Input Devices

Nintendo Faces Patent Suit Over the Wii 91

Posted by Soulskill from the to-the-rocket-docket dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A company named Thinkoptics has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Nintendo over the motion controller used with the Wii. Apparently they make a similar product named the Wavit Remote, and they've been granted patents describing its operation. 'And they've chosen the setting most likely to yield a win: the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Texas. Now, that's not to say that Wavit-maker Thinkoptics will get a win, but this particular court circuit tends to favor the patent holder over all else. The patent in question, U.S. Patent Number 7,796,116, is titled "Electronic equipment for handheld vision based absolute pointing system." Thinkoptics' primary argument in the case is that Nintendo had previous knowledge that the Wii would infringe based on the Trademark Office's rejection of certain claims in Nintendo-filed patents.'"
Yahoo!

After Firing CEO, Yahoo Puts Itself Up For Sale 264

Posted by samzenpus from the make-me-an-offer dept.
Reeses writes "Fare thee well, Yahoo: In addition to firing CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo's board has now put the company up for sale. From the article: 'It was once the world's leading search engine, its founders held talks about a merger with Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation – and it even managed to fend off a $44bn takeover bid by Microsoft. But Yahoo has put itself up for sale, after firing its chief executive of 18 months Carol Bartz by phone.'"
Games

Linux 3D Games Run Faster On PC-BSD 298

Posted by Soulskill from the with-enough-emulators-we-could-make-the-singularity dept.
koinu writes "Phoronix has published benchmarks comparing 3D game performance on Ubuntu Linux 11.04 with the FreeBSD Linux ABI emulation on the 8.2 release of PC-BSD, which is a desktop variant of FreeBSD. Most results show that the emulated Linux layer on FreeBSD performs better than Linux natively. It's pretty interesting, because most people would expect that an additional abstraction layer would generally slow down the execution of binaries."
News

Michael Hart, Inventor of the E-book, Dead At 64 70

Posted by samzenpus from the a-moment-of-silence dept.
FeatherBoa writes "Michael Hart, the founder and long time driving force behind Project Gutenberg and 1971 inventor of the electronic book has died at his home in Urbana Ill, on Sept. 6th 2011. Project Gutenberg is recognized as one of the earliest and longest-lasting online literary projects, has spawned sister projects in Australia, Canada, Germany and other locations to transcribe public domain literature and make it available via the Internet."
Desktops (Apple)

Hidden Wi-Fi Diagnostics Application In OS X Lion 116

Posted by samzenpus from the keeping-an-eye-on-things dept.
WankerWeasel writes "The latest version of Apple's operating system, OS X 10.7 Lion, has a hidden Wi-Fi Diagnostics application that allows the user to view information about their wireless network performance, record performance and also capture raw frames. Hidden away in the System folder the application is meant for Apple tech diagnostic use but is also very useful for any user interested in diagnosing wi-fi problems or checking network performance."
Education

British CS Majors Doing Badly In the Jobs Market 349

Posted by samzenpus from the no-work-for-you dept.
An anonymous reader writes "British CS majors do badly in the job market — with, four years after graduation, a higher than average (for college graduates) unemployment rate and fewer returning to higher education. Brit CS majors also do badly immediately after graduation. No similar U.S. figures exist reports the Computing Education Blog."
Power

Microbes Produce Power As They Clean Nuclear Waste 90

Posted by samzenpus from the two-in-one dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) have isolated and explained the phenomenon that causes microbes to generate electricity while cleaning up nuclear waste. The team is hoping to use their findings to create a microbial fuel cell that is capable of generating renewable energy while it cleans up environments exposed to nuclear waste. The bacteria the team studied is a kind of geobacter that is covered in a coat of tiny, natural nanowires that protect the bacteria from the toxic materials. While completing the complex task of stabilizing radioactive spills, the bacteria simultaneously creates energy that can be harnessed and used as a zero-emissions power supply."
Crime

