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Hardware Hacking

Building a Telegraph Using Only Stone Age Materials 238

Posted by samzenpus from the from-scratch dept.
MMBK writes "It's the ultimate salvagepunk experiment, building a telegraph out of things found in the woods. From the article: 'During the summer of 2009, artist Jamie O’Shea of the organization Substitute Materials set out to test whether or not electronic communication could have been built at any time in history with the proper knowledge, and with only tools and materials found in the wilderness of New Jersey.'"
The Internet

Interop Returns 16 Million IPv4 Addresses 270

Posted by samzenpus from the share-the-wealth dept.
klapaucjusz writes "Every discussion about IPv4 address exhaustion prompts comments about whether Apple (or MIT, or UCB, or whoever) needs all of those addresses. Interop has set the example by returning 16 million IPv4 addresses to the ARIN pool, extending the IPv4 address exhaustion deadline by a whole month."
Social Networks

Meg Whitman Campaign Shows How Not To Use Twitter 147

Posted by samzenpus from the type-slower dept.
tsamsoniw writes "California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman's campaign team attempted to share with her Twitter followers an endorsement from a police association. Unfortunately, the campaign press secretary entered an incorrect or incomplete Bit.ly URL in the Tweet, which took clickers to a YouTube video featuring a bespectacled, long-haired Japanese man in a tutu and leggings rocking out on a bass guitar. And for whatever reason, the Tweet, which went out on the 18th, has remained active through today."
Software

Submission + - Microsoft to offer Office free online (cnn.com)

Submitted by webax
webax writes: In an 'I can't believe it's not April Fools' move, Microsoft is going to offer portions of Microsoft Office free (albeit advertisement supported) online.

Comment WTF (Score 1) 364

by webax (#26923113) Attached to: Obama Anti-Trust Chief on Google the Monopoly Threat
"Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem"

2009, already almost a decade of blatant monopoly abuse by Microsoft in the new century, and she comes out with a statement like this?

Wow, words can't describe what wonders she can perform as antitrust chief. Yes She Can.
Censorship

With Olympics Over, China Re-Censors Internet 242

Posted by timothy from the escape-from-zì-yóu dept.
eldavojohn writes "We last left the story of Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China when the IOC had reached a deal with the Chinese government whereby some of the press restrictions were lifted. With the 2008 Olympics now but a memory, China has began censoring foreign news sources again. Maybe the West is making too big of a deal over this, as many Chinese citizens seem to like it that way."
Earth

Drilling Hits an Active Magma Chamber In Hawaii 251

Posted by timothy from the time-for-a-lava-luau dept.
Smivs writes "The BBC are reporting that drillers looking for geothermal energy in Hawaii have inadvertently put a well right into a magma chamber. Molten rock pushed back up the borehole several meters before solidifying, making it perfectly safe to study. Magma specialist Bruce Marsh says it will allow scientists to observe directly how granites are made. 'This is unprecedented; this is the first time a magma has been found in its natural habitat,' the Johns Hopkins University professor told BBC News. 'Before, all we had to deal with were lava flows; but they are the end of a magma's life. They're lying there on the surface, they've de-gassed. It's not the natural habitat.' It is hoped the site can now become a laboratory, with a series of cores drilled around the chamber to better characterise the crystallisation changes occurring in the rock as it loses temperature."
OS X

Plethora of New User Space Filesystems For Mac OS X 225

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-you-can dept.
DaringDan writes "As part of the recent MacFUSE 2.0 release Amit Singh has added support for an insane number of filesystems on the Mac. This video from Google and this blog post pretty much explain everything in detail but to sum-up Singh has written a new filesystem called AncientFS which lets you mount a ton of UNIX file formats starting from the very first version of UNIX. Even more interesting is that they have also taken Linux kernel implementations of filesystems like ufs, sysv-fs, minix-fs and made them work in user-space on the Mac, which means its now possible to read disks from OSes like FreeBSD, Solaris and NeXT on OS X. ext2/ext3 don't seem to be on the list but apparently the source for everything is provided, so hopefully some enterprising soul can apply the same techniques to ext2. One of their demos even has the old UNIX kernel compiled directly on the Mac through the original PDP C compiler by somehow executing the PDP binaries on OS X!"
The Almighty Buck

New York State Budget Relies On Entertainment Tax 655

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-thought-mass-would-do-it-first dept.
einer writes "Facing a budget shortfall, New York State Governor David Paterson crafts a budget that taxes iPod music downloads and other 'digitally delivered entertainment services.' On the chopping block is $700 million in school aid and $3.5 billion in health care subsidies."

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