103552
submission
Good writes:
When friends check out Aaron Priest's new Acura TL sedan, the oohs and aahs start on the inside.
Forget the powerful 3.5-liter, 286-horsepower engine; they're more enthralled with the car's rearview video camera and the in-dash voice-command system.
"The technology is what gets people the most," said Priest, a 23-year-old lab technician at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. "They don't really care anymore about what's under the hood. It's all about what's in the car now."
103550
submission
JavaRob writes:
From the WordPress development blog: "If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately."
Fortunately, they got a tipoff, but it's not clear how long the altered download (the cracker altered a couple of files to add in remote execution capabilities) would have stayed up otherwise.
Note: the cracker did not sneak in code by posing as an OSS developer (the common FUD scare scenario...); they just managed to crack one of the site's servers, and altered the download directly.
Apparently, WordPress has taken steps to ensure it doesn't happen again. Personally, I'm wondering about ways browsers and/or operating systems might be improved to automate checksum validation for downloaded executables.
103522
submission
st_johnny writes:
"[The]chips use less than a sixth the energy of an Intel Pentium, and less than a quarter the energy an AMD Athlon uses. In addition to efficiency, VIA has started a program called "carbon-free computing", where they offset the carbon that will be produced by the manufacturing and lifetime energy use of their CPU's. They do these offsets by building renewable power generation in developing countries, restoring forest and wetlands, and doing energy conservation."
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/006239.html
http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/processors/c7-d
http://www.via.com.tw/en/initiatives/cleancomputin g/carbon-free_computing.jsp
103510
submission
myside writes:
'The Great Global Warming Swindle', a documentary set to air on BBC on Thursday, claims that man-made global warming is a scam. http://www.lse.co.uk/ShowStory.asp?story=CZ434669U &news_headline=global_warming_is_lies_claims_docum entary
103508
submission
Overly Critical Guy writes:
More documents in the Iowa antitrust case have come out. This time, it's revealed that Microsoft considers Mac users its "guinea pigs" for new Office features, and they once considered dropping Mac Office entirely, "as doing so will do a great deal of harm to Apple immediately." This case has become a treasure trove of internal memos describing Microsoft's internal business practices of the last ten years.
103498
submission
Bryan writes:
This first paragraph from the article pretty much sums it up:
'Data on several sites maintained by the operators of Texxors.com suggests that Google may be manipulating the profits webmasters receive from Google's Adsense program. Our analysis shows statistical evidence that as a website becomes more popular, it receives less earnings per click (EPC) from Google Adsense. Since the EPC is determined by Google's algorithms prior to the ad being served to a page, this suggests that Google may be intentionally or unintentionally manipulating EPC to increase their profit and/or Adsense participation. The method appears to be similar to the "throttling" practices that landed online movie retailer Netflix in legal hot water last year.'
Full article