avner

The very omission of the camera from the Ipod touch makes me wonder what their design team was thinking. Sticking a camera on the ipod nano adds no value to it than the camera on my old samsung cell phone.

A camera on the touch would have probably destroyed the market for some devices and disrupted Apple's own iphone line.

Sounds practical. I'm down if accepted.

Having seen combat and being exposed to some of these bots as a soldier in the recent past, I can confidently say that the mobility and situational awareness provided by some of these bots superlatively increases the operating effectiveness of a platoon. There was an instance when we were handed "maps" of an AO before an operation and to my surprise the maps were nothing more than hand drawn topo details, with rather miniscule details of the area itself. All this when the bad guys were using google maps to coordinate their own operations!

Months later, we inducted a mobile UAV into the platoon and I still, to this day think about the number of times it saved us from certain trouble.

Today, as I work on autonomous military bots as an engineer I can only appreciate the effort that goes into building these things. Occupancy grid mapping in a noisy environment of a battlefield being one the most challenging aspects of making these bots.

"Apple doesn't have any responsibility to the people who buy them"

I beg to differ; I believe any company providing a service or a good has an obligation to its customers. Granted that Apple can afford to ride the high horse at the moment because of its refinement and early adoption of multi-touch, but a draconian control over something like the iPhone will not fare well for Apple in the long term. Sooner or later litigators will compare this amount of control on an ever increasing popular device with the Microsoft-IE case and anti-competitive suits are likely to follow.

Competition will catch on in the iPhone's case, and people will look for alternatives when multi-touch based devices with similar UX and more liberal standards become available.

Apple and AT&T are allowed to do this in the US because of ludicrous FCC overwatch that allows operators to do almost whatever they want after they have paid the obligated billions in spectrum licenses. Such practice along with things like locking hardware devices to one operator, thus effectively limiting consumer choice would not only be considered anti-competitive in other parts of the world, but also grounds for a major investigation.

Unfortunately, the 'lobbying' mobile communications industry in the US has an absurdly rigid establishment that has limited competition from the beginning and people gladly pay for things like receiving phone calls/sms .

The hits are a result of an OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) procedure that every investigative agency or department typically follows as part of an investigation. The modus operandi being that personnel scour public sources for a given set for amalgamated analysis.

That said, it is not necessary that people related to this investigation are the ones who visited that link. The organizations in question are large entities with a multitude of people curious about what is possibly the biggest corporate 'espionage' case of the year. Cool experiment nonetheless.

Immoderately cluttered and labyrinthine to mensurate.

Processing

Good post. The other end of the spectrum: I used to write code for autonomous UAVs back home (commercial and military). After completing my second degree in the US, I made it through to 90% of the interviews and selection process at the top firms that play in such applied heuristics. At that point I didn't think I was wasting my time, given my background and experience.

In the end, I was apologized to almost everywhere as they couldn't offer me a position because of my immigration status and there were existing federal restrictions limiting their hiring of foreign workers. Nonetheless, almost all those companies still e-mail me today asking whether I would take a position at their operations in my home country because there just aren't that many good people who do this kind of shit in the US.

Why, I ask? Later, I got multiple offers from companies back home who were willing to pay 5 times as much and were either in direct competition to the folks in the U.S. or were selling them patented technologies that cost billions in licenses every year.

I've been using GV ever since its early GrandCentral days. I should highlight that the biggest hurdle was to pass the new number on to my contacts. Even then, the biggest hole in the concept is that when you call your contacts without going through GV's web-site, your contact sees your old/carrier number. The end result is a lot of confusion and additional time consumption just trying to get it to display the GV number when calling anyone.

For the free market beacon the US projects, it has one of the least competitive mobile markets in the entire world. How are contracts such as Apple-AT&T not against consumer choice? Why do I have to have a ridiculously priced contract with AT&T to use this model of a phone?

Basically, the current iphone model in the US tells me to either go on ebay to get an iphone or buy it in another country. Why?

