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Netscape

Submission + - Top 10 IT products of the past 40 years (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
Ian Lamont
Ian Lamont writes: "Computerworld has compiled a list of the ten most important IT technologies and products of the last 40 years. Some of them are no surprise — Ethernet, Linux, the PC — but others are unexpected, such as Netscape Navigator, which was picked over Mosaic for inclusion in the list because of cookies. There are a few obscurities that many /. readers have probably never heard of — IBM System/370 and an early 90s SAP accounting package."
Bug

Submission + - New Quality Footage of Loch Ness Monster

Submitted by jcgam69
jcgam69 writes: story: "I was minutes from going home and I had only gone up there to relax and enjoy the view when I saw something moving on the surface of the water so I dashed to get the camera. "It wasn't a wave because it was going in the opposite direction to the waves that I could see and the top half of it seemed to be black. "My camcorder was on a black and white setting and it took me a while to find it again in the water, but I've got two-and-half-minutes of footage which I have shown to experts and they think it is definitely a living creature." http://www.yorkshiretoday.co.uk/news?articleid=291 3523 video: http://www.stv.tv/content/news/north_scotland/disp lay.html?id=opencms:/news/north_scotland/Man_belie ves_he_has_filmed_nessie
Google

Google Wins Nude Thumbnail Legal Battle 204

Posted by CowboyNeal from the over-for-now dept.
eldavojohn writes "Google is currently fighting many fronts in its ability to show small images returned in a search from websites. Most recently, Google won the case against them in which they were displaying nude thumbnails of a photographer's work from his site. Prior to this, Google was barred from displaying copyrighted content, even when linking it to the site (owner) from its search results. The verdict: "Saying the District Court erred, the San Francisco-based appeals court ruled that Google could legally display those images under the fair use doctrine of copyright law." This sets a rather hefty precedence in a search engine's ability to blindly serve content safely under fair use."
Data Storage

Submission + - Holographic storage to be commercialized this fall

Submitted by
prostoalex
prostoalex writes: "The Guardian takes a look at the current developments in the world of holographic storage. Despite being available in research for over 40 years, the technology is getting commercialized only now, with InPhase Technologies launching its 600 GB write-once disk and a drive this fall. What avout the price? "The first holographic products are certainly not mass-market — a 600GB disc will cost around $180 (£90), and the drive costs about $18,000. Potential users include banks, libraries, government agencies and corporations.""
Robotics

A Robotic Cable Inspection System 65

Posted by Zonk from the amazing-voyage-only-without-guts dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "In a short article, Popular Science reports that researchers at the University of Washington have built a robotic cable inspection system. This system should help utility companies to maintain their networks of subterranean cables. The robot, dubbed Cruiser, is about 4-feet-long and is designed like a snake. When it detects an anomaly on an underground cable, it sends a message to a human operator via Wi-Fi. The first field tests took place in New Orleans in December 2006. But a commercial version should not be available before 2012."
Data Storage

The First Terabyte Hard Drive Reviewed 495

Posted by Zonk from the that-is-a-lot-of-dvd-rips dept.
mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has a review and benchmarks of the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1TB Hard Drive, which ushers in the terabyte age. It performs well on HDTach and PCMark benchmarks, though not as speedily as professional-grade drives. It could be just the ticket for digital media junkies. 'One of the first issues to note is that you may not see an actual one terabyte capacity on your system. First, the formatted capacity is always less than the raw space available on the drive. Directory information and formatting data always take up some space. Second, the hard drive industry's definition of a megabyte differs from the rest of the PC business. One megabyte of hard drive space is 1,000,000 bytes: 10^6 bytes. Operating systems calculate one megabyte as 2^20 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes. Once installed and set up, Hitachi's 1TB hard drive offers up an actual formatted capacity of about 935GB, as measured by the OS. That's still a lot of space, by anyone's definition.'" Update: 05/17 21:52 GMT by Z : Adding '^s' missing from article.
Operating Systems

Performance Evaluation of Xen Vs. OpenVZ 116

Posted by kdawson from the price-to-pay dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Compared to an operating-system-level virtualization technology like OpenVZ, Xen — a hypervisor-level virtualization technology that allows multiple operating systems to be run with and without para-virtualization — trades off performance for much better isolation and security. OpenVZ's performance advantage due to running virtual containers in a single operating system kernel can be significant. A performance evaluation study (PDF) done by researchers at the University of Michigan and HP labs provides insight into how big a performance penalty Zen pays and what causes the overheads (primarily L2 cache misses)." From the report: "We compare both technologies with a base system in terms of application performance, resource consumption, scalability, low-level system metrics like cache misses and virtualization-specific metrics like Domain-0 consumption in Xen. Our experiments indicate that the average response time can increase by over 400% in Xen and only a modest 100% in OpenVZ as the number of application instances grows from one to four... A similar trend is observed in CPU consumptions of virtual containers."
Enlightenment

Submission + - Toyota going 100% hybrid by 2020

Submitted by
autofan1
autofan1 writes: "http://www.motorauthority.com/cars/toyota/toyota-c utting-hybrid-costs/ Toyota's vice president in charge of powertrain development, Masatami Takimoto, has said cost cutting on the electric motor, battery and inverter were all showing positive results in reducing the costs of hybrid technology and by the time Toyota's sales goal of one million hybrids annually is reached, it "expect margins to be equal to gasoline cars". Takimoto also made the bold claim that by 2020, hybrids will be the standard drivetrain and account for "100 percent" of Toyota's cars as they would be no more expensive to produce than a conventional vehicle."
Education

Submission + - Publishing Project and Lab Code Files

Submitted by
Tokimasa
Tokimasa writes: "Should students be able to publish their own solutions to past (completed and past the due date/submission date) Computer Science projects and labs on a website, especially as part of a code portfolio intended to demonstrate their solutions to problems to potential employers?

