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The Internet

Fairpoint Pledges To Violate Net Neutrality 249

Posted by timothy from the we'll-read-it-to-you-over-the-phone dept.
wytcld writes "Fairpoint Communications, which has taken over Verizon's landline business in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, has announced that on February 6, 'AOL, Yahoo! and MSN subscribers will continue to have access to content but will no longer be able to access their e-mail through the third-party Web site. Instead, Yahoo! and other third-party e-mail will be accessed directly at the MyFairPoint.net portal.' Since Verizon spun off its lines to Fairpoint in a maneuver that got debt off of Verizon's balance sheets by saddling Fairpoint with it, there was concern by the public service boards of the three states about how Fairpoint would deal with that debt. Fairpoint's profit plan: force all Webmail users through Fairpoint's portal, by blocking all direct access to Webmail portals other than its own. Will Fairpoint's own search engine portal be next? What can stop them?"

Comment Re:Multiple interpretations (Score 4, Insightful) 542

by johndmartiniii (#26209995) Attached to: The RIAA's Rocky Road Ahead
Of course this is how the statement should be interpreted. It does, however, indicate that the ISP in question might be pretty realistic about the reality of the RIAA interpretation of copyright law: that it is not tenable in the long run and that everyone cannot simply be expected to jump on board. While it is not an unequivocal "no," it does indicate a reluctance to simply comply: though, that reluctance might indeed be assuaged by a little cash (probably a lot of cash.

Maybe the ISP's will charge RIAA so exorbitantly that they it will be a deterrent to their seeking compliance in the first place.

Comment Tin-foil hat (Score 1) 137

by johndmartiniii (#26130475) Attached to: The Best Burglar Alarm In History
I think this is a little ridiculous to be on the front page as well, but did anyone happen to notice the picture in the pool with a tin-foil hat?

I think that this might be the nugget that got it on /. in the first place. Then again, I could be totally wrong. But really, how often do you see pictures of people actually wearing tin-foil hats?
HP

HP Creates First Hybrid Memristor Chip 155

Posted by timothy from the stitch-in-time dept.
An anonymous reader writes "HP researchers have built the first functioning hybrid memristor-transistor chip. Lead researcher Stanley Williams and his team built the very first memristor — the '4th fundamental element' of integrated circuits after resistors, capacitors and inductors — back in April. Memristors can remember their resistance, leading to novel electronic capabilities. The new FPGA circuit uses memristors to perform tasks normally carried out by (many more) transistors and is therefore smaller, more power efficient and cheaper to make, HP says. Memristors could also turn out to be a more compact, faster alternative to flash memory."
Data Storage

100x Denser Chips Possible With Plasmonic Nanolithography 117

Posted by timothy from the powers-of-10-are-nice dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to the semiconductor industry, maskless nanolithography is a flexible nanofabrication technique which suffers from low throughput. But now, engineers at the University of California at Berkeley have developed a new approach that involves 'flying' an array of plasmonic lenses just 20 nanometers above a rotating surface, it is possible to increase throughput by several orders of magnitude. The 'flying head' they've created looks like the stylus on the arm of an old-fashioned LP turntable. With this technique, the researchers were able to create line patterns only 80 nanometers wide at speeds up to 12 meters per second. The lead researcher said that by using 'this plasmonic nanolithography, we will be able to make current microprocessors more than 10 times smaller, but far more powerful' and that 'it could lead to ultra-high density disks that can hold 10 to 100 times more data than today's disks.'"
Earth

When Dinosaurs Battled Crurotarsans 181

Posted by kdawson from the thunder-gator dept.
onehitwonder writes "Reuters reported yesterday on new scientific research that indicates how dinosaurs beat out another early reptilian species for domination of the earth. Roughly 200 million years ago, dinosaurs battled with another dinosaur-like animal, the crurotarsan, which is related to the crocodile. Some species grew to 39 feet long, according to the article, at an epoch when few dinosaurs exceeded 10 feet in length. Scientists used to believe that dinosaurs beat out the crurotarsans because the dinosaurs were physiologically superior. But new research indicates that dinosaurs might have won out due to a large stroke of cosmic luck, the nature of which is speculative."
Bug

Strange Ubuntu/Vista Compatibility Bug, Solved 140

Posted by timothy from the love-it-when-a-plan-comes-together dept.
Walter Vos writes "Since I've been running Vista and Ubuntu in dual boot with a shared FAT32 partition for my personal folders, I've been seeing some strange compatibility issues between these two operating systems. Somehow Vista locks the folders on the FAT32 partition that are used for folders like Documents, Downloads, etc. A blogpost I wrote gives a detailed description of the problem and a fix for it."
Linux Business

Source Claims 240K Kindles Sold 176

Posted by kdawson from the drm-and-all dept.
Naturalist writes "Exact data on (the Linux-powered) Kindle sales figures have been hard to come by. Amazon is notoriously tight-lipped about it, and although CEO Jeff Bezos did give some Kindle-related information back in July, the company has yet to break out how many readers it has sold to date. Now TechCrunch claims to have spoken to a source close to Amazon with direct knowledge of the company's sales figures. According to this unnamed source, Amazon has sold 240,000 Kindles to date, for an estimated hardware revenue between $86 million and $96 million; media sales would push the total above $100M." We've been following the Kindle since its launch nine months ago.
Linux Business

Linux Pre-Installs In the UK Hit 2.8% 289

Posted by kdawson from the small-but-encouraging dept.
schliz alerts us to a story out of the UK PC distribution channel. It seems that the percentage of systems pre-installed with Linux has gone up 28 times since Vista shipped, from 0.1% in January 2007 to 2.8% last June. Still not huge numbers, but Apple did OK for years with similar market share figures. Linux's headway comes in the face of the marketing money that manufacturers pass out to distributors, money that has historically been important to their profits: "In the late 1990s competition was so keen that distributors were said to sell at or below cost and take their profit direct from the marketing funds they received from vendors. Vendors nowadays keep watch to see their marketing funds are actually spent on marketing, but distribution runs on single figure profits and vendor marketing funds are a crucial aid."
Science

Researchers Find Color In Fossils 77

Posted by kdawson from the any-color-as-long-as-it's-black dept.
Science News has a look at the latest paleontological fashion: what may be the remains of pigment in fossilized feathers 100 million years old. The material in question is believed to be black melanin, on the evidence of its similarity in scanning-microscope images to the modern pigment. The researchers are hopeful of identifying other varieties of melanin, which provide red or yellow coloration; and also possibly of spotting fossilized nanostructures of melanin that create iridescent patterns in some modern animals.
Hardware Hacking

World's First Custom Firmware For Wii Released 165

Posted by timothy from the how-to-quantify-spare-time dept.
Croakyvoice writes "Waninkoko has released the world's first custom firmware for the Nintendo Wii, which is installed using the twilight hack; among its features is the ability to allow writeable DVDs to be read in emulators. From the readme: 'The Custom Firmware installs as IOS249 and it does not modify any other IOS so it is secure to install and has been made to be used ONLY with homebrew software. This is a custom IOS, an IOS modified to add some new features not available in the official IOS.'"

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