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How To Play HD Video On a Netbook 205

Posted by timothy from the addressing-that-stuttering-problem dept.
Barence writes with some news to interest those with netbooks running Windows: "Netbooks aren't famed for their high-definition video playing prowess, but if you've got about $10 and a few minutes going spare, there is a way to enjoy high-definition trailers and videos on your Atom-powered portable. You need three things: a copy of Media Player Classic Home Cinema, CoreCodec's CoreAVC codec, and some HD videos encoded in AVC or h.264 formats. This blog takes you through the process."

Comment Re:$199 too high! (Score 1) 217

by jbridges (#31088318) Attached to: XCore's EduBook, a Netbook That Runs on AA Batteries

A small flash drive may be preferable in an extra toy computer. For for those who use a netbook as a primary, 8GB (or less) is a joke.

I have the Lenovo with 160GB, and the harddrive is acceptably quick.
In fact the whole machine feels faster than my top of the line Thinkpad from a few years before.

The only thing that really drags on the Lenovo S10 is the 1.6Ghz Atom processor. Given that the $199 AA battery machine uses a MUCH slower processor, I think it would be far less acceptable as a primary machine, even if it had the same 160GB harddrive.

And I do agree on AA batteries for cameras, I try to use them exclusively. But the power demands of a netbook make me less enthusiastic about them in that platform.

Comment Re:$199 too high! (Score 3, Interesting) 217

by jbridges (#31080412) Attached to: XCore's EduBook, a Netbook That Runs on AA Batteries

Except four things:

The $199 price does not include WinXP. The $250 Lenovo S10 price does.
The $199 price does not include 1GB of ram (only 512mb). The $250 Lenovo S10 price does.
The $199 price does not include 160GB harddrive (only small flash drive). The $250 Lenovo S10 price does.
The $199 price does not include batteries (AA or otherwise). The $250 Lenovo S10 price does.

What does the $199 unit cost with a copy of WinXP Home, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB harddrive, and a supply of AA batteries?
A lot closer to $250 than you imply.

(and you have the much slower CPU in the AA battery unit)

Comment $199 too high! (Score 4, Insightful) 217

by jbridges (#31079002) Attached to: XCore's EduBook, a Netbook That Runs on AA Batteries

You can buy a Lenovo S10 with 1GB of ram, 1.6Ghz CPU and 160GB harddrive for $249, and that includes WinXP.

The AA batteries sounds interesting, but since all the netbooks come with a battery, and they are cheap enough to buy an entire new netbook with new battery when anything breaks or wears out.

If this unit was $150 or less, it's slow CPU and AA battery power might make sense. But at $199 it's not worth it.
Technology

Submission + - When an Electric Car Dies, What Will Happen to the (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by TheClockworkSoul
TheClockworkSoul writes: This year, President Obama laid out the goal of putting 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015, which raises a question: how the heck are we going to recycle millions of lithium ion batteries be recycled?

As part of the $2.4 billion in stimulus funds awarded last month to jump-start the manufacturing and deployment of a domestic crop of vehicle batteries, the U.S. Department of Energy recently awarded $9.5 million to California-based recycling company Toxco Inc., the only company in the U.S. currently able to recycle all sizes and models of lithium-ion batteries, the kind used to power most of the new hybrid and plug-in electric vehicles entering the world market. With most of the world's lithium production centered in Bolivia, Chile and China, some say having a recycling infrastructure in place for vehicle batteries could help save the United States from trading "peak oil" for "peak lithium."
Earth

Submission + - Panasonic's New LED Bulbs Shine for 19 Years (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by
Mike
Mike writes: "As lighting manufacturers leapfrog the incandescent bulb and CFLs looks set to define the future of lighting, Panasonic recently unveiled a remarkable 60-watt household LED bulb that they claim can last up to 19 years. With a lifespan 40 times longer than their incandescent counterparts, Panasonic's new EverLed bulbs are the most efficient LEDs ever to be produced and are set to debut in Japan on October 21st. Hopefully as the technology is refined we'll see them break down their significant cost barrier — $40 dollars is still pretty pricey for a light bulb."
Security

Submission + - FreeBSD trivial ROOT, first on 6.X, now on 7.X (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by udippel
udippel writes: The Register made some headlines [theregister.co.uk] first, scary. There is a video [vimeo.com] that demos how to compile a small program; or upload it to your unprivileged shell, or exploit some scripting on a web server to get some shell, for example the one needed to send out mail, and off you go. Since it is the exploit of a race condition, the whole system could as well crash or hang. In its article, The Register still says "Versions 7.1 and and beyond are not vulnerable". Just one day later, the author uploaded another video [vimeo.com], demonstrating the whole process another time, this time for FreeBSD 7.2.
Scary. I start to question FOSS, and wonder, how few cold eyes have reviewed this code, overlooking a NULL-dereference plus a race condition.
Icing on the cake: Przemyslaw Frasunek, who discovered the misery, duly informed FreeBSD on August 29th; but his message, so the FreeBSD guys, "got lost in the slew".
Is this the kind of OS we will gladly recommend for security-related applications?
Mozilla

