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Television

Comcast and Charter Team Up in Hopes of Toppling Roku, Amazon Streaming Hardware (theverge.com) 51

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
As the old saying goes, if you can't beat 'em, partner up with another overly powerful cable giant to give yourself a better shot. From a report: This morning, Comcast and Charter announced a new joint venture that will see the two companies teaming up to develop "a next-generation streaming platform on a variety of branded 4K streaming devices and smart TVs." This new platform and the devices that run it will square off against Amazon, Roku, Google, Apple, and other established streaming hardware players. The new venture is evenly divided between the two companies and is exclusively focused on streaming; it "does not involve the broadband or cable video businesses of either Comcast or Charter, which will remain independent." Comcast says its Flex streaming platform will serve as the foundation for what's coming next. It's also contributing "the retail business for XClass TVs and will contribute Xumo, a streaming service it acquired in 2020." Comcast introduced its XClass TVs last year as an alternative to the many popular budget TVs that come preloaded with Roku, Amazon, or Google software. For its part, Charter -- known better to many for its Spectrum brand -- is kicking in $900 million over the course of several years.

Submission + - New Toyota helps you yell at the kids

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If you're tired of yelling at the kids without the help of technology, Toyota has a van for you. From the article: "The latest version of the company's Sienna minivan has a feature called 'Driver Easy Speak.' It uses a built-in microphone to amplify a parent's voice through speakers in the back seats. Toyota says it added Easy Speak 'so parents don't have to shout to passengers in the back.' But chances are many parents will yell into the microphone anyway. And the feature only works one way, so the kids can't talk back. At least not with amplified voices. The feature is an option on the 2015 Sienna, which is being refreshed with a totally new interior. It also has an optional 'pull-down conversation mirror' that lets drivers check on kids without turning around."

Submission + - Torvalds: Free OS X Is No Threat To Linux (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Apple is now offering upgrades to the latest version of OS X for free. When Linux inventor Linus Torvalds was asked whether this threatened Linux (presumably by someone who had only a passing knowledge of all the things "free" can mean when applied to software) it gave him an opportunity for a passionate defense of open source. Torvalds also says that he'll keep programming until it gets "not interesting," which hasn't happened yet.

Submission + - How Safe Is Cycling?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: With new bike sharing programs all the rage, spending tens of millions of dollars to make city streets more bike friendly with hundreds of miles of bike lanes has become a priority for bike-loving mayors like NYC's Michael Bloomberg and Chicago's Rahm Emanuel. 'You cannot be for a startup, high-tech economy and not be pro-bike,' claimed Emanuel, who credited bike-sharing and bike lanes for attracting Google and Motorola Mobility to downtown Chicago. Now, with huge bike-sharing contracts awarded and programs underway, the NY Times asks the big question, How Safe Is Cycling? Because bike accidents rarely make front page news and are likely to be dramatically underreported, it's hard to say, concludes the NYT's Gina Kolata. UCSF trauma surgeon Dr. Rochelle Dicker, who studied hospital and police records for 2,504 bicyclists treated at San Francisco General Hospital, told Kolata,'Lots of my colleagues do not want to ride after seeing these [city biking] injuries.' On the other hand, Andy Pruitt, the founder of the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine and an avid lifelong cyclist, said the dangers were overstated, noting he's only broken his collarbone twice and hip once in four decades of long-distance cycling. So, is cycling safe, especially in the city? And is it OK to follow Mayor Emanuel's lead and lose the helmet?
Chrome

Submission + - Google to support or oppose DRM on HTML5 video? (mozillazine.org)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "Mozilla has committed to not implement DRM in Firefox for WebM HTML5 video even though it is theoretically possible. Microsoft has asked Google and the WebM community several other questions that still have not been answered, but this one seems more important: will Google commit to keeping WebM in Chrome DRM-free? Does our community think that is important for the open web and free software?"
Intel

Intel Sandy Bridge Desktop and Mobile CPUs 116

Posted by CmdrTaco from the touch-the-future dept.
Vigile writes "The new Intel Sandy Bridge architecture is being launched at CES this week but the reviews and benchmarks are out today. PC Perspective took a look at both the desktop and mobile variants, the former of which turns out to be quite an impressive processor for both highly threaded and single threaded applications. With some tweaks to the execution unit, a new Turbo Boost mode that increases clock speeds dynamically and a vastly improved integrated graphics implementation, the Core i7-2600K improves in every aspect. Also interestingly, the most expensive desktop part will start at $317, putting the screws to AMD yet again. On the mobile side of things, PC Perspective tested the quad-core Core i7-2820QM and the benchmark results are equally impressive; especially when looking at the gaming performance using integrated graphics. Sandy Bridge will no doubt put quite a dent in the discrete notebook graphics market for NVIDIA and AMD."
Piracy

