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Media

Submission + - Sales gap closing between HD DVD & Blu-ray (hdtvinfo.eu)

Submitted by
DaMan1970
DaMan1970 writes: "Some consumer electronics retailers are reporting a sales gap closing between stand-alone HD DVD players & Blu-ray Disc players as the 2 formats have come closer in price.

http://www.hdtvinfo.eu/content/view/119/1/

Toshiba's 2nd-generation players are still the best-selling individual models, but collectively, Blu-ray players have been outselling HD DVD Toshiba models in recent weeks. At the end of May, Toshiba offered a round of promotional price cuts on its players. Toshiba will release its 3rd-generation HD DVD players in September & October, like reported before http://www.hdtvinfo.eu/news/hd-video-formats/toshi ba-to-launch-3rd-generation-hd-dvd-players.html
with all 3 players at less than 500 Euros."
Media

Submission + - HD discs outsell VHS tapes this year (hdtvinfo.eu)

Submitted by
DaMan1970
DaMan1970 writes: "The combined sales of both HD-DVD & Blu-ray discs was greater than the sales of VHS cassettes sold in the 1st half of this year.

http://www.hdtvinfo.eu/news/hd-video-formats/hd-di scs-outsell-vhs-tapes-this-year.html

Although HD sales are definitely growing, especially after Warner Video sold 250,000 copies of 300 in the last month, like reported a week ago http://www.hdtvinfo.eu/news/hd-video-formats/300-i s-highest-selling-hd-disc-ever.html the numbers are still comparatively low for early adoption figures."

iPhone Bill a Whopping 52 Pages Long 369

Posted by Zonk from the make-the-trees-stop-crying dept.
PoliTech writes "iPhone bills are surprisingly large - 'Xbox Large', according to Ars technica: 'AT&T's iPhone bills are quite impressive in their own right. We're starting to get bills for the iPhone here at Ars, and while many of us have had smartphones for some time, we've never seen a bill like this. One of our bills is a whopping 52 pages long, and my own bill is 34 pages long. They're printed on both sides, too. What gives? The AT&T bill itemizes your data usage whenever you surf the Internet via EDGE, even if you're signed up for the unlimited data plan. AT&T also goes into an incredible amount of detail to tell you; well, almost nothing. For instance, I know that on July 27 at 3:21 p.m. I had some data use that, under the To/From heading, AT&T has helpfully listed as Data Transfer. The Type of file? Data. My total charge? $0.00. This mind-numbing detail goes on for 52 double-sided pages (for 104 printed pages!) with absolutely no variance except the size of the files.' You would think that a data company would have a more efficient billing process."
Printer

Submission + - How long will your photos last?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Have you ever wondered how long your home photo prints will last? If you expect them to look as good in a year as they did when you printed them, you may be disappointed. This article examines ink jet photo prints that have been sitting in a window for three months. Some of them still look great but others look terrible. It seems that using good ink makes all the difference! http://www.trustedreviews.com/printers/review/2007 /08/12/The-Inkjet-Investigation-Part-2/p1
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Cluster Computer Built from PS3's

Submitted by jbcage
jbcage writes: A professor at North Carolina State University has built a cluster computer using 8 PlayStation 3's running Linux. "His cluster of eight PS3 machines — the first such academic cluster in the world — packs the power of a small supercomputer, but at a total cost of about $5,000, it costs less than some desktop computers that have only a fraction of the computing power."
Censorship

Submission + - Do Not Talk About Polar Bears!

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: Scientific American has an article on a memo for foreign travelers on U.S. government business says that requests for foreign travel

"involving or potentially involving climate change, sea ice, and/or polar bears" require special handling, including notice of who will be the official spokesman for the trip. The Fish and Wildlife Service top officials need assurance that the spokesman, "the one responding to questions on these issues, particularly polar bears" understands the administration's position on these topics."
Sounds like a good policy. I'm sure that the problem will just fix itself.
Google

Submission + - How Open Source projects survive poisonous people

Submitted by
CoolVibe
CoolVibe writes: "Two Subversion developers talk at google about how to keep pests and malcontents out of your open source projects. From the abstract: "Every open source project runs into people who are selfish, uncooperative, and disrespectful. These people can silently poison the atmosphere of a happy developer community. Come learn how to identify these people and peacefully de-fuse them before they derail your project. Told through a series of (often amusing) real-life anecdotes and experiences""
Wireless Networking

