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The Almighty Buck

Submission + - OLPC cost rises from $100 to $188 per laptop (cnn.com)

Arathon writes: "Turns out that the amazing "$100" laptop designed by the "One Laptop Per Child" program isn't going to make it out the door for that price. CNN reports that the laptops are now expected to cost $188 apiece when they come out later this fall. This is expected to make the program's appeal potentially much smaller, since the developers were relying on the mind-bogglingly low-price to hook governments into the concept of buying laptops for their people. OLPC's spokesman guarantees that the price won't rise further, to "above $190". The price differential is being blamed on raw materials costs and currency fluctuation.
Is this the end of the OLPC's newsworthiness, or should we continue to hope that it will make the difference that so many have said it will?"

Communications

Submission + - Comcast Needs to Clearly Define their Usage Policy (newsgroupreviews.com)

UsenetJunkie writes: "Comcast is currently in the hot seat with many customers.Causes range from disconnecting users for utilizing too much bandwidth to drastically limiting BitTorrent traffic. What is the answer to the madness? While Comcast denies bandwidth throttling and traffic shaping allegations I wonder what they would do if all the BitTorrent users switched ISP's."
Toys

Company Demos Personal Aircraft, Future Jetpack 98

coondoggie writes "Earlier this week researchers with the company ESG Elektroniksystem in Germany demonstrated a form of 'strap-on jet wing' that lets a user truly fly through the air. The system, called Gryphon, consists of a six-foot wing and hand-held rotary controls for the rudder. The pilot has several different instruments available to him, including onboard oxygen and helmet that features a heads-up display. 'Researchers say the final version of the flying wing will contain an electronic system that will take care of some of the steering for the pilot which today can be a little tricky, researchers say. The company also plans to add small jets to the wing making it a true jetpack in the future.'"
Censorship

City Fights Blogger On Display of Public Information 134

rokkaku writes "When the gadfly blogger Claremont Insider went searching for information about employee compensation on the city of Claremont web site, they never expected to find scans of pay stubs for all the employees. Nor did they expect the city attorney to demand that they remove copies of those pay stubs from their web site. They found it especially odd since, according to California law, the compensation of public employees is public information."
Data Storage

The Many Paths To Data Corruption 121

Runnin'Scared writes "Linux guru Alan Cox has a writeup on KernelTrap in which he talks about all the possible ways for data to get corrupted when being written to or read from a hard disk drive. This includes much of the information applicable to all operating systems. He prefaces his comments noting that the details are entirely device specific, then dives right into a fascinating and somewhat disturbing path tracing data from the drive, through the cable, into the bus, main memory and CPU cache. He also discusses the transfer of data via TCP and cautions, 'unfortunately lots of high performance people use checksum offload which removes much of the end to end protection and leads to problems with iffy cards and the like. This is well studied and known to be very problematic but in the market speed sells not correctness.'"
Caldera

SCO Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy 421

Can you say "the SCO, the" in German? writes "Trading of SCO's stock has been halted on news that SCO has filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. This move just so happens to fall on the eve of SCO's trial with Novell. One would think that their prior boasts were mostly bluster, that they believe they have almost no chance of prevailing at trial, and that they're now desperate to protect their executives from SCO's creditors while seeking yet another delay. From the release: 'The SCO Group intends to maintain all normal business operations throughout the bankruptcy proceedings. Subject to court approval, SCO and its subsidiaries will use the cash flow from their consolidated operations to meet their capital needs during the reorganization process. "We want to assure our customers and partners that they can continue to rely on SCO products, support and services for their business critical operations," said Darl McBride, President and CEO, The SCO Group. "Chapter 11 reorganization provides the Company with an opportunity to protect its assets during this time while focusing on building our future plans."'"
Media (Apple)

Apple Cuts Off Linux iPod Users 854

Will Fisher writes "New iPods will no longer be able to work with Linux. iTunes now writes some kind of hash (SHA1, md5?) to the iPod database which new iPods check against. If this check fails then the iPod reports that it contains 0 songs. This appears to be protection against 3rd party applications writing out their own databases. We haven't found out how to generate our own valid hashes (but we do know the hash includes the database itself, and possibly the iPod serial number), and are looking for help."
Censorship

How To Configure Real PC Parental Controls? 618

Orange Crush writes "As the resident computer geek in an office full of accountants, my boss recently asked me how she could reasonably keep her teenage son from using the family computer to 'access inappropriate sites.' I of course responded 'Give up now. There's nothing in this world that can keep a determined teenager from acquiring porn.' Sadly, she was dissatisfied with this answer. I mentioned that there was in fact software available for this purpose, but that all of it was trivially easy to bypass for a clever young mind. I really can't think of another answer. She could password protect the BIOS to prevent booting a different OS, but that's easily defeated with a screwdriver at most. The only solutions I can think of involve upstream firewalls/proxies/etc to which I gleefully redirected her to her ISPs tech support number. As much as I disagree with her reasoning — and ignoring the obvious 'go to a friend's house' loophole — is there really any other way (on a home budget) to netnanny a household computer?"
Role Playing (Games)

