mbenzi - Slashdot User

Submission + - Cheap solar panel uses human hair, not silicon (wired.co.uk)

Submitted by on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @09:26AM

An anonymous reader writes: An 18-year-old boy has designed a solar panel that replaces expensive silicon with cheap and plentiful human hair: "By using hair as a replacement, Karki says that solar panels can be produced for around £23, a price tag that could be halved if they were mass-produced."

Intriguingly, it seems that a pound of hair can be bought for 25 cents in Nepal.

Submission + - TomTom anounces an open source GPS technology 1

Submitted by TuringTest on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @09:15AM

TuringTest writes: (Found via OStatic). European company TomTom (which recently settled a patent agreement with Microsoft) has announced a new open source format OpenLR for sharing routing data (relevant points, traffic information...) in digital maps of different vendors, to be used in GPS devices. The LR stands for Location Referencing. They aim is to push it as an open standard to build a cooperative information base, presumably in a similar way than its current TomTom Map Share technology in which end users provide map corrections on the fly. The technology to support the format will be released as GPLv2. Does it make OpenLR a GPL GPS?

Submission + - http://www.news24.com/Content/SciTech/News/1132/1b

Submitted by Frustrated SA Citizen on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @09:13AM

Frustrated SA Citizen writes: Winston, a homing pigeon, has made history by beating a Telkom ADSL line (South African main ISP)in delivering 4GB of data from Howick to Hillcrest, outside Durban (South Africa)in just 2 hours 6 minutes and 57 seconds, whereas the ADSL download was "still just under four percent complete" at 11:45.

Submission + - Israeli bloggers revolt local ISOC (haaretz.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @08:52AM

An anonymous reader writes: A group of bloggers, developers, internet marketers and many more are trying to change the Israeli Internet Association. financial reports recently exposed of the association had shown mismanagement of funds, large travel expenses, and millions that flow in advertising campaigns. The local association is in control of the .il domain registry and uses the funds for a multitude of activities. The chairman of the association refuses to publish the price that domains being sold to registrars, protocols ofmanagement meetings and more documents about the conduct of management behaviour. In its upcoming meeting the association went to change its rules to allow the management to stay in power for three more years.

Submission + - IPv6 Grows 1,400% in Last 12 Months (due to P2P) (arbornetworks.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @08:47AM

An anonymous reader writes: A new study of 110 ISPs finds (for the first time) significant growth in Internet IPv6 traffic. But in results undoubtedly disappointing for IPv6 evangelists, the traffic is mostly uTorrent IPv6 P2P. The same researchers reported vanishingly small levels of IPv6 last year.

Submission + - Coming problems of rolling out 3D TV

Submitted by

holy_calamity

on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @08:41AM

holy_calamity writes: "After Sony's announcement that it will sell 3D televisions from 2010 come the attempts to predict how rocky a road taking 3D TV mainstream will be. New Scientist says that not only do programme makers lack the technology to make shows in 3D, but that little is known about the creative problems posed by shooting shows in a whole new dimension and what works for audiences. Engadget's own pundit focuses on the more predictable problems of format wars between competing 3D display technologies. Suddenly 2010 seems a little too soon."

Submission + - OEMs sabotage the Windows 7 free upgrade program (techarp.com) 1

Submitted by

crazyeyes

on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @06:42AM

crazyeyes writes: "Buyers beware! OEMs like Dell and HP are doing their best not to give you the free Windows 7 upgrade that Microsoft promised. To save cost and perhaps help sales of their Windows 7 PCs later, they are making it difficult for you to get the free copy of Windows 7. This article looks into the problem and lays the blame entirely on the OEMs. Fight for your rights!
The announcement of the free upgrade option program for Windows 7 have kept sales of PCs up, even during this economic downturn. Not only were there pent-up sales from folks who stayed their purchases earlier to take opportunity of this free upgrade program, it also generated interest from buyers who were piqued by the possibility of getting a free Windows 7 license.

Unfortunately, the people who benefited the most from this program, namely Microsoft's OEM partners, seemed to be sabotaging the very program that was saving their collective asses during this economic downturn. Many people who purchased their PCs under the program from OEMs like HP, Toshiba and Dell have encountered mind-numbing obstacles in getting their free copy of Windows 7.

Most of these buyers encountered complications during the registration process, some of which were intentional.

