thedohman - Slashdot User

Feed Verizon rolling out G-PON technology to boost FiOS speeds (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed on Wednesday April 04, 2007 @11:52PM

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment, Networking

In Verizon's never-ending quest to continue bumping the bandwidth to the four or five lucky customers that actually have access to its FTTH network, the firm is planning to implement a new technology which will hopefully increase the speed of FiOS fiber-to-the-premises links "by four to eight times." Of course we jest about the amount of you oh-so-fortunate ones that can actually get ahold of such speedy luxuries, but Verizon is looking to Alcatel-Lucent to help with the forthcoming gigabit passive optical network (G-PON), which is slated to "increase the aggregate broadband speeds on Verizon's FTTP systems by four times downstream to the customer, and by eight times upstream back to the Internet." The outfit also stated that it would "continue deploying the broadband passive optical network (B-PON)" that it has been using since 2004, and took a moment to boast about "how simple" upgrading FiOS actually was. Still, the vast majority of you won't even be in the general vicinity necessary to acquire the newfangled G-PON niceties, but the soon-to-be-celebrating town of Lewisville, Texas can keep an eye on Q2 of this year, while folks in Kirklyn, Pennsylvania should have it sometime "over the summer."

[Thanks, Jim V.]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Submission + - Mileage Maniacs

Submitted by WY on Wednesday April 04, 2007 @10:51PM

WY writes: Bloomberg reports in this article about the Japanese hybrid car hackers: "Toyota Motor Corp. says its Prius gasoline-electric hybrid car gets about 55 miles to the gallon, making it one of the most fuel-efficient cars on the road. That's not good enough for Takashi Toya." He managed to reach as high as 115 MPG. He "is one of about 100 nenpimania, Japanese for 'ileage maniacs,'."

Is The Term Paper Dead? 444

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday April 04, 2007 @01:37AM from the drop-and-give-me-5,000-words dept.

Reader gyges writes in to tell us that the Washington Post has picked up a piece he wrote about cut-and-paste plagiarism: "Plagiarism today is heavily invested with morality surrounding intellectual honesty. That is laudable. But truly distinguishing plagiarism is a matter of intent. Did I mean to copy, was it accidental (a trick of memory), was it polygenesis[?] ... Young people today are simply too far ahead of anything schools might do to curb their recycling efforts. Beyond simply selling used term papers online, Web sites such as StudentofFortune.com allow students to post specific questions and pay for answers." The author argues that in the era we're entering, schools need to rely far less on term papers in assessing students.

Feed News: Google Desktop for Mac released (macworld.com)

From feed by macworldfeed on Wednesday April 04, 2007 @01:13AM

Google has released a Mac version of its Google Desktop search tool.

Feed April 4, 1581: Francis Drake Knighted by His Grateful Queen (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed on Wednesday April 04, 2007 @12:52AM

April 4, 1581: Francis Drake is knighted by his grateful queen.

Feed Wrightspeed's X1 Electric Supercar Sparks Hybrid Dreams (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed on Wednesday April 04, 2007 @12:52AM

A year after introducing the X1 pure-electric race car prototype that blows away Ferraris in drag races, the startup company Wrightspeed is seeking investment for plans to morph its demonstration car into a super-fast production hybrid.

Journal Journal: You Can be a Rocket Man

Journal by Alien54 on Wednesday April 04, 2007 @12:26AM

The world's first commercially-available rocket pack is now on the market - for £130,000. Its inventor, Juan Manuel Lozano, who owns Mexican-based Tecnologia Aeroespacial Mexican (TAM), describes the Rocket Belt as "the most spectacular flying machine ever developed". The 52-year-old said the main difference between his belt and the James Bond version is the

Submission + - Intel Mac Performance Comparison

Submitted by jfpoole on Wednesday April 04, 2007 @12:21AM

jfpoole writes: Primate Labs has a processor performance comparison of almost all the Intel Macs Apple's shipped over the past sixteen months (the only omission being the new Xeon-based Xserve). It's interesting to see just how little processor performance varies across the entire Intel Mac lineup (except for the quad-core Mac Pro, of course).

Submission + - Gaim is being renamed to "Pidgin IM"

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 04, 2007 @12:12AM

An anonymous reader writes: After some legal threats from AOL, the GAIM project is undergoing a name change in preperation for the 2.0 release. The project will now be known as Pidgin IM, and libgaim will now be known as libpurple, according to discussions on the GAIM project mailing lists

The new site will be located at http://www.pidgin.im/ , and the developers site is at http://developer.pidgin.im/

Submission + - Firefox also vulnerable to Windows cursor exploit

Submitted by Stony Stevenson on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @11:42PM

Stony Stevenson writes: Computerworld is reporting that the unpatched Windows vulnerability involving cursor animation files that caused Microsoft to release an out-of-sequence patch on Tuesday also affects Mozilla's Firefox 2.0 browser.

From the article: "Contrary to other reports, Mozilla's Firefox 2.0 is vulnerable to attackers armed with the Windows animated (ANI) cursor exploit, a researcher said Tuesday.

Alexander Sotirov, the vulnerability researcher at Determina who discovered the ANI flaw last December and notified Microsoft of it later that month, yesterday posted a demonstration of an ANI exploit that hijacks a PC when Firefox users are conned into visiting a malicious site.

An identical attack against Firefox 2.0, however, gave Sotirov complete and total access to the PC's drive. "Since Firefox does not have a low-privilege mode, similar to the protected mode in IE, we'll be able to overwrite files as well," he said."

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