172409
story
Tracy Reed writes
"According to the BBC, Intel has designed and begun marketing it's own low-cost laptop targeted at education in developing countries. 'Professor Negroponte, who aims to distribute millions of laptops to kids in developing countries, said Intel had hurt his mission "enormously". Speaking to US broadcaster CBS, Intel's chairman denied the claims. "We're not trying to drive him out of business," said Craig Barrett. "We're trying to bring capability to young people." Mr Barrett has previously dismissed the $100 laptop as a "gadget".'"
172497
submission
blowdart writes:
gnu is promoting ogg vorbis though www.playogg.com.
This is the perfect example of how not to do it; promoting a free audio format is laudable, but they promote it by suggesting to users that they .... download an entirely new media player.
iTunes users won't give up iTunes just for a codec. WMP users won't give up WMP just for a codec. In fact there are ways to get Ogg into those players; but what do GNU do? ignore how users currently work to push an open source media player along with the codec. This just is not realistic. There must be a better way, right?
172399
submission
brian0918 writes:
Researchers speaking at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco, Mexico, this week will outline a new theory for the extinction event and subsequent global cooling that occured about 13,000 years ago. From the Guardian: 'A group of US scientists have found a layer of microscopic diamonds at 26 different sites in Europe, Canada and America. These are the remains of a giant carbon-rich comet that crashed in pieces on our planet 12,900 years ago.' According to geophysicist Allen West, the comet was 'about 2km-3km in diameter and broke up just before impact, setting off a series of explosions, each the equivalent of an atomic bomb blast. The result would have been hell on Earth. Most of the northern hemisphere would have been left on fire.'