Obama Admin Wants Hackers Charged As Mobsters 568

Posted by samzenpus from the let-the-punishment-fit-the-crime dept.
GovTechGuy writes "The Obama administration wants hackers to be prosecuted under the same laws used to target organized crime syndicates, according to two officials appearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday morning. From the article: 'Associate Deputy Attorney General James Baker and Secret Service Deputy Special Agent in Charge Pablo Martinez said the maximum sentences for cyber crimes have failed to keep pace with the severity of the threats. Martinez said hackers are often members of sophisticated criminal networks. "Secret Service investigations have shown that complex and sophisticated electronic crimes are rarely perpetrated by a lone individual," Martinez said.'"
Google

HTC Sues Apple Using Google Patents 342

Posted by samzenpus from the litigate-or-die dept.
AlienIntelligence writes "Apparently to stay viable in the IP wars, HTC secured some patents from Google (who purchased them originally from Palm Inc., Motorola Inc. and Openwave Systems Inc.) on the 1st of September. The patents were used to fire a new salvo of shots across Apple's bow today, September 7th. HTC filed infringement claims against Apple in federal court in Delaware, suing based on four of those patents that originally were issued to Motorola. Additional complaints were filed with the U.S. ITC based on the other patents."
Power

Scientists Create New Type of Superconductor Wires 96

Posted by samzenpus from the greased-lightning dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists in Israel have used technology created at a U.S.-funded national research lab to created a new kind of wire spun from sapphire crystals, that is a vastly better conductor than traditional copper wires. The research could have profound implications for renewable energy since much of the generation is in remote locations. It could help bring more electricity from renewable sources to cities."
IBM

IBM, 3M Team To Glue Together Silicon "Bricks" 81

Posted by samzenpus from the stack-your-chips dept.
coondoggie writes "IBM and 3M today said they will jointly develop a new line of adhesives they hope will let them make it possible to build commercial microprocessors composed of layers of up to 100 separate chips. Such stacking would allow for higher-powered servers and more advanced consumer electronics applications, the companies stated. Processors could be tightly packed with memory and networking, for example, into a 'brick' of silicon that would create a computer chip 1,000 times faster than today's fastest microprocessor enabling more powerful smartphones, tablets, computers and gaming devices."
Space

Dark Matter Hinted at Again at Cresst Experiment 80

Posted by samzenpus from the look-what-we-found dept.
physburn writes "The BBC is reporting recent results from the Cresst dark matter search in Italy. Between 2009 and 2011, Cresst have seen 67 events, a 4 sigma detection of dark matter particles with a mass of either around 15 GeV or 25 GeV. The results are near those previous results from DAMA and Cogent. So has dark matter finally been found, and if so what is it?"
Image

Book Review: JIRA 4 Essentials Screenshot-sm 33

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
frisket writes "The JIRA issue-tracking system has been around for seven years and has proved popular in commercial as well as open-source environments owing to its licensing arrangements (free of charge to certain classes of organizations, and source code available to developers). The release of v.4 in 2009 (now at 4.4) brought some major changes to the UI and searching, a new plugin architecture, and the ability to share project dashboards outside the system. Patrick Li's JIRA 4 Essentials is a comprehensive guide to the interface and facilities that both presents the material straightforwardly and avoids the trap of just being a guide to the menus. Although it is aimed mainly at the administrator, it will also be useful for the desktop user wanting a standalone system." Read on for the rest of Peter's review.
Iphone

Find My IPhone Used To Locate Plane Crash In Chile 95

Posted by samzenpus from the last-call dept.
spagiola writes "Late last week, a military transport aircraft with 17 people on -board went missing near Robinson Crusoe, Chile. The relatives of one of the crash victims logged into Find My iPhone and were able to isolate the coordinates of the last known whereabouts of the plane before it crashed. From the article: 'Rear Admiral Francisco García-Huidobro explained the founding that garnered a lot of attention today, and it has to do with an iPhone belonging to one of the victims of the aereal accident in Juan Fernández, in a beach in Bahía Carvajal. The phone signal could be captured thanks to the GPS system, however, water ended up shutting it down. Nevertheless, García Huidoro explained that they managed to plot the last position from where the signal was last generated, which will be made public tomorrow.'"
Open Source

