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Wireless Networking

Submission + - Nortel's Edholm on the future of work

Submitted by Tinkel
Tinkel writes: Nortel's enterprise CTO — Phil Edholm (he of 'Edholm's law') — has been discussing the company's work with university students — specifically learning how they use social networks and virtual worlds such as Second Life. The future workplace is likely to involve a lot more of these technologies, according to Edholm who looks forward to a time when bandwidth across all types of networks enables "true mobile broadband"...

From the article:
"Information and interaction are coming together and it's not going to be information technology it's going to be information and interaction technology in a few years."
Television

Submission + - BBC iPlayer spinal tap Easter Egg? (imageshack.us)

Submitted by mr-mafoo
mr-mafoo writes: I noticed, whilst watching some of auntie's best through the online iPlayer, a potential easter egg. The volume slider on the BBC's browser-based flash version of its viewing service doesn't cap at the standard arbitrary 10, its goes all the way up to 11. Thats what makes its special.

To those of you who are currently scratching their heads in confusion, this is a reference to the classic sequence in the 80's Parody-Rockumentary Spinal Tap, and a certain guitar amp that went up to 11.

The character Nigel Tufnel justified it as follows: "Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where? "

Sadly I don't know if people outside of the UK can view the player.
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Top 10 funniest jokes to play on a Smoker

Submitted by Jason
Jason writes: Have you ever wondered how to play a hilarious joke on a Smoker? Look no further! Now you can be the #1 joker and impress all of your friends. NicotineIsland.com has compiled and published a user submitted list of the funniest jokes to play on Smokers. Try not to go overboard with some of them, and please remember that Smokers are people too. Click here for the jokes
Windows

Submission + - Microsoft Forces you to use UAC

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It's not enough for Microsoft to make UAC the most user-protection implementation on the planet, now they're also forcing Administrators to use it. Windows Vista makes it impossible for Administrators to add network printers to a local machine if UAC is disabled. Instead: "The only workaround available to date is to re-enable UAC, restart the PC, add the printer, go through the UAC prompts, disable UAC, and then restart once more."
The Courts

Submission + - Pirate Bay to buy its own copyright-free country

Submitted by paulraps
paulraps writes: Notorious Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay is planning to buy its own nation in an attempt to get around troublesome international copyright laws. The organisation, the world's largest bit torrent tracker, has set its sights on Sealand, a former British naval platform in the North Sea that has been designated a 'micronation' and claims to be outside UK jurisdiction. With a target price of £500m it won't be cheap, but Pirate Bay says contributors will become honorary citizens.
Movies

Submission + - Blu-ray says NO to porn, porn says NO to Blu-ray

Submitted by Sarusa
Sarusa writes: If this is true, it's Beta vs VHS all over again and HD-DVD may be the foregone winner of the format wars. First, Heise reports (summarized from the German by sgknox.com) that Digital Playground (NSFW), who were committed to Blu-ray last year, are now producing HD-DVD titles instead. No Blu-ray disk manufacturer would make their disks because Sony doesn't want porn on Blu-ray (just as with Betamax). Second, as reported by tgdaily, the porn industry at CES overwhelmingly favors HD-DVD because it's much cheaper and easier to produce. As noted in the tgdaily article, porn was a huge factor in VHS winning the VHS/Beta format wars even though most people don't like to acknowledge it. Porn, like gaming, pushes tech adoption.
The Internet

Submission + - Firefox 3 Plans and IE8 Speculation

Submitted by
ReadWriteWeb
ReadWriteWeb writes: "Information about the next versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer suggest that the two biggest browsers are heading in different directions. Mozilla has published a wiki page detailing its plans for the next version of Firefox, codenamed "Gran Paradiso". Among the mandatory requirements listed for FF3 are improving the add-on experience, providing an extensible bookmarks back-end platform, adding more support for web services "to act as content handlers" — all of which show that Firefox wants to be an independent information broker rather than a simple HTML renderer in its next version. Also in the works is Microsoft's IE8. According to ActiveWin.com, a Microsoft official at CES told them that work has already begun for IE 8 and it may be released as a final product "within 18-24 months". Looking ahead, it's obvious that IE will continue to hook into the advanced functionality that Vista offers.

