An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica has a piece looking at the history of corporate R&D, in response to an article on the BusinessWeek site essentially calling the telecommunication giants aging fossils of communication. The Ars piece looks as several innovations to come out of the AT&T Labs over the years, as well as the era of innovation brought on by the Cold War." From the article: "The Cold War, with its 'Pentagon socialism', combined with large corporate monopolies that were expected to provide lifetime employment and pensions, made for something of a golden age for American technological innovation. This is the era that brought us the transistor and the predecessor to the Internet, an era where all the seeds of today's 'information economy' were sown and carefully cultivated at great private and public expense. The great labs of this era--Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and IBM's labs--were places with massive budgets, where the world's top scientists were invited to pursue "blue sky" research into areas with no immediately apparent commercial applications. The facilities were state-of-the-art, and there was no pressure from management or shareholders to do anything but science for science's sake."

anthemaniac writes "The NY Times is reporting that scientists have found a second code in DNA that goes beyond the genes. The code is superimposed genetic information and 'sets the placement of the nucleosomes, miniature protein spools around which the DNA is looped. The spools both protect and control access to the DNA itself. The discovery, if confirmed, could open new insights into the higher order control of the genes, like the critical but still mysterious process by which each type of human cell is allowed to activate the genes it needs but cannot access the genes used by other types of cell.'"

Kranfer writes "Reuters is covering the newest offering from Google: real-time traffic mapping on your cell phone. Now you can check how the traffic is ahead of you, of course as long as you don't cause the traffic incident yourself by checking the local issues on your cell phone while driving. Point your cell phone browser to http://google.com/gmm to get your local traffic maps if you live within one of the 30 U.S. cities where this is available."

An anonymous reader writes "As part of his 1680-page book Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach, Amit Singh of kernelthread.com wrote a very detailed technical history of Apple's operating systems. Since he had to cut down on the history chapter because of the book's already too-large size, most of this chapter didn't make it to the printed book. Singh has made available the history chapter as a free PDF. The file is 140 pages long, and is generously filled with figures and screenshots. It starts with the internals of the original Apple I and goes through a tour of all operating systems Apple dabbled with, including internals of A/UX, Lisa OS, and such. It even covers details of outside influences like the Xerox Alto, STAR System, Smalltalk, and Sketchpad, and closer to home things like Mach, NeXTStep, and OpenStep."

Fijer Nrosikjen writes to mention a ZDNet article about a claim by CA that F-Secure is just spreading FUD over mobile virus code, in order to promote its product. From the article: "CA said criminals do not have an economic incentive to develop malicious code and that the risk of such attacks spreading around smart phones is minimal because of a lack of interoperability between platforms and phone models. Network services don't allow for the fast spreading of code from phone to phone, and user interaction is required for any viruses to spread, the company added. It said F-Secure has created an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty and doubt to sell its product, undermining the relationship of trust that has been established between the industry and vendors. "

bart_scriv writes "BusinessWeek reports that Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (creators of Kazaa and Skype) are at work on a new project: 'software for distributing TV shows and other forms of video over the Web.' Calling the work 'The Venice Project,' Zennstrom and Friis have assembled teams of developers to tackle the problem. The developers are already in negotiations with TV networks to use the system.'" From the article: "This time around, Zennstrom and Friis are inviting the cooperation of TV producers and networks. While the exact nature of their business model isn't clear, they are talking to every TV network in town, according to one person familiar with the matter. The idea is to become a dominant TV distribution company for the Internet era, just as companies such as Comcast (CMSCA) have dominated TV distribution in the cable era."

Hans Pecheston writes "Merom, Intel's notebook processor, will be joining in the festivities at their upcoming launch event. This chip will continue to use the Core 2 Duo brand and should display additional improvements in performance and power consumption over the current chips. Intel has already begun to ship Merom processors to its PC customers and systems with Merom should begin to appear around the end of August."

