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beuges writes "Is Windows Vista really as bad as everyone says it is? "Spurred by an e-mail from someone deep in the marketing ranks, Microsoft last week traveled to San Francisco, rounding up Windows XP users who had negative impressions of Vista. The subjects were put on video, asked about their Vista impressions, and then shown a "new" operating system, code-named Mojave. More than 90 percent gave positive feedback on what they saw. Then they were told that "Mojave" was actually Windows Vista." The Mojave campaign aims at countering Apple's anti-Vista marketing as well as generally changing the public's perception of the operating system. "The need for the campaign is clear. Apple has been making inroads, as well as headlines with its anti-Vista push. Although Microsoft dominates in corporations and in overseas markets, Apple has been grabbing a significant share of the consumer market in the U.S., pushing its overall domestic share as high as 8.5 percent last quarter, a significant rise from even a year ago.""
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-9998336-56.html

RealGene writes "When Marco Zaldivar purchased four T-Mobile cell phones for his family a few years ago, he had no interest in text messages. They came anyway, and by 2007 unwanted texts were adding $20 to $30 to his bill every month, he claims. When he asked T-Mobile to shut off text service, the firm said that was impossible. Instead, he was given a Hobson's choice — either sign up for a bundled text message plan with a monthly fee, pay $800 in early termination fees to cancel the service or turn the phones off for the remainder of his two-year contract.

Zaldivar decided on a fourth option — he's suing T-Mobile for violating consumer protection laws."

An anonymous reader writes "After seeing some success with Brew and Java games, legendary developer John Carmack is ready to tackle the iPhone. Carmack tells Forbes that he plans to bring a game from the company's existing catalog to the 3G, promising it will be "a graphical tour de force." Carmack also talks about his plans for an MMO cell phone game and why he has given up on transitioning a cell phone game to more traditional consoles."
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/07/24/doom-iphone-morris-tech-personal-cx_cm_0725doom.html

OhHellWithIt writes "The Red Tape Chronicles blog on MSNBC.com is reporting that T-Mobile is being sued by a subscriber for requiring him to pay for text messages. The subscriber didn't know when he signed up for service that T-Mobile can't turn off text messages, and the carrier said he would have to pay $800 to terminate the contract.

IMHO, it's pretty galling, when you consider that a text message's use of bandwidth has got to be way lower than even one minute of voice traffic. It's going to be interesting to see how this shakes out."

The city of San Francisco's IT department is certainly not the exception when it comes to allowing just one person to have unfettered rights to make password and configuration changes to networks and enterprise systems. In fact, it's a situation fairly common in many organizations — especially small to medium-size ones, IT managers and others cautioned in the wake of the recent Terry Childs incident.
http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9110562

MechEMark writes "The Economist recently published an overview of intentions to improve helicopter fuel efficiency by switching from using turbines to Diesel engines for power. The increased weight of the Diesel engine would be offset on longer missions by the savings in fuel mass to be carried and in overall consumption. To quantify that, from the article, "Diamond Aircraft, an Austrian company, is making a diesel-powered light aircraft which it says uses just 17 litres of fuel an hour instead of the 35 litres that a similarly sized plane with a traditional piston engine would consume." Eurocopter expects to have a prototype Diesel 'copter out by 2012. See http://www.economist.com/daily/news/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11779859 for more."
http://www.economist.com/daily/news/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11779859

Sfing_ter writes "Seems Eddie Davidson walked away from a Colorado Federal Prison Camp the FBI is looking for him, if you see him give them a call. So now, he is a convicted spammer and a fugitive, perhaps he too was framed by a one-armed man who spammed all those people..."
http://denver.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/2008/spamking072208.htm

Mz6 writes "The San Francisco computer engineer accused of withholding access codes to the city's network surrendered the password during an unusual jailhouse visit by Mayor Gavin Newsom, authorities said Tuesday. Newsom came away with the access codes Monday night after talking with Terry Childs, 43, of Pittsburg, who has been held since July 13 on four felony counts stemming from what prosecutors describe as an effort to block administrative access to the network that handles 60 percent of the city's information, including sensitive law enforcement, payroll and jail booking records. Childs had given officials what turned out to be bogus passwords and then had refused to give the correct ones, even when threatened with arrest, authorities say. But Monday, Childs' defense attorney Erin Crane contacted the mayor's office, setting in motion the secret visit."

