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NES (Games)

Nintendo Already Anticipating Holiday Wii Shortages 246

As we approach the holiday season, Nintendo has already said that they don't expect to keep up with demand for the Wii console. In an interview with the LA Times, Nintendo president Reggie Fils-Aime said they're ramping up production by 33% already, with further increases planned. They're hoping to avoid the scarcity of Wii's that occurred last year, which cost them a great deal of money in potential sales. "We're now producing 2.4 million units a month worldwide. Last year, we made 1.6 million a month. So we've made a 33% increase. One of our competitors projects they will sell 10 million consoles worldwide this year. For us, that's three months of production. We're producing an unprecedented level of hardware to try to meet demand."
Power

Nanoparticles Could Make Hydrogen Cheaper Than Gasoline 442

Roland Piquepaille writes "According to EE Times, a California-based company called QuantumSphere has developed nanoparticles that could make hydrogen cheaper than gasoline. The company says its reactive catalytic nanoparticle coatings can boost the efficiency of electrolysis (the technique that generates hydrogen from water) to 85% today, exceeding the Department of Energy's goal for 2010 by 10%. The company says its process could be improved to reach an efficiency of 96% in a few years. The most interesting part of the story is that the existing gas stations would not need to be modified to distribute hydrogen. With these nanoparticle coatings, car owners could make their own hydrogen, either in their garage or even when driving."
GNU is Not Unix

Author of ATSC Capture and Edit Tool Tries to Revoke GPL 472

The author of ATSC capture and edit tool has announced that he is attempting to revoke the licensing of his product under the GPL General Public License. Unfortunately it appears that the GPL does not allow this particular action. Of course in this heyday of lawyers and trigger happy litigators who can tell. What successes have others had in trying to take something they once operated under the GPL and make it private? And the more pressing question, why?
Media

HD DVD Player Sales Grind To a Halt 507

Lucas123 writes "While the news may fall under the 'Duh' category, it's still relatively shocking how quickly the death knell for HD DVD player sales came on after Warner Bros. announced they were dropping dual hi-def DVD format support in order to back only Blu-ray. According to a Computerworld story, the week after Warner's announcement, sales of HD DVD players dropped to 1,758, down from 14,558 players the week before. In contrast, consumers bought 21,770 Blu-ray Disc players, up from 15,257 the previous week."
Operating Systems

Submission + - After the Fireworks, GoboLinux 014 is Released (gobolinux.org)

paranoidd writes: "After one year of work, the GoboLinux team announces the new major release of the distribution that features a rethinked file system structure. By keeping applications self-contained in a '/Programs/App/Version'-like tree, the management of every program becomes simple and free of a database such as RPM in the backend. And since the installation disc also serves as a Live CD, having a taste of such a different approach could never be so easy!"
Privacy

Submission + - ACLU Suit Against Bush Administration Dismissed

ti1ion writes: News today that "a federal appeals court has dismissed a lawsuit challenging President George W. Bush's domestic spying program, saying the plaintiffs have no standing to sue. The 2-1 ruling by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel is not on the legality of the surveillance program itself."
It's funny.  Laugh.

Submission + - NC man fined for using vegetable oil as fuel (newsobserver.com)

mdsolar writes: "The News and Observer reports on an Charlotte, NC driver who has been fined $1000 for not paying a fuel tax when he fills his tank with vegetable oil. Perhaps the funniest quote is this one:

"With the high cost of fuel right now, the department does recognize that a lot of people are looking for relief," said Reggie Little, assistant director of the motor fuel taxes division. "We're not here to hurt the small guy, we're just trying to make sure that the playing field is level."
since the field is so plainly tilted against Arab oil interests."

Software

Submission + - NeoOffice Accepting Feature-Specific Donations

Eon writes: The NeoOffice project recently announced that it will be accepting donations towards specific features. For those who aren't familiar with it, NeoOffice is the port of OpenOffice.org to Mac OS X that aims to be more Mac-like and does not require X11 (unlike the official OS X version of OOo). The open source project has a limited number of developers, so the New Features Program will allow users to do more than request features only to see their requests be denied due to lack of resources. Each candidate new feature has an estimated cost, and if that dollar amount is met in donations by 14 June, 2007 then work will begin on the feature immediately. If the amount is not met, all donations towards it will be refunded, so the program is completely risk-free to those who donate. They are currently accepting donations towards support for the native OS X spellchecker, and the native OS X address book. There is also a forum where anyone can propose a new feature to add to the list. Is this the future of donations to open source projects? Have other projects tried similar programs? (Coral Cache links to 1, 2, and 3 above).

Feed Hitachi gets its one terabyte Deskstar 7K1000 drives out the door (engadget.com)

Filed under: Storage


We already crunched the numbers: 1TB is a lot. And if you've got $399 to blow, it can be all yours, with Hitachi saying Deskstar 7K1000 shipments have reached "critical mass" this month, after starting out scarce in March. We're guessing if you need one terabyte of data, in a 3.5-inch enclosure, spinning at 7,200 RPM and hooked up to your computer / RAID / iPod, you know who you are, so we won't spend any more time extolling the 7K1000's virtues -- quit your drooling and buy, buy, buy!

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


United States

Submission + - Canada Joins U.S. Piracy Complaint Against China

An anonymous reader writes: Canada has become the first country to join the U.S. in its piracy complaint against China with the World Trade Organization. Canadian officials claim that the move is based on concern from Canadian companies, but given the fact that those same companies barely export any entertainment products to China, this is clearly a case of Canada following orders from Washington.

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