Gallery: Configuring Virtual PC 2007 to run Windows 3.11 (right)
Paul Murphy: Considering a Windows Innovation Demo
Tom […]
Sun Microsystems on Thursday will launch the JavaFX preview release as it aims to round up its bevy of Java developers to be a player in rich Internet applications.
The preview release gives designers, web scripters and developers a peek at Sun’s tools to make RIAs across multiple screens–mobile to PC and other devices. “We have […]
