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The Internet

Andreesen Offers New Browser 'Rockmelt' 185

Posted by CmdrTaco from the that-poor-horse dept.
DrHeasley writes "Rockmelt, available for the first time Monday, is built on the premise that most online activity today revolves around socializing on Facebook, searching on Google, tweeting on Twitter and monitoring a handful of favorite websites. It tries to minimize the need to roam from one website to the next by corralling all vital information and favorite services in panes and drop-down windows. 'This is a chance for us to build a browser all over again,' Andreessen said. 'These are all things we would have done (at Netscape) if we had known how people were going to use the Web.'"
Piracy

Porn Maker Sues 7,000+ For Copyright Infringement 374

Posted by Soulskill from the enjoy-explaining-that-letter dept.
This summer, we discussed news that the producers of The Hurt Locker had sued 5,000 people for sharing the movie over BitTorrent. Reader suraj.sun writes with word that a porn company is now following suit, filing a complaint targeting 7,098 people for illegally sharing one of their films. Quoting: "Axel Braun Productions filed the complaint Friday in US District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia, alleging that the defendants illegally shared the adult film Batman XXX: A Porn Parody. The film was written and directed by Axel Braun and distributed by Vivid Entertainment, one of the country's best known porn studios. ... '**** 'em all,' Braun told Xbiz. 'People don't realize that when you pirate a movie it hurts all of the people who work very hard to get it produced — from the cast to the production assistants to the makeup artists. So we are going after every one of them who pirates our content.'"
Science

Researchers Find a 'Liberal Gene' 841

Posted by samzenpus from the let-the-flame-war-begin dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Liberals may owe their political outlook partly to their genetic make-up, according to new research from the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University. Ideology is affected not just by social factors, but also by a dopamine receptor gene called DRD4. The study's authors say this is the first research to identify a specific gene that predisposes people to certain political views."
Firefox

Germany Warns Against Using Firefox 509

Posted by timothy from the fuer-ihre-sicherheit dept.
jayme0227 writes "Due to the recent exploit in Firefox, Germany has warned against its use. This comes a couple months after Germany advised against using IE. Perhaps we should start taking odds as to which browser will be next." Note: the warning (from the Federal Office for Information Security) is provisional, and should be rendered moot by the release later this month of 3.6.2.
Operating Systems

Multicore Requires OS Rework, Windows Expert Says 631

Posted by timothy from the ok-let's-split-up dept.
alphadogg writes "With chip makers continuing to increase the number of cores they include on each new generation of their processors, perhaps it's time to rethink the basic architecture of today's operating systems, suggested Dave Probert, a kernel architect within the Windows core operating systems division at Microsoft. The current approach to harnessing the power of multicore processors is complicated and not entirely successful, he argued. The key may not be in throwing more energy into refining techniques such as parallel programming, but rather rethinking the basic abstractions that make up the operating systems model. Today's computers don't get enough performance out of their multicore chips, Probert said. 'Why should you ever, with all this parallel hardware, ever be waiting for your computer?' he asked. Probert made his presentation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Universal Parallel Computing Research Center."
Games

Which Game Series Would You Reboot? 1120

Posted by Soulskill from the star-control-please dept.
Franchise reboots are all the rage these days in Hollywood, and the trend is starting to creep into the games industry as well. The Guardian's games blog is running a story discussing a few examples and pondering likely candidates for future reboots. Quoting: "If anything, the concept of the reboot makes more sense in the videogame sector than it does in movies. For a start, games are complex entities, with each new iteration in a familiar series adding many, many hours of fresh narrative content. Entering, say, the Zelda, Resident Evil, Half-Life, Dragon Quest or Metal Gear worlds at this stage must be massively intimidating — even if the developers go to great lengths to make each entry work as a singular, self-contained entity within the canon. Also, videogames are going through a paradigm shift in terms of popular appeal at the moment. The faithful audience of young males has been joined by new demographics brought in by the Wii, PC casual games, and now the iPhone. Many of these people may be vaguely aware of long-running game brands, but won't have a clue about the key characters, sign post events and basic gameplay mechanisms." So, which series (or individual title) would you like to see rebooted?
Privacy

Obama Administration Defends Warrantless Wiretapping 788

Posted by timothy from the high-moral-ground-is-a-grassy-knoll dept.
a whoabot writes "The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the Obama administration has stepped in to defend AT&T in the case over their participation in the warrantless wiretapping program started by Bush. The Obama administration argues that that continuation of the case will lead to the disclosure of important 'state secrets.' The Electronic Frontier Foundation has described the action as an 'embrace' of the Bush policy." Update: 04/07 15:18 GMT by T : Glenn Greenwald of Salon has up an analysis of this move, including excerpts from the actual brief filed. Excerpt: "This brief and this case are exclusively the Obama DOJ's, and the ample time that elapsed — almost three full months — makes clear that it was fully considered by Obama officials."
The Internet

Google Engineers Say IPv6 Is Easy, Not Expensive 233

Posted by timothy from the step-one-is-hire-smart-engineers dept.
alphadogg writes "Google engineers say it was not expensive and required only a small team of developers to enable all of the company's applications to support IPv6, a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol. 'We can provide all Google services over IPv6,' said Google network engineer Lorenzo Colitti during a panel discussion held in San Francisco Tuesday at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Colitti said a 'small, core team' spent 18 months enabling IPv6, from the initial network architecture and software engineering work, through a pilot phase, until Google over IPv6 was made publicly available. Google engineers worked on the IPv6 effort as a 20% project — meaning it was in addition to their regular work — from July 2007 until January 2009."
Sci-Fi

