Toshiba To Launch First 512GB Solid State Drive 256

Posted by timothy on Thursday December 18, 2008 @04:16PM from the bits-o'-plenty dept.

designperfection9 writes "Toshiba said Thursday that it will show off a new line up of NAND-flash-based solid state drives with the industry's first 2.5-inch 512GB SSD. The drive is based on a 43 nanometer Multi-Level Cell NAND and claims to offer a high level of performance and endurance for use in notebooks as well as gaming and home entertainment systems."

Judge Tosses Telco Suit Over City-Owned Network 281

Posted by kdawson on Friday October 10, 2008 @09:23AM from the why-not-sue-the-state-for-building-roads dept.

tsa sends along news of the city of Monticello, Minnesota, which was sued by their local telco, Bridgewater Telephone Company, because the city chose to build a fiber optics network of their own. The judge dismissed their complaint of competition by a governmental organization. Quoting: "The judge's ruling is noteworthy for two things: (1) the judge's complete dismissal of Bridgewater Telephone Company's complaint and (2) his obvious anger at the underfunding of Minnesota's state courts. Indeed, the longest footnote in the opinion is an extended jeremiad about how much work judges are under and why it took so long to decide this case."

Geneticist Claims Human Evolution Is Over 857

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday October 09, 2008 @12:27AM from the flame-on dept.

GogglesPisano writes "UK geneticist Steve Jones gave a presentation entitled Human Evolution Is Over. He asserts that human beings have stopped evolving because modern social customs have lowered the age at which human males have offspring, which results in fewer of the mutations necessary to drive evolutionary change. Apparently the fate of our species now depends upon older guys hooking up with younger woman. I, for one, welcome this development."

TiVo Wins Appeal On Patents For Pause, Ffwd, Rwd 215

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday October 08, 2008 @08:12AM from the satellites-descending dept.

Lorien_the_first_one writes "After years of wrangling, TiVo has won its day in court against Dish Network, formerly known as the EchoStar, when the Supreme Court declined to take up Dish Network's appeal, forcing the satellite television company to pay $104 million in damages. According to the article, 'TiVo originally won a patent infringement case in 2004 against Dish, which was then named EchoStar Communications. It charged that Dish illegally copied its technology, which allows people to pause, rewind, and record live television on digital video recorders.' Despite an injunction, Dish continued distributing its set-top boxes in the belief that the work-around they had implemented avoided infringing TiVo's patents. Now the case goes back to the lower court for review to determine if they did indeed steer clear of those patents."

Prevent Gmail From Emailing Under the Influence 258

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday October 08, 2008 @12:29AM from the chili-meter-with-brains dept.

mikesd81 writes "Google has developed 'Mail Goggles,' a Gmail add-on that makes sending email from Gmail more difficult during certain times (which you can set). If you have Mail Goggles installed, it will force you to answer a series of math questions before sending out any new messages. You can adjust the math difficulty and times this option is in effect. If you get any of the questions wrong, Mail Goggles will say, 'Water and bed for you. Or try again.' Of course, if you set the math settings too high, you may have a tough time solving some of those problems in under 60 seconds, even when sober. Then again, if you're sober, you could just turn Mail Goggles off and hit send on that impassioned letter to your ex-boyfriend/girlfriend or that flame to your boss."

Comment Re:Seems strange to me (Score 0, Flamebait) 125

by Jeconais on Saturday July 14, 2007 @04:50AM (#19857677) Attached to: PHP 4 End of Life Announcement

The bigger issues is that PHP4 isn't very good (I'm not saying that PHP5 is perfect, but it is significantly better). It shipped in an insecure manner, and a lot of programs rely on that behaviour to run.

An example would be the "Magic Quote GPC" runtime option, that auto escaped " and ' etc. People used this (and still do) as the sole defence against SQL-Injection.

The other thing is that PHP4 wasn't really developed with forward compatibility in mind. One of the changes between 4 and 5 is that the variable $this is reserved - now obviously, good programmers would never call anything "this", they'd assign it a descriptive name. Sadly, PHPs ease of use has meant that everyone with a text editor and a <? echo "hello world" ?> * script calls themselves a programmer. So I've seen ever this issue cause problems.

Getting rid of PHP4 is a very good idea.

J

* - short tags was another strange idea, try having short tags turned on and using "include()" on an xml file (Of course, you shouldn't use include for that purpose...)