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Apple

Submission + - Apple Threatens Man Over Selling Broken Stairstep (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by somanyrobots
somanyrobots writes: A former employee at Apple's Fifth Avenue Store in New York City came into possession of a cracked glass step, after a contractor performed the replacement. At the time, the contractor was preparing to dispose of the replaced step, and he simply asked if he could take one home. The contractors didn't have a problem with it, and even helped him load it into his car. Fast forward a few years later: the man recently put it up on eBay, and is now being threatened with litigation over the "stolen" step. Apple's contractor, Seele, has (ostensibly at Apple's behest) repeatedly threatened to sue over his possession of the glass stairstep. It's back up on eBay with a three-day auction. Any takers?

Submission + - The School webcam spying gets weirder (tomshardware.com) 2

Submitted by
markass530
markass530 writes: "It seems that the Lower Merion schools aren't the only one with the spying capabilities that were apparently used in the current class action lawsuit. A reader of Boing Boing pointed out that PBS aired a documentary a few weeks ago called "Digital Nation." In it, vice-principle of Intermediate School 339, Bronx, NY, Dan Ackerman showed how he's able to remotely monitor students through webcam.

Ackerman demonstrates the webcam spying ability: "They don't even realize we are watching," "I always like to mess with them and take a picture," and "9 times out of 10, THEY DUCK OUT OF THE WAY."

Oddly there are no questions regarding student privacy, which is likely how the recent class action lawsuit came about.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/learning/schools/how-google-saved-a-school.html?play

Skip to around 4:36 to see the remote webcam monitoring."
Hardware

Submission + - OMAP4 Chipset Promies Insane battery Life (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "TI's new dual-core OMAP4 mobile chipset, the sequel to the OMAP3 series that powers the Droid and Palm Pre (among others), claims crazy performance: Three independent displays running 1080p video, for example, and an estimated 145-hour battery life for audio. ... The demo unit uses a dual-1GHz-core version, and supports 1080p video recording at 24/30fps, three simultaneous independent displays (why you'd need that is beyond me), 20MP image processing, and more memory bandwidth than the Tegra 2 (for better multitasking)."
Science

Why Time Flies By As You Get Older 252

Posted by kdawson from the like-a-banana dept.
Ant notes a piece up on WBUR Boston addressing theories to explain the universal human experience that time seems to pass faster as you get older. Here's the 9-minute audio (MP3). Several explanations are tried out: that brains lay down more information for novel experiences; that the "clock" for nerve impulses in aging brains runs slower; and that each interval of time represents a diminishing fraction of life as we age.
Wireless Networking

Submission + - VOIP Over 3G Apps Working on iPhone (engadget.com)

Submitted by silverpig
silverpig writes: Yesterday marked the announcement of the Apple iPad device, and with it came a new version of the SDK. In this new version, Apple has lifted the voip over 3G restrictions that limited VOIP traffic to wifi only.

This morning, Fring announced that it's iPhone app is 3G capable starting immediately. No update is needed as apparently the app had 3G capability all along, but a server side block prevented its use.

Furthermore, apparently a 3G capable version of skype has been ready for some time now, and has been waiting for this restriction to be lifted.
Censorship

Submission + - Australia bans small breasts (somebodythinkofthechildren.com) 6

Submitted by mariushm
mariushm writes: The Australian Sex Party (ASP) said Wednesday that the Australian Classification Board (ACB) is now banning depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films. It comes just a week after it was found that material with depictions of females ejaculating during orgasm are now Refused Classification and Australian Customs directed to confiscate it.

The National Classification Code dictates that anything that describes or depicts a person who is, or appears to be, a child under 18 (whether the person is engaged in sexual activity or not) in a way that is likely to cause offense to a reasonable adult is Refused Classification.
Science

Submission + - Older = Wiser? Positive effects of aging on memory (utoronto.ca) 1

Submitted by Cludge
Cludge writes: The news service of the University of Toronto reports a study on changes in memory skills that occur with age. Apparently, older brains have a weakened ability to filter out irrelevant information. But this may actually give aging adults a memory advantage over their younger counterparts. In computer-based memory tasks, in which words were paired with pictures, "The older adults showed a 30 per cent advantage over younger adults in their memory" for the paired words and pictures. "As this type of knowledge is thought to play a critical role in real world decision- making, older adults may be the wiser decision-makers compared to younger adults..."
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - OnLive Gaming Service Gets Lukewarm Approval (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: When the OnLive cloud-based gaming service was first announced back in March of 2009, it was met with equal parts excitement and controversy. While the idea of playing games on just about any kind of hardware thanks to remote rendering and streaming video was interesting, the larger issue remained of how OnLive planned to solve the latency problem. With the closed beta currently underway, PC Perspective put the OnLive gaming service to the test by comparing the user experiences of the OnLive-based games to the experiences with the same locally installed titles. The end result appears to be that while slower input-dependent games like Burnout: Paradise worked pretty well, games that require a fast twitch-based input scheme like UT3 did not.
Music

