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Music

Submission + - Live Earth a Ratings Flop (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Kevin
Kevin writes: According to the New York Times,

The main three-hour American TV broadcast on NBC averaged a meager 2.7 million viewers, ranking as the least-watched U.S. program on Saturday night and falling below NBC's summer prime-time Saturday average, Nielsen Media Research reported on Monday... It was the same story in Britain, where BBC One coverage of the Live Earth climax at London's Wembley Stadium, leading up to Madonna's eagerly awaited finale, averaged 3.1 million viewers, compared with 11.4 million for the Diana tribute.
Television

Submission + - 'Stealth advertising' infiltrating TV news (pressesc.com)

Submitted by
amigoro
amigoro writes: "Over 90 per cent of newscasts in the US contained stealth advertising. Stealth advertising is showing advertisements outside regular commercial blocks cloaked as news. What's disturbing about this trend of "stealth advertising" is that viewers seldom are aware of potential slants in coverage because the connection of a story to an advertiser rarely is disclosed."
Debian

Submission + - Ubuntu Deveopers Ignoring Critical Flaw?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Seems there is a lot of buzz on the bug reporting forum about Ubuntu
Linux and it's problem supporting many USB devices, many USB scanners,
and even some USB Teletype devices for the hearing impaired. The
Ubuntu Manifesto clearly states that "every computer user should be
given every opportunity to use software, even if they work under a
disability." Various work-arounds have been offered, none of which
work well for everyone. One "work-around" suggested was to recompile
the kernel, disabling the "USB-SUSPEND" option (which is part of the
problem). While this no doubt would work, how many of the people who
switched to Ubuntu solely because it was supposed to be user friendly
and didn't require an IT degree to use would be able to do this? And
do they expect a blind person to be able to follow the directions on
the screens when selecting the recompiling options? What was meant by
"even if they work under a disability?"

Developers insist that the power-saving USB_SUSPEND function (it's
debatable among laptop users how well this works anyway) is more
important than supporting the USB devices that don't work with this
function enabled, and this function is enabled by default in the
kernel itself.

The problem is marked "low" in importance for fixing the kernel. A new
Linux kernel that fixes this problem is available to the developers
and could be incorporated into Ubuntu before the next release. From
developer's feedback, this doesn't look likely to happen, as it
doesn't seem to be important. We'll have to wait and see if the Ubuntu
Manifesto really means anything, or if it is just empty words. Many
are waiting to see if this issue is resolved in the next release
(Gutsy Gibbons) and will decide whether to switch to one of the other
distros available if it is not fixed by then. I must admit, for the
most part, reading the bug reporting forum, the Ubuntu community has
been very patient. Will their patience wear out before the problem is
fixed? We will have to wait and see.

The bug reporting forum can be read here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sane-bac kends/+bug/85488
Communications

FCC Head Wants New Wireless Devices Unlocked 221

Posted by kdawson from the maybe-in-a-few-years-innovation dept.
[TheBORG] writes with news that FCC chairman Kevin Martin wants 700-MHz wireless devices and services to be unlocked. Spectrum auctions for the 700-MHz airwaves, being opened up for fixed and mobile broadband, are scheduled for early next year. "The proposed rules would apply only to the spectrum being auctioned, not the rest of the wireless business, which still makes most of its revenue from voice calls. But Martin's proposal, if adopted by the FCC, could reverberate through a U.S. wireless industry that has tightly controlled access to devices and services... Like most devices sold in the USA, the iPhone ... allows only features and applications that Apple and AT&T provide and works only with an AT&T contract. The FCC chairman said he has grown increasingly concerned that the current practices 'hamper innovations' dreamed up by outside developers. One example:... 'Internationally, Wi-Fi handsets have been available for some time,' Martin noted. 'But they are just beginning to roll out here.'"
Programming

Submission + - Revolutionary New Algorithm for Photo Editing (prweb.com)

