OECD - Slashdot User

Submission + - Shatner Leaks Trek XI Details

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12, 2007 @09:36PM

An anonymous reader writes: The rumors that the next Star Trek movie would revolve around the earliest missions of Kirk and Spock have been confirmed by William Shatner in a Sci Fi Wire interview. J.J. Abrahms (creator of "Lost") will direct, and has confirmed that a draft script is completed.

So, the question is, will Shatner appear as a reminiscing older Kirk in the beginning, setting up the rest of the movie as a flash-back, or will geriatric-Kirk and young-Kirk meet? (Spock to Kirk: "Jim, if you don't go on this mission, we will never meet!").

Feed Get a Job! Apple's Hiring (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed on Friday January 12, 2007 @09:12PM

Apple's iPod engineering division beefs up to get the iPhone out to eager consumers, posting more than 30 jobs in engineering and QA. In Cult of Mac.

Submission + - iPhone 3rd party development support petition

Submitted by Alex Speller on Friday January 12, 2007 @09:01PM

Alex Speller writes: According to http://www.petitiononline.com/iphone/petition.html :

"Apple's major competitors in this space (Palm, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile) were given a thorough drubbing by Steve Jobs during his latest MacWorld keynote. But all of these platforms allow easy, open 3rd-party development by developers large and small. Even the vast majority of non-"smart" mobile phones allow the installation of mobile Java applications, including complex games. In the case of Palm, it is possible to develop and distribute applications with no licensing fees and no software investment. As a result, the thousands of free and shareware applications developed by the community are largely considered the platform's biggest asset.

The software included with the iPhone is incredible, with functionality and user interfaces far superior to the standard software included with any other handheld. But as amazing as it is, it's just not enough. With a tiny investment, any smartphone can be enabled to edit Office documents, connect to chat networks, read electronic books, manage a diet, and play games. All of these activities would be better, easier, faster and more enjoyable on the iPhone, so it breaks our heart to know that, if Apple maintains its closed stance, none of this potential will be realized. "

Submission + - Cisco lost rights to iPhone trademark last year?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12, 2007 @08:56PM

An anonymous reader writes: An investigation into the ongoing trademark dispute between Cisco and Apple over the name "iPhone" appears to show that Cisco does not own the mark as claimed in their recent lawsuit. This is based on publicly available information from the US Patent and Trademark office, as well as public reviews of Cisco products over the past year. The trademark was apparently abandoned in late 2005/early 2006 because Cisco was not using it. TFA: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=236

Submission + - Sun Releases "Fortress"; a Replacement for

Submitted by

inetsee

on Friday January 12, 2007 @08:41PM

inetsee writes: "According to an article in ZDNET Sun has released an open source interpreter for the Fortress programming language. The article describes Fortress as 'a modern replacement for Fortran, a programming language born 50 years ago at IBM'. FORTRAN continues to be used for high-performance computing applications, partly because of the wealth of highly optimized numeric libraries that have been developed over the years. Fortress was designed as part of a DARPA funded supercomputer project, and is intended to take advantage of modern multi-core processors, including Sun's own 8 core Niagra chips. Sun is hoping that by open sourcing Fortress, they will attract the attention of 'academics and other third parties' to the language."

Submission + - PVR on appleTV

Submitted by

MartinB

on Friday January 12, 2007 @08:34PM

MartinB writes: "The guys at elgato are completely confident that eyeTV will support appleTV. Turns out the key thing is exporting to iTunes in H.264 or MPEG-4. Now, can we please have a MythDVD-like DVD ripper that can do the same, so I can watch all my (legal) video content on the thing?"

Submission + - The Snoop Next Door Is Posting to YouTube

Submitted by

Carl Bialik from WSJ

on Friday January 12, 2007 @05:19PM

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes: "Your most trivial missteps are increasingly ripe for exposure online, reports the Wall Street Journal, thanks to cheap cameras and entrepreneurs hoping to profit from websites devoted to the exposure. From the article: 'The most trivial missteps by ordinary folks are increasingly ripe for exposure as well. There is a proliferation of new sites dedicated to condemning offenses ranging from bad parking (Caughtya.org) and leering (HollaBackNYC.com) to littering (LitterButt.com) and general bad behavior (RudePeople.com). One site documents locations where people have failed to pick up after their dogs. Capturing newspaper-stealing neighbors on video is also an emerging genre. Helping drive the exposés are a crop of entrepreneurs who hope to sell advertising and subscriptions.' But other factors are at work, including a return to shame as a check on social behavior, says an MIT professor."

Submission + - Hello AT&T, Goodbye Cingular

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Friday January 12, 2007 @03:39PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "From the Article "The Cingular name will start to disappear on Monday, when the AT&T brand will once again describe a mobile offering in the U.S. The move will have a tangental effect on Apple's nascent plans to get into the mobile phone business. Earlier this week, in unveiling its new iPhone, Apple announced that Cingular would be the exclusive U.S. carrier for the smartphone. Cingular CEO Stan Sigman appeared onstage with Steve Jobs during the Apple CEO's Macworld Expo keynote." And "As a result of a series of mergers and acquisitions, the AT&T brand on a wireless service was recently killed off, only to now be revived."

