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Movies

Submission + - Woman Filming Sister's Birthday Party Gets Charged (suntimes.com)

Submitted by
ScuttleMonkey
ScuttleMonkey writes: "A 22-year-old woman from Chicago recently spent two nights in jail and could face up to three years in prison for taping four minutes of the new movie "Twilight: New Moon". Samantha Tumpach and family threw her sister a surprise birthday party at the theater and captured much of it on video, unfortunately two "very shot segments" was enough to make theater managers want to press charges. "Tumpach insisted she recorded no more than three minutes while in the theater — and said not all of the video she shot was of the movie. There’s footage of she and her relatives singing to her sister, she said. “We sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to her in the theater,” Tumpach said. She also took pictures of family members in the theater before the film began, but an usher who saw the photo session never issued them a warning, Tumpach said.""
Books

Submission + - Hearst Launching Kindle Competitor (engadget.com)

Submitted by
ScuttleMonkey
ScuttleMonkey writes: "The Hearst Corporation has announced their intention to launch an e-reader competitor to Amazon's Kindle and a supporting store and platform that is much more "publisher friendly." More details are also available form their official press release this morning. "Launching in 2010, Skiff provides a complete e-reading solution that includes the Skiff Service platform, Skiff Store and Skiff-enabled devices. Skiff will sell and distribute newspapers, magazines, books, blogs and other content. Skiff gives periodical publishers tools to maintain their distinct visual identities, build and extend relationships with subscribers, and deliver dynamic content and advertising to a range of dedicated e-readers and multipurpose devices. Skiff is headquartered in New York City and also has offices in Palo Alto, Calif. Visit Skiff at www.Skiff.com.""
The Internet

Submission + - Salon.com Editor Looks Back at Paywalls (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by
ScuttleMonkey
ScuttleMonkey writes: "Techdirt pointed out an interesting retrospective by Scott Rosenberg, former managing editor of Salon.com, about their experiments with paywalls and how repercussions can last a lot longer than some might expect. "More important, by this point the public was, understandably, thoroughly confused about how to get to read Salon content. It took many years for our traffic to begin to grow again. Paywalls are psychological as much as navigational, and it's a lot easier to put them up than to take them down. Once web users get it in their head that your site is "closed" to them, if you ever change your mind and want them to come back, it's extremely difficult to get that word out.""

Submission + - Google Voice Transcribes "Night Before Christmas" (appscout.com)

Submitted by SkinnyGuy
SkinnyGuy writes: Google Voice's transcription technology is OK, but it can mangle some of the simplest phrases. Here, someone asks it to transcribe a voicemail of the entire "'Twas the Night before Christmas." With prhases like "so up to the house tops of course is a flu...with the sleigh full of toys in Saint Nicholas 2" the result is hilarious.
Microsoft

Submission + - Xbox 360 can now run unsigned code

Submitted by xer0aim
xer0aim writes: A kernel for the Xbox 360 has finally been released that has no more XEX signature checks, LIVE/PIRS signature checks or Harddisk authentication. This will open up the ability to run homebrew XDK on a retail box, although any 360 that has been updated to the current dashboard is currently not exploitable.
Linux

Submission + - Nokia N900 running linux-based Maemo 5 reviewed (cnet.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Nokia N900 just got its first proper review over at CNet. The N900 runs Maemo 5, the Linux-based mobile OS, on an ARM Cortex A8 processor and has a touchscreen and slide-out Qwerty keyboard. Nokia says Maemo will be on all its N-series smart phones by 2012, but is it worth having? The reviewer says it's great as a mini-tablet, with a smooth user interface, great multi-tasking and web browser, but it's not so great as a phone.

Submission + - Google Patent Reveals New Data Center Innovations (datacenterknowledge.com)

Submitted by miller60
miller60 writes: Google is seeking to patent a system that provides precision cooling inside racks of servers, automatically adjusting to temperature changes while reducing the energy required to run chillers. The cooling design uses an adjustable piping system featuring "air wands" that provide small amounts of cold air to components within a server tray. The cooling design, which could help Google reduce the power bill for its servers, reinforces Google’s focus on data center innovation as a competitive advantage. Check out the patent application and a diagram of the system.

Submission + - LHC Reaches Over One Trillion Electron Volts (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "The LHC pushed the energy of its particle beams beyond one trillion electron volts, making it the world's highest energy particle accelerator."
Censorship

Submission + - US Congressman Announces Plans to Probe Wikileaks (newsday.com) 1

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: Congressman Peter King (Republican — New York) is calling for a probe into Wikileaks with regards to the half million 9/11 pager messages published recently. He has announced plans involving his Washington staff conducting a preliminary investigation under the premise that this action 'raises security issues.' A word of caution, Congressman King has been known to make inflammatory and unpopular statements.
The Internet

Submission + - IE9 browser to tap hardware for speed boost (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Microsoft's next browser, Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), will offload image and text rendering chores to the PC's graphic processor, one way the company plans to increase the browser's overall performance. But Microsoft won't be alone. Rivals including Mozilla, and Norwegian developer Opera, are working on ways to use a computer's graphics processor unit (GPU) to accelerate their browsers. While acknowledging that the company had a lot of catching up to do, Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft's president of Windows and Windows Live, said that early work on IE9 had already shown significant performance strides. Dean Hachamovitch, general manager for IE, explained one way that Microsoft would speed up IE9. "One reason why you get such great value from PC hardware comes from the machine's graphics, [so] we're moving IE on top of the modern Windows graphics engine, DirectX," said Hachamovitch. Specifically, IE9 will ditch Windows' GDI (Graphics Device Interface) used by earlier versions for image rendering, and instead call on the Direct2D and DirectWrite APIs (application programming interfaces) to render two-dimensional images and text, respectively. Those APIs shift the processing from the PC's CPU to its GPU. "Graphics hardware acceleration means that rich, graphically intensive sites can render faster while using less CPU," Hachamovitch said.
IBM

Submission + - SPAM: IBM smartphone software translates 11 languages

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Researchers at IBM say they have created smart software that that translates text between English and 11 other languages including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Arabic.

Hosted as an internal IBM service since August 2008, n.Fluent offers a secure real-time translation tool that translates text in web pages, electronic documents, Sametime instant message chats, and provides a BlackBerry mobile translation application.

According to IBM the software, n.Fluent was developed from an internal IBM crowdsourcing project where Big Blue's nearly 400,000 employees in more than 170 countries, submit, update and continuously refine word translations. Every time it's used, n.Fluent "learns" and improves its translation engine. To date, the tool has been used by IBMers to translate more than 40 million words, IBM stated.
Link to Original Source
Security

Submission + - Workers Stealing Data For Competitive Edge (net-security.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The recession is creating camaraderie amongst workforces, at the expense of their employers, is the finding of a transatlantic survey. Carried out amongst 600 office workers in Canary Wharf London and Wall Street New York, 41% of workers have already taken sensitive data with them to their new position, whilst a third would pass on company information if it proved useful in getting friends or family a job.

Submission + - Nvidia's RealityServer (extremetech.com)

Submitted by WesternActor
WesternActor writes: ExtremeTech has an interview with a couple of the folks behind Nvidia's new RealityServer platform, which purports to make photorealistic 3D images available to anyone on any computing platform, even things like smartphones. The idea is that all the rendering happens "in the cloud," which allows for a much wider distribution of high-quality images. RealityServer isn't released until November 30, but it looks like it could be interesting--the article has photos and a video that show it in action.

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