258785
submission
Stony Stevenson writes:
Intel has come under attack from US civil rights activists over its backing of attempts to change Californian class action law.
The moves, which are being made via a California ballot initiative, would "devastate the class action system as a tool for civil rights enforcement", according to a letter sent to Intel chief executive Paul Otellini today. "Your initiative removes vital class action protections specifically intended to allow US citizens to defend their civil rights. We must view this initiative as an attack on the civil rights of Californians," the letter states (PDF).
The ballot measure would, according to the activists, limit civil rights, worker and consumer protections by rigging the playing field in favour of big businesses by requiring evidence of wrongdoing before a case can move forward.
258775
submission
Stony Stevenson writes:
Analyst groups and Cisco have come out saying that the internet is heading for a crash unless it increases its bandwidth capabilities which are being strangled by the increased use of Web TV.
Stan Schatt, research director at ABI said: "Uploading bandwidth is going to have to increase, and the cable providers are going to get killed on bandwidth as HD programming becomes more commonplace." He added that the solution to the problem is to change to digital switching and move to IPTV. "They will be brought kicking and screaming into the 21st century," he said.
Cisco weighed into the argument, adding that it had found American video websites currently transmit more data per month than the entire amount of traffic sent over the internet in 2000.
258635
submission
Stony Stevenson writes:
Sun Microsystems' CTO, Greg Papadopoulos has come out with a Red Shift Theory for IT which posits that an elite group of companies are consuming inordinate amounts of IT infrastructure, well beyond most other businesses, and that their demand is growing exponentially. This trend, Papadopoulos maintains, has implications not just for IT's most insatiable consumers, but for the structure of the computing industry itself. It's not just about how many CPU cycles a company uses. Papadopoulos argues that red-shift companies will enjoy exponential business growth in the coming years. Blue-shift companies — those whose processing needs aren't exploding — will grow at about the same rate as GDP, he says.
He uses red shift to describe the rapidly expanding universe of computing demand as data processing requirements — not only from Web companies like Google, YouTube, MySpace, and Salesforce.com, but also from large conventional users of high-performance computing like pharmaceutical, financial, and energy companies — exceed the ability of Moore's Law to keep up.
This in depth article takes a look at what Papadopoulos's theory is about and its impact on the wider IT community.
258589
submission
sesshomaru writes:
Game Politics is reporting that the Entertainment Software Association has been editing Wikipedia entries on modchips and abandonware so that they will be more favorable to their point of view. In other words, they've edited them so that any discussion of legal or moral gray areas are removed and the Wikipedia entries say that these things are illegal, period. Here's a link to the Game Politics article:
ESA Altered Wikipedia Entries on Mod Chips, Abandonware
Links to the alterations made in the article can be found in the article, and thanks to Wikipedia Scanner for uncovering this scandal.