Battlestar Galactica Gets Spinoff Prequel Series 297

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the frak-here-comes-more-fraking dept.
It was recently announced that sci-fi remake series Battlestar Galactica is getting a whole new spinoff prequel series called "Caprica." Signed on for twenty hours worth of finished product, including a two-hour pilot, the new series is to be set 50 years prior to Battlestar Galactica, and will focus on two rival families, the Graystones and the Adamas. "Enmeshed in the burgeoning technology of artificial intelligence and robotics that will eventually lead to the creation of the Cylons, the two houses go toe-to-toe blending action with corporate conspiracy and sexual politics. 'Caprica' will deliver all of the passion, intrigue, political backbiting and family conflict in television's first science fiction family saga."
Communications

The State of UK Broadband — Not So Fast 279

Posted by kdawson from the but-you-have-actual-competition dept.
Barence writes "The deplorable speed of British broadband connections has been revealed in the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics, which show that 42.3% of broadband connections are slower than 2Mb/sec. More worryingly, the ONS statistics are based on the connection's headline speed, not actual throughput, which means that many more British broadband connections are effectively below the 2Mb/sec barrier. Better still, a separate report issued yesterday by Ofcom revealed that the majority of broadband users had no idea about the speed of their connection anyway."
Patents

Rewriting a Software Product After Quitting a Job? 604

Posted by kdawson from the clean-room-white-coats dept.
hi_caramba_2008 writes "We are a bunch of good friends at a large software company. The product we work on is under-budgeted and over-hyped by the sales drones. The code quality sucks, and management keeps pulling in different direction. Discussing this among ourselves, we talked about leaving the company and rebuilding the code from scratch over a few months. We are not taking any code with us. We are not taking customer lists (we probably will aim at different customers anyway). The code architecture will also be different — hosted vs. stand-alone, different modules and APIs. But at the feature level, we will imitate this product. Can we be sued for IP infringement, theft, or whatever? Are workers allowed to imitate the product they were working on? We know we have to deal with the non-compete clause in our employment contracts, but in our state this clause has been very difficult to enforce. We are more concerned with other IP legal aspects."
The Courts

Microsoft Moves To Quash Case, End E-mail Revelations 158

Posted by timothy from the gentlemen-do-not-open-each-other's-email dept.
CWmike writes "Microsoft asked a federal judge yesterday to end the class-action lawsuit that has been the source of a treasure trove of embarrassing insider e-mails covering everything from managers badmouthing Intel to others on who worried how Vista would be compared to Apple's Mac OS X in 2005. In seeking to end the case, Microsoft argues the plaintiffs have not demonstrated that the lowest-priced version of Windows Vista was not the 'real' Vista, or showed that users paid more for PCs prior to the new operating system's launch because of the Vista Capable campaign."
Christmas Cheer

Holiday Art Executed In Google Documents 72

Posted by timothy from the but-they-offered-it-a-blindfold dept.
CyberKnet writes "Some enterprising folks over at Google have collaborated via Google Documents to create holiday art using cells in a spreadsheet as the pixels. A time delay video was taken and is available over at YouTube and the result is pretty spectacular. More info on how they did this is available behind the scenes. They're inviting people to share their own masterpieces or post a video response over on YouTube."
Google

Google Apps Gets a 99.9% Guarantee 155

Posted by kdawson from the outlook-cloudy-try-again dept.
David Gerard passes along a posting on Google's official blog announcing that they have extended the three-nines SLA for the Premier Edition of Google Apps from Gmail alone to also cover the Calendar, Docs, Sites, and Google Talk services. 99.9% uptime translates to 45 minutes a month of downtime, and the blog post puts this in context with Gmail's historical reliability, which has been between three and four times as good over the last year (10-15 min./mo.). It also claims, based on research by an outside group, that Gmail's historical reliability beats that of in-house hosted solutions such as Groupwise and Exchange, on average. Reader Ian Lamont adds an article in The Standard that digs down into the details of the SLA, revealing for instance that outages of less than 10 minutes aren't counted against the monthly 45 minutes.

Comment Re:Texas voter here: This is simply untrue. (Score 2, Informative) 898

by SimplexO (#22650792) Attached to: Clinton Takes Ohio, Texas; McCain Seals The Deal
The goal of the presidential primary process (right or wrong) is to obtain delegates for the national convention in Denver. The delegate results for the primary seem to be Clinton 65 Obama 61. That's a net of 4 for Clinton. Obama looks to win 21 of the 31 state districts (which is how the remaining 67 remaining delegates get allocated). I can't speak as to how the TX caucus processes works from here forward. I know it's complicated and not as straight forward as the 21/31 senate districts number I sited above. But I would guess that Obama is going to net more than 4 delegates from the caucuses, and actually come out of Texas a delegate winner even though he lost the popular vote (see Nevada for details).

Also, don't think that only Texans understand how silly and convoluted the process is. Everyone outside of Texas also thinks "y'all are doing it wrong." However, it's the process that the state democratic party came up with, and that's the way you do it down there. Complaining about the disenfranchisement of voters because of a system that was created before the race began is a bad argument. You should complain about the incompetence of the plan on its own merits. However, it's the system Texas Democrats decided upon and that's the way it goes. (I have similar feelings about Michigan and Florida.) Lets all learn from our mistakes and get it right next time.

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