Businesses

iPad Isn't "Killing" Netbook Sales, According To Paul Thurrott 457

Posted by timothy from the only-a-flesh-wound dept.
mantis2009 writes "Paul Thurrott, the prolific technology analyst and Windows expert, reacts strongly to an article highlighted on Slashdot. Thurrott takes numbers from IDC and the Wall Street Journal, indicating that netbook sales have not in any meaningful way been affected by sales of Apple's tablet computer, the iPad. Money quote: '[N]etbooks and sub-12-inch machines will sell 45.6 million units in 2011 and 60.3 million in 2013. If I remember the numbers from 2009, they were 10 percent of all PCs, or about 30 million units. Explain again how the iPad will beat that. Please. Even the craziest iPad sales predictions are a small percentage of that.'"
Television

Is the 4th Yellow Pixel of Sharp Quattron Hype? 511

Posted by timothy from the hi-fi-jumprope dept.
Nom du Keyboard writes "Sharp Aquos brand televisions are making a big deal about their Quattron technology of adding a 4th yellow pixel to their RGB sets. While you can read a glowing review of it here, the engineer in me is skeptical because of how all the source material for this set is produced in 3-color RGB. I also know how just making a picture brighter and saturating the colors a bit can make it more appealing to many viewers over a more accurate rendition – so much for side-by-side comparisons. And I laugh at how you are supposed to see the advantages of 4-color technology in ads on your 3-color sets at home as you watch their commercials. It sounds more like hype to extract a higher profit margin than the next great advance in home television. So is it real?"
Google

Google Attorney Slams ACTA Copyright Treaty 157

Posted by timothy from the you-would-think dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "CNET reports that Daphne Keller, a senior policy counsel at Google, says ACTA has 'metastasized' from a proposal to address border security and counterfeit goods to a sweeping international legal framework for copyright and the Internet that could increase the liability for Internet intermediaries such as, perhaps, search engines. 'You don't want to play Russian roulette with very high statutory damages.' One section of ACTA says that Internet providers 'disabling access' to pirated material and adopting a policy dealing with unauthorized 'transmission of materials protected by copyright' would be immune from lawsuits but if they choose not to do so, they could face legal liability. Both the Obama administration and the Bush administration had rejected requests for the text of ACTA, with the White House last year even indicating that disclosure would do 'damage to the national security.'"
United States

9/11 Made Us Safer, Says Bruce Schneier 280

Posted by timothy from the silver-lining dept.
richi writes "Security guru and BT CTO Bruce Schneier discusses terrorist attacks. In fact, Bruce seems to be saying that 9/11 actually made us safer from terrorists, which seems like a curious argument. While Bruce's blog post is interesting and no doubt insightful, I'm not sure I really buy it. And what's the deal with the new rules for searching the TSA No Fly List? Why is it, in 2010, we're still mucking about with publishing database extracts and waiting hours for them to be searched? How about checking within seconds of an update? Couldn't someone volunteer to show them how to implement a reliable, scalable, NoSQL setup? Instead, the TSA plan to fix this is a classic 'big government' solution."
Databases

Cassandra and Voldemort Benchmarked 45

Posted by timothy from the rifling-the-file-cabinet dept.
kreide33 writes "Key/Value storage systems are gaining in popularity, much because of features such as easy scalability and automatic replication. However, there are several to choose from and performance is an important deciding factor. This article compares the performance of two of the most well-known projects, Cassandra and Voldemort, using several different mixes of access types, and compares both throughput and latency."
Canada

iPhone App Helps To Cure Vertigo 57

Posted by Soulskill from the stop-the-world-i-want-to-get-off dept.
vleky writes "This is thinking outside the box ... or head. Dr. Matthew Bromwich of the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario has written an iPhone app to help doctors with the Epley maneuver to cure some forms of vertigo. The patient places the iPhone against his or her forehead and the app leads the doctor through the maneuver. Bromwich's first attempt at the app sounded even more fun. With that version, the iPhone hung from the front of a baseball cap the patient wore, and the patient tried to keep a ball centered in a twisting tube by moving their head. Winning the game meant the maneuver had been successfully completed and the vertigo cured."
The Courts

Games Workshop Sues Warhammer Online Fansite 182

Posted by Soulskill from the don't-anger-your-base-again dept.
chalkyj writes "WarhammerAlliance.com (run for the last five years as one of the leading fansites for the MMORPG Warhammer Online) is being sued by Games Workshop for the use of the 'Warhammer' name, 'cybersquatting' and 'unfair competition.' This lawsuit is yet another in Games Workshop's disturbing pattern of suing their fans and hobbyists, this time going after a legitimate fansite for their MMORPG franchise. The full complaint (PDF) has been posted online."
Networking

