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Television

Submission + - Best DVR *without* subscription services.

Submitted by ngc5194
ngc5194 writes: I'm thinking about joining the 21st century and purchasing a Digital Video Recorder. However, I DO NOT want to subscribe to any services. I understand that this will limit what my DVR can do, and I'm fine if it just acts like a solid-state VCR.

My question is, given the constraint above (sans subscription services), which would be the best DVR to purchase and why? Are there any that will fail to function altogether without a subscription?
Communications

Submission + - Sony Ericsson Shows Off Super Cell Phones

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: As if waiting until the end of the month for the iPhone wasn't bad enough, Sony Ericsson has announced a set of super phones due to come out later this year. The Sony Ericsson K850i features an impressive 5-megapixel camera with auto-focus and xenon flash, while the W960i comes with a whopping 8GB of on-board memory, stereo Bluetooth, 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity, and a 3.2-megapixel camera. These were among other new devices and put Sony Ericsson firmly back on the camera and music phone map. Time will tell whether or not Aple's iPhone can succesfully compete with devices like the W960i that come with mechanical keypads and 3G connectivity.
Patents

Submission + - Two Big Patent Rulings from the Supreme Court

Submitted by
BrianWCarver
BrianWCarver writes: "The Supreme Court of the United States has just handed down two important patent rulings that could be especially relevant for software and technology companies. In a ruling that alters the analysis of when a patent is obvious the Supreme Court found that lower courts had too rigidly interpreted the requirements for finding a patent obvious, allowing some bad patents to slip through. (Read full opinion.) In a separate opinion the Court addressed part of the U.S. patent law that prevents companies from getting around a patent by shipping the components of the patented invention from the U.S. to a foreign country for assembly and sale. The Court found that supplying software to a foreign country for sale therein did not constitute a "component" of a patented invention and hence was not prohibited. This was a victory for Microsoft who had been accused of violating an AT&T patent simply on the basis of shipping Windows to foreign countries. Regardless of one's usual feelings about the world's largest software company, enforcing limits on the extra-territorial application of U.S. patent law, especially in the software context, is generally a good thing for innovation. If the first ruling results in more software patent applications being deemed "obvious" then that could be even better."
Biotech

Submission + - Are heart attack victems really dead?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Consider someone who has just died of a heart attack. His organs are intact, he hasn't lost blood. All that's happened is his heart has stopped beating — the definition of "clinical death" — and his brain has shut down to conserve oxygen. But what has actually died? As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller "How We Die," the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn't be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn't receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can't be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "After one hour," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18368186/site/newsweek ?GT1=9951
Security

Death Knell For DDoS Extortion? 101

Posted by kdawson from the greener-pastures dept.
Ron writes "Symantec security researcher Yazan Gable has put forward an explanation as to why the number of denial of service attacks has been declining (coincident with the rise of spam). His theory is that DoS attacks are no longer profitable to attackers. While spam and phishing attacks directly generate profit, he argues that extortion techniques often used with DoS attacks are far more risky and often make an attacker no profit at all. Gable writes: 'So what happens if the target of the attack refuses to pay? The DoS extortionist is obligated to carry out a prolonged DoS attack against them to follow through on their threats. For a DoS extortionist, this is the worst scenario because they have to risk their bot network for nothing at all. Since the target has refused to pay, it is likely that they will never pay. As a consequence, the attacker has to spend time and resources on a lost cause.'"
Networking

Submission + - In search of a graphical NMS package...

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I've recently been assigned the task of managing about a hundred switches and routers, and am in dire need of a good graphical network monitoring and management package. Virtually all the devices are Cisco, but there was no NMS of any kind in place before I inherited this gig. Config changes were done by hand by individually telnetting to each device and no automated monitoring at all is implemented. I have a small budget to purchase a commercial package if necessary, but after looking at all the usual bog names on the market, they all seem to be crap. (e.g. like the big unmentioned brand name package that's implemented solely in java, and accessed thru an old version of an IE webbrowser only, and quirky as hell, which is three strikes against it right there.) What I need is something that is quick and easy to set up and will perform auto-discovery, present the findings to me in a graphical map that's easily editable, and allow me to quickly make config changes by, perhaps clicking on a device's icon to invoke a telnet or ssh session to the device, show me when a device craters by turning its icon red or something.... and most of all, allow me to easily back up all the devices' configs to textfiles in one easy fell swoop batch operation and allow me to change all the passwords at once in a batch operation. I don't care if it's Windows or Linux based, open source or commercial ... I'll gladly take either platform if it will fit in my budget. I do not need it to monitor servers, workstations and services running on them, I only need to monitor and manage the network infrastructure hardware devices.
Television

Submission + - TV Broadcasters Experimenting with BitTorrent

Submitted by ernesto99
ernesto99 writes: Tomorrow a new version of the Tribler BitTorrent client will be released at a seminar of European TV bosses Geneva. Tribler is a Bittorrent client which aims to grow into a Youtube-like solution for Internet TV with torrent recommendations, search capabilities without webservers, and friends. The public TV broadcasters in the EU are currently defining a standard for P2P. They decided that this standard needs to be Open Source and preferably created non-profit organizations like universities.
Announcements

Submission + - Climate Change - PNW Floods Predicted

Submitted by
esobofh
esobofh writes: "Emergency Planning officials in British Columbia, Canada and Washington State have issued advisories to all residents in low-lying or flood-prone areas. In a word — get to higher ground! The local coastal mountain snow caps are calculated to have 134% of the normal snow load this year — a product of an odd spring that's lasted longer than normal, with more precipitation than expected. The fraser river watershed index indicates we're at the highest snow pack level since 1953 — when recording began in the Fraser Valley. Major floods are expected between May 15 — Jun 15 when a sharp rise in temperature is being predicted. Snow packs in the neighborhood of 20-25% above normal in the past have caused huge floods with marked telephone, gas & electrical outages. BC's Provincial Emergency Preparation web site is recommending all residents stock water, medical and food supplies for what could be a very devastating flood."
Security

Submission + - Hard drive snafu has NBA star suing, fuming

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "All basketball player Bruce Bowen wanted was his hard drive fixed. What he got apparently is an invasion of privacy and a big mess. The Smoking Gun Website says the San Antonio Spurs forward hired a Texas company to fix but instead the repair company removed the machine's hard drive and sold the item — which contained confidential personal and financial information — to another customer. Bowen is now seeking over $2 million in damages from Computer Nerdz, the San Antonio company used to repair his Gateway computer. http://www.networkworld.com/community3/?q=node/147 53"
Music

Music Decoded From 600-Year-Old Carvings 243

Posted by kdawson from the rosslyn-motet dept.
RulerOf writes "Musicians recently unlocked a 600 year old mystery that had been encoded into the walls of the Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, the one featured in The Da Vinci Code. The song was carved into the walls of the chapel in the form of geometric shapes that a father-son team — both are musicians and the father is an ex-Royal Air Force code breaker — finally matched to so-called Chladni patterns (see the Wikipedia article on cymatics). The recovered melody was paired with traditional lyrics (translated into Latin) and recorded; the result can be heard in this video (also linked from the musicians' website). The video also gives a visual representation of how the engravings match up to the cymatic patterns." From the Reuters article: "'The music has been frozen in time by symbolism... [The carvings] are of such exquisite detail and so beautiful that we thought there must be a message here.' The two men matched each of the patterns on the carved cubes to a Chladni pitch, and were able finally to unlock the melody."

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