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Major Sites To Join ‘World IPv6 Day’ 247

Posted by CmdrTaco
from the skipping-five dept.
netbuzz writes "Facebook, Google, and Yahoo are among the major sites on board with what the Internet Society is dubbing 'World IPv6 Day,' a collective trial scheduled for June 8. 'It's an exciting opportunity to take IPv6 for a test flight and try it on for a full 24 hours,' says Leslie Daigle, the Internet Society's Chief Internet Technology Officer. 'Hopefully, we will see positive results from this trial so we will see more IPv6 sooner rather than later.'"
Patents

HP Patents Bignum Implementation From 1912 144

Posted by kdawson
from the can-you-spell-prior-art dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The authors of GMP (the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library) were invited to join Peer-to-Patent to review HP's recent patent on a very old technique for implementing bignums because their software might infringe. Basically, HP's patent claims choosing an exponent based on processor word size. If you choose a 4-bit word size and a binary number, you end up working in hexadecimal. Or for a computer with a 16-bit word and a base-10 number, you use base 10,000 so that each digit of the base-10,000 number would fit into a single 16-bit word. The obvious problem with that is that there's plenty of prior art here. Someone who spent a few minutes Googling found that Knuth describing the idea in TAOCP Vol. 2 and other citations go back to 1912 (which implemented the same algorithm using strips of cardboard and a calculating machine). None of this can be found in the 'references cited' section. Even though the patent examiner did add a couple of references, they appear to have cited some old patents. The patent issued a few months ago was filed back in October of 2004, and collected dust at the USPTO for some 834 days."
Censorship

Craigslist Blocks Yahoo Pipes 164

Posted by kdawson
from the nose-meet-knife dept.
Romy Maxwell posted a blog piece on Craigslist apparently shutting off access to Yahoo Pipes. Maxwell was working on a project, one of 2,111 using Craigslist as a data source, for a (non-commercial) Pipes-based mashup. He sent Craig Newmark an invitation to the alpha test, after a few rounds of friendly communication — "...as a rule of thumb, okay to use RSS feeds for noncommercial purposes." The apparent response, 4 days later, was for Craigslist to redirect any request with an HTTP referrer of pipes.yahoo.com to the Craigslist home page. Maxwell writes: "It's a sad day for me. I'm not too upset about my own project, as Flippity was already removing Craigslist as a data source. With the likes of eBay and Oodle not only providing open APIs but encouraging and rewarding developers, spending my time wrestling with Craigslist is just plain stupid and exhausting. I'm sure I'm not the only person to have come to that conclusion, and I wish it were different. ... If Craigslist wants to keep its doors shut to the world, so be it."
Idle

Canadian Blood Services Promotes Pseudoscience 219

Posted by samzenpus
from the type-A-negative-personality dept.
trianglecat writes "The not-for-profit agency Canadian Blood Services has a section of their website based on the Japanese cultural belief of ketsueki-gata, which claims that a person's blood group determines or predicts their personality type. Disappointing for a self-proclaimed 'science-based' organization. The Ottawa Skeptics, based in the nation's capital, appear to be taking some action."

Comment: Re:Did no one read the fine summary? (Score 1) 305

by cperciva (#30166140) Attached to: Synchronize Data Between Linux, OS X, and Windows?

Tarsnap is really designed as a backup service rather than a synchronization service: While it is very good at recognizing duplicate data and only uploading new blocks when you create an archive, it has no such mechanism for making archive extraction more efficient -- I wrote it with the presumption that people would only be extracting archives after losing data. That said, I think I can see a way to implement "tarsnap -x --sync" efficiently.

But for right now, as much as I'd love to get more customers, I don't think Tarsnap really matches the submitter's requirements.

Comment: Bing replaces Live Search (Score 1) 1

by Chalst (#30153856) Attached to: Bing - Now Featuring

Bing is, in essence a relaunch of the MSN Search / Windows Live Search / Live Search; Wikipedia says that Live Search was discontinued on 21st May this year, redirecting from then to Bing.

Hence Bing becomes the built-in search for many old browsers in Windows land. Some default market share is expected. What would be interesting is how the expectation stacks up against the new data.

The world's most polite dustbin->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Thanks to the recent efforts of today's youth, and particularly of a few students from the Industrial Design Centre (IDC) at IIT-Bombay, one rather unique solution to keeping rubbish off the city streets has been put forth. The students have designed and developed a dustbin they've called 'Sustain-o-bin'(TM). It's equipped with sensors that can detect the proximity of people and automatically wheel itself in the direction of those closest. To further scare the bejeebers out of them, this interactive bin is even designed to request people to use it. Once you’ve used it, it'(TM)s also programmed to be polite enough to say 'Thank you'(TM) and be on it’s merry way. What makes the bin economical as well as eco-friendly is the fact that it's entirely made up of waste material."
Link to Original Source
Science

Robot video - way cool ->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "This robot was developed by Boston Dynamics to test chemical protective clothing for the United States Army.

The robot has a range of motion that is astounding"
Link to Original Source

Bing - Now Featuring -> 1

Submitted by samzbest
samzbest writes "Just yesterday we talked about Microsoft Bing gaining 10% market share in the US, after it’s release five months ago.
Today we see again that bing is constantly trying to update its features which might help users to find relevant data quicker and easily with the launch of ”latest posts from news sites” feature."
Link to Original Source

Where do you go to get anorexia? -- Shelley Winters