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Comments: 84 + -   Flawed iTunes Stands Out Among Apple's Products on Friday September 03, @12:05PM

Posted by Soulskill on Friday September 03, @12:05PM
from the maybe-if-it-only-had-one-button dept.
gui
waderoush writes "On top of all the other features that it has crammed into iTunes, Apple this week added Ping, a Facebook-like social network for music discovery. It's all part of the company's plan to dominate the world of consumer media, but Xconomy argues that this time, Apple may have gone a bridge too far. iTunes, nearing its tenth birthday, started out merely as a program for ripping CDs, and has grown increasingly creaky and impenetrable as Apple has added more and more cruft, the article argues. The company won't have a stable base for its new media empire until it rebuilds iTunes from scratch — perhaps along the lines suggested by its other new product this week, the revamped Apple TV."
Read More... 84 comments story

Comments: 71 + -   Northrop Grumman Says 'I'm Sorry' For Virginia IT Outage on Friday September 03, @11:22AM

Posted by Soulskill on Friday September 03, @11:22AM
from the wipe-the-tears-away-with-benjamins dept.
networking
Lucas123 writes "After a storage area network in a data center run by Northrop Grumman went down last week, crippling 26 state agencies' websites — some for more than a week — Northrop Grumman has now apologized to Virginia, saying it will learn from its mistakes in order to recover systems faster in the future. Northrop's $2.6 billion service contract with Virginia's government has come under harsh criticism in the past for service outages, along with project delays and cost overruns."
Read More... 71 comments story

Comments: 70 + -   Major Battle Brewing Between French Gov't and ISPs on Friday September 03, @10:36AM

Posted by Soulskill on Friday September 03, @10:36AM
from the race-to-surrender dept.
government
Dangerous_Minds writes "Drew Wilson has been following HADOPI (France's three strikes law) a lot lately, and the latest developments are that the French ISPs and the French government are edging closer to a full-on war over compensation. The French government apparently requested that ISPs send an invoice of the bills after a certain period of time, but the French ISPs don't feel this is good enough — probably because of worries that the compensation the government will ultimately provide won't be enough. The ISPs are demanding adequate compensation, and if the government doesn't give it to them, they simply will not hand over evidence required to enforce HADOPI law. While HADOPI demands that ISPs cooperate, speculation suggests that if the government takes ISPs to court, the ISPs will simply rely on constitutional jurisprudence to shield them from liability (translation)."
Read More... 70 comments story

Comments: 256 + -   Hurt Locker File-Sharing Subpoenas Begin on Friday September 03, @09:50AM

Posted by Soulskill on Friday September 03, @09:50AM
from the how-not-to-generate-good-press dept.
piracy
In May we discussed news that producers of the film The Hurt Locker filed a lawsuit against 5,000 John Does, known only by their IP addresses at the time, for sharing the movie over peer-to-peer sites. Now, reader suraj.sun notes that subpoenas for the lawsuit are finally going out. "Qwest Communications on Monday notified a customer in Denver that the Internet service provider has received a subpoena from lawyers representing Voltage Pictures, the production company that made The Hurt Locker. ... In legal documents, Voltage Pictures has blamed the movie's relatively poor domestic performance on illegal file sharing. As of March 21, the movie had grossed $16 million domestically, but took in $40 million overall. According to reports, the film's production budget was $15 million. The film leaked to the Web five months before the movie's US debut. ... For allegedly downloading The Hurt Locker, DGW told the Qwest customer from Denver that settling the case early would cost $2,900, according to documents reviewed by CNET."
Read More... 256 comments story

Comments: 78 + -   HP Backs Memristor Mass Production on Friday September 03, @09:05AM