Crackdown On Counterfeit Networking Gear 115

Posted by Soulskill from the do-not-pass-go dept.
angry tapir writes "US agencies targeting the sale of counterfeit networking hardware have gotten 30 felony convictions, including a man attempting to sell fake networking equipment to the US Marine Corps, and seized $143 million worth of fake Cisco hardware. The agencies have conducted Operation Network Raider, which has made 700 separate seizures of networking equipment since 2005, the DOJ said. In addition to the convictions and seizures, nine people are facing trial and another eight defendants are awaiting sentencing."
Nintendo

Nintendo To Take On Piracy In 3-D 249

Posted by Soulskill from the dee-arrrrrr!-emm dept.
crimeandpunishment writes "Nintendo says when its new handheld game device with 3-D technology comes out, it will have beefed-up anti-piracy measures. For obvious reasons, the company is keeping tight-lipped on the specifics. Nintendo President Satoru Iwata says they're not only concerned about software piracy, but also a growing tolerance for it. He said, 'We fear a kind of thinking is become widespread that paying for software is meaningless.'"
Biotech

First Superbugs, Now Superweeds 435

Posted by Soulskill from the as-long-as-there-are-no-supersharks-we're-ok dept.
Finxray writes "Years of heavy use of the broad spectrum herbicide Roundup has led to the rapid growth of superweeds. They are spreading throughout North America, creating headaches for farmers and posing 'the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,' according to Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts. From the article: 'The first resistant species to pose a serious threat to agriculture was spotted in a Delaware soybean field in 2000. Since then, the problem has spread, with 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of acres, predominantly soybeans, cotton and corn. The superweeds could temper American agriculture’s enthusiasm for some genetically modified crops. Soybeans, corn and cotton that are engineered to survive spraying with Roundup have become standard in American fields. However, if Roundup doesn’t kill the weeds, farmers have little incentive to spend the extra money for the special seeds."
Patents

USPTO Plans Could Kill Small Business Innovation 175

Posted by Soulskill from the method-for-making-things-worse dept.
bizwriter writes "If protecting inventions is at the heart of high tech competitiveness, plans afoot at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will critically wound small companies. The agency's notorious 750,000 patent application backlog has long been the subject of heavy criticism. One of the key tools the USPTO wants to use is to raise fees so high as to directly reduce 40 percent of the backlog. That would mean setting filing and maintenance rates so high as to make it economically difficult, if not impossible, for many small companies to adequately protect their innovations, leaving large corporations even more in control of technology than they are now."
Bug

House Calls For Hearing On Stock Market "Glitch" 180

Posted by timothy from the hands-on-the-tables-gentlemen dept.
Lucas123 writes "The House Financial Services securities subcommittee plans to hold a hearing next Tuesday to examine what caused the US stock market to plunge almost 1,000 points in a half hour Thursday, and it called on the SEC to investigate possible problems with computer algorithms that may have exacerbated a human order-entry error and led to the precipitous drop. 'Reports have surfaced that much of this movement was potentially as a result of a computer glitch,' Committee Chairman Kanjorski said. 'We cannot allow a technological error to spook the markets and cause panic. This is unacceptable. In this day and age and with the use of such complex technology, we should be able to make sure that our financial markets are effectively monitored and investors are protected.'"
Data Storage

Diskless Booting For the Modern Age 99

Posted by timothy from the who-needs-moving-parts dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Ever wonder what happened to PXE? Intel's popular standard for diskless booting hasn't been updated since 1999, and has missed out on such revolutions as wireless Ethernet, cloud computing, and iSCSI. An open source project called Etherboot has been trying to drag PXE into the 21st century. One of their programmers explains how to set up diskless booting for your cloud, using copy-on-write to save space."
Wikipedia

Wikipedia Offers a Book Creator 89

Posted by timothy from the select-all-then-print dept.
Kilrah_il writes "Wikipedia recently added an option to create a book from your chosen entries: 'That's it, the book creator has gone live in the English Wikipedia! A few hours ago, the book creator has been made available to all users of the English Wikipedia. This feature, which allows all readers to create books from Wikipedia articles, has been until now only available to logged-in users. It has been available in other Wikipedias for a longer time, it's now available on the English Wikipedia, for all, without restrictions.' You can either download the book in PDF format for free or have it printed and sent to you via PediaPress with 10% of the total going to the Wikimedia Foundation."

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