The State of Open Source Software 76

Posted by samzenpus from the line-them-up dept.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner provides an in-depth look at the state of open source software and an overview of the best open source software of the year. 'It's easy to find hundreds of other positive signs of open source domination. If the mere existence of a tar file filled with code from the nether regions of a beeping device that's buried deep inside someone's pocket is all you need to feel warm and fuzzy about "open source," you might conclude that open source development is the most dominant form in the increasingly dominant platform of the future,' Wayner writes. 'But anyone who digs a bit deeper will find it's not so simple. Although the open source label is more and more ubiquitous, society is still a long way from Richard Stallman's vision of a world where anyone could reprogram anything at any time. Patents, copyrights, and corporate intrigue are bigger issues than ever for the community, and more and more people are finding that the words "open source" are no guarantee of the freedom to tinker and improve. Some cynics even suggest that the bright, open future is receding as Linux and other open source tools grow more dominant.' Included in the writeup are the best open source applications, best open source desktop and mobile offerings, best open source development tools, and best open source software for datacenters and the cloud."
The Military

Airship Company Gets First Civilian Customer 81

Posted by samzenpus from the float-into-the-future dept.
Zothecula writes "Hybrid Air Vehicles has recently achieved two massive commercial wins that seem to indicate that the airship has a very rosy future indeed. The aircraft's versatility plus an ability to stay airborne for 21 days enabled HAV to win a 517million contract (€370million) to supply a Long-Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) to the U.S. Army for deployment in Afghanistan starting in 2012. Whilst the LEMV is a relatively small vehicle designed for surveillance, HAV has now announced a civil customer for their heavy-lift variant."
Hardware

Single-Chip DIMM To Replace Big Sticks of RAM 100

Posted by samzenpus from the size-is-important dept.
MrSeb writes "Invensas, a subsidiary of chip microelectronics company Tessera, has discovered a way of stacking multiple DRAM chips on top of each other. This process, called multi-die face-down packaging, or xFD for short, massively increases memory density, reduces power consumption, and should pave the way for faster and more efficient memory chips. Multi-die face-down packaging is exactly what it sounds like, with memory dies stacked on top of each other like roofing tiles. Much like a normal desktop DIMMs and laptop SO-DIMMs, each of the stacked dies is wired to each other in series — but in this case, the connections are much shorter, as they only have to run a few micrometers to the chip below it. This is where all of the power and speed enhancements come from: shorter interconnects mean less power is needed (and thus less heat is dissipated) and signals propagate faster."
Mars

Could New Rover's Wheels Deliver Germs To Mars? 82

Posted by samzenpus from the war-of-the-worlds dept.
astroengine writes "Although the idea of "infecting" the Red Planet with our germs is nothing new, one microbiologist believes the next Mars rover may have a higher chance of becoming a microbe lifeboat. Andrew C. Schuerger, of the University of Florida and the Space Life Sciences Lab at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, believes the problem could lie in the way NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) will land on the Red Planet — wheels first. Previous Mars rovers have sat atop a lander platform for at least two Martian days (sols) before venturing into the regolith; any surviving bacteria attached to their wheels were therefore killed by the harsh UV light that bathes Mars. As the MSL's wheels will immediately make contact with the regolith straight after entry, there might be an increased chance of contaminating Mars with terrestrial germs. But still, as Schuerger admits, the risks are tiny."
Privacy

Are Some CAs Too Big To Fail? 163

Posted by samzenpus from the they-don't-fall-down dept.
Trailrunner7 writes "In the wake of this weekend's revelations of the seriousness of the attack on certificate authority DigiNotar, security experts have renewed criticism of the Internet's digital certificate infrastructure, with some wondering if larger certificate authorities (CAs) might be too big to fail. Would Mozilla and Microsoft and Google have revoked trust in root certificates from VeriSign or Thawte had they been compromised? Unlikely. 'It's not a simple matter of removing certificates from a database, because they're not in any databases,' says researcher Moxie Marlinspike, who presented an alternative approach to the current SSL infrastructure last month at DEFCON. 'We may never track them all down.'"

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