PLANET jfontan

Filed under: Apple Financial

Apple shares today dropped to an intra-day 52-week low of a penny over $75, and rebounded to close at $80.49 per share. That was down 5.8 points from yesterday's close.

Filed under: Humor, Flickr Find

n01 writes "The last few months of my spare time I've been implementing an abstract strategy board game (that I invented) along with a decent AI. The game resembles TwixT in that it is also a connection game, and could be played without the need for a cellphone or computer. The implementation on the Java 2 Mobile Edition platform will soon be finished, with only some minor usability and sound issues to fix. While I enjoyed working on the game (actually more than on my day job as a programmer) I would still like to earn some money from selling the game, so I can work more on such projects in the future. What experiences have Slashdot readers made with selling their applications/games for mobile phones? With which publisher will I have the broadest audience and achieve the highest earnings? Would you try to publish the game both as a mobile game and a traditional board game?"

somanyrobots writes with an interesting followup in the New York Times to the earlier-reported substantial reconstruction of the woolly mammoth genome: "Scientists are talking for the first time about the old idea of resurrecting extinct species as if this staple of science fiction is a realistic possibility, saying that a living mammoth could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million. The same technology could be applied to any other extinct species from which one can obtain hair, horn, hooves, fur or feathers, and which went extinct within the last 60,000 years, the effective age limit for DNA." (The Washington Post article linked from the earlier post was much more skeptical, calling such an attempt "still firmly the domain of science fiction." The New York Times article, while describing the process in similar terms, also calls attention to recent advances in sequencing DNA, as well as recoding DNA for cloning.)

As I dive into the world of datawarehousing, designing the schema for this case is much different than you would for a transactional database. In a standard transactional database you would first find...

destinyland writes "For decades, people have been asking this brain teaser: 'What's the longest word you can type with only the left-hand letters on a keyboard?' The answer is supposed to be 'stewardesses,' but grepping the standard dictionary that ships with Unix reveals a much better answer. There's nearly 2,000 shorter words that can typed with only the left hand — including one word that's even longer. (The article also quotes a failed novel attempt using nothing but words typed on the keyboard's left side.)"

MacWorld Sweden caught the attention of iPhone users when they reported that Swedish carrier Telia is planning on bringing Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) to their iPhone users. MMS is a feature that has been long requested by iPhone users and wo...

TechRadar.com reports on some preliminary benchmarks on Intel's upcoming Nehalem EP chips which they say will be sold as the Xeon X5560 CPUs in the 1st quarter of 2009. Apple has traditionally used the Xeon processors for the Mac Pro line.
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To my mind, the only thing missing from Test::Unit is an easy way to defer tests. So, here's a quick and dirty way to defer tests in your Rails app without loading up test/spec or RSpec or what have you.

Java-heads will be familiar with JBoss, a popular Java EE-based application server. Bob McWhirter has been working on a plugin to make it easy to deploy Rails applications to a JBoss app server - some...

netbuzz writes "Meeting in Minneapolis this week, the Internet engineering community is debating whether to aggressively fashion and apply fixes for the so-called Kaminsky bug in the DNS discovered this summer, or to simply let its threat stand as motivation for all to move with greater speed toward DNSSEC, which is considered the best long-term security solution. Problem with the latter approach is that DNSSEC has been in the works for a decade already, no one is confident it will be universally embraced, and the Kaminsky flaw is causing real problems today.

German publication Spiegel.de reports an newly announced iPhone vulnerability that can force a (potentially expensive) phone call to be made simply by visiting a webpage in Safari. The vulnerability was to be announced in ComputerBild on Monday bu...

Aunque por un momento pienses que estamos en Xatakamovil no te equivoques, sigues en Applesfera, aunque esta vez nos toca hablar sobre la facturación del iPhone con Movistar.

Filed under: Humor, Software, iPhone, Holidays, App Store, iPod touch

Santa Claus has decided that he'd like all good little boys and girls to check in on what he's doing at the North Pole, so he's set up a special webcam network at his workshops. The webcams can only be viewed through a special iPhone app called SantaLive 2008. Starting on Thanksgiving Day and for 30 days after, you can get a daily update on your iPhone or iPod touch as Santa trains his elves to make toys, feeds Rudolph and the other reindeer, and prepares for worldwide toy deliveries during the evening of December 24th - 25th.

duh P3rf3ss3r writes "The Associated Press reports that, after 200 years of speculation and investigation, the tomb of Nicolaus Copernicus has been found. Although the heliocentric concept had been suggested earlier, Copernicus is widely thought of as the father of the scientific theory of the heliocentric solar system. The positive identification was made by comparing the DNA from a skeleton's teeth with that from hairs in a book known to have belonged to Copernicus. A computer-generated facial reconstruction is said to also bear a resemblance to contemporary portraits of the scientist."

Earlier this week, IBM announced its plans to buy Transitive, a small cross-platform virtualization company.

MacRumors readers will remember the company for providing the technology behind Rosetta, Apple's PowerPC emulator for Mac OS...

In his "What's New in Edge Rails" series, Ryan Daigle has just written about "default scoping." You're probably familiar with regular named scopes on Rails models, but now there's a default_scope meth...

TRS-80 writes "Apple has sent a DMCA takedown notice to the IpodHash project, claiming it circumvents their FairPlay DRM scheme. Some background: Apple first added a hash to the iTunesDB file in 6th-gen iPods, but it was quickly reverse-engineered. They changed it with the release of iPhone 2.0 and a project was started to reverse the new hash, but weren't successful yet. My guess is Apple used the same algorithm as FairPlay for the new hash, so Apple could use the DMCA to prevent competing apps like Songbird and Banshee from talking to iPods/iPhones. BTW, don't tell Apple, but the project uses a wiki, so the old page versions from before the takedown are still there."

RubyFu is a new community based ruby news site. RubyFu is not made to compete with RubyFlow, but to complement it :)

RubyFu is a project I’ve been working on, along with Phil Jeffs, for a couple of weeks now. We’ve got big plans so keep your eyes peeled. What is RubyFu? RubyFu is a community driven ruby news sit...