Submitted by
Zach Stevens
Zach Stevens writes: "A UC Berkeley PhD student and another who graduated with his bachelors in Computer Science have developed a revolutionary new online photo editing suite called PhotoFlexer. The program uses a new statistical approach to locate pixels and modify images with the help of a proprietary new algorithm designed by the team of two. The program just had it's press launch and it's already making waves in the industry. It works as a standalone app and a Facebook plugin. Our growth is already dwarfing that of our largest competitor — Picnik. We've had more users in our few days of release than has our competitor. If you're interested in writing a piece on FotoFlexer and the new technology behind it, please email me at Zach@arborlabs.com, or call me at (909) 717-3732 and I can give you a lot more information and set you up with a bunch of graphics, examples of our work, etc. Thanks."
Mozilla

Submission + - Mozilla Delays Firefox 3.0 Beta

Submitted by dsinc
dsinc writes: According to PCWorld, "Firefox 3.0's first beta has been delayed at least six weeks, Mozilla Corp. engineers said Sunday, and it now won't appear until the middle of September." Not many details are known at this point, but what Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering says ("Talos is showing a ~18 percent increase in [memory] footprint and informal dogfooding confirms things are currently worse on the trunk") should be sufficient reason to get out of the Holding-your-breath department. http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,134282-c,mozilla /article.html
Sci-Fi

Submission + - Recording all human knowledge (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by TENxOXR
TENxOXR writes: UK science fiction writer Charles Stross, author of novels Accelerando and Singularity Sky, posits a future in which all human experience is recorded on devices the size of a grain of sand.

We've had agriculture for about 12,000 years, towns for eight to 10,000 years, and writing for about 5,000 years. But we're still living in the dark ages leading up to the dawn of history.
United States

Submission + - FCC head wants to unlock wireless devices

Submitted by
[TheBORG]
[TheBORG] writes: "The proposed rules would apply only to the spectrum being auctioned, not the rest of the wireless business, which still makes most of its revenue from voice calls. But Martin's proposal, if adopted by the FCC, could reverberate through a U.S. wireless industry that has tightly controlled access to devices and services. The Apple iPhone is a prime example: Like most devices sold in the USA, the iPhone is, in industry parlance, "locked." It allows only features and applications that Apple (AAPL) and AT&T (T) provide and works only with an AT&T contract. The FCC chairman said he has grown increasingly concerned that the current practices "hamper innovations" dreamed up by outside developers. One example: Mobile devices that also can use Wi-Fi, such as a home network or airport "hot spot," for Internet access. "Internationally, Wi-Fi handsets have been available for some time," Martin noted. "But they are just beginning to roll out here.""
Networking

Submission + - 10 Ways to Tick off Your IT Dept. (pcmag.com)

Submitted by
Rinne
Rinne writes: "Sit down, this may be shocking: Your company's network bandwidth and storage are finite resources. And the hall monitors for those resources are in your friendly, neighborhood IT department. There are things they like us to do — say, not back up our music on the server — and then there are the things they wish we didn't know how to do. Here are the top ten things you probably would love to do on your work PC that IT wishes you didn't know about."
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Oregon man flies lawn chair 193 miles at 13,000 ft (newscloud.com)

Submitted by
Jeff
Jeff writes: "Kent Couch, an Oregon cluster balloonist has flown a lawn chair above Oregon at an altitude of 13,000 feet using helium balloons. The AP reports he received rope burns trying to hang on during a bout of turbulence having forgotten to buckle his seat belt.

Couch, 47, is the latest American to emulate Larry Walters — who in 1982 rose three miles above Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by balloons. Walters surprised an airline pilot, who radioed the control tower that he had just passed a guy in a lawn chair with a gun.
Snopes confirms the Walter flight but has no entry yet for Couch."
Communications

Submission + - Sprint cancels PCS wireless of over 200 soldiers (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Newer Guy
Newer Guy writes: Sprint has cancelled the PCS service of over 200 military members for "excessive roaming". This is on the heels of last week's news about Sprint where they were cancelling PCS service for "excessive complaining" to Customer Service. Time to cancel my Sprint PCS I guess!
Software

Submission + - Apple announces 1 million Safari for Windows downl (macscoop.com)

Submitted by
Alexandros Roussos
Alexandros Roussos writes: "Apple announced today through a press release that downloads of Safari for Windows which was released on Monday have already reached the first million. In only 48 hours, Apple's web browser has probably gained considerable market share in a market dominated by Internet Explorer for over a decade and already quite successfully challenged by Mozilla's FireFox during the last four years."

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