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Music

EMI Only Selling CDs To Mega-Chains From Now On 334

Posted by samzenpus from the another-brick-in-the-wall dept.
farrellj writes "According to Zeropaid, record company EMI has been notifying small music stores that they will no longer be able to buy EMI CDs from EMI, and will have to buy product from mega-chains like Walmart. Independent record store customers are some of the most loyal music buyers around. You are not going to find the back catalog, what used to be the staple of the music business, at your local Walmart. One wonders when the music business is going to run out of feet to shoot?"
The Internet

The Web of Data, Beyond What Google and Yahoo Show 50

Posted by timothy from the thought-symantic-was-just-some-company dept.
jccq writes "Both Google and Yahoo have been supporting Semantic Web markup (RDFa, RDF and Microformats) for weeks and months respectively. What they do, at the moment, is use the markup only for visual feedback by returning better looking, more functional 'page snippets.' But how would it look if you could get all these bits and compose them automatically to form a single structured information page about what you're searching for? The folks at the DERI institute have just released Sig.ma, a visual browser and mashup generator that will go all over the web of data and find dozens of sources to combine together when answering a user query. It also comes in API mode to reuse the information Sig.ma finds inside applications. Here are a screencast and a blog post, with semantic-web-geek details."

Comment Re:At least you'll have options (Score 1) 378

by noliver (#28720667) Attached to: Typography On the Web Gets Different

No, you've missed the point.

The current situation, if you wanted a stylized block of text, it had to be a graphic--which can't be searched, screen-read, or indexed. In short, the text and the presentation are stuck together.

With the new font-face concept, you now have the text in the source (which CAN be searched, indexed, and read by a screen-reader) and the presentation controlled by the CSS. So I guess, yes, you can get features that previously required a graphic, but now allow text-search, too.
Education

Google Summer of Code Announces Mentor Projects 44

Posted by timothy from the everyone-gets-a-free-mentors-album-too dept.
mithro writes "As everyone should already know, Google is running the Summer of Code again this year. For those who don't know, GSoC is where Google funds student's to participate in Open Source projects and has been running for 5 years, bringing together over 2600 students and 2500 mentors from nearly 100 countries worldwide. Google has just announced the projects which will be mentor organizations this year. It includes a great list of Open Source projects from a wide range of different genres, include content management systems, compilers, many programming languages and even a bunch of games!"
Microsoft

Microsoft Shoots Own Foot In Iceland 476

Posted by kdawson from the blood-from-a-stone-middleman dept.
David Gerard writes "The Microsoft Certified Partner model is: an MCP buys contracts from Microsoft and sells them to businesses as a three-year timed contract, payable in annual installments. Iceland's economy has collapsed, so 1500 businesses have gone bankrupt and aren't paying the fees any more. But Microsoft has told the MCPs: 'Our deal was with you, not them. Pay up.' The MCPs that don't go bankrupt in turn are moving headlong to Free Software, taking most of the country with them. (Warning: link contains strong language and vivid imagery.)"

Comment Re:Body Mass Index?!? (Score 2, Informative) 66

by noliver (#26869855) Attached to: Researchers Snag 60 TB of <em>Everquest 2</em> Behavioral Data

...I don't believe that even the most magical of algorithms can derive player body mass indexes or whether they're "slightly more depressed than average" from it. I call bullshit.

TFA also states that the user data "was followed up with demographic surveys of the users." I'd wager that among the demographic information collected was height and weight, as well as some mental health type questions. Admittedly, those aren't questions I'd expect if someone was surveying me, but I'd probably ask them if I were surveying a group of Everquest players...
Censorship

Canon Tries To Shut Down "Fake" Canon Blog 125

Posted by kdawson from the what-part-of-fake-do-you-not-understand dept.
Thomas Hawk writes "An interesting twist over at the Fake Chuck Westfall Blog. Fake Chuck (like Fake Steve before him) has a blog out parodying Canon's real Technical Information Advisor Chuck Westfall. It seems that Canon and their lawyers over at Loeb & Loeb are none too fond of all the fun that Fake Chuck and DSLR geeks everywhere have been having at their expense and have sent Fake Chuck's blog hosting company, WordPress, a notice to take the blog down. Canon's lawyers cite that Fake Chuck's blog is 'calculated to mislead recipients,' even though the blog has 'fake' in the title, 'fake' in the URL and 'fake' just about everywhere else in the blog. What in the heck is wrong with Canon? Do they really think that trying to shut down a parody blog is going to make their new 5D Mark II ship any faster?" After Fake Chuck removed the Canon logo from his site, WordPress is standing behind him and has rebuffed Canon's demand.
Handhelds

