folstaff - Slashdot User

Submission + - iPhone turns into iRock (noahgift.com)

Submitted by on Saturday June 30, 2007 @09:40PM

An anonymous reader writes: The iPhone won't activate for thousands and it has turned into a debacle for Apple according to this post there are threads on the Apple Support center that have up to 23,000 views and will actually hang your browser they are so big.

Submission + - Music Industry Attacks Papers For Free Prince CD (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by

im just cannonfodder

on Saturday June 30, 2007 @09:11PM

im just cannonfodder writes: ""Prince is giving away a free CD in a national British newspaper The Mail & to anyone going to his concerts. The music retail industry executives are viewing this as an attack and are threatening to 'retaliate'. 'The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behavior like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. And I say that to all the other artists who may be tempted to dally with the Mail on Sunday,' said Entertainment Retailers Association spokesman Paul Quirk. Mr Quirk also said it would be 'an insult' to record stores. Obviously the music industry views anything that doesn't result in a sale to be subversive or unfair. I say it's Prince's music and he can bloody well give it away if he wants to."

Submission + - Sun spot activity at a 1,000 year high

Submitted by Burnhard on Saturday June 30, 2007 @07:13PM

Burnhard writes: A new analysis shows that the Sun is more active now than it has been at anytime in the previous 1,000 years. Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star's activity in the past. They say that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth's climate became steadily warmer.

Submission + - MI5 terrorist threat "critical" (mi5.gov.uk)

Submitted by

wallyhall

on Saturday June 30, 2007 @06:30PM

wallyhall writes: "Today MI5's terrorist threat assessment level was moved to "critical" (MI5.gov.uk), the highest it can be. The BBC (news.bbc.co.uk) also has the story.
The level changed from "severe" after 2 attempted car bombings yesterday and a burning car driven into Glasgow airport today. Several people were arrested in connection to the attacks. Those living in Britain are told to be vigilant."

Submission + - Interactive 360 Light Field Display (usc.edu)

Submitted by

marcog123

on Saturday June 30, 2007 @06:19PM

marcog123 writes: "A group at USC's Graphics Lab have developed an interactive 360 3D display, which boils down to shining light on a spinning mirror. There is a paper and video (warning — 87MB) available. From the abstract: "We describe a set of rendering techniques for an autostereoscopic light field display able to present interactive 3D graphics to multiple simultaneous viewers 360 degrees around the display. The display consists of a high-speed video projector, a spinning mirror covered by a holographic diffuser, and FPGA circuitry to decode specially rendered DVI video signals.""

Submission + - Compressed Air Car

Submitted by FridayBob on Saturday June 30, 2007 @05:13PM

FridayBob writes: Yesterday, a Belgian newspaper published this article (translation) about a new car that runs on nothing but compressed air. Apparently, it can run for about 200km on a tank of air filled up to a pressure of 300 bar (4351 psi). Special filling stations can refill an empty tank in only 3 minutes, but the car can also refill itself in six hours using an electrical outlet and its own on-board compressor. The car was developed by MDI (lots of info), a company set up by French engineer, Guy Nègre (ex-Formula One), that makes its money by selling patents and manufacturing licenses. It will become available in Belgium some time next year for a minimum price of only EUR 4,000 ($5,402). The Indian company, Tata, have also bought a manufacturing license and plan to sell a model for as little as EUR 1,835 ($2,478). This Wikipedia article has some interesting information regarding the air engine. Until a good enough battery appears with which to run an electric car, this seems like an excellent solution.

Submission + - Up to 40 million Mastercards compromised by theft (securityfocus.com) 2

Submitted by

John3

on Saturday June 30, 2007 @03:33PM

John3 writes: "Mastercard announced that at least 68,000 and possibly as many as 40 million Mastercard accounts were compromised by a security breach at Cardsystems Solutions. Cardsystems Solutions has been in trouble before due to security breaches, so one would have hoped that they would have beefed up security. I received a replacement Mastercard yesterday in the mail (with a totally new account number) due to this security breach, and a number of customers shopping at my hardware store today commented that they also received new Mastercards. Anyone else receive a replacement Mastercard in the past few days and how much is this breach costing the banks (and ultimately the cardholders)?"

100x Faster Hard Drive In Lab 180

Posted by kdawson on Saturday June 30, 2007 @02:02PM from the lasers-and-gadolinium dept.

Gary lets us know about research out of the Netherlands that has succeeded in reading and writing a hard disk using polarized laser light. The researchers claim this offers a 100-times speedup over reading/writing using magnets. People have been trying for years to write data using polarized light; the secret of the current work's success lies in its disk's materials — gadolinium, iron, and cobalt. Working prototype drives should be available within a decade.