Call of Duty: Black Ops the Most Pirated Game of the Year 5

Posted by Soulskill from the five-button-discount dept.
Torrentfreak reports that after calculating download frequency for pirated copies of popular video games, Call of Duty: Black Ops has won the dubious honor of being the most pirated game of 2010. The PC version of the game was torrented roughly 4,270,000 times, and the Xbox 360 version was downloaded an additional 930,000 times. (The most pirated Wii game was Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Dante's Inferno somehow managed to accrue the most downloads of Xbox 360 games.) Fortunately for Activision, the game has still made over $1 billion in sales, and its 20,000,000+ players have racked up over 600,000,000 man-hours of play time since the game's launch in early November.
Privacy

Mozilla Posts File Containing Registered User Data 154

Posted by Soulskill from the heads-up dept.
wiredmikey writes "Mozilla yesterday sent an email to registered users of its addons.mozilla.org site, letting them know that it had mistakenly posted a file to a publicly available Web server which contained data from its user database including email addresses, first and last names, and an md5 hash representation of user passwords."
Crime

London Police Credit CCTV Cameras With Six Solved Crimes Per Day 280

Posted by Soulskill from the now-to-be-installed-in-your-home dept.
stoilis writes "CCTV cameras across London help solve almost six crimes a day, the Metropolitan Police has said. According to the article, 'the number of suspects who were identified using the cameras went up from 1,970 in 2009 to 2,512 this year. The rise in the number of criminals caught also raises public confidence and counters bad publicity for CCTV.'"

Comment oblig (Score 1) 220

by mgrivich (#32080264) Attached to: <em>StarCraft II</em> To Be Released On July 27

And as another side-note, I don't envy the Blizzard employees that have to deal with beta tester feedback. The beta community forums are horrible which is why I don't feel like I can effectively provide any feedback or criticism. It's an immature forum full of players whining, where most arguments include some form of "you're retarded" remarks and where a bunch of platinum-level players acts like anyone from a lower league is automatically wrong about any issue. Gah.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/9/1/

Comment Re:Only 24 hours? (Score 1) 107

by b4dc0d3r (#30985648) Attached to: Sams Teach Yourself HTML and CSS In 24 Hours

The current hotspot is now having a footer at the bottom which:
-Floats at the bottom of the page, regardless of how little content there is
-Expands down the page when content overflows, so it doesn't cover content.
-Reacts when you do things like hide/show content.

So many different ways to do it, all with little quirks. Bottom line, CSS is designed as a system of browser HINTS which the browser uses to determine how content is laid out when the window changes size/shape. It has some hacks for specifying specific layouts, but it is absolutely not browser-based. It is more oriented towards print layout, where the output size is static. You can make some great layouts if you make assumptions about the size, but they break as soon as you re-size the window. Flow and float and similar ideas upon which CSS is based tend to really mis-align what you intended.

I'm still using tables for certain things, and I'll never give it up until CSS is replaced by something oriented towards browser layout.
Google

Google Pack Adds StarOffice 156

Posted by Zonk from the little-stars-everywhere dept.
derrida writes The GoogleOS Blog has the news that Google Pack, their collection of applications, now includes StarOffice. 'It will be interesting to see why Google didn't choose to include OpenOffice.org, the primary difference between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org being that StarOffice includes some proprietary components like clip-art graphics, fonts, templates and tools for Microsoft Office migration.'"
Operating Systems

Replacing Atime With Relatime in the Kernel 416

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the results-apparently-too-much-to-ask-for dept.
eldavojohn writes "Our friend Jeremy at the Kernal Trap has dug up some interesting criticism of atime from Linus Torvalds. As Linus submitted patches to improve relatime he noted: 'I cannot over-emphasize how much of a deal it is in practice. Atime updates are by far the biggest IO performance deficiency that Linux has today. Getting rid of atime updates would give us more everyday Linux performance than all the pagecache speedups of the past 10 years, _combined_.' And later severely beat atime about the head with a pointed stick: 'It's also perhaps the most stupid Unix design idea of all times. Unix is really nice and well done, but think about this a bit: 'For every file that is read from the disk, lets do a ... write to the disk! And, for every file that is already cached and which we read from the cache ... do a write to the disk!'" Well, I guess I can expect my Linux machine to become a little bit faster!"

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