223307
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pdtp writes:
Just ran across this on Break.com where Director Kirby Dick has submitted his film to be rated by CARA only to find out that there have been illegal copies of the film made by the MPAA, and distributed.
222711
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HowMany writes:
There are over 300 million people living in the United states. With that many people the chances of you being the only person with your name are pretty low. HowManyOfMe endeavors to determine how many people in the US have your (or any other) name. Using data from the Census Bureau and a few statistical tricks, they make a rough guess of the number of people that have a particular name.
For example, there are over 50,000 people with the name James Smith. However, to everyone's relief, there is apparently only one Paris Hilton.
222269
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Bombula writes:
In a video on GM's blog, CEO Bob Lutz says clean diesel engines, already widespread in Europe, would add $4,000 — $5,000 to the price of each car and are therefore impractical for the US market. He adds that emissions standards are more stringent in the United States, and that this is also part of the problem with switching to diesel engines. Given the enormous latent interest in moving towards biodiesel people are leaping to call BS on his statements, but is there any truth to them?
221879
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JumperCable writes:
The AP has an interesting article on the use of ice blocks as air conditioning in New York high rises. The concept is pretty basic. Overnight during off peak energy pricing hours & during the coolest part of the 24 hour day, the system freezes water in storage tanks into giant blocks of ice. These storage tanks are located in the basement (coolest location). They are frozen with ethylene glycol.
Given that most of the brown outs occur during the summer months due to high electric demand for air conditioning, I wonder how much of an effect this system would have in reducing brownouts if it's use was more wide spread. The article mentions it is only cost efficient for large companies. But how much of this is profit padding? Couldn't a smaller system be worked out for home use? CALMAC is one of the producers of these systems.
221735
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EWAdams writes:
Gamasutra is running a brief interview with Peter Dille, senior VP of marketing for Playstation. He pulls no punches in his comments on the viability of the Xbox and HD-DVD:
With the Xbox 360 you've got an inconsistent design, some have a hard drive, some don't, and none of them have Blu-Ray, and the HD-DVD will be out of business in a matter of months. Is this a 10 year product? And by the way, it doesn't even work. Do they want to be selling it for 10 years and refurbishing them all for 10 more years? I don't think that's a 10 year product. You could disagree with me, or they could disagree with me, but I'd put that up against the PS3 any day.
A longer version of the interview will be published later.
219477
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Anonymous non-xbox360-owning Coward writes:
It seems that Microsoft has admitted that all of the 11.6 million sold Xbox360 units are faulty with a design error. So beware, your console may be dead tomorrow. Read more here
219453
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AnotherDaveB writes:
The BBC Trust has asked to meet open source advocates to discuss their complaints over the corporation's Windows-only on demand broadband TV service, iPlayer.
The development came less than 48 hours after a meeting between the Open Source Consortium (OSC) and regulators at Ofcom on Tuesday. Officials agreed to press the trust, the BBC's governing body, to meet the OSC. The consortium received an invitation on Wednesday afternoon.
The Register has the story.
219191
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StonyandCher writes:
IBM is making it easier to utilize its patented intellectual property to implement nearly 200 standards in SOA, Web services, security and other spaces.
Under a pledge issued by the company Wednesday, IBM is granting universal and perpetual access to intellectual property that might be necessary to implement standards designed to make software interoperable. IBM will not assert any patent rights to its technologies featured in these standards. The company believes its move in this space is the largest of its kind.
Among the technologies included on IBM's list, are various standards pertaining to SOAP, SAML, XML Schema, and Service Component Architecture.
"These are what I could call the core infrastructure standards that people now use around such things as SOA," said Bob Sutor, IBM vice president of open source and standards. Web 2.0 applications also could be developed, for example. The company seeks to spur development of software that leverages these standards.
215731
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realjd writes:
The music industry has started demanding "protection money" from coffee shops with live music. One was even fined for having the TV on while the Monday Night Football theme played. And the owners pay up to one licensing company, all of the others start harassing them demanding payment too. What's a small business to do? It sounds like they don't even check whether any copyright violations occurred, they're just sending bills to any business that may or may not have live music.
