Mike Dailly explains how this iconic Amiga game evolved from a simple challenge: Could a walking man be animated in an 8x8 box?

The resulting animation, drawn in an hour over lunchtime, was funny enough to inspire one of the most involving games of all time. Lemmings was released in 1991, and has been ported to almost every computer platform in existence.
http://www.javalemmings.com/DMA/Lem_1.htm

Microsoft's WGA servers are down. All computers running Vista or XP which try to validate are being marked as counterfiet.

A user at one of Microsoft's tech forums posted this response from the company.

http://forums.microsoft.com/Genuine/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2053834&SiteID=25

Indian sources claim Google is two weeks away from announcing a new Google-branded mobile phone. An official release would come within a "fortnight" and would initially release the phone simultaneously in Europe and the US. http://www.electronista.com/articles/07/08/24/google.phone.in.fortnight/

HTC is rumoured to be producing the phones, which will not be carrier-locked.
MacCNN reports;

http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/08/24/google.phone.in.fortnight/

Scientists have found diamonds inside tiny zircon crystals from the ancient rocks of Western Australia.

Not only are the microscopic diamonds one billion years older than the previous oldest-known diamonds, they also lend weight to the controversial "cool earth" theory, said team member Alexander Nemchin, an isotope geochemist with Curtin University of Technology in Perth.

Dr Nemchin and his colleagues reported they found the diamonds by chance while studying zircon grains from Jack Hills, 600-700km northeast of Perth.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22294772-30417,00.html

An audit of the carbon output of Australia's IT suggests the industry generates as much atmospheric pollution as aviation and steel industries. http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,22254993-15306,00.html

IT and communications produced 2.84 per cent of total national emissions excluding transport, with desktops computers among the biggest contributors to IT's carbon footprint.

Australian Computer Society president Philip Argy said;

Suggestions to reduce IT's footprint included the extension of the national energy star rating scheme to cover commercial IT products, and purchasing carbon offsets.

Two German scientists, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, claim to have broken the speed of light.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/08/16/scispeed116.xml

They sent beams of microwave photons through two prisms, then moved the prisms apart. When the prisms were separated, most photons reflected off the first prism into a detector, however, a few appeared to tunnel through the gap as if the prisms were still together.

Dr Nimtz told New Scientist magazine: "For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of."

After 20 million years, Baiji (Yangtze River Dolphin) are now officially extinct http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,292932,00.html.

The dolphins were driven to extinction by the destruction of their habitat and more direct causes such as entanglement in fishing nets. Recent attempts to preserve the species proved to be too little, too late.

In what looks like an accidental leak yesterday, Sony New Zealand boss Warwick Light let slip that the company plans to release a digital tuner for the Playstation 3 that will mean the consoles will be able to be used as a TiVo-like digital video recorder. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10455415

It appears that the tuner will be released as a USB add-on, accompanied by a software upgrade that will allow PS3s to record television to their internal hard drives.

In a move clearly intended to counter the hype surrounding Apple's iPhone, Microsoft has announced their own innovative new phone. http://www.iphonehacks.com/2007/05/apple_says_hell.html

Dubbed the oPhone, the new machine is based around a fold out tri-blade boomerang shape, and is in fact aerodynamically stable enough to be thrown. With it's round screen and user assigned keypads, the oPhone is sure to put the "Oh!" back into the mobile phone market.

Microsoft has admitted that the XBox 360s' "Red Ring of Death" is a real problem, and has set aside more than a billion dollars for warranties on the troubled console.

In what is likely to be the largest warranty payout of all time, Microsoft will repair or replace all failed consoles, reimburse customers who have already paid for repairs and extend the warranty from one year to three.

"This problem has caused frustration for some of our customers, and for that we sincerely apologize," said Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division.

Microsoft is not stating the rate of failure for the consoles, but the amount put aside suggests the company believes one in four XBox 360s will fail.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/business/la-fi-xbox6jul06,1,4761516.story?coll=la-headlines-business-enter&ctrack=1&cset=true

Sun Microsystems has debuted a high-performance computing platform called Constellation which they hope will vault the company back into the top ranks of supercomputer manufacturers.

The system features a switch with 3,456 ports which will increase bandwidth available to the processors.

"We are looking at a factor-of-three improvement over the current best system at an equal number of nodes," said Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun's senior vice president of the systems group.

Interestingly, the supercomputer will depend on AMD's Barcelona CPUs. Constellation sysems can use a variety of processors, including UltraSparc, AMD and Intel, however, AMD currently provides better performance on floating point calculations than Intel's chips, according to Bechtolsheim.
http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/hardware/0,39042972,62025136,00.htm

Despite all the speculation about high tech military uses for brain-machine interfaces, it looks like a Telepathic TV will be the first product of thought control research.

Scientists at Hitachi have used thought to move a model train, and believe the same technology could be used for a TV remote.

The technique, known as optical topography, reads thoughts by measuring changes in blood flow to key areas of the brain.
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21955382-2,00.html

Smarthouse news is reporting that more than 30% of Australian XBox360 owners are returning the consoles with the "Red Ring of Death", which occurs when the console suffers a hardware failure http://www.gwn.com/news/story.php/id/13201/Retailers_Claim_360_Failure_Rate_Is_Over_30.html.

It appears that the failures are caused by a fundamental design flaw in the cooling of the GPU.

Some European Xbox 360's are being repaired by Microsoft with extra cooling http://www.maxconsole.net/?mode=news&newsid=17870. Hopefully they will now admit the design flaw and retrofit the same repair for their Australian customers.

Australian Prime Minister announced a US1.68 billion plan to supply fast and cheap Internet access across the nation on Monday.

"What we have announced today is a plan that will deliver to 99 percent of the Australian population very fast and affordable broadband in just two years' time," Howard said.

A joint venture of Optus and rural finance company Elders would contribute a further 900 million US dollars to build a broadband network in the bush and provide broadband of at least 12 megabits per second by June 2009.

Full story here: http://www.smh.com.au/news/Technology/Australia-announces-vast-national-broadband-plan/2007/06/18/1182018999327.html

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFFF) has uncovered more documents detailing secret government surveillance of AT&T's Internet traffic.

Some of information was already publically available, but after negotiations with AT&T, EFF has found new documents describing a secret, secure room in AT&T's facilities that gave the National Security Agency (NSA) direct access to customers' emails and other Internet communications.

"This is critical evidence supporting our claim that AT&T is cooperating with the NSA in the illegal dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn.

Full story here: http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2007_06.php