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Music

Activision Wants To Bring Guitar Hero To Arcades 75

Posted by Soulskill
from the shredding-in-public dept.
dlapikin writes "Activision is preparing a deal with Konami and Raw Thrills to bring Guitar Hero to arcades worldwide as soon as 2009. It looks to be a great fusion of their current Guitar Hero III axe and World Tour. 'Some features have been streamlined, however, like character customization. Raw Thrills doesn't want people obsessing over the hair color of their on-screen rock star. But one important feature that has remained is downloadable content. Raw Thrills has the ability to push new songs to "Guitar Hero Arcade" through the Internet. Owners of the machines can pick and choose which of the new songs to add to the cabinet.'"
Power

Appliances Hog More Energy Than High-Tech Gadgets

Submitted by
Carl Bialik from WSJ
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "A tech columnist looked around his home and wondered, 'All these TVs and cable boxes and computers and computer gear and chargers for various adapters had to be sucking up a lot of power, right?' So WSJ.com's Jason Fry bought a power meter to find the biggest power hogs in his home. They weren't his newfangled gadgets: 'The heavily used agglomeration of PC/two monitors/printer/hard drive/speakers in my downstairs study costs a bit more than $10 a month. The PC in our bedroom costs about $6 a month. The upstairs laptop? Less than $1 — a bit more than other always-on gadgets such as the router, cable modem, wireless repeater and Airport Express. So what were our apartment's power hogs? The lights and the dryer. I estimate our lights cost us around $30 a month, nearly a third of that from a chandelier with eight bulbs. Then there's the dryer. I don't know exactly how many watts it uses, but estimate it's costing us at least $25 a month.'"
Microsoft

Copy protection too complex: Bill Gates

Submitted by
Aryabhata
Aryabhata writes "Bill Gates thinks that copy protection for digital media(music & video) is too complex for the consumers. He was speaking to an invited party of bloggers and web developers at Microsoft's Seattle headquarters. "DRM is not where it should be." said Mr Gates. "In the end of the day incentive systems (for artists) make a difference," said Mr Gates. "But we don't have the right thing here in terms of simplicity or interoperability," he added. Interestingly, Microsoft is one of the biggest exponents of DRM, which is used on lots of different online services, including Napster and the Zune store.

So what does Bill suggest we do? His short-term advice for people wanting to transfer songs from one system to another was to "buy a CD and rip it"."
The Internet

Real Estate Heat Maps Increase Market Transparency

Submitted by
Doug
Doug writes "As reported by the Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/business/la-re-web3dec03,1 ,5128944.story?coll=la-mininav-business ), map-based real estate sites Zillow.com ( http://zillow.com/ Trulia.com (http://trulia.com ), and HotPads.com (http://hotpads.com) have launched pricing, demographic, and user traffic "heat maps" to increase market transparency. The "heat maps" overlay a color gradient on maps to depict the distribution of different attributes among areas: average sale/rental price, demographic information, and user traffic trends. While some of this information is reported to be inaccurate, the majority comes from government census data."
Google

Google NASA Partnership Announced

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes "Google & NASA announced their partnership today which with many benefits. The director of a NASA site said "Just a few examples are new sensors and materials from collaborations on bio-info-nano convergence, improved analysis of engineering problems, as well as Earth, life and space science discoveries from supercomputing and data mining, and bringing entrepreneurs into the space program." The site GoogleNASA has been launched and will be a place to keep up with all the news from this partnership."
GNU is Not Unix

GPLv3 Questions & Answers

Submitted by
ismak
ismak writes "Umeet 2006, this year's online conference on Free Software, will be holding a GPLv3 Questions & Answers session with Richard Stallman. The session is this Tuesday, December 19th, at 18:00 UTC on the #umeet channel on irc.uninet.edu.
If you plan on attending Tuesday's session, you will want to read the background information on the GPLv3 that Richard Stallman has made available."
Censorship

Disney claims ownership of Santa Claus

Submitted by swimgeek
swimgeek writes "Disney world officials in Florida have told a man resembling Santa Claus to leave the park, as they claimed that Santa Claus was a Disney character. From the article: "How do you tell a little kid, 'No, go away, little kid'," Mr Worley told local television. He said Disney had told him "Santa was considered a Disney character"."
Programming

Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits

Submitted by
BlueVoodoo
BlueVoodoo writes "Adopt 10 good habits that improve your UNIX command line efficiency — and break away from bad usage patterns in the process. This article takes you step-by-step through several good, but too often neglected, techniques for command-line operations. Learn about common errors and how to overcome them, so you can learn exactly why these UNIX habits are worth picking up.

Other Popular AIX/UNIX Articles "

Short people get rained on last.