110411
submission
YogaFlame writes:
Cingular Wireless will refund $18.5 million to thousands of former California customers who were penalized for canceling their mobile phone service because they had trouble making and receiving calls.
The settlement announced Thursday with the California Public Utilities Commission ends a lengthy battle revolving around Cingular's treatment of dissatisfied subscribers from January 2000 through April 2002.
108197
submission
aditi writes:
CNN reports that exercise boosts brainpower by building new brain cells in a brain region linked with memory and memory loss.
Tests on mice showed they grew new brain cells in a brain region called the dentate gyrus, a part of the hippocampus that is known to be affected in the age-related memory decline that begins around age 30 for most humans.Researchers used magnetic resonance imaging scans to help document the process in mice — and then used MRIs to look at the brains of people before and after exercise.They found the same patterns, which suggests that people also grow new brain cells when they exercise.
108115
submission
perlhacker14 writes:
A Moroccan Man with explosives on his body blew himself up in an Internet Cafe in Morocco after he was not allowed to look at terror websites. The man and his companion had entered late at night, seeking to see terrorist propaganda. The bombs were not intended for the cafe, but they did injure four other people there. Most likely the men were about to get "motivated" by terror sites, and then go cause harm to society, but were angered by the refusal to see the said sites.
1: "Man blows himself up in Internet cafe"
2: mail: perlhacker14@gmail.com
107951
submission
Lars Skovlund writes:
Groklaw reports that the Office XML standard is being put on the fast track in ISO despite the detailed complaints from national standards bodies. The move seems to be the decision of one person, Lisa Rachjel, secretariat of the ISO Joint Technical Committee, according to a comment made by her.
107276
submission
kumachan writes:
According to a Standards New Zealand spokesperson, the objection is that "the ISO [The International Organisation for Standardisation] has already developed a standard for XML open format [that is, Open Document] and the committee does not believe that there is a need for another standard, and that Microsoft's [standard] is in conflict with the existing one."
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/82AF97DEB BAFD057CC2572990006C14C
103028
submission
alphabetasigmagamma writes:
The Computer Science Club of the University of Waterloo hosted a talk in 1989 with Bill Gates as the speaker. Recently this audio tape of the talk has been discovered by the Computer Science Club office and has since been digitized and posted on the Computer Science Club website at http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/ In this talk you get to hear Bill Gates in an awkward position at Microsoft, promoting the then soon to fail OS/2 operating system product while at the same time downtalking slightly the significance of Windows. This rare glimpse into Microsoft in its early days shows some of the predictions that Microsoft got right as well as got wrong (such as the memory allocation issues in MS-DOS). In addition, Bill Gates discusses how he sees the computer industry in the coming years.
93410
story
alphadogg writes
"Quanta Computer has confirmed orders for 1 million notebook PCs for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The article goes into some background on the project, and lays out the enthusiastic adoption that the project is seeing overseas. The company estimates they'll ship somewhere between 5 and 10 Million units this year, with 7 countries already signed up to receive units. The machines currently cost $130, but with that kind of volume the original goal of $100 a machine may be viable. Even with the low cost, Quanta expects to make a small profit on each machine, making charity work that much easier."