Comment Re:Seven hours from a wall outlet (Score 1) 235
Or at least one of those little bags of peanuts which they give you on the plane.
Submission + - Opera Files EU Antitrust Suit Against Microsoft
taskforce writes: Opera Software just filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft at the European Commission. (A place where Micorosft has historically come to blows over its monopolist practices before.) The suit alleges that Microsoft has abused its dominant position in the operating system market by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows; Unlike Apple or Nokia, who also bundle a browser with their OS, Opera argues that web designers build their sites with IE in mind both because of its dominant market share and non-compliance with web standards, meaning that other browsers simply do not work correctly with many pages which are designed for IE, leading to unfair and deliberate restriction of competition on the part of Microsoft.
Feed Transcend touts ExpressCard Flash disk (theregister.com)
Use for next-gen PCMCIA slot found at last
Want to do something useful with that unused ExpressCard 34 slot sitting there in your laptop? How about turning it into a Flash-based solid-state disk?
Submission + - Amazon Patents Use of Humans to Assist Computers
theodp writes: "Amazon's latest patent, the Hybrid Machine/Human Computing Arrangement, reads like scary Sci-Fi, with claims covering the use of humans 'of college educated, at most high school educated, at most elementary school educated, and not formally educated' to perform subtasks dispatched by a computer. From the patent: 'For examples, the task on hand requires French speaking humans, and Task Server has requested that each subtask be performed by at least 10 humans with a past accuracy record of at least 90%.' Yikes."
Feed Regenerative house to grace Greece mountainside (engadget.com)
Filed under: Household
You've got plenty of options when it comes to healing your own body, but patching up your domicile usually requires days of back-breaking labor and gobs of cash to boot. Thankfully, that awful process could be nearing its end, as a £9.5 million ($18.64 million) European Union-funded project sets out to develop self-healing walls for your average home. The idea is to develop "special walls for the house that contain nano polymer particles, which will turn into a liquid when squeezed under pressure, flow into the cracks, and then harden to form a solid material." The technology would prove quite useful in areas where earthquakes are prominent, and in an effort to test things out before shoving it out to contractors everywhere, a swank villa is being erected on a Greece mountainside to collect information. The house's walls will be built from "novel load bearing steel frames and high-strength gypsum board," but more importantly, they will contain a smorgasbord of wireless sensors and RFID tags meant to collect, store, and disseminate critical data regarding "any stresses and vibrations, temperature, humidity, and gas levels." Now, who's the lucky lad(s) that get to call this their home research dwelling?[Via Physorg]
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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 + - Photo Usage Rights
Sonja Schenkel writes: "To whom it may concern
I am contacting you concerning a photo showing the Tokyo stock exchange market that was published on your website (http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/ap/tok11012090345.hme dium.jpg). We are intending to use it for an exhibiton and are looking for the institution/the person to contact herefore.
Thank you for your help
Yours truly
Sonja Schenkel
Museum of Cultures, Basel, Switzerland"
Feed ICANN wants immunity from U.S. law like the International Red Cross (com.com)
Blog: The closest thing the Internet has to a governing body seems to want the same kind of immunity from national laws that the International...
Submission + - Hideo Kojima confirms MGS4 only for PS3.
F***edCompany writes: "http://kotaku.com/gaming/go307/feature-talkin-meta l-gear-with-hideo-kojima-248695.php
Feature: Talkin' Metal Gear With Hideo Kojima
"But like I said, MGS4 is aimed for the movie theatre, it's aimed for the PS3, so the game's scenario and graphics need this theatre-type hardware. It's when a producer has a game that can work on the 'DVD level' that a game will go multiplatform", he says. Sorry kids. Your "OMGMGS4360" banners will have to come out another day.
Since we've opened up this can of worms, I may as well get his thoughts on it. Why, I ask, do you think this rumour simply refuses to go away? "Because 360 owners want it on 360, obviously", he quips."
Feature: Talkin' Metal Gear With Hideo Kojima
"But like I said, MGS4 is aimed for the movie theatre, it's aimed for the PS3, so the game's scenario and graphics need this theatre-type hardware. It's when a producer has a game that can work on the 'DVD level' that a game will go multiplatform", he says. Sorry kids. Your "OMGMGS4360" banners will have to come out another day.
Since we've opened up this can of worms, I may as well get his thoughts on it. Why, I ask, do you think this rumour simply refuses to go away? "Because 360 owners want it on 360, obviously", he quips."
One Laptop Per Child Security Spec Released 253
juwiley writes "The One Laptop Per Child project has released information about its advanced security platform called Bitfrost. Could children with a $100 laptop end up with a better security infrastructure than executives using $5000 laptops powered by Vista? 'What's deeply troubling — almost unbelievable — about [Unix style permissions] is that they've remained virtually the only real control mechanism that a user has over her personal documents today...In 1971, this might have been acceptable...We have set out to create a system that is both drastically more secure and provides drastically more usable security than any mainstream system currently on the market.'"
Submission + - Your Favorite Dupe
An anonymous reader writes: Which was your favourite dupe?
o The first one
o The second one
o The third one due in June 2007
o CowboyNeal
o The first one
o The second one
o The third one due in June 2007
o CowboyNeal
Submission + - PCIe Cabling Spec Allows External Graphics Cards
writertype writes: The PCI Express SIG released its Cabling 1.0 spec on Wednesday, which translates the PCI Express protocols found within motherboards into a cable that takes PCI Express outside the box, ExtremeTech reports. PCI SIG executives specifically mention that the spec was designed to allow external PC graphics solutions, making things like SLI cooling all that much easier. An important step forward for the PC, I think.
Submission + - DVD jon on Job's "give up DRM if I could"
Whiney Mac Fanboy writes: ""Dvd" Jon Johansen has posted several sceptical blog entries reacting to Steve Job's blog posting about DRM.
One post questions Job's misuse of statistics that attempts to prove consumers aren't tied to iPods through ITMS.
The other question's the DRM-free in a heartbeat claim. There are apparantly, many Indie artists who would love to sell DRM-free music on iTunes, but Apple will not allow them.Many iPod owners have never bought anything from the iTunes Store. Some have bought hundreds of songs. Some have bought thousands. At the 2004 Macworld Expo, Steve revealed that one customer had bought $29,500 worth of music.
"It should not take Apple's iTunes team more than 2-3 days to implement a solution for not wrapping content with FairPlay when the content owner does not mandate DRM. This could be done in a completely transparent way and would not be confusing to the users.
