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Feed The 2006 Engadget Awards: Vote for Worst Gadget of the Year (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed on Monday April 16, 2007 @01:52PM

Filed under: Announcements, Misc. Gadgets

Ready to get your hater on? We're at the end of the line, and your chance to cast your ballot for the 2006 Worst Gadget of the Year! (Note: nominees were not necessarily selected for having outright bad or defective gadgets -- the disappointment / let-down factor also plays a big role.) Our Engadget Awards nominees are listed below, and you've got until 11.59PM EST on Wednesday, April 18th to file your vote. You can only vote once, so make it count, and may the best tech win! The nominees: Defective Apple MacBooks (see here, here, here, and here), Exploding Sony batteries (see here, here, here, here, here, and many more), Microsoft Zune, Motorola Q, Nintendo Wiimote straps (see here, here, here, and here), and Sony PlayStation 3.

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Submission + - You're all obsolete: Machine-readable news

Submitted by guanxi on Monday April 16, 2007 @01:43PM

guanxi writes: One of the fastest growing markets for news has no interest in sex, celebrity gossip, or partisan hackery — it's computers. Financial traders looking for an edge no longer want to wait for people to read, analyze, and communicate the latest events; they want the news fed right into their computers so they can process trades immediately. The turnaround time from a "PS3 sales slow" story to dumping the stock is milliseconds. Reuters met this demand with NewsScope Real-Time, which outputs machine-readable news, and reportedly Thomson Financial (which already sells computer-generated news) and Bloomberg offer similar products. Would you trust your money to an unskeptical computer reading the news? Can bloggers compete? Will Jon Stewart have a feed?

Submission + - ID theft: how likely?

Submitted by spge on Monday April 16, 2007 @01:42PM

spge writes: Everyone's going on about ID theft these days, but there's a lot of FUD being sprayed around. Apparently, in the UK there's much more chance that you'll get punched or just plain shouted at by a criminal, than to have him nick your identity. UK crime stats extrapolated here.

Submission + - Odd Units of Measurement

Submitted by

CowboyRobot

on Monday April 16, 2007 @01:34PM

CowboyRobot writes: "ACM's Queue has a column by the inimitable Stan Kelly-Bootle, where he explains the curse of metrics and the dangers of their bastard offspring, units as well as some of the more absurd units of measurements. My favorite line: milliHelen: The amount of beauty that can launch one ship."

Enforced Ads Coming to Flash Video Players 397

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday April 16, 2007 @01:27PM from the advertising-ploy-to-rule-the-world dept.

Dominare writes "The BBC is reporting that Adobe is releasing new player software which will allow websites that use their Flash video player (such as YouTube) to force viewers to watch ads before the video they selected will play. 'But the big seller for Adobe is the ability to include in Flash movies so-called digital rights management (DRM) — allowing copyright holders to require the viewing of adverts, or restrict copying. "Adobe has created the first way for media companies to release video content, secure in the knowledge that advertising goes with it," James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research said.' This seems to have been timed to coincide with Microsoft's release of their own competitor, Silverlight, to Adobe's dominance of online video."

Feed Review: SpamSieve 2.6 (macworld.com)

From feed by macworldfeed on Monday April 16, 2007 @01:12PM

SpamSieve 2.6 should be on the lips of all Mac users serious about ridding their computers of junk mail. It's affordable, effective, easy to use, and as configurable as just about anyone needs a spam utility to be.

Submission + - Microsoft Copies BlueJ, Patents It

Submitted by PRC Banker on Saturday January 27, 2007 @05:40AM

PRC Banker writes: One of BlueJ's developers, Michael Kolling, has posted a message on his website, Michael Kolling, saying Microsoft copied BlueJ and are attempting to patent it. "After blatantly copying BlueJ (without reference or attribution), Microsoft have now filed for patent for the functionality they knowingly copied from us." He even quoted a Microsoft developer "*My* [Dr Fernandez's] interpretation of the above statement is basically that our academic customers wanted this because of the success of this BlueJ feature." Something in Microsoft just doesn't tie up. BlueJ is an educational IDE for teaching object-oriented programming and Java to beginners, a cross-platform academic project started in 1998.

Submission + - Microsoft steal BlueJ idea and patent it

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 27, 2007 @05:40AM

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft is attempting to patent "Object Test Bench", a graphical object-oriented teaching tool. The problem is that BlueJ created it in 1994 and it's been in active and healthy use since, as a free project created by academics. Microsoft openly acknowledges this. Whichever way the BlueJ team turn, they now face a legal battle against huge corporation. Headstrong Slashdotters might be screaming "SUE!! PRIOR ART!!" but BlueJ is an academic project and legal battles require lots of cash. It's not helped by the fact BlueJ is based outside of the US.

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