New Technologies Attack the One-World Problem 157

Hugh Pickens writes "An MIT Technology Review article has new details on the challenges of a 'one world design' in Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Most games shard their servers, putting up artificial barriers between friends and family members. Technologies are now being developed to keep lots of players within a single world, some of them based off of the unique PvP-heavy title EVE Online. The best part - the technologies don't just apply to gaming. 'NASDAQ, for example, can be thought of as a very large MMO, supporting very large numbers of 'players' performing billions of transactions daily in a graphically intense environment, all within a single shard. Technologies that solve this problem effectively, says George Dolbier, technical lead for games and interactive entertainment at IBM, will have applications in any industry that requires spotting and reacting to trends, or "anything where behavior is dynamic and you need to move resources around rapidly."'"
Google

Google's Head of Research — We Don't Do Hardware 94

mr_sifter writes "In a recent, wide-ranging interview Google's Head of Research, Dr Peter Norvig, revealed the firm has no interest in developing its own hardware. (Except a phone, apparently.) Said Norvig, 'We want to work everywhere and be neutral. That neutrality is important.' Interestingly, Norvig is tough on where the company's priorities are at the moment, saying: 'I think there could be much better tools, we're [Google] still kind of isolated in what we do. You give us a question and we give you an answer ... We're really focused on either the five second-type question ... We don't really support the five month or the five year queries, the project or life-long goal.' He also talks about the importance of adding a narrative to search, mobile technology, and how Google's strong financials mean the company can run research in an unusual way."
Programming

Debating the Linux Process Scheduler 232

An anonymous reader writes "The Linux 2.6.23 kernel is expected around the end of the month, and will be the first to include Ingo Molnar's much debated rewrite of the process scheduler called the Completely Fair Scheduler. In another Linux kernel mailing list thread one more developer is complaining about Molnar and his new code. However, according to KernelTrap a number of other Linux developers have stood up to defend Molnar and call into question the motives of the complaints. It will be interesting to see how the new processor really performs when the 2.6.23 kernel is released."

Gates Successor Says Microsoft Laid Foundation for Google 500

thefickler writes "According to Bill Gates' successor Craig Mundie, there would have been no Google without Microsoft. 'I mean, the fact is: Google's existence and success required Microsoft to have been successful previously to create the platform that allowed them to go on and connect people to their search servers. Now, Microsoft's business is not to control the platform per se, but in fact to allow it to be exploited by the world's developers. The fact that we have it out there gives us a good business, but in some ways it doesn't give us an advantage over any of the other developers in terms of being able to utilize it.' This comment comes from a lengthy interview between Mundie and APC magazine, which talks with the newly installed strategy and R&D head. Other interesting topics discussed include the future of Microsoft and Windows, OOXML, and and the 'rise of Linux' on the desktop."

How the iPod Touch Works 208

starexplorer2001 writes "The iPod Touch isn't in stores yet, but HowStuffWorks has a nice summary of how the 'touch' part of the iPod Touch works. Very similar to how the iPhone works, without those pesky rebates! From the article: 'The iPod touch also has a few other features that iPod enthusiasts had hoped to see on standard iPod models. Some users hoped for a wirelessly enabled iPod so they could synch their music or share files with friends over a Bluetooth or WiFi connection. The iPod touch is the first iPod to have wireless capability, although it doesn't use it to synch with a computer or friends' iPods. Instead, you can use it to browse the Web, watch YouTube videos or download music from a WiFi-specific iTunes Music Store. With its widescreen display and WiFi capability, the iPod touch might sound like a big step up from older iPod models. But the iPod touch isn't for everyone.'"
The Internet

Germany Makes Arrests In Global Phishing Scam 56

Monkier writes "PC World reports on a sting by German police resulting in the arrest of ten people suspected of a phishing scam. The group was targeted bank customers with emails from organizations like eBay and Deutsche Telekom. The team attached software to the emails that recorded data entered into the host computers. From the article: '"This case shows that criminal organizations are using the Internet more and more to gain enormous amounts of money with a supposedly low risk of being caught," said Crime Office President Joerg Ziercke in a statement. "The authorities face constant new challenges in the fight against computer crime where perpetrators are developing a higher degree of professionalism and specialization." The office said the suspects had led luxurious lifestyles involving expensive jewelry, cars and travel.'"

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