RFC writes "In a move that may be indicative of modern ISP customer service, Time Warner has announced the introduction of packet shaping technology to its network. 'Packet shaping technology has been implemented for newsgroup applications, regardless of the provider, and all peer-to-peer networks and certain other high bandwidth applications not necessarily limited to audio, video, and voice over IP telephony.' As the poster observes, this essentially renders premium service useless. The company is already warning users that attempts to circumvent these measures is a violation of their Terms of Service."

eldavojohn writes "According to Google, Microsoft's server software is at least twice as likely to host viruses or malware. The reason why? 'Google reports that IIS is likely used to distribute malware more often than Apache because many IIS installs are on pirated Windows versions which aren't configured to automatically download patches. (Even pirated Windows versions can automatically receive security fixes, however.) Our analysis demonstrates how important it is to keep web servers patched to the latest patch level,' Google notes."

An anonymous reader writes "IDEMA has finally released the LBD (Long Block Data) standard. This standard, in work since 2000, increases the length of the data blocks of each sector from 512 bytes to 4,096 bytes. This is an update that has been requested for some time by the hard-drive industry and the development of new drives will start immediately. The new standard offers many advantages — improved reliability and higher transfer rates are the two most obvious. While some manufacturers say the reliability may increase as much as tenfold, the degree of performance improvement to be expected is a bit more elusive. Overall improvements include shorter time to format and more efficient data transfers due to smaller overhead per block during read and write operations."

SeaDour writes "The famous Deep Impact mission, which in 2005 launched a projectile in the path of comet Tempel 1, may be extended by NASA. The proposal is to slingshot the probe around the Earth as it passes by at the end of this year, putting it on a trajectory to reach comet Boethin in December 2008. Scientists want to see if the strange composition and behavior of Tempel 1 is more common than they had previously assumed. (The probe only had one projectile though, so we will not see another brilliant man-made explosion on this comet.) Additionally, while the probe is en route to the comet, researchers will point its on-board telescope at known exosolar planets to determine the compositions of their atmospheres."

narramissic writes "File this one under 'if you can't beat em, join em.' Samsung, one of the main backers of the Blu-ray Disc format, Friday said it plans to release an optical disc player this year that will play both Blu-ray Disc and the rival HD DVD format. With the announcement, Samsung becomes the second company to shift from a single-format stance (LG launched a dual player in North America earlier this year.) 'Our main concern is with the consumer and not a particular technology,' said Samsung spokesman Kwak Bumjoon."

KingKong writes "Scientists have unraveled the DNA of another of our primate relatives, this time a monkey named the rhesus macaque — and the work has far more immediate impact than just to study evolution. These fuzzy animals are key to testing the safety of many medicines, and understanding such diseases as AIDS, and the new research will help scientists finally be sure when they're a good stand-in for humans. 'Having a third primate will allow scientists to compare the three genomes, with an added emphasis on singling out the genes possessed by humans alone. The end goal is to reconstruct the history of every single one of the approximately 20,000 genes, to determine when they first appeared in history, and in what species. All of this requires an extraordinary amount of information.'"

newtronic clues us to an article in IEEE Spectrum by Jeff Hawkins (founder of Palm Computing), titled Why can't a computer be more like a brain? Hawkins brings us up to date with his latest endeavor, Numenta. He covers progress since his book On Intelligence and gives details on Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM), which is a platform for simulating neocortical activity. Programming HTMs is different — you essentially feed them sensory data. Numenta has created a framework and tools, free in a "research release," that allow anyone to build and program HTMs.

audiophile writes "Just because it's a PC doesn't mean it can't output good-sounding audio. In the same vein as specialty A/V products, you can find PC-based A/V systems with extensive audio processing and step-up performance specifications, including Signal-to-Noise ratio, which can make a significant difference when using the analog outputs. Media center manufacturer Niveus shares tips for getting high-quality audio from a PC."

Arun Demeure writes "Beyond3D has once again obtained new information on Intel's plans to compete against NVIDIA and AMD's graphics processors, in what the Chief Architect of the project presents as a 'battle for control of the computing platform.' He describes a new computing architecture based on the many-core paradigm with super-wide execution units, and the reasoning behind some of the design choices. Looks like computer scientists and software programmers everywhere will have to adapt to these new concepts, as there will be no silver bullet to achieve high efficiency on new and exotic architectures."