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Submission + - China Says Internet Addiction a Mental Disorder

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @11:17AM

eldavojohn writes: "China has taken new extremes in preventing internet addiction in youths and is even offering boot camps to parents who want their child weened from the electric teat. Some go as far as electric shock or drug treatment while others seem to embrace a cold turkey stance. The article notes that "no country has gone quite as far as China in embracing the theory that heavy Internet use should be defined as a mental disorder and mounting a public crusade against Internet addiction." The article mentions the story of Sun Jiting who "spends his days locked behind metal bars in this military-run installation, put there by his parents. The 17-year-old high school student is not allowed to communicate with friends back home, and his only companions are psychologists, nurses and other patients. Each morning at 6:30, he is jolted awake by a soldier in fatigues shouting, "This is for your own good!"" Sun found himself spending 15 hours or straight on the internet. Thanks to his parent's intervention and the treatment, he now has life mapped out until he's 84. Maybe this is a little extreme — I have no idea what I'm doing yet from 24 to endl, and I'm not too concerned about it."

Submission + - Bacteria could one day store data?

Submitted by

Vinit

on Monday February 26, 2007 @01:02PM

Vinit writes: "Japanese researchers has announced a new technology which utilizes bacteria as a long-term record medium of the data. The information is retained in the bacterium by inserting artificial DNA arrangement in genome DNA arrangement of the bacterium. Bacterias are very small in size and keep gene information for generations, so they can be used to store information for a longer period of time, compared to electronic or magnetic media including CD-ROM, flash memory and hard disc. The robustness of DNA data ensures the maintenance of archived information over hundreds to thousands of years, according to the researchers. http://www.pclaunches.com/other_stuff/bacteria_cou ld_one_day_store_data.php"

Submission + - Do we need a light-up, talking Rubik's Cube? Yes.

Submitted by William Casey on Monday February 26, 2007 @11:32AM

William Casey writes: Ars Technica was able to get their hands on a production sample of the soon-to-be-released Rubik's Revolution. If you thought the original was a pain in the butt this update adds six games, digital voices, and light up buttons. Does the world really need an electronic Rubik's Cube?

Submission + - The decline and fall of the Palm empire

Submitted by

PetManimal

on Monday February 26, 2007 @11:21AM

PetManimal writes: "According to Computerworld, Palm is doomed to decline and failure, thanks to a series of bad business decisions including Palm's acquisition by U.S. Robotics back in 1995 and the musical chairs with PalmSource/PalmOne earlier in this decade. There's also been a lack of innovation — Palm's own corporate timeline has tons of references to innovation and development milestones from 1995 to 2000, but since then it's been mostly boring corporate marketing speak about partnerships, new markets, and product releases. Now the Treo has tons of new competitors, and when the iPhone comes out, it will be game over for Palm, says the Computerworld article: '... Last month, [the] iPhone changed everything. Jobs' Macworld keynote was like a nuclear bomb in the world of smart-phone enthusiasts. The "key influencers" who gave Treos visibility and cachet a year ago — Hollywood types, gadget freaks and absolutely everyone who's anyone in Silicon Valley — have stopped talking about Treos and are simply waiting for the iPhone to come out, at which time they will unceremoniously dump their Treos and embrace the new innovation leader. Meanwhile, it looks like Palm isn't even trying to innovate. [Palm CEO Ed] Colligan said in an interview recently that the company is focused on ease of use, rather than design, and that the company doesn't want to "follow design fads." In other words, Palm is not only failing to set trends, it's not even following them anymore.'"

Pthreads vs Win32 threads 385

Posted by Hemos on Monday February 26, 2007 @11:00AM from the different-situations,-different-needs dept.

An anonymous reader writes "It's interesting when different people have different opinions. While I was searching for something on Intel's website, I came across an article on why Windows threads are better than Posix threads. Curiously, I also came across this article on why Posix Pthreads are better that Win32 threads. The thing is, both of these articles are written by the same author!

So who is right (metaphorically speaking?), or what has changed since the first article was written?"

Submission + - Is there value in the SMART monitoring technology?

Submitted by

Khuffie

on Monday February 26, 2007 @10:57AM

Khuffie writes: "Ars Technicha has a very interesting writeup regarding a study made by Google about hard-drive failures and SMART technology. Their findings? SMART wasn't a very effective way of predicting hard-drive failure, and that contrary to popular belief, "drive failures did not increase with high temperatures or CPU utilization"."