After building my new Core 2 Quad Q6600 pc, I was readly to unleash video conversion activity the likes of which I had never seen before. However I was disappointed to see a lot of the conversion tools either dont use SMP at all, or do not balance the workload evenly across processors, or require ugly hacks to use SMP (eg invoking distributed encoding options). I get the impression that Open Source projects are a bit slow on the uptake here? Which Open Source video conversion apps take full native advantage of SMP?

And before you ask, no I dont want to pick up the code and add SMP support myself, thanks.

Barence writes "SanDisk has blamed Windows Vista for the poor performance of its solid-state drives. Speaking during the company's second-quarter earnings conference call, chairman and chief executive officer, Eli Harari, said Vista wasn't exploiting the full potential of flash drives."
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/214236/sandisk-slams-vistas-solidstate-disk-performance.html

General Motors is forming a team with utility companies nationwide to create a charging infrastructure for electric cars. Their goal is to improve the design of charging stations by overcoming the challenges of providing affordable electricity in locations such as public garages, meters, and parking lots, as well as avoiding utilities being overwhelmed during peak hours. Their goal is to have these improved charging stations implemented by 2010, however recognize that a national car-charging infrastructure would be far from being established at that time.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-9996348-54.html

ewhac writes "One of the most famous live television gaffes in recent history was the 2004 SuperBowl halftime "wardrobe malfunction," which briefly exposed a mortified Janet Jackson's breast to an international audience. Bowing to coordinated pressure from socially conservative groups, the FCC fined CBS $550K for the mishap — the $27,500 maximum fine multiplied by CBS's 20 owned-and-operated stations. Today, the US Third Circuit Court of Appeals threw the fine out, saying that the FCC had deviated from its 30-year history on previous such matters, and had, "acted arbitrarily and capriciously," when levying the fine."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25782527/

vivalarevoluation writes "The Canadian Wireless spectrum auction has just finished, with a entrant into the Canadian cellular market. Globalive Communications won spectrum accross all provinces, with the notable exception of Quebec, and they have issued plans for the development of a new Canadian wireless company. There press release cites a study showing that Canadian prices are about 60% higher than American prices, and I'm sure some of you will Canada being the second most expensive place to buy an iphone :~ Oddly enough, it would appear that one of the investors (Orascom) in this may be behind a large North Korean construction project. Canada's Wireless industry has always been a little odd, but I'm guessing things are about to get a lot more interesting (and hopefully less expensive :))."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed the FCC's $550,000 fine against CBS for the infamous 'wardrobe malfunction' during the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. Per the ruling, the FCC acted inconsistently with its 'fleeting expletive' rule in levying the fine. While the FCC might have better justified the fine if the show were prerecorded, the Court found that the FCC acted in an 'arbitrary and capricious' manner and so it reversed the fine. Further details can be found in the ruling (PDF)."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/21/usa1

Croakyvoice writes "Bushing one of the Wii Scenes most prominent hackers, a coder of the Twilight Hack enabling Wii Homebrew, last week went public with his plea to Nintendo to answer him and stop a piracy exploit (unreleased) in the Wii that allows unmodified Wiis to run pirated Games, Bushing updated and Nintendo have replied: "First of we do not support what you are doing, but since you found a issue that could allow pirated Wii games. We have to see to patch this as fast as possible, So what is this security issue you want to talk about. "

Looks like the pirates wont be getting their day after all and by doing this Bushing has protected the Homebrew scene. Yes a strange move for a Wii Hacker to Work with Nintendo but protecting against Piracy benefits all and especially the Homebrew Community."