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PlayStation (Games)

Breaking Down the Dropping Parts Cost for Sony's PS3 302

Posted by timothy from the wait-until-it's-all-one-chip dept.
will_die writes "The people at iSuppli have taken apart an October 2008 version of the PlayStation 3 to create a bill of materials, along with providing a comparison to original PS3. The article provides information about the changes Sony has made. One of the big ones was that the hardware has gone from costing $690.23 to the current price of $448.73. This was done using a combination of removing parts (currently 2,820 vs. the original 4,048), cutting the cost of the CPU ($46.46 vs. $64.40), and cutting the cost of the graphics processor to $58.01 from $83.17."
Bug

Tales From the Support Crypt 855

Posted by timothy from the plug-in-your-mouse-please dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Talking viruses, infected physical devices, and lights that go out are some of the 'problems' Panda Security's tech support service has had to face. Many of them were not a result of computer viruses, but of confused users. This proves once again, that antivirus manufacturers must make a special effort to increase user knowledge regarding computer security and malware effects." For anyone who's been on the receiving end of such questions, now's a good time to tell your cathartic tale.
Cellphones

What's the Problem With iPhone 3G Reception? 322

Posted by Soulskill from the solar-flares dept.
CWmike writes "Apple's iPhone 3G was just a couple of days old when reports began trickling onto the company's support forum from dissatisfied customers complaining about poor reception. Although no one outside of Apple and AT&T — and maybe a chipmaker or two — really knows, that has not kept others from speculating, or in a few cases, making claims based on unnamed sources. What's going on? We may not have all the answers, but we do have questions. Gregg Keizer put together everything we know in a FAQ on the griping about iPhone 3G reception."
Biotech

Former Intel CEO Rips Medical Research 484

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the git-r-done dept.
Himuanam writes "Former Intel CEO Grove rips on the medical research community, contrasting their lack of progress with the tech industry's juggernaut of breakthroughs over the past half-century or so. 'On Sunday afternoon, Grove is unleashing a scathing critique of the nation's biomedical establishment. In a speech at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, he challenges big pharma companies, many of which haven't had an important new compound approved in ages, and academic researchers who are content with getting NIH grants and publishing research papers with little regard to whether their work leads to something that can alleviate disease, to change their ways.'"
Security

Submission + - Ebay Hacker Posts Credit Card Info of Ebay Users (associatedcontent.com)

Submitted by
vampriter
vampriter writes: "The info that was published included user id, name, address, email address, feedback score, credit card number, date of registration, and the three digit code contained on the back of your card. Because of this, the potential for fraud is very real, not only for those appearing on the list. http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/392758/apparent_ebay_hacker_posts_credit_card.html"
Privacy

Sony Developing Gigapixel Satellite Imaging 101

Posted by Zonk from the hello-up-there dept.
holy_calamity writes "Sony and the University of Alabama are working on a gigapixel resolution camera for improved satellite surveillance. It can see 10-km-square from an altitude of 7.5 kilometres with a resolution better than 50 centimetres per pixel. As well as removing annoying artefacts created by tiling images in Google Earth and similar, it should allow CCTV surveillance of entire cities with one camera. 'The trick is to build an array of light sensitive chips that each record small parts of a larger image and place them at the focal plane of a large multiple-lens system. The camera would have gigapixel resolution, and able to record images at a rate of 4 frames per second. The team suggests that such a camera mounted on an aircraft could provide images of a large city by itself. This would even allow individual vehicles to be monitored without any danger of losing them as they move from one ground level CCTV system to another.'"
Supercomputing

