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The Internet

Harvard Study Says Weak Copyright Benefits Society 326

Posted by samzenpus from the free-is-good dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Geist summarizes an important new study on file sharing from economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf. The Harvard Business School working paper finds that given the increase in artistic production along with the greater public access conclude that 'weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society.' The authors point out that file sharing may not result in reduced incentives to create if the willingness to pay for 'complements' such as concerts or author speaking tours increases."
Medicine

Submission + - Buckyballs Polymerised into Buckywires (technologyreview.com) 1

Submitted by
KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: "Scientists have found a way to join buckyballs together so that they form buckywires. The wires form when buckyballs are dissolved in an aromatic hydrocarbon called 1,2,4-trimethylbenzene. The 1,2,4-trimethylbenzene links the balls together to make buckywires shaped like a string of pearls, which then precipatate out. This relatively simple procedure opens the door to industrial scale manufacture. Buckywires ought to be efficient light harvesters because of their great surface area and the way they can conduct photon-liberated electrons. But perhaps the area of greatest interest is drug delivery. The researchers suggest that buckywires ought to be safer than carbon nanotubes because the production method is entirely metal-free. That cannot be said of nanotubes because the reaction that forms them is catalysed by metallic nanoparticles."

Comment With GTK+ & Cairo you can do anything these da (Score 1) 948

by denominateur (#28156511) Attached to: Harsh Words From Google On Linux Development

I don't understand this. There's a reasonably clear HIG document in GNOME which is continuously updated. The strict packing rules make the resulting interface flexible in regards to RTL languages and reasonably consistent with other applications. GTK+ has widgets for just about every purpose. Since the introduction of Cairo it is trivial to draw custom widgets, especially using the gtkmm and cairomm C++ bindings: the custom tab bar could be done in a day. With those bindings it is even quite easy to modify the behaviour of existing widgets by overloading their signal handlers, Murray Cumming and the others working on those have invested a great deal of effort to truly (and easily) expose the object system via C++.
The Media

Wikipedia Launches a New Mobile Interface, Seeks Help 70

Posted by timothy from the discuss-in-the-talk-section dept.
hampton2600 writes "The Wikimedia Foundation is proud to present our new mobile site optimized for modern high-end phones. The interface is focused on being clean and easy to read on your mobile device. We currently officially support reading on the iPhone and Android phones. The new gateway is written entirely in Ruby (using the Merb framework) and the Git repository can be found here. We are looking for open source help with supporting other phone types and translations into new languages. Currently 8 languages are supported, but we'd like to support all languages Wikipedia supports. This is an active project and we are looking for new features, etc. from the community."

Comment Re:Fix the intel graphics bugs yet? (Score 2, Interesting) 620

by denominateur (#27688023) Attached to: Ubuntu 9.04 Released

I agree with you that this issue seems to have been thoroughly ignored by the release engineers, who pushed the 2.6 driver through despite its downfalls. (apparently to gain support for some newer chipsets, which could've been simply backported by adding PCI ID's to the 2.4 driver)

Compositing and 3D performance are horrid and even non-composited 2D is slow when EXA is used. Apparently, if you're lucky you can switch to UXA, but it is non-functional on my systems. (G35: no modes found & i915: DRI disabled)

The issue can be improved (but not fixed) by using a backport of the version 2.4 intel driver available from the "http://ppa.launchpad.net/siretart/ppa/ubuntu" PPA of siretart. This provides minor performance enhancements but is still slower than intrepid.
PC Games (Games)

Does Professional Gaming Have a Future? 116

Posted by Soulskill from the fatal-one-thank-you dept.
mr_sifter writes "Three years ago, celebrity gamers such as Fatal1ty were bagging millions in prizes, and TV channels were queuing up to broadcast games on TV. Professional gaming looked set for the big time. It never happened, and in the current economic crisis, sponsors and media organizations are cutting costs, resulting in the closure of many pro gaming competitions (as we recently discussed) and a down-scaling in prize money. This feature looks at whether pro gaming can bounce back, and whether it will always be a PC sport, or if pro gaming on consoles is the future."
AMD

AMD Shows Upcoming Phenom II CPU At 6.0 GHz+ 159

Posted by timothy from the calm-down-there-cowpoke dept.
Vigile writes "Today during a press briefing at AMD's offices in Austin, TX the company showed off some upcoming technology that should be available sometime early in 2009. What was most impressive was the overclocked speeds of the pending Phenom II X4 45nm processors. On air cooling AMD showed the quad-core CPU running at nearly 4.0 GHz while with much more extreme liquid nitrogen cooling help the same CPU reached over 6.0 GHz! It looks like AMD's newest processor might finally once again compete with the best from Intel, including its recent Core i7 CPUs."
Education

Perimeter Institute Launches Modern Physics Resource 30

Posted by Soulskill from the how-things-work dept.
An anonymous reader writes "You can find six new online sources of info about hot topics in modern physics at the 'What We Research' outreach page of Perimeter Institute. The info includes text, graphics and online presentations dealing with Cosmology, Superstring Theory, Quantum Gravity, Quantum Foundations, Quantum Information and Particle Physics. The resource section at the bottom of each page recommends a wealth of interesting online lectures by some famous scientists. PI is an independent, nonprofit scientific research and outreach organization."
Government

Submission + - British Village Requests Removal from GPS Maps (nytimes.com) 6

Submitted by
longacre
longacre writes: "The tiny village of Barrow Gurney, England has asked GPS map publisher Tele Atlas to remove them from the company's maps. The reason: truck drivers using GPS navigation devices are being directed to drive through the town despite the roads being too narrow for sidewalks, and causing numerous accidents. At the root of the problem lies the fact that the navigation maps used by trucks are the same as those used by passenger cars, which don't contain data on road width or no truck zones. Tele Atlas says they will release truck-appropriate databases at some point, but until then they advise local governments to make use of a technology dating back to the Romans: road signs."
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - Valve Cafe hacked! Financial info stolen.

Submitted by denominateur
denominateur writes: According to a forum thread at No-Steam Valve Software's "Valve Café" servers have been compromised giving the perpetrators access to users' financial information and Valve's balance sheets for the café service. So far Valve has reacted by deleting posts mentioning the security breach in the official forums. Apparently, they responded to one user asking about why his post was deleted and why Valve won't inform its users with: "Actually mate....as far as I know only the Cyber Cafe owners were hit. I am not sure though...but there is no need to panic at this time."

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