Palm Pulls the Plug On Palm OS 300

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the now-my-palms-wont-operate dept.
BobB-nw writes to tell us that Palm has decided to kill their PalmOS operating system and is instead betting their future on a still mostly unknown Palm webOS. Very little is known about the new Palm webOS, but it will supposedly support HTML5 and enable a local data store so that applications can be used both online and off. All of this is rolled into a Linux framework with a message bus based on JSON. Will be interesting to see where they take it.
Unix

Why Do We Name Servers the Way We Do? 1397

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the just-no-more-muppets-please dept.
jfruhlinger writes "If you use a Unix machine, it probably has a funny name. And if you work in an environment where there are multiple Unix machines, they probably have funny names that are variations on a theme. No, you're not the only one! This article explores the phenomenon, showing that even the CIA uses a whimsical server naming scheme." What are some of your best (worst?) naming schemes?
Science

Scientists Solve Century-Old Optics Mystery 265

Posted by CmdrTaco from the all-out-of-joementum dept.
evan_arrrr! writes "From the article: Since the early 20th century physicists have known that light carries momentum, but the way this momentum changes as light passes through different media is much less clear. Two rival theories of the time predicted precisely the opposite effect for light incident on a dielectric: one suggesting it pushes the surface in the direction light is traveling; the other suggesting it drags the surface backwards towards the source of light. After 100 years of conflicting experimental results, a team of experimentalists from China believe they have finally found a resolution."
Patents

The Post-Bilski Era Gets Underway 94

Posted by kdawson from the method-in-their-madness-but-no-apparatus dept.
bfwebster writes "A set of pharmaceutical process patents for 'evaluating and improving the safety of immunization schedules' (Classen v. Biogen et al.; see US Patents 6,420,139; 6,638,379; 5,728,385; 5,723,283) were held to be invalid due to unpatentability. The decision was appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, but was upheld with a terse citation to In re Bilski (which decision we discussed here). Here's the entire text of the appeals decision: 'In light of our decision in In re Bilski, 545 F.3d 943 (Fed. Cir. 2008) (en banc), we affirm the district court's grant of summary judgment that these claims are invalid under 35 U.S.C. 101. Dr. Classen's claims are neither "tied to a particular machine or apparatus" nor do they "transform a particular article into a different state or thing." Bilski, 545 F.3d at 954. Therefore we affirm.' It will be interesting to see what happens when these same standards start getting applied to software-related patents."
Earth

Scientist Patents New Method To Fight Global Warming 492

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the and-we-will-need-an-additional-10,000-coal-plants-to-power-this dept.
SUNSTOP writes to tell us that a relatively unknown Maryland scientist has proposed a public patent that he claims could combat global warming. The proposed plan would require massive amounts of water to be sprayed into the air in an effort to bolster the earth's existing air conditioning system. "First, the sprayed droplets would transform to water vapor, a change that absorbs thermal energy near ground level; then the rising vapor would condense into sunlight-reflecting clouds and cooling rain, releasing much of the stored energy into space in the form of infrared radiation. Kenneth Caldeira, a climate scientist for the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University whose computer simulation of Ace's invention suggests it would significantly cool the planet. The simulated evaporation of about one-half inch of additional water everywhere in the world produced immediate planetary cooling effects that were projected to reach nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit within 20 or 30 years, Caldeira said."
Earth

Scientists Find Hole In Earth's Magnetic Field 200

Posted by samzenpus from the better-tan dept.
Velorium writes "The Earth's magnetic field has been found to have two large holes that are making Earth's surface vulnerable to solar winds. Despite what scientists originally thought, these holes allow 20 times the normal amount of solar particles through when they are facing away from the sun. This is the opposite of what the scientists had first speculated."
United States

Submission + - Barak Obama Voted President of The US (cnn.com) 3

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "Barak Obama has just achieved 297 electoral votes ensuring him the presidency of the United States of America for the term 2008-2012. This is an historic event for the nation and possibly even the world. What changes will he bring as he sweeps Democrats into other leadership positions? What brought this momentum and change in party majorities/control?"

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