Posted by Soulskill on Friday September 03, @09:05AM
from the can't-wait-for-the-next-round-of-patent-battles dept.
business
neo12 writes with news that Hewlett-Packard is teaming with Hynix Semiconductor, the world's second-largest producer of memory chips, to mass produce memristors for the first time. Quoting the BBC: "HP says the first memristors should be widely available in about three years. The devices started as a theoretical prediction in 1971 but HP's demonstration and publication of a real working device has put them on a possible roadmap to replace memory chips or even hard drives. ... Steve Furber, professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester, explained that the potential benefits lie in the fact that memristors are 'much simpler in principle than transistors. Because they are formed as a film between two wires, they don't have to be implanted into the silicon surface — as do transistors, which form the storage locations in Flash — so they could be built in layers in 3D,' he told BBC News. 'Of course, the devil is in the detail, and I don't think the manufacturing challenges have been fully exposed yet.'"
Read More... 78 comments story

Comments: 95 + -   Wireless Power Group Has 'Qi' Prototypes on Friday September 03, @08:18AM

Posted by timothy on Friday September 03, @08:18AM
from the now-you-can-charge-in-the-bathtub dept.
cellphones
judgecorp writes "Steady progress on inductive wireless charging. There are now certified prototypes of chargers for Blackberry and iPhone devices that meet the Qi specification of the Wireless Power Consortium, which was announced last year. The spec has advanced from version 0.95 to 1.0, too."
Read More... 95 comments story

Comments: 204 + -   New Calculations May Lead To a Test For String Theory on Friday September 03, @05:28AM

Posted by timothy on Friday September 03, @05:28AM
from the string-washing-powder-what's-the-difference dept.
math
dexmachina writes "A team of theoreticians, led by a group from Imperial College London, has released calculations that show string theory makes specific, testable predictions about the behaviour of quantum entangled particles. Professor Mike Duff, lead author of the study from the Department of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London, commented, 'This will not be proof that string theory is the right "theory of everything" that is being sought by cosmologists and particle physicists. However, it will be very important to theoreticians because it will demonstrate whether or not string theory works, even if its application is in an unexpected and unrelated area of physics.' In other words, string theory may finally have shed its critics' most common complaint: unfalsifiability. However, given the second most common complaint, I can't help but wonder: which string theory?"
Read More... 204 comments story

Comments: 110 + -   Facebook To Add Remote Logout on Friday September 03, @02:30AM

Posted by timothy on Friday September 03, @02:30AM
from the best-not-get-hacked dept.
security
angry tapir writes "Facebook users will soon have a new way of knocking spammers out of legitimate accounts. The social-networking company is rolling out a new security feature that lets users see which computers and devices are logged into their Facebook accounts, and then removing the ones that they don't want to have access."
Read More... 110 comments story

Comments: 158 + -   Google Releases Chrome 6, Pays $4337 In Bounties on Thursday September 02, @11:26PM

Posted by timothy on Thursday September 02, @11:26PM
from the working-in-the-background dept.
google
Trailrunner7 writes "Google has released a new version of its Chrome browser and has included more than a dozen security fixes in the update. The new version, 6.0.472.53, was released two years to the day after the company pushed out the first version of Chrome. Google Chrome 6 includes patches for 14 total security vulnerabilities, including six high-priority flaws, and the company paid out a total of $4,337 in bug bounties to researchers who reported the vulnerabilities. A number of the flaws that didn't qualify for bug bounties were discovered by members of Google's internal security team." (Read on for more, below.)
Read 872 More Bytes... 158 comments story

Comments: 316 + -   Harvard Ditching Final Exams? on Thursday September 02, @08:37PM

Posted by timothy on Thursday September 02, @08:37PM
from the love-the-kerning dept.
education
itwbennett writes "According to Harvard magazine, Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted at its meeting on May 11 to require instructors to officially inform the Registrar 'at the first week of the term' of the intention to end a course with a formal, seated exam, 'the assumption shall be that the instructor will not be giving a three-hour final examination.' Dean of undergraduate education Jay M. Harris 'told the faculty that of 1,137 undergraduate-level courses this spring term, 259 scheduled finals — the lowest number since 2002, when 200 fewer courses were offered. For the more than 500 graduate-level courses offered, just 14 had finals, he reported.'"
Read More... 316 comments story
Poll I can see X LEDs as I fall asleep. X = __
None
1 - 3
4 - 6
7 - 10
More than 10
Enough that my sanity has fled
Depends on how much electrical tape I have
[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:363 | Votes:19120

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