Adblock Plus Maker Proposes Change To Help Sites 615

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the next-comes-the-ad-block-blocker dept.
Dotnaught writes "Wladimir Palant, maker of the Firefox extension Adblock Plus, on Monday proposed a change in his software that would allow publishers, with the consent of Adblock Plus users, to prevent their ads from being blocked. Palant suggested altering his software to recognize a specific meta tag as a signal to bring up an in-line dialog box noting the site publisher's desire to prevent ad blocking. The user would then have to choose to respect that wish or not."
Earth

Antarctic Ice Is Growing, Not Melting Away, At Davis Station 633

Posted by timothy from the weather-is-what-you-get dept.
schwit1 writes "A report from The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research says that Antarctic ice is growing, not melting away. Ice core drilling in the fast ice off Australia's Davis Station in East Antarctica by the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-Operative Research Centre shows that last year, the ice had a maximum thickness of 1.89m, its densest in 10 years. The average thickness of the ice at Davis since the 1950s is 1.67m. A paper to be published soon by the British Antarctic Survey in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded."
Games

Bethesda Talks DLC Size and Limitations 93

Posted by Soulskill from the better-smaller-faster-easier dept.
Gamasutra has an interview with Pete Hines, product manager for Fallout 3, about Bethesda's philosophy for DLC, and how it's changed over the years. Quoting: "All these people are out there playing our game by the hundreds of thousands on a daily basis and we want to be able to bring those folks something they could do in a much shorter time frame, rather than just saying, 'See you next year.' That instantly ruled out doing a big expansion because those things just take so damn long to do. So we started looking at the biggest stuff we'd done that people really liked, but that we could do in smaller, digestible chunks. That's where we came to the Knights of the Nine model — it's substantive and it adds multiple hours of game play and new items, but we can do it in a time frame that allows us to get it out without waiting forever. That's what we've gone for with Fallout 3."
Windows

83% of Businesses Won't Bother With Windows 7 545

Posted by CmdrTaco from the count-me-in dept.
Olipro writes "Most enterprises stated they won't bother with Windows 7 for at least a year as they simply continue to distrust that compatibility issues won't occur with their mission-critical software ... The Million Dollar question will be whether the fact that XP upgrades to Windows 7 requires a clean install will prove to be Microsoft's undoing." I suspect that will change before they actually release the OS.
Editorial

Submission + - ISP Capping is Becoming the New DRM

Submitted by
Crazzaper
Crazzaper writes: "There's a lot of controversy over ISP capping with Time Warner leading the charge. Tom's Hardware has an interesting article about how capping is the new form of DRM at the ISP level. The author draws some comparison to business practices by large cable operators and their efforts to protect cable TV programming. While this is understandable from the cable operator's perspective, the article points out how capping will affect popular services such as Steam for game content publishing and distribution, cloud-computing and online media services. Apparently this is also an effective way of going after casual piracy."
The Media

Paid Shilling Comes to Twitter 134

Posted by kdawson from the follow-the-eyeballs dept.
An anonymous reader alerts us that an outfit called Magpie is paying Twitter users to tout advertisers' products. Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb has identified a number of household-name companies — among them Apple, Skype, Kodak, Cisco, Adobe, Roxio, PC Tools, and Box.net — whose products are hyped by identically worded, paid Magpie tweets. But comments to Kirkpatrick's post, including one from a Box.net spokesman, make it sound likely that these shills were paid for not by the companies themselves, but by affiliate marketers. That may not matter. In the same way that Belkin recently got burned paying consumers to write complimentary online reviews about the company's products, the makers of products and services touted through Magpie may find themselves tainted in the backlash from this new form of astroturfing. Kirkpatrick concludes his post: "So there's the Twitter-sphere for you! Bring on 'real time search,' bring on a globally connected community, bring on vapid, vile, stupid shilling. It all seems pretty sad to me."
Spam

Spam Replacing Postal Junk Mail? 251

Posted by kdawson from the connecting-the-dots dept.
TheOtherChimeraTwin writes "I've been getting spam from mainstream companies that I do business with, which is odd because I didn't give those companies my email address. It is doubly strange because the address they are using is a special-purpose one that I wouldn't give out to any business. Apparently knotice.com ('Direct Digital Marketing Solutions') and postalconnect.net aka emsnetwork.net (an Equifax Marketing Service Product with the ironic name 'Permission!') are somehow collecting email addresses and connecting them with postal addresses, allowing companies to send email instead of postal mail. Has anyone else encountered this slimy practice or know how they are harvesting email addresses?"

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