The article is done by Macworld,, and they have some good keypoints as to how this merger will effect Apple and their release of the new iPhone. Apparently all this name flipflopping is causing more than a bit of confusion with all their customers."

Submission + - Google Exploit Allows Account HiJacking

Submitted by

Rub3X

on Friday January 12, 2007 @03:17PM

Rub3X writes: "To execute the attack, the victim needs to be logged in to a Google service, and visit a specially crafted page. The page in question is on a Google sub domain, so it does look legitimate. A proof of concept page was set up to verify the claims, and successfully tested on a user of the Google services in question. With this attack you can: Get in to Google Docs and Spreadsheets application and read and modify documents saved there, Read subjects from GMail, including part of the first sentence, Access the personalized homepage, View Google Accounts page, Enter Google Reader, Read your private Google Notebook, View my complete Google search history if search history feature is enabled."

Submission + - R.I.P. Robert Anton Wilson

Submitted by mindwar23 on Friday January 12, 2007 @02:26PM

mindwar23 writes: Science-fiction author and mental provocateur Robert Anton Wilson has died: "Robert Anton Wilson Defies Medical Experts and leaves his body @4:50 AM on binary date 01/11." Wilson is best known for co-writing the Illuminatus! Trilogy and for founding Discorianism. Fnord.

Submission + - First Internet-Enabled Game for the Commodore 64

Submitted by

Leif_Bloomquist

on Friday January 12, 2007 @12:32PM

Leif_Bloomquist writes: "At the World of Commodore 2006, we previewed our rewrite of the Commodore 64 classic 'Artillery Duel' that can be played over an Ethernet LAN or the Internet. A playable beta has now been released. We hope it will be the first of many new games written to take advantage of Ethernet cards now available for the C64!"

Submission + - A Post-Desktop View of Apple and Free Software

Submitted by TheRaven64 on Friday January 12, 2007 @07:35AM

TheRaven64 writes: David Chisnall has recently written two pieces describing the post-destop world. The first, on InformIT, discusses how Free Software can take advantage of the transition. In this piece, he claims that Microsoft has already won the desktop war, and it's a mistake for the Free Software community to keep fighting it. The second piece covers how Apple's iPhone and Apple TV fit in to the picture. The article asks:

Apple has lost the desktop war twice now; once with the Apple II and once with the Mac. The iPhone and Apple TV are the first salvos in the post-desktop war. Where exactly do they fit in?

Submission + - Black hole triplets spotted

Submitted by Harmonious Botch on Friday January 12, 2007 @02:06AM

Harmonious Botch writes: ( CNN seems to have trouble distinquishing between a quasar and a blck hole, but otherwise it is interesting. -HB )

The discovery of three distant supermassive black holes in proximity to one another is giving astronomers a glimpse into the chaotic early years of the universe.

Known as quasars, these incredibly bright objects are thought to be powered by gas falling into enormous black holes situated in the centers of galaxies. Although smaller than our solar system, a single quasar can outshine an entire galaxy of a hundred billion stars.

Roughly 100,000 quasars have been observed in recent years, some of them double quasars. But this is the first time that three quasars have been found so near one another. The three quasars are separated by about 100,000 to 150,000 light years — about the width of our Milky Way.

"Quasars are extremely rare objects. To find two of them so close together is very unlikely if they were randomly distributed in space," said study leader George Djorgovski, an astronomer at Caltech. "To find three is unprecedented."

More at http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/01/11/three.bla ck.holes/index.html

Submission + - Engineering Challenges of the next century

Submitted by on Thursday January 11, 2007 @03:51PM

An anonymous reader writes: The National Academy of Engineering has gathered a committee of the super-geeks to discuss the Engineering Challenges facing the world. Some of the committee members are known names in IT or are otherwise known for their engineering/technology leadership. MSNBC picked it up earlier.

Submission + - Changes to the NetFlix Queue/Ship Algorithm

Submitted by

zyzzx0

on Thursday January 11, 2007 @03:45PM

zyzzx0 writes: "It's been well-known and documented that part of the NetFlix 'mode d'operation' is a complex algorithm that, in some cases, will delay shipment to heavy renters. Very recently, in two separate cases, we have a queue of two or three DVDs that are from a single season of a television series. In both cases, disk two and three came a day or two before disk one, forcing us to put a pause to our Battlestar Galactica watching. This doesn't seem to be documented anywhere, and hasn't discouraged my un-dying NetFlix love. (I dislike Blockbuster enough to never go back.) Has anyone else seen this trend, or change in 'shipping algorithm'?
And what about the latest reports that NetFlix is going to finally unveil their digital renting strategy?"

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