FAA Ruining People’s Day

NPR:

An “equipment outage” at Atlanta’s William B. Hartsfield International Airport has forced a “ground stop” there, the Federal Aviation Administration says.

There’s also a “ground stop,” at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental.

The problems, as often happens with the airline system, are rippling across the nation.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “a computer glitch shut down most, if not all, departing flights at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and other airports across the country Thursday morning.”

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Ars Reviews Ubuntu 9.10

Ryan Paul:

Despite its strengths, Karmic still has a long road ahead before it will be a suitable candidate for desktop dominance. Audio support, hardware compatibility, upgrade reliability, and ease of use remain areas where the developers still have a lot of work to do. Canonical and the Ubuntu community clearly take those challenges seriously and are making good progress in each new release.

That’s always been an issue for Ubuntu, but this release is really, really slick.

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Camino Hits 2.0

Camino is a weird, wonderful application. It’s a full-blown Cocoa browser powered by Gecko — which is the rendering engine behind Firefox. In almost every way, it is what Firefox for the Mac should be — fast, nimble and very Mac-like. And today, it’s reached the infamous 2.0 status:

After over a year of hard work by devoted volunteers, the Camino Project is proud to give you Camino 2. This latest version includes many bug fixes and new features, providing all users with an improved browsing experience.

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Jailbreaking: Don’t Skirt the Issue

TUAW’s Brett Kelly:

A couple of weeks ago, I had decided that it was time to make Google Voice a more central part of my communication workflow. Having not launched GV Mobile in a while, I fired it up to reacquaint myself with the interface, capabilities, etc. Trouble is, I couldn’t authenticate with Google. I triple-checked my credentials but the app would just throw an error on launch and that was that. A couple of people on Twitter had mentioned having the same issue and a quick Google search informed me that, sure enough, the app no longer worked. Apparently, Google had modified the Voice API such that authentication now worked differently than it did when GV Mobile was written. Because the app no longer had Apple’s seal of approval, I had little recourse because there obviously weren’t going to be any updates to the app anytime soon.

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Painful Review of the Pixi

Gizmodo, on the Palm Pixi:

The Pixi is screwed. It’s totally cannibalized by the technologically superior Pre, which you can find for under $100. Even if you can get the Pixi for $30 at Walmart, it’s worth trading up to the Pre for $40 or $50 more if you’re absolutely wedded to the idea of a webOS phone, simply for the speed and screen. Mostly the speed, since the Pixi is brain damaged, three-legged dog slow, as nice as the hardware is on the outside.

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The Apple Store or Harvard?

Business Insider:

At a press event today, Apple said that 10,000 people submitted applications to work at the new store on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, according to Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan.

Of those, just over 200 got jobs, for a 2% acceptance rate.

Meanwhile, Harvard’s acceptance rate was 7% this past year, according to a March report in the Boston Globe. That’s 29,000 applications for about 2,000 admissions.

Sad.

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Bill Gates, on Steve Jobs

Via AppleInsider:

“Well, he’s done a fantastic job,” Gates said. “Apple is in a bit of a different business where they make hardware and software together. But when Steve was coming back to Apple, which was actually through an acquisition of NeXT that he ran, Apple was in very tough shape. In fact, most likely it wasn’t going to survive.”

He continued: “And he brought in a team, he brought in inspiration about great products and design that’s made Apple back into being an incredible force in doing good things. And it’s great to have competitors like that. We write software for Apple, Microsoft does. They compete with Apple. But he, of all the leaders in the industry that I’ve worked with, he showed more inspiration and he saved the company.”

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The Risks of an Open App Store

Joshua Schnell:

The AppStore would turn into a market where a few big developers gain the trust of iPhone users, and users will be reluctant to try anything new because it could completely annihilate their phone. That’s not the world I want to live in as a consumer. I want to be able to install an application with some degree of faith that the absolute junk was already weeded out.

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On Verizon and ATT&T’s War

Chris Ziegler over at Engadget has put together a good overview of the never-ending battle between the two carriers:

So listen, AT&T, we’re sorry Verizon made you upset, but the solution’s actually pretty simple: compete. Fix your network, keep scoring hot exclusives, and get hungry again – because in a year or two, no one’s going to give a damn that you used to have an exclusive on the iPhone.

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On Rogue Amoeba’s App Store Debacle

First some background from the software developer Rogue Amoeba:

Our problems began back in July, when we first submitted this bug fix for Airfoil Speakers Touch to the App Store. While we generally disliked the restrictiveness of the review process, we’d never had any direct problems with it. Further, this was a mere bug fix – it just improved the way audio was received. It was functionally identical to the already-approved version 1.0.0. As such, we expected to have this update available by the end of July or early August.

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