"

Submission + - Mouse tracking bashes Pre-Click-Privacy (clixpy.com)

Submitted by

HavanaF

on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @05:53AM

HavanaF writes: "Your mouse pointer roams the screen, sits idle, perhaps clicks gently here and there. You think you're alone, nobody watching, at least not till you click. No more of that Pre-Click-Privacy. Bulgarian based Clixpy developed a script to see through the network and your browser and capture what you're doing on your browser screen. That's a layer of privacy gone. Getting too close? It seems sites using this technology should let the user know. Or at least mention this little intrusion in their privacy policy."

Submission + - 9/9/09 First Computer Bug 2

Submitted by

Sooner Boomer

on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @02:49AM

Sooner Boomer writes: "It's 09/09/09. Besides being numerologically interesting it's also the 64th anniversary of Grace Hopper discovering the first computer bug. The moth was preserved in the log at the time. Computers have come a ways since then, and so have the bugs associated with them."

Submission + - How Many Rejections Will It Take to Kill 1-Click?

Submitted by

theodp

on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @02:39AM

theodp writes: "Last week, a USPTO Examiner issued another 'Final Rejection' for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' 1-Click patent. So will Amazon finally suck it up and be a gracious loser? Don't bet on it. The e-tailer just dumped thousands more pages of documents — including 600+ pages of CORBA specifications and a 495-page CompuServe text — on the poor USPTO Examiners that got stuck with the 3.5+ year-old 1-Click patent reexamination, requesting a full review of them. Let's hope Amazon at least had the decency to submit the documents on one of their carry-your-library-in-10.2-ounces Kindles. After all, didn't 'patent-reformer' Amazon say they're all about making life easier for the overworked USPTO? BTW, when IBM sued Amazon for allegedly ripping off its IP ('Much, if not all, of Amazon's business is built on top of this property,' quipped IBM), new USPTO chief David Kappos was in charge of Big Blue's patent portfolio. Not sure if that's good news or bad — let's hope it's not out of the Amazon frying pan and into the IBM fire!"

Submission + - Wi-Fi hacking USB hubs popular in China (shanzai.com) 2

Submitted by

Song Jiang

on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @02:11AM

Song Jiang writes: "This USB wireless device allows you to hack into security protected Wi-Fi networks in a matter of minutes, although purchasing one of these esoteric and strictly 'under the counter' devices could have you reliving your favorite rain-soaked scene from Blade Runner. All very clandestine, and thoroughly illegal. http://www.shanzai.com/index.php/bandit-gadgets/13-peripherals/186-shanzhai-wi-fi-crackers-offer-free-internet-emit-deadly-radiation"

Submission + - POWER7: twice the muscle, half the transistors (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by

TechnoJoe

on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @02:07AM

TechnoJoe writes: "IBM touted its upcoming 8-core POWER7 server processor, which supports 4 simultaneous threads per core and a whopping 32MB of on-die L3 cache. Amazingly, POWER7 does all this with only half the transistors of Intel's Nehalem-EX, which only supports 2 threads with HyperThreading and 24 MB cache. That kind of development gap makes me wish I could afford IBM's hardware."

Submission + - How We Caught Missing Wired Writer Evan Ratliff (newscloud.com)

Submitted by

newscloud

on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @01:17AM

newscloud writes: "A twitter savvy gluten-free pizza shop nabbed missing Wired magazine writer Evan Ratliff in New Orleans earlier Tuesday to win the $5,000 Vanish contest. Ratliff was ensnared in part by repeated non-TOR visits to our Facebook application, launched to support the contest's tracker community and his secret travel journal on twitter. Ratliff's side of the story will be published in the December issue."

Submission + - Opera 10 Hits 10M Downloads During First Week (appscout.com) 2

Submitted by adeelarshad82 on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @01:13AM

adeelarshad82 writes: Ten is apparently the magic number for Opera. The latest iteration of the company's browser, Opera 10, secured 10 million downloads in its first week. This is probably a huge achievement for the company given that they are up against the likes of Firefox, IE and Chrome. In the United States, Opera slips to 0.75%, behind Chrome with 3.48%.

Submission + - Tolkien Trust Okays Hobbit Movie

Submitted by saudadelinux on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @12:58AM

saudadelinux writes: Last year, the Tolkien Trust which administers JRR's estate, bellowed stentoriously, "Youuuu shall not make The Hobbit!" and sued New Line Cinema for "a reported $220m (£133m) in compensation, based on breach of contract and fraud." New Line, chastened, has settled for an undisclosed sum of money. The Trust has given its blessing to New Line for Guillermo del Toro to film "The Hobbit" and for New Line to make other films based on Tolkien's work. Much rejoycing!

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