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HP

HP Explains Why Printer Ink Is So Expensive 651

Posted by kdawson from the megabucks-per-picoliter dept.
CWmike writes "'There's a perception that [printer] ink is one of the most expensive substances in the world,' says Thom Brown, marketing manager at HP. Well, yeah. One might get that feeling walking out of a store having spent $35 for a single ink cartridge that appears to contain fewer fluid ounces of product than a Heinz ketchup packet. Brown was ready to explain. He presented a series of PowerPoint slides aptly titled 'Why is printer ink so expensive?' I was ready for answers. The key point in a nutshell: Ink technology is expensive, and you pay for reliability and image quality. 'These liquids are completely different from a technology standpoint,' Brown says, adding that users concerned about cost per page can buy 'XL' ink cartridges from HP that last two to three times longer. (Competitors do the same.) The message: You get value for the money. No getting around it though — ink is still expensive, particularly if you have to use that inkjet printer for black-and-white text pages."
Real Time Strategy (Games)

StarCraft II To Be Released On July 27 220

Posted by Soulskill from the guess-it's-ready dept.
Blizzard announced today that StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, the first game in a series of three, will be released on July 27. The game will contain the Terran campaign (29 missions), the full multiplayer experience, and "several challenge-mode mini-games," with "focused goals designed to ease players into the basics of multiplayer strategies." It will launch alongside the revamped Battle.net, which we've previously discussed. Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said, "We've been looking forward to revisiting the StarCraft universe for many years, and we're excited that the time for that is almost here. Thanks to our beta testers, we're making great progress on the final stages of development, and we'll be ready to welcome players all over the world to StarCraft II and the new Battle.net in just a few months."

Comment True, but obvious (Score 1) 436

by jlp2097 (#32073714) Attached to: Why IE9 Will Not Support Codecs Other Than H.264

This wasn't supposed to be an anti-MS article - with all the previous discussions on /. regarding html5 and video I thought this was rather obvious. Quite the contrary: the article was supposed to highlight why MS made that decision and let us discuss their arguments. I for one would have probably made the same decision as the IE9 manager.
Microsoft

Submission + - Why IE9 will not support other codecs than H2.64 (msdn.com) 2

Submitted by jlp2097
jlp2097 writes: There is a new article up on Microsofts IEBlog explaining why IE9 will only support H.264:

First and most important, we think it is the best available video codec today for HTML5 for our customers. Relative to alternatives, H.264 maintains strong hardware support in PCs and mobile devices as well as a breadth of implementation in consumer electronics devices around the world, excellent video quality, scale of existing usage, availability of tools and content authoring systems, and overall industry momentum – each an important factor that contributes to our point of view. H.264 also provides the best certainty and clarity with respect to legal rights from the many companies that have patents in this area.

The article goes into detail for each of these points and is an interesting read, confirming a lot of points already discussed here.

Submission + - Why ICQ is so important to Russia (wired.co.uk) 2

Submitted by Lanxon
Lanxon writes: Sell your old ICQ number on the Russian market, and you could make hundreds of dollars, reports Wired. The news of DST acquiring the instant messaging service ICQ from AOL for a fraction of its original price might seem, to the English-speaking world, as an offloading of obsolete software assets. But the reality is quite different: In Russia, ICQ is enormous, and Russian-language internet auction sites trade desirable ICQ numbers for the equivalent of hundreds of pounds or dollars. The more repeating figures are there, the more expensive it gets. The posh 9060900, for example, will set you back 11,111 rubles (around £250/$400).
Intel

Submission + - Is Windows 7 Actually Faster Than Ubuntu 10.04? (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Phoronix has published their first set of benchmarks that compare Windows 7 Professional to Ubuntu 10.04. This first article covers the OpenGL / gaming performance of Windows and Ubuntu using a number of tests and different resolutions and six different computers are used in the comparison. Ubuntu 10.04 ran surprisingly good compared to Windows 7, but the Intel Linux performance is where the numbers plummeted.
It's funny. Laugh.