Submission + - The Battle for Wireless Broadband

Submitted by Bill_McNeal
Bill_McNeal writes: At a panel in Washington DC this week, Skype outlined the full details of its plan to transform the wireless industry through federal legislation. Prof. Timothy Wu lashed out against the carriers for crippling their phones and networks while the CTIA defended the big four. Does Skype have a chance of opening up wireless broadband networks? Read more at http://www.dailytechrag.com/node/5075
Google

Making Sense of Census Data With Google Earth 65

Posted by kdawson from the GIS-for-everyman dept.
mikemuch writes "Imran Haque has developed a mashup of Google Earth with data from the U.S. Census Bureau, called gCensus. The app uses the XML format known as KML (Keyhole Markup Language), which can create shapes and colors on the maps displayed by GE. Haque had to build custom code libraries (which he's made available as open source) that could generate KML for the project. He also had to extract the relevant data from the highly counter-intuitive Census Bureau files and store them in a database that could handle geographic data. gCensus lets you do stuff like create colorful overlays on maps showing population ages, race, and family size distributions."
Upgrades

Submission + - Impact from DST?

Submitted by
Lokatana
Lokatana writes: "Managing the email environment for a large financial institution, I've spent the last month and a half working to prepare for the adjustments to Daylight Saving Time. There has been a large amount of effort communicating to users, upgrading old blackberries, and patching servers and workstations. Now that we're here, and the changes have been made, the silence so far has been deafening.

Is this another Y2K, and the hype has been overstated, or have all of our preparations paid off? What are others in the community experiencing in their workplaces? Is there anyone out there who did not prepare for DST, and if so, what kind of impact are you seeing today?"
Games

Submission + - Duke detects depression

Submitted by
Matthew Sparkes
Matthew Sparkes writes: "Duke Nukem is helping scientists detect and quantify depression. Depression has been linked to a shrunken hippocampus, a part of the brain that also plays a role in spatial memory, so scientists created a test where people had to navigate to as many in-game landmarks as possible within a set amount of time. Depressed people found their way to an average of 2.4 locations compared with 3.8 locations for healthy controls."
Businesses

Submission + - How do you score the One Job?

Submitted by
dmayle
dmayle writes: "We all know how to look for a new job. Polish up your resume, look at the job boards, beg your old college roommate, etc., it's not easy, but it eventually works. What do you do, however, when you want a specific job? How do you go about making the contacts necessary and getting through the recruiting process for your dream job? What if your dream job is in another town, or another state?"
Slashback

Submission + - Distributed Proofreaders + /. = 10,000 eBooks

Submitted by Jagged
Jagged writes: This week Distributed Proofreaders commemorated their digital transcription of 10,000 written works. Back on November 8, 2002, Slashdot posted an article on Distributed Proofreaders. That initial Slashdotting smashed records, wore out the DP admins, and started changes in the way the volunteers worked that made Distributed Proofreaders what it is today.

Distributed Proofreaders, a wholly volunteer organization, was established in 2000 for the purpose of producing quality transcriptions of machine-readable texts from public domain sources. The resulting texts are published on Project Gutenberg.

True to its international nature, Distributed Proofreaders, while respecting U.S. copyright laws, does not limit itself to preserving solely English language content. Nearly 15% of completed titles, to date, represent over 20 languages beyond English. A look to DPs 10,000th title set reveals the diversity of world cultural content in the public domain. Among this commemorative collection are a French translation of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice; the chronicle of Portuguese explorer Serpa Pinto's African expeditions; a pair of illustrated children stories from Germany; the first part of 'Species Plantarum', a 17th century Latin botanical reference work and a translation of a 17th century Guatemalan Maya manuscript.

The fifteen titles released today are not a cheer towards the past accomplishments of Distributed Proofreaders, nor are they pat on the back for deeds fulfilled on this day. What these titles so clearly represent, of their own merits, is the future and what awaits within the world's public domain yet to be rescued from obscurity and re-presented to an audience hungry to rediscover the cultural treasures of previous ages.
Communications

Mobile Carriers Cry "Less Operating Systems" 217

Posted by Hemos from the less-qq-more-pew-pew dept.
A NYTimes story says "Multiple systems have hampered the growth of new services, mobile phone executives say. " The story does a good job of capturing some of the changing dynamics in the mobile OS market — but rightly raises the point that given the sheer size of the mobile market, it's unlikely we're going to see the homogenization we have in the desktop market.

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