So while IE7 and Firefox 2 were more alike than different (feature-wise they're practically identical!), with IE8 and FF3 we will likely see the two biggest browsers head off into different directions."
Patents

Submission + - IBM breaks patent record, wants patent reform

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: IBM set the record for most patents granted in a year for 2006. At the same time, IBM points out that small companies earn more patents per capita than larger enterprises and pushes for reform to address shortcomings in the process of patenting business methods: "The prevalence of patent applications that are of low quality or poorly written have led to backlogs of historic proportions, and the granting of patents protecting ideas that are not new, are overly broad, or obvious." And it's been committing itself to a new patent policy: "Key tenets of the policy are that patent quality is the responsibility of the applicant; that patent applications should be open to public examination and that patent ownership should be transparent; and that business methods without technical content should not be patentable."
Microsoft

Submission + - UK schools at risk of Microsoft lock-in

Submitted by Robert
Robert writes: UK schools and colleges that have signed up to Microsoft Corp's academic licensing programs face the 'significant potential' of being locked in to the company's software, according to an interim review by the UK government agency responsible for technology in education. The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency report also states that most establishments surveyed do not believe that Microsoft's licensing agreements provide value for money.
It's funny. Laugh.

Journal Journal: You have been... Goatsed?

Journal by Noryungi

About 2,500 people have had a (very) nasty surprise recently when they looked at their MySpace page. Let's just say a small image was replaced by... another small image. Only, the second one was from the infamous "Goatse.cx" (You remember THAT one, don't you?). But what exactly happened? Jason Scott, the owner of textfiles.com explains all -- or is it confesses all?. The email received are hilarious. Well worth a read and a chuckle
Microsoft

Microsoft Worried OEM 'Craplets' Will Harm Vista 527

Posted by samzenpus from the any-reason-to-say-crap dept.
elsilver writes "An article at the CBC indicates that Microsoft is worried that the assorted crap most OEM companies load onto a new machine may affect users' opinion of Vista. An unnamed executive is concerned that the user will conclude the instability of the non-MS-certified applications is Vista's fault. Is this a serious concern, or is MS trying to bully OEMs into only including Vista-certified apps? As for the OEMs, one "removed older DVD-writing software they found was incompatible and replaced it with Vista's own software." — do they get points for realizing it was both buggy AND redundant?"
Power

Submission + - Will Nuclear Fusion Fill the Gap Left by Peak Oil?

Submitted by
clv101
clv101 writes: "The Oil Drum has a comprehensive review of the current state of nuclear fusion research and development addressing the question of whether fusion can fill the energy gap left by the depletion of traditional fossil fuels this century.

The project timetable is outlined along will all outstanding scientific and engineering challenges and how they are being tackled.

So Will Nuclear Fusion Fill the Gap Left by Peak Oil?"
Links

Submission + - Tragic Early Death of Boy Genius

Submitted by BayaWeaver
BayaWeaver writes: Is there a moral to this tragic story? Boy goes to Caltech at the age of 12, gets his Ph.D from Cornell in string theory (under Brian Greene, a boy genius himself), and then things seem to have gone downhill after that. He is treated in a hospital for depression at 25, dies at age 30 and his family won't say why. Here is the story from the New Straits Times in Malaysia.
"Boy genius Chiang Ti Ming, who died on Saturday, was buried yesterday at the Jalan Sikamat Christian Cemetery. The cause of his death is unknown and family members were tight-lipped at the funeral. Chiang made the headlines in 1989 when, as a 12-year-old, he was accepted into the prestigious California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to study physics. He went on to pursue a doctorate in the field of Super String Theory in 1992 at Cornell University, an Ivy League institution.Not much was known about Chiang after his initial "fame", though in 1993, he suffered a personal tragedy when his four-year-old sister Eei Wern drowned at the swimming pool of the Seremban International Golf Club. In 2002, it was reported that he was admitted to a hospital in Kuala Lumpur after suffering from depression."
If there a lesson to be learnt here, what would that be? Don't go to Caltech when you are 12yo? Don't waste the best years of your life doing string theory? Was the poor kid pushed too far too fast? One can only imagine the overwhelming pressure the boy must have felt to perform. Perhaps he should have been left alone to find his way and not be pushed to what is very possibly a dead end

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