Submission + - EMI: ditching DRM to cost you

Submitted by 33rpm on Monday February 26, 2007 @10:54AM

33rpm writes: EMI has told online music stores that selling its catalog without DRM is going to cost them a lot of money. 'EMI is the only major record label to seriously consider abandoning the disaster that is DRM, but earlier reports that focused on the company's reformist attitude apparently missed the mark: EMI is willing to lose the DRM, but they demand a considerable advance payment to make it happen. EMI has backed out of talks for now because no one will pay what they're asking.'

Submission + - Stable Open Source NTFS After 12 Years of Work

Submitted by

irgu

on Monday February 26, 2007 @10:53AM

irgu writes: "Open source NTFS development started in 1995 by Martin von Loewis under Linux, which was taken over by Anton Altaparmakov in 2000. Two years ago Apple hired Altaparmakov to work on Mac OS X and made a deal with the team to relicense the code and return the new one, soonest in the spring of 2008. But the team also continued the work and Szabolcs Szakacsits announced the read/write NTFS-3G driver for beta testing last year. Only half year passed and NTFS-3G reached the stable status and has been already ported to FreeBSD, Mac OS X, BeOS, Haiku, 64-bit and big-endian architectures, and new CPU's!"

Submission + - Windows for Warships nears frontline service

Submitted by demented on Monday February 26, 2007 @10:48AM

demented writes: The Register has a piece on Win2K server based combat control systems soon to be deployed on several UK Royal Navy vessels, including air defense ships and nuclear-powered submarines armed with Trident nuclear missiles. The article deals with some interesting problems regarding combat control systems in general and argues whether Microsoft's Windows 2000 Server is a suitable platform for this kind of software.

Submission + - The Top 5 Movie Cell Phone Moments

Submitted by on Monday February 26, 2007 @10:40AM

An anonymous reader writes: It's a real shame that the Oscars don't include any technology categories so Cnet has come up of the top five movie mobile moments. "Not only are mobiles used as a reference to modern life but in many cases they've become intrinsic to the film's plot. From comedies to dramas, the ever-present mobile phone is a prop that's becoming as popular on the silver screen as off it."

Submission + - Will Apollo mistakes be made with Mars?

Submitted by

MattSparkes

on Monday February 26, 2007 @10:10AM

MattSparkes writes: "In some ways the Apollo 11 mission was a great success; the astronauts got back to Earth safely after walking on the moon. However, it was a massive disaster in terms of quarantine procedures — the astronauts had to leave the landing capsule to enter the quarantine module, after it was found that the crane on board the ship wasn't strong enough to raise it. Would NASA be able to protect the Earth from Martian pathogens if it successfully returns soil samples from the Red Planet?"

Submission + - Ontario pulls subliminal gambling machines

Submitted by

davecb

on Monday February 26, 2007 @09:07AM

davecb writes: "Gambling machines made by a particular vendor have been pulled from Ontario casinos: it turns out that instead of a random sequence of cards shown before the (hopefully!) random result, every machine displays a 5-card maximum jackpot for just long enough to be recognizable.

Does this remind you, perhaps, of voting machines made by a certain video-gambling-machine vendor?"

Sun Releases ODF plugin for Microsoft Office 50

Posted by Hemos on Monday February 26, 2007 @09:04AM from the making-it-easier dept.

Verunks writes "Microsoft Word users now can easily import and export to the OpenDocument Format. The StarOffice 8 Conversion Technology Preview, a plug-in for Microsoft Word 2003 that allows users of Microsoft Word 2003 to read, edit and save to the OpenDocument Format (ODF) is now available"

Submission + - The Ever Increasing Density Of RF Transmitters

Submitted by

sprocks

on Sunday February 25, 2007 @08:27PM

sprocks writes: "There are more and more RF transmitters around us every day. The chart shown in this article speculates at where the trend leads, showing the density of RF transmitters per square kilometer. At what point does the density push the transmitters inside the human body? Take a look at the article and find out."

Submission + - Looking for email to web service

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24, 2007 @12:47PM

An anonymous reader writes: The place where I work has blocked web access and I've been reduced to using an email to web service for web browsing. The biggest downsides to this are the dearth of servers as well as the slow response times of the ones that are available. I've considered setting up my own www4mail http://www.www4mail.org/ server but I've read that My provider (ATT) won't allow an email server on a home account. There are free hosting services that will allow tou to run scripts but again the email restriction applies there as well. Are there any other options I am missing?

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