While I am sympathetic to the cause, the biggest problem with routing anything tor is that you will almost certainly, rapidly lose control over the traffic and its content. The average geek should really know what sort of repercussions a tor node can unleash if things go wrong. The administrator (you) of the exit node has almost no control over this.

I urge anyone who plans to run a tor node to please take the necessary steps, if possible to avoid a situation like http://calumog.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/why-you-need-balls-o...

If a close friend of mine, in all seriousness presents me this form in the casual manner the author suggests, I wouldn't be able to help but think that he's the one being the "douche" by ridiculing the trust in our friendship with this poorly fabricated "agreement".

Privacy and their modus operandi aside, I'm intrigued as to how they expected to survive such a high overhead cost operation with only $100 an year/customer, without any economies of scale or federal govt. support.

I've been using GV ever since its early GrandCentral days. I should highlight that the biggest hurdle was to pass the new number on to my contacts. Even then, when you call your contacts without going through GV's web-site, your contact sees your old/carrier number. The end result is a lot of confusion.

On the other hand, I am now able to simultaneously forward calls (and now sms) to my VOIP (SIP) softphone and cellphone. The current exploitative state of the US cell phone market has made me hack my way through it using GV. So yes, "power users" can indeed get a big break from GV. However, GV may be moderately infinitesimal for people who blindly pay their phone bill without cursing.

I concur. It should also be noted that the work culture in the US is different than that of India. Very often, foreign companies investing in the U.S. make the mistake of expecting the same uniformity in the local workforce that they are used to seeing back home.

I should also mention the monumental levels of competition overseas students like in India have to clear to have a shot at a school like IIT, and I guess this radiates into everything else that follows. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology...

Your opinion has to be one of the most unconversant comments I have read on HN in a while. Please stop - Thanks. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fellow Penn Stater here. The IST program, in its infinite wisdom has its strengths and weaknesses. One issue that you may have acknowledged already, especially in such economic times is the lack of awareness about the IST program and its various tracks amongst the business circle that recruits from Penn State.

Since you graduated from the SysDev track, you need to moderately differentiate yourself from the other "consultant" crowd, to a level that exudes that you have sufficient skills to undertake CS related projects. Having Open Source contributions on your resume may also be beneficial, since people can gauge your technical prowess.

Lastly, I would advise that you use COMPASS (the internal job hunt site) and the Career Services on campus extensively. They are there to help you specifically in a situation like this.

[If you wish, you may send me a copy of your resume and I may be able to float it in my circle]

Facebook quite intermittently displays careless amateurism in its conduct. However, what exudes more concern in their response is the 'possibility' of any random employee having the audacity to respond to a matter like this, without actual insight.

It highlights a flawed business model that misleads unsuspecting users to pay for a one-way communication tool through sugar coated TV ads.

Its got mostly to do with their closed platform. However, recently they have started opening up things (i.e. their codecs). Skype has established a phenomenal brand image that is under-utilized right now because its still chained to the computer. Nonetheless, Developments like the iphone app are a breath of fresh air and shows their strategy of truly mobilizing the app.

I'm curious (and this is not a rant), what is the logic behind releasing a mac-only client right at the start?

I always remember what my mother once told me: "Son, whatever you do in life, treasure your family and friends. Don't do things I wouldn't be proud of and always remember- health is greater than wealth."

Here's my 10 second review: Firefox crashed trying to load the JVM for this. I'm not sure if I want to re-visit the site.

I am taking a course that revolves around this book. Most of the material is freely available for anyone that is interested:

clgiles.ist.psu.edu/IST441/index.html

This article is mere speculation. However, It would help if someone from Google said something about Grandcentral's future considering the service has gone nowhere in a long time.

it shocks me that skype, being all its worth- does not have an iphone application yet.

The place where I work actually own extensive google search appliance but to get through inter-departmental red tape will be harrowing- not to mention I won't be able to admin it.

Looking for something free- ^^ Solr looks promising.

with all that has happened in the world (south asia) today.. unfortunately there is nothing happy about it.