Spy Handler writes "The Blue Origin spacecraft, being built by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos' new venture, will have VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) capability, according to the company's FAA permit applications. It will be a cone-shaped vehicle about 50 feet tall and 22 feet in diameter at the base, and carry 3 or more passengers to an altitude of 325,000 feet"

An anonymous reader writes "Popular Science is running a story about a small company trying to take advantage of all the global warming hype. Matteran Energy uses 'thermal-collection technology to heat a synthetic fluid with a very low boiling point (around 58F), creating enough steam to drive a specially designed turbine. And although a fluid-circuit system converting heat into electricity is nothing new, Matterans innovative solution increases the systems efficiency to a point where small-scale applications make economic sense.' Notably, this comes during a record breaking heat wave here in the US. So has the day finally arrived where I can run my AC off of all that heat outdoors?"

jefu writes "As you may know, the 2006 Tour de France finished yesterday with an American, Floyd Landis, the overall winner. This years Tour had a very nice live website, including frequent news postings and a flash interface that showed the gaps between the lead riders updated every couple of minutes. The site was taking up to 35,000 hits per minute. There is lots of technology involved in this race, including carbon fiber bikes, serious aerodynamic studies to improve the bikes, the helmets and even the riders. There are also bike transponders, GPS trackers , fancy radio systems to connect the riders to the team cars, online database access to race statistics, and probably lots more."

Spinnerbait writes "Hothardware has a review of the Western Digital WD5000KS, a member of Western Digital's Caviar SE16 family. It's a 500GB SATA 3Gb/s drive, features a 16MB cache and a 7200 RPM spindle speed. WD's Raptor line, with their 10k RPM spindle speed, may have won the overall 3.5" desktop HDD performance crown, but they don't win any capacity battles. That's where the WD5000KS comes in. Up against Seagate's finest, the Barracuda 7200.10, the half-terabyte WD5000 holds strong performance metrics."

netbuzz writes "The law of unintended consequences is taking a chomp out of grocery chain profits as more stores transition from human clerks to self-service checkout technology, thus reducing the time shoppers spend in line and under the temptation of impulse items. That's the upshot of research being released tomorrow by IHL Consulting Group in Franklin, Tenn., which provides market analysis to the retail industry and its IT vendors."

DarkNemesis618 writes "The Space Shuttle Atlantis was moved into the Vehicle Assembly Building today to begin the mating process to it's external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters. Atlantis is scheduled to launch either August 27th or 28th, being only the 3rd launch since the Columbia tragedy in 2003. Atlantis is set to resume construction of the International Space Station by bringing up the second set of massive solar arrays needed for the laboratory modules that are to be added later on in the station's construction. Once the flight review is completed (Aug. 16), an exact date will be set for launch. Pending any problems, rollout to the launchpad is scheduled for July 31st."

phorm asks: "It seems that for almost every service out there nowadays businesses want to fix customers into a contract. Some are pretty obvious (cellphone service, etc), but others are downright sneaky. About a year ago, my grandparents signed up for internet service with one of the bigger ISP's (Telus). They were offered an lesser rate for the first year, followed by $10/month more for following years, as well as their DSL modem for free (to be returned when service ends). None of the documentation received with the modem indicated that any 'contract' was being entered, nor were any documents signed. However, when they recently tried to cancel their service, Telus has indicated they will be charged a fee due to being within the 'contract'." Similar to EULAs, sometimes companies will enter you into a "contract" without providing anything to sign and will hold you to terms you may not even know about simply by your use of the service. How can you deal with companies practices, especially if dealing with their representatives becomes...difficult?

ChelleChelle writes "When it comes to managing and deploying large scale systems and networks, discipline and focus matter more than specific technologies. In a conversation with ACM Queuecast host Mike Vizard, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels says the key to success is to have a 'relentless commitment to a modular computer architecture that makes it possible for the people who build the applications to also be responsible for running and deploying those systems within a common IT framework.'"