First 'Quantum Computer Chips' Demonstrated 171

Posted by Zonk from the just-like-magic dept.
holy_calamity writes "The first quantum computer chips have been made by two US groups, New Scientist reports. Both NIST and Yale have demonstrated chips where information was transferred between two superconducting qubits using a 'quantum bus'. The bus is made from a cavity that traps a single microwave photon as a standing wave — the NIST group also managed to use the bus to store data from one qubit for a short time. 'After encoding information in one qubit, they transferred it into the cavity for 10 nanoseconds before transferring it to the other qubit. Yale's chip used qubits around 1-micron square built on silicon, while NIST used larger 10-square-micron qubits on top of sapphire. In both prototypes, the bus between the qubits was between five and seven millimeters long.'"
United States

Submission + - San Jose Cops Unveil Interactive Crime Map (mercurynews.com)

Submitted by
Degrees
Degrees writes: "The San Jose police department has unveiled new crime-mapping software on its web site that pinpoints crime data down to the city block. People can see the status of a report, such as whether an arrest was made or if an investigation is continuing or was dropped. And, with more detailed mapping, they also can zero in on an area as small as a one-mile radius of their home or school. CrimeReports.com takes you to the data — providing you register first.

The San Jose Police Department web site has a press release (in the form on a .pdf). It says that future upgrades include SMS alerting, allowing the SJPD to send alerts to specific neighborhoods if specifically requested by the department."

Feed The Register: Dawn on its way to the asteroid belt (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed
Lift off, at last

Dawn, NASA's mission to the asteroid belt, has at last launched successfully. At the time of writing, NASA mission managers were still waiting for the Delta II's second and third stages to fire, but so far it is all looking good.

Feed Engadget: Best Buy's secret intranet site to get a disclaimer; customers to get shaft (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

So after all the uproar and lawsuits over Best Buy's secret in-store intranet, which looked exactly like the external bestbuy.com site but lacked sale prices and other discounts, the company has responded in the lamest way possible: by putting a warning label on the in-store kiosks. The warning will say something like "THIS KIOSK DISPLAYS IN-STORE PRICES - WHICH MAY DIFFER FROM NATIONAL INTERNET PRICES," and advise customers to see a sales associate if they have any questions. It's still unclear why the company won't just do the right thing and match its own listed prices, but we're willing to bet the suits are patting themselves on the back for their innovative, out-of-the-box solution. Martinis for all!

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

Firefox Working to Fix Memory Leaks 555

Posted by CmdrTaco from the important-but-boring-work dept.
Christopher Blanc writes "Many Mozilla community members, including both volunteers and Mozilla Corporation employees, have been helping to reduce Firefox's memory usage and fix memory leak bugs lately. Hopefully, the result of this effort will be that Firefox 3 uses less memory than Firefox 2 did, especially after it has been used for several hours." Here's hoping. Frequent restarts of things on my computer make me furious. I can't imagine why anyone would tolerate such things.
Communications

Submission + - Ashton Kutcher's VOIP Service Has Fatal Flaw (brainhandles.com)

Submitted by
gbulmash
gbulmash writes: "In this article, a tech reviewer describes his experience with the beta of the new VOIP service, Ooma, which names Ashton Kutcher as it's creative director. The service uses the landlines of its subscribers to help it provide last mile connections for long distance calls, and the author points out two potential pitfalls for Ooma (slow adoption, telco lawsuits). But a blogger has pointed out the true fatal flaw in Ooma's plan... a simple TOS change by the telcos could turn your Ooma hub into a $400 paperweight."
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - The Emoticon Turns 25 :-) (cnn.com)

Submitted by tuxlove
tuxlove writes: CNN reports: "Twenty-five years ago, (Sept 19, 1982) Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes — a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis — as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message."

Emoticons are now part of daily life for anyone who uses a computer or other text-capable communication device. Just about everyone in the world has at least seen an emoticon. It may perhaps be the most important innovation ever in electronic communications. I know the smiley has saved me many times from horrible email misunderstandings. How many others has it saved? :-) Unfortunately, in recent years others have tried to claim rights to emoticons, most notably the evil folks at Despair.com. In a controversial move, they trademarked the frowny emoticon and banned its use from email without a license. In their defense, the license fee is quite affordable. :-( (Yes, this one is licensed.)

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