Man Spends 2,200 Hours Defeating Bejeweled 2 179

Posted by Soulskill from the wins-complimentary-straight-jacket dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A California steel contractor spent 2,200 total hours over the last three years racking up a high score in Bejeweled 2. He exceeded the 2^31-1 maximum score programmed for the score display, proving that there is, in fact, an end to the game. I suppose congratulations or condolences are in order."
Earth

Aral Sea May Recover; Dead Sea Needs a Lifeline 131

Posted by timothy from the just-needs-feng-shui-adjustment dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It's a tale of two seas. The drying up of the Aral Sea is considered one of the greatest environmental catastrophes in history, but the northern sector of the sea, at least, is showing signs of life. A dam completed in 2005 has increased the North Aral's span by 20 percent, and birds, fish, and people are all returning to the area. Meanwhile, the Dead Sea is still in the midst of precipitous decline, since too much water is being drawn out of the Jordan River for thirsty populations and crops. To keep the sea from shrinking more, scientists are pushing an ambitious scheme called the 'Red-Dead conduit,' which would channel huge amounts of water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. However, the environmental consequences of such a project may be troubling."
Data Storage

WD, Intel, Corsair, Kingston, Plextor SSDs Collide 56

Posted by timothy from the will-it-collide dept.
J. Dzhugashvili writes "New SSDs just keep coming out from all corners of the market, and keeping track of all of them isn't the easiest job in the world. Good thing SSD roundups pop up every once in a while. This time, Western Digital's recently launched SiliconEdge Blue solid-state drive has been compared against new entrants from Corsair, Kingston, and Plextor. The newcomers faced off against not just each other, but also Intel's famous X25-M G2, WD's new VelociRaptor VR200M mechanical hard drive, and a plain-old WD Caviar Black 2TB thrown in for good measure. Who came out on top? Priced at about the same level, the WD and Plextor drives each seem to have deal-breaking performance weaknesses. The Kingston drive is more affordable than the rest, but it yielded poor IOMeter results. In the end, the winner appeared to be Corsair's Nova V128, which had similar all-around performance as Intel's 160GB X25-M G2 but with a slightly lower capacity and a more attractive price." Thanks to that summary, you might not need to wade through all 10 of the pages into which the linked article's been split.
Programming

Microsoft Fuzzing Botnet Finds 1,800 Office Bugs 111

Posted by timothy from the running-through-the-possibilities dept.
CWmike writes "Microsoft uncovered more than 1,800 bugs in Office 2010 by tapping into the unused computing horsepower of idling PCs, a company security engineer said on Wednesday. Office developers found the bugs by running millions of 'fuzzing' tests, a practice employed by both software developers and security researchers, that searches for flaws by inserting data into file format parsers to see where programs fail by crashing. 'We found and fixed about 1,800 bugs in Office 2010's code,' said Tom Gallagher, senior security test lead with Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing group, who last week co-hosted a presentation on Microsoft's fuzzing efforts at the CanSecWest security conference. 'While a large number, it's important to note that that doesn't mean we found 1,800 security issues. We also want to fix things that are not security concerns.'"

Comment Re:Nothing new (Score 4, Informative) 152

by jlp2097 (#31638894) Attached to: Microsoft Adopts SVG For Internet Explorer 9

And with all that said, perhaps it's time to put Microsoft's SVG implementation through the /. torture rack.

Not necessary - here is a nice comparision for all current browser implementations of SVG and how much tests of the official SVG test suite they pass : SVG Implementation Table. If you click on the chart you get a very detailed view.

To summarize:
IE9: 29% of the SVG test cases,
Firefox: 72%,
Chrome/Safari: 83
Opera: 93%

IE9 is way behind, Opera is the winner in this test
Wikipedia

Wikipedia Explains Today's Global Outage 153

Posted by timothy from the citation-you-requested dept.
gnujoshua writes "The Wikimedia Tech Blog has a post explaining why many users were unable to reach Wikimedia sites due to DNS resolution failure. The article states, 'Due to an overheating problem in our European data center many of our servers turned off to protect themselves. As this impacted all Wikipedia and other projects access from European users, we were forced to move all user traffic to our Florida cluster, for which we have a standard quick failover procedure in place, that changes our DNS entries. However, shortly after we did this failover switch, it turned out that this failover mechanism was now broken, causing the DNS resolution of Wikimedia sites to stop working globally. This problem was quickly resolved, but unfortunately it may take up to an hour before access is restored for everyone, due to caching effects."
Bug

Server Room Smells Can Be an Early Warning 154

Posted by timothy from the ever-smelled-a-starter-motor-burn-out? dept.
Barence writes "As embarrassing as it may seem, an eggy smell in a server room needn't mean broaching the delicate subject of hygiene with a colleague. It can actually be a signal that something is about to go wrong with your server setup, as this consultant discovered after days of assuming questionable personal habits were to blame. The culprit? An expiring UPS device, sending out its own unique warning signal."

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