THX Caught With Pants Down Over Lexicon Blu-ray Player 397

Posted by timothy from the high-end-but-not-high-road dept.
SchlimpyChicken writes "Lexicon and THX apparently attempted to pull a fast one on the consumer electronics industry, but got caught this week when a couple websites exposed the fact that the high-end electronics company put a nearly-unmodified $500 Oppo Blu-ray player into a new Lexicon chassis and was selling it for $3500. AV Rant broke the story first on its home theater podcast with some pics of the two players' internals. Audioholics.com then posted a full suite of pics and tested the players with an Audio Precision analyzer. Both showed identical analogue audio performance and both failed a couple of basic THX specifications. Audioholics also posted commentary from THX on the matter and noted that both companies appear to be in a mad scramble to hide the fact that the player was ever deemed THX certified."
Portables

Submission + - 12 hour battery life in a high-end laptop? Asus sa (hjkladshjkladshjkladfs.org)

Submitted by
ScuttleMonkey
ScuttleMonkey writes: "Asus' new high end laptop could finally be the traveler's best accoutrement, touting twelve hour battery life thanks to intelligent, second-by-second, switching between the two GPUs and automatic on-the-fly re-clocking of the Intel Core i7 CPU. All this also comes in with a price tag of just over $1,000. "ASUS's solution is different because it's user-transparent; even a novice user will get the fullest possible benefit because the laptop itself is deciding when to switch. The same principle applies to the dynamic CPU clocking. ASUS includes a desktop widget to track CPU clock speed. While using the UL80JT, I could see it moving up and down with what I did; up with program openings and CPU-intensive processes, and way down at idle. Between the GPU switching, dynamic clocking, and ASUS's other power management features, the UL80JT manages to consume less than half as much power as the unibody Macbook while browsing.""
Security

Submission + - Firm to Drop 0day in Database, Web Server Apps (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by krebsonsecurity
krebsonsecurity writes: January promises to be a busy month for Web server and database administrators alike: A security research firm in Russia says it plans to release information about a slew of previously undocumented vulnerabilities in several widely-used commercial software products, including Mysql, Tivoli, IBM DB2, Sun Directory, and a host of others, writes krebsonsecurity.com. From the blog: “After working with the vendors long enough, we’ve come to conclusion that, to put it simply, it is a waste of time. Now, we do not contact with vendors and do not support so-called ‘responsible disclosure’ policy,” Legerov said.
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - BBC Journalist Breaks 'Unbreakable' Phone At CES

Submitted by andylim
andylim writes: A lesson for anyone claiming their product is unbreakable. Bob Plaschke, Sonim's CEO, told the BBC: "You can drop it from at least 10 storeys, you can go under water 20ft for a half hour... you can hammer a nail with it. It is basically unbreakable." Seconds later a BBC journalist smashed the screen against the side of a fish tank.
Google

Submission + - Google Applies to become Energy Marketer

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: Google consumes massive amounts of electrical energy to power its data centers across the country and world. Now it has created a subsidiary, Google Energy LLC, and applied (pdf) to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to become a utility-scale energy trader. Google's stated aim is to be able to purchase renewable energy directly from producers at bulk rates, pursuing its goal of becoming carbon neutral. It is likely that Google Energy would also permit Google's own renewable energy projects to sell their energy at more favorable rates. Google reportedly does not have plans to actively become an energy broker, a la Enron.
Input Devices

Razer, Valve, and Sixense Working On Motion Control For PC Games 126

Posted by Soulskill from the trendy-name-guaranteed dept.
An anonymous reader sends along this excerpt from Shacknews: "Gaming hardware developer Razer has announced a new multi-year partnership with Sixense Entertainment and Valve Software to deliver a '...revolutionary true-to-life, next-generation motion sensing and gesture recognition controller for PC gaming.' Razer, Valve, and Sixense, along with a selection of PC OEM partners, are aiming to produce '...ultra-precise one-to-one motion sensing controllers that use electromagnetic fields to track precise movements along all six axes.' Each controller will reportedly track its orientation within a single degree, and detect positioning within one millimeter. Thankfully, the device will be compatible with both current and future generation PC games."

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