loyalsonofrutgers - Slashdot User

Submission + - Stress-testing and the Verizon G'zOne cellphone

Submitted by

abkaiser

on Sunday January 28, 2007 @12:06PM

abkaiser writes: "You can dunk it under water. Put it in the oven and crank up the heat. Drop it, smack it, treat it like the hunk of plastic that it is. And yet this is a cellphone. I got my hands on the Verizon G'zOne, a phone designed for high-abuse environments. Come for the test methodology, stay for the photo of a cellphone cooking in an oven."

Bezos and O'Reilly 2.0 16

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday January 28, 2007 @12:05PM from the it's-sweet-that-they-found-each-other dept.

theodp writes "Looks like Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly are investing together again, and this time it has nothing to do with patent reform. In Bezos Goes Web 2.0 Wild, Private Equity Week's Alexander Haislip reports that Explore Holdings, which as of late has been doing business as Bezos Expeditions, is one of 19 investors that have pumped $34.3M into O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures."

Submission + - Fight DRM while there's time

Submitted by ageor on Sunday January 28, 2007 @11:28AM

ageor writes: It seems (not only) to me that DRM is about far more than intellectual property. It's also about monopoly and freedom of choice. It's one of those cases where us, the consumers, have to decide against accepting the new control-and-money-making-is-all-we-care-about industry's rules.

The whole matter is very well put in DRM, Vista and your rights where you can read about it and also follow the subject as deep as you like through numerous relevant links.

Submission + - Which Is It, Microsoft? Vista Or Linux?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28, 2007 @11:09AM

An anonymous reader writes: In Microsoft Loves Linux: What's With That?, Dr. Dobb's takes a deep dive into the five-year patent and technology sharing agreement between Microsoft and Novell, the vendor of SUSE Linux. What with consumer Vista being launched Jan. 30, and OS X due for the 'Leopard' update, the OS debate is raging. Which one do you think is best?

Submission + - TomTom admits Satnav device is infected with virus

Submitted by

miserableles

on Sunday January 28, 2007 @11:06AM

miserableles writes: "http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry1276.html TomTom admit to UK security journalist that a number of GO 910 satnav units have shipped with two Trojans installed on the hard drive, but still no sign of an official warning on the TomTom website."

Bookmark TomTom admits Satnav device is infected with virus (daniweb.com)

by miserableles on Sunday January 28, 2007 @11:04AM

Spamming Google Maps 225

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday January 28, 2007 @11:02AM from the already-getting-lame dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Google organized a flyover of Sydney, Australia last Friday for Australia Day. The images taken on the day will be posted to Google Maps in a few weeks. A number of dotcoms spent hours making huge signs that would be visible from the air. It will be interesting to see whether Google will repeat the event in other cities. If they do, get prepared early. What sign would you make?"

Inside the Lucasfilm datacenter 137

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday January 28, 2007 @10:08AM from the wrecking-childhoods-takes-bandwidth dept.

passthecrackpipe writes "Where can you find a (rhetorical) 11.38 petabits per second bandwidth? It appears to be inside the Lucasfilm Datacenter. At least, that is the headline figure mentioned in this report on a tour of the datacenter. The story is a bit light on the down-and-dirty details, but mentions a 10 gig ethernet backbone (adding up the bandwidth of a load of network connections seems to be how they derived the 11.38 petabits p/s figure. In that case, I have a 45 gig network at home.) Power utilization is a key differentiator when buying hardware, a "legacy" cycle of a couple of months, and 300TB of storage in a 10.000 square foot datacenter. To me, the story comes across as somewhat hyped up — "look at us, we have a large datacenter" kind of thing, "look how cool we are". Over the last couple of years, I have been in many datacenters, for banks, pharma and large enterprise to name a few, that have somewhat larger and more complex setups."

Feed A Nano, Mega Memory Circuit (feedburner.com)

From feed by wiredfeed on Sunday January 28, 2007 @09:12AM

Researchers develop a memory circuit 100 times denser than anything yet seen, and its the size of a human white blood cell. By the Associated Press.

Feed Tax Takers Send in the Spiders (feedburner.com)

From feed by wiredfeed on Sunday January 28, 2007 @09:12AM

Under a little-known project called Xenon, several nations are deploying sophisticated bots to troll web businesses in search of tax cheats. By Quinn Norton.

Feed Fanning Fears of a Space War (feedburner.com)

From feed by wiredfeed on Sunday January 28, 2007 @09:12AM

U.S. space hawks seize on China's anti-satellite missile test. Luke O'Brien reports from Washington.

Feed Entrepreneurs Resurrect Concorde (feedburner.com)

From feed by wiredfeed on Sunday January 28, 2007 @09:12AM

Supersonic passenger jets are back -- billionaires board first. By Daniel Gross from Wired magazine.

Submission + - Should the "home" browser button be rename

Submitted by CraveAggregation on Friday January 19, 2007 @07:37PM

CraveAggregation writes: One upon a time, the web was a sort of ad-hoc network of links. People set up "home pages", full of personal information, whatever strange stuff they did, exits ("links") to other people's homes and so on. Their own "home page" was what they saw when they loaded the browser, their own home on the web, and a special extra-fast shortcut button was added to the browser just for it — just like when you see your homedir or desktop in the local filesystem on a workstation or desktop local GUI. People were often house proud and maintained their home pages, because guests might drop in at any moment. Many had extremely poor taste, and liked little stick man "under construction" signs, but that fine too.

Yet I see countless people using the "Home" button in the browser to point to someone else's pages. Are most people on the web now "homeless", living on the virtual streets or barracked anonymously in some neofeudal corporate lord's vast virtual estates? Even bloggers don't always seem to twig that the home button is there to take you to your *own* home — in the blogger's case, they ARE actually fully maintaining a modern version of a home page for themselves, yet I see bloggers with their "home" button pointing at some pointless corporate site, and their own blog in a deep bookmark.

I think the loss of the "my home page" as a web phenomenon is kind of sad, and contributing to the decay of large chunks of the web into a more one-way medium. So, what's to be done? Rename the "Home" button to "My Blog" or "My Own Site" so that the youngsters these days get what it was always there for? Any other suggestions? Or am I worrying over nothing?

Submission + - Apple wanting single Telco for iPhone in Europe?

Submitted by LordFocus on Friday January 19, 2007 @06:18PM

LordFocus writes: According to this story (German). Apple is looking for a single telecom provider to carry the iPhone in Europe. Good business or huge failure?

What Brings Users to Blogs? 143

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tuesday July 18, 2006 @04:22PM from the skewed-sample-populations dept.

Billosaur writes "The Center for Citizen Media Blog has an interesting overview of the Collaborative News Survey 'Hype versus Reality', detailing the results of a study done by Hsing Wei from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government on why users are attracted to collaborative news, commenting and blogging sites. Among the conclusions of the study are that people who use these sites are 'mostly young and male, especially those who visit technology-related sites, looking for 'a fix of unique, informative fun,' and 'filling in the blanks' left by traditional news sources. Or is it just because it beats working?"

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