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Books

Publishers Gave Away 123 Million Books During World War Two 121

Posted by samzenpus from the publish-or-perish dept.
An anonymous reader writes Information wants to be free? During the Second World War, it actually was. Publishers took advantage of new printing technologies to sell crates of cheap, paperback books to the military for just six cents a copy, at a time when almost all the other books they printed cost more than two dollars. The army and the navy shipped them to soldiers and sailors around the world, giving away nearly 123 million books for free. Many publishers feared the program would destroy their industry, by flooding the market with free books and destroying the willingness of consumers to pay for content. Instead, it fueled a postwar publishing boom, as millions of GIs got hooked on good books, and proved willing to pay for more. It's a freemium model, more than 70 years ago.

Comment SMS ? More like MMS (Score 1) 280

by Metatron (#46322693) Attached to: Who's On WhatsApp, and Why?

Most people I know in the UK use it a cheaper replacement for MMS. Sending pictures quickly and much more cheaply with inclusive data bundles. A lot of people have unlimited SMS but MMS is still very expensive for some reason.
Programming

Needed: A LAMP Stack For Robotics 65

Posted by timothy from the help-wanted-apply-through-the-usb-port dept.
waderoush writes "If you visit Menlo Park, CA-based Willow Garage, you'll meet a $400,000 humanoid robot called PR2 that has stereo vision, a pair of dextrous arms, and enough smarts to roam the building indepedently and even plug itself into the wall when it needs to recharge. But in a sense, PR2 is just a demo. The real action at Willow Garage is around ROS, the Robot Operating System, a free meta-operating system that's already being used by hundreds of roboticists around the world and may soon be handed over to an independent foundation analogous to the Apache Software Foundation. Brian Gerkey, Willow Garage's head of open source development, says 'What we need is a LAMP stack for robotics,' and hopes that ROS will jumpstart innovation in robotics in the same way Linux and other free software components provided the foundation for the Internet boom. Today's roboticists 'have to come at the problem with a very deep expertise in all aspects of robotics, from state estimation to planning to perception, which automatically limits the number of people capable of building new things,' Gerkey says. 'But by providing a basic toolset analogous to the LAMP stack, we can get to a point where all you need to know is how to write code and what you want your robot to do.'"
Music

Submission + - Music file sharer cleared of fraud (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by krou
krou writes: The BBC is reporting that Alan Ellis, who ran music file sharing site Oink from his flat in the UK, has been found not guilty of conspiracy to defraud. Between 2004 and 2007, the site 'facilitated the download of 21 million music files' by allowing its some 200,000 'members to find other people on the web who were prepared to share files'. Ellis was making £18,000 a month from donations from users, and claimed that he had no intention of defrauding copyright holders, and said 'All I do is really like Google, to really provide a connection between people. None of the music is on my website.'

Comment Re:How do people pay eachother? (Score 3, Informative) 796

by Metatron (#30470806) Attached to: UK Wants To Phase Out Checks By 2018

Pay for the what now ? I can logon to my bank online, and given any sort code and account number transfer any sum of money I choose, (that I have available), for free. This is standard across any UK bank I am aware of. Lots of these types of transactions are instant now too, (or certainly very quick), some institutions still drag and you have to wait a day or so, but they are becoming fewer.

A lot of banks also have a great deal of large companies details stored for you, making it equally as easy to pay any bill.
Earth

Is Alcohol Killing Our Planet? 468

Posted by timothy from the every-day-is-earth-day dept.
Andy_Spoo writes "Something that I've been trying to get an answer to: Is alcohol killing our planet? Alcohol is a byproduct of yeast, but another is CO2. As we all know (unless you've been asleep for years), CO2 is helping to warm our planet, sending us into destruction. So how much is the manufacture and consumption of alcohol contributing to the total world CO2 level? And don't forget that bars and pubs force beer through to their pumps using large compressed cylinders of CO2. Does anyone know?"
Input Devices

Lenovo To Bring Wii-Inspired Input To PCs 53

Posted by Soulskill from the now-we-just-need-monitor-insurance dept.
PCWorld reports on an upcoming Lenovo PC that includes a remote control with functionality similar to that of the Wii Remote. It will control games using the same motion-based method, and Lenovo appears to be coming out with sports games like tennis and bowling to demonstrate its capabilities — an unsurprising choice given the huge success of Wii Sports . "Lenovo is trying to capitalize on the trend of entertainment options merging into the PC. Few are able to play motion-based games, which could make this motion-based game controller a pioneer. In addition to controlling TV functions and video recordings on the PC, the remote control can also be used as an air mouse that moves the mouse pointer when waved. It has some advantages over a conventional mouse — it can function without being on a surface and be used at a distance — when sitting on a couch, for example."
Data Storage

Ext4 Advances As Interim Step To Btrfs 510

Posted by kdawson from the butter-is-better dept.
Heise.de's Kernel Log has a look at the ext4 filesystem as Linus Torvalds has integrated a large collection of patches for it into the kernel main branch. "This signals that with the next kernel version 2.6.28, the successor to ext3 will finally leave behind its 'hot' development phase." The article notes that ext4 developer Theodore Ts'o (tytso) is in favor of ultimately moving Linux to a modern, "next-generation" file system. His preferred choice is btrfs, and Heise notes an email Ts'o sent to the Linux Kernel Mailing List a week back positioning ext4 as a bridge to btrfs.
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Russians claim WPA/WPA2 cracking breakthrough (securityandthe.net)

Submitted by
secmartin
secmartin writes: "Russian security firm Elcomsoft has released software that uses Nvidia GPU's to speed up the cracking of WPA and WPA2 keys by a factor of 100. Since the software allows them to network thousands of PC's this anouncement effectively signals the death of wireless networking in business networks; any network handling sensitive data should start using VPN encryption on machines connecting over Wi-Fi networks, or stop using these networks altogether."

Comment It will affect us more than them (Score 3, Interesting) 295

by Metatron (#15017781) Attached to: Pay-per-email and the "Market Myth"
From my experience working for an ISP, business is more likely to be affect ed for organisations that don't pay for Goodmail certificates. End users just see one thing - email you sent me doesn't get to my AOL account, but email that othercorp sends me does. They don't care about the technicalities of what systems AOL is using that are getting in the way, all they see is service works from x but not y. Large email providers like hotmail and AOL hold everyone else in the palms of their hands, either we play ball, or we lose business.

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