Submission + - One-Laptop-Per-Child - 300 laptops, but no power 1

Submitted by

SK

on Saturday June 30, 2007 @10:55AM

SK writes: "Galadima Primary is the first school in Nigeria where each pupil has his own laptop. The school received a gift of 300 laptops unfortunately it has no electricity to power them."

Submission + - Navigating the Legal Risks of Open Source

Submitted by jammag on Monday May 21, 2007 @11:09AM

jammag writes: In this article, a lawyer with the Software Freedom Law Center and other experts talk about the legal ramifications of the GPL. "We don't intend to police the GPL," says the Law Center attorney. "In fact, we don't really do that much violations work. Most of our clients need to figure out how to handle licenses. Plenty of developers have used GPL but don't know what it means."

Submission + - Fujitsu's H.264 chip encodes/decodes in Full HD

Submitted by

RareButSeriousSideEf

on Monday May 21, 2007 @11:06AM

RareButSeriousSideEf writes: "Fujitsu's H.264 chip encodes/decodes in Full HD
http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/21/fujitsus-h-264- chip-encodes-decodes-in-full-hd-a-worlds-fir/

Might this chip finally power a workaround for PC-based PVR users being unable to access most cable HDTV programming? Could it assist in fixing problems like "Windows Media Center Restricts Cable TV"? (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/21/0 138255)

From the article:
"Fujitsu just announced a world's first H.264 chip capable of encoding/decoding 1920 x 1080 (60i/50i) video in real time. The chip features 256MB of onboard FCRAM and ultra low 750mW power draw when encoding video. That means lickity quick, MPEG-2 quality processing with only a third, or half the required storage. The ¥30,000 ($247) MB86H51 chip is available to OEMs starting July 1st after which you'll find it bunged into the latest up-scale, consumer-class video recorders."

(I imagine someone could easily command $1500/unit or better by being the first to run YPbPr component inputs into one of these, put the whole thing on a PCI-Express 1x board, and write working Linux and Windows drivers. I'd shell that much out myself. Anyone else?)"

Submission + - GoogleDocs, OpenOffice or Microsoft Office?

Submitted by

E. Stride

on Monday May 21, 2007 @10:44AM

E. Stride writes: "An office suite expert explains the differences between GoogleDocs, OpenOffice and Microsoft Office, and goes deeper into the OpenXML vs. OpenDocument debate."

Submission + - PC World 100 Best Products of 2007

Submitted by

Beth Schechner

on Monday May 21, 2007 @10:21AM

Beth Schechner writes: "Hi, So that you don't have to, the editors of PC World Magazine have ranked the best PCs, HDTVs, components, sites, and services of 2007 so far. I thought you might be interested in reading the complete article, and checking out some of the online-only features. Let me know if you have any questions, and check out the links below. Best, Beth Schechner (212.725.2295 ext. 28) 100 Best Products of the Year: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,131935/article.h tml?tk=pr_BP2007 Top 20 Slideshow: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,131925-page,1/ar ticle.html?tk=pr_BP2007top20ss Reader Favorites Slideshow: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,131926-page,1/ar ticle.html?tk=pr_BP2007rfss Most-Anticipated Products Slideshow: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,131927-page,1/ar ticle.html?tk=pr_BP2007mapss Top Products Video: http://www.pcworld.com/video/id,512-page,1-bid,0/v ideo.html?tk=pr_BP2007video"

Submission + - Paying for Better Math and Science Teachers

Submitted by

Coryoth

on Monday March 05, 2007 @03:40PM

Coryoth writes: "While California is suffering from critical shortage of mathematics and science teachers, Kentucky is considering two bills that would give explicit financial incentives to math and science students and teachers. The first bill would provide cash incentives to schools to run AP math and science classes, and cash scholarships to students who did well on AP math and science exams. The second bill provides salary bumps for any teachers with degrees in math or science, or who score well in teacher-certification tests in math, chemistry and physics. Is such differentiated pay the right way to attract science graduates who can make much more in industry, or is it simply going to breed discontent among teachers?"

Submission + - Windows Vista Cracked by Paradox

Submitted by

AlienWarrior75

on Monday March 05, 2007 @03:39PM

AlienWarrior75 writes: "I have verified and tested the Paradox crack that allows OEM manufacturers to embedded their pre-activated certificates into the system, essentially activating the software, making the operating system fully genuine and able to receive Windows Updates."

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