At the university I currently attend as an undergraduate, even though the university-wide Intellectual Property rules state that unless (a) the student signs an agreement prior to the start of work, (b) the work is done under employment of a division of the university, or (c) the student is paid for the work, the work belongs to the student. However, the Computer Science department does not allow past solutions to any project or laboratory assignment be posted on the Internet and, in the past, requested that posted solutions be removed."
Power

Submission + - Walmart picks CA and HI for Solar

Submitted by
mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "Walmart has picked three companies: BP Solar, SunEdison, and PowerLight from its RFP to install solar power on some of its stores. In this pilot project, 22 store roofs will produce 20 GWH per year (2.3 MW) in California and Hawaii. According to BP Solar, Walmart will save on electricity costs with installations that can cover up to 30% of a store's power use. This news comes at a time when a new concentrator design for roof top solar is being touted as costing half as much (88% less silicon) as the panels used by these three companies in the MIT Technology Review, with deliveries for this kind of application expected this year. Is is coincidence, or does Walmart always fire the starting gun for a race to the bottom on price?"
Displays

Submission + - LG.Philips Develops World's First Color E-Paper

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: LG.Philips LCD developed the world's first 14.1-inch flexible color E-paper display, equivalent in size to an A4 sheet of paper.
The 14.1-inch flexible color E-paper uses electronic ink from E-Ink Corp. to produce a maximum of 4,096 colors. It can be viewed from a full 180 degrees, so that images always appear crisp, even when the display is bent.
Censorship

Submission + - Scientologists In Row With BBC

Submitted by
CmdrGravy
CmdrGravy writes: "The Church Of Scientology is currently engaged in a row with BBC over a Panorama investigation by the BBC reporter John Sweeney. John is investigating the Church Of Scientology for the program to find out if they have changed in the last few years and moved away from the questionable practices and secrecy they have employed in the past.

The row centres around a YouTube video posted by the scientologists and a DVD they have released which show Mr Sweeney losing his temper with a scientology spokesman Tom Davis in which Mr Sweeney is driven to yelling at Tom Davis at the top of his voice. Mr Sweeney has since apologised for losing his temper which he says he now realises was both wrong and stupid. In the DVD the scientologists also accuse the BBC of organising an anti scientology demonstration and yelling terrorist death threats at John Travolta, allegations which the BBC denounce as being clearly laughable and utter nonsense. John Travolta has also accused of Mr Sweeney of harbouring "personal prejudices, bigotry and animosity" against Scientology in the documentary, and accused the reporter of displaying "hatred against my religion." This despite the fact that in the UK scientology is not classed as a religion due to the financial nature of their practices.

Mr Sweeneys outburst came at the end of a tour of a scientology exhibition which attempts to portray psychiatrists as evil nazi type torturers entitled "Psychiatry: Industry of Death" which is both gruesome and utterly unconvincing. In the days previous to this Mr Sweeney and his camera team became the latest in a long line of reporters to suffer harassment at the hands of scientologists whereby he has been shouted at, spied on, denounced as a bigot by John Travolta had his hotel invaded at midnight, and had mysterious strangers visit his neighbours and family and spy on his wedding. You can begin to see why someone might lose their temper having been victim to this sort of activity.

There is an excellent article in the Telegraph and you can read about the incident in Mr Sweeneys own words here at the BBC.

The video of Mr Sweeney losing his temper is available on YouTube, the argument is about Tom Davis claiming he has said things in a previous interview with someone else at which Tom Davis was not present and therefore cannot know what he has said. During this interview with, I think, an ex scientologist Tom Davis burst in half way through to make claims that the interviewee was some kind of paedophile.

Happily it looks like the BBC is going to stand behind their reporter, judging by this interview with the programs editor and the general tone of their reporting but, really why I'm posting this on /., what can be done against an organisation so determined to prevent fair and unbiased reporting on their activities and is clearly able to utilise the power of the internet and YouTube to further their aims. The BBC is a large organisation and can survive attacks like this which would easily cause a lot more problems to individuals or smaller organisations, is there a way of levelling the playing field in favour of the general population being able to access accurate information on organisations or corporations rather than propaganda put out by the said organisations or corporations ?"
Graphics

AMD Promises Open Source Graphics Drivers 264

Posted by Zonk from the feel-the-love-linux-gamers dept.
MoxFulder writes "Henri Richard, AMD's VP of sales, has promised to deliver open-source drivers for ATI graphics cards (recently acquired by AMD) at the recent Red Hat Summit. A series of good news for proponents of open-source device drivers. In the last year, Intel, the leading provider of integrated graphics cards, has opened their drivers as well. But ATI and NVidia, the only two players in the market for high-performance discrete graphics cards, have so far released only closed-source drivers for their cards. This has created numerous compatibility, stability, and ethical problems for users of Linux and other open source OSes, and prompted projects like Nouveau to try and reverse-engineer NVidia drivers. Hopefully AMD's decision will put pressure on NVidia to release open-source drivers as well!"
Security

Submission + - The Pirate Bay Gets Hacked

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: A group of hackers has stolen a list of all 1.6 million usernames and passwords for registered users of file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. Computer Sweden reports that the sensitive information was accessed by a group calling itself Angry Young Hackers (Arga Unga Hackare — AUH). Source: http://www.thelocal.se/7280/20070511/

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