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PunkOfLinux writes "From The NYTimes comes news that TiVo and Amazon have reached an agreement to allow consumers to purchase products from Amazon through their television sets using their TiVo remote control. TiVo will launch the new service to consumers by merchandising products related to several high-profile programs, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, The Colbert Report, and Burn Notice. Broadband-connected Series2, Series3, and TiVo HD DVRs will be able to take advantage of the new feature." This sounds like the latest incarnation of the dream of television executives who in the early '90s talked about the "information superhighway," before it was clear that the Internet was going to fill that role. What they envisioned was "interactive TV," i.e. buying stuff with your remote.

China mostly to blame, but so is Google

Almost half the websites pushing malware are hosted by just 10 networks, according to a new report that adds new support to the growing argument that a relatively few number of actors are responsible for most of the net-based threats.

http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/24/stopbadware_report/

Nokia will take on iPhone and Google's Android platform by buying the Symbian operating system and taking it open-source.

http://rss.macworld.com/~r/macworld/feeds/main/~3/319025144/nokia_symbian.html

praps writes "A three-year trademark conflict has ended with Google withdrawing its use of the Gmail brand in Germany. On Friday, a plain-text message appeared, beginning 'We can't provide service under the Gmail name in Germany ... Bummer.' Despite the climbdown, Google Germany's spokesman said on Monday that the action was being taken 'even though we believe we're not legally obliged to do so.'" We discussed the tussle in Germany when Google first lost in court a year ago.

In five years with my current employer as the IT administrator I've amassed a sizable cabinet of discarded hard drives; just shy of 100 in fact. All of the drives range in size from 20GB up to 300GB. They've all been stored in anti-stat bags and spot checks of even the oldest ones show that that most all of them still work. Individually they're mostly useless for our line of work which is digital video production. However, the collective storage potential is quite significant. They are of varying size and speeds, but the one commonality is they're all IDE.

In the Slashdot community's opinion, what is the best way to approach connecting all of these devices and realizing their storage potential? On a budget of course.

Now I'd never use such an array for critical data storage, but it certainly would be useful as a massive backup array to our existing SAN that does store critical data.

I have several spare and functioning PCs, but not nearly enough to utilize their internal IDE controllers; even with multiple add-in controllers it still wouldn't be enough. Not to mention the nightmare of managing a bunch of independent PCs.

I've looked into ATA Over Ethernet and there's a lot of potential there, but current 15 to 20 bay AoE cabinets are expensive and single device enclosures are so rare that they're also expensive. Are there any hardware hackers out there that have crafted their own home-brew AoE systems? Could they scale to 100 drives? Is there a better way?

Quick... someone start making shirts that say:

<a href="link"><img src="picture"></a>

... its about time those DeCSS shirts got replaced.

I'm glad to see that we've even managed to outsource patent trolls.

touch is junk and nothing out there that people buy uses it. MULTI-TOUCH caught on. multi touch was invented by two professors at the university of delaware, who founded a company that made the greatest keyboard of all time, the touchstream lp. jobs saw the inherent promise of multi-touch and bought the company and all its ip, in the process making everyone sign nondisclosure agreements and burying the company. the price of the greatest keyboard ever made, no longer available due to job's actions, has rocketed to over $1000 on ebay and keeps going up.

a lot of you are reading this and thinking of non multi touch products that are getting some sales; however they use the fundamental tech that makes multi touch work. multi touch was about figuring out the shape and pressure of the fingers being applied, in addition to distinguishing multiple fingers. this eliminates the "palm brush" problem that plagued early touch pads.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,1039254,00.asp
http://fingerfans.dreamhosters.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=842

it took a long time for people to figure out what happened; in the end one of the delaware professors listed his profession as 'apple engineer' on a public political contribution and the mystery of the jobs touchstream "nuclear option" was solved.

the reason it's caught on "just now" is that it's actually brand new technology. hopefully someone someday will undo that damage that apple has done to the multitouch industry by buring it under NDA's and patents. in the meantime, they have usurped microsoft for title of tech company most damaging to progress. let's see how long they can hold the crown.

PapayaSF writes "Researchers have announced the first direct conversion of plant cellulose into "green gasoline." Rapidly heating cellulose with catalysts and then cooling it produces liquids like naphthalene and toluene that are a quarter of the components of gasoline, in under two minutes. The result can be further treated or used as part of a gasoline blend, and can be used in existing engines without the mileage penalty of ethanol-based fuel. The process requires less energy to make than ethanol, can use forest or agricultural waste, and (in principle) won't have a carbon footprint. They say it could be at the pump in five to 10 years."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080407102812.htm

Pioneer Woman writes "Laboratory evolution is greatly accelerated compared with natural evolution, but it usually requires substantial manipulation by the experimenter. Researchers Brian M. Paegel and Gerald F. Joyce have developed a system that relies on computer control and microfluidic chip technology to automate the directed evolution of functional molecules in much the same way that one would execute a computer program using a population of billions of RNA enzymes with RNA-joining activity, which were challenged to react in the presence of progressively lower concentrations of substrate. The steps were repeated automatically for 500 iterations of 10-fold exponential growth followed by 10-fold dilution. The researchers observed evolution in real time as the population adapted to the imposed selection constraints and achieved progressively faster growth rates over time. The original research paper is available on PLOS Biology, the open-access, peer-reviewed journal."

Gene writes "Todd Tiahrt is the Representative for the fourth congressional district of Kansas. While that may be interesting to some people, it is not very interesting to me since I live in California. That has not stopped Mr. Tiahrt from sending me monthly emails describing his positions on Air Force contract decisions and telling me that he is against wasteful spending. OK, everyone gets onto email lists that they don't remember signing up for. In this case however, Todd has been emailing me as "Norma Adams " I am not now nor have I ever been Norma Adams. But Norma is a name that I have occasionally seen as a recipient name on spam emails over the years. I don't know how it got linked with my name on some spammer's email list, but that's where it's been.

Now, how can I conclude anything except that that Todd Tiahrt has bought or otherwise acquired a mailing list from a spammer? I've emailed Todd's office twice, but have gotten no reply. Perhaps that will change with a little publicity."

jm writes "How Oracle successively taking over SleepyCat and InnoDB left MySQL without any decent storage engine."
http://blog.milkingthegnu.org/2008/03/mysql-stripped.html

TaeKwonDood writes "It's not the sequel to a bad Meryl Streep movie. A new theory says some humans (namely in parts of the mid-east and, oddly, Australia and New Zealand) may be descended from a group that migrated from Africa tens of thousands of years earlier than the migration commonly known about that involves all humans. Those in the original migration may even be part of a different sub-species."
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/03/14/neanderthal-africa.html