Dorkz brings news of a class-action settlement from Creative Labs over the capacity of their HDD MP3 players. Evidently they calculated drive capacity in base-10 (1,000,000,000 bytes per GB) instead of base-2 (1,073,741,824 bytes per GB). The representative plaintiff is entitled to $5,000, and everyone else who bought one of the HDD MP3 players in the past several years gets a 50% discount on a new 1GB player[PDF]. They can also opt for a 20% discount on anything ordered from Creative's online store. Creative has made available all of the necessary legal forms. Seagate lost a similar lawsuit late last year.

longacre writes "With the official entry period for the $10 million Automotive X-Prize contest just around the corner, Popular Mechanics offers a preview of the most promising entries. Among the 100-mpg vehicles that Detroit (and Japan) have claimed impossible to build comes a hybrid designed by a class of inner-city high school students in West Philadelphia. Also displayed is a futuristic-looking electric model with a range of 300 miles. We discussed the beginning of this contest earlier this year."

UnknowingFool writes "Everyone's favorite CEO Darl McBride took the stand on Wednesday April 30 in Novell v. SCO. Chris Brown has posted his account on Groklaw of the 2nd day of trial. The first day's account can be found here. To refresh your memory in this ongoing case, Judge Kimball has already ruled that Novell owns the copyrights to Unix and has practically dismissed all of SCO's claims. This portion of the trial is about Novell's counterclaims that SCO never paid them the money from the Sun and MS deals. What is to be determined in this trial is how much of the money from the deals were for Unix licensing (SVRx) and how much were for SCO's server technology (Unixware)." (Read on for the rest, below.)

palegray.net notes that on this day in 1964, the first BASIC program was run. From the Wired article:"Mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz had been trying to make computing more accessible to their undergraduate students. One problem was that available computing languages like Fortran and Algol were so complex that you really had to be a professional to use them. BASIC is still alive and well these days, from Microsoft's VB.net to cross-platform variants like REALbasic. For the old-school among us, there's always Joshua Bell's Apple II BASIC emulator implemented in Javascript."

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist takes a look at the evidence-base behind the science and technology in the new blockbuster Iron Man, and finds it is pretty solid. From exoskeletons to real-time translation there are at the very least proof-of-concept demonstrations of pretty much all the glitzy tech the hero Tony Stark uses."

An anonymous reader writes "gNewSense DeltaH (2.0), a second major release of a GNU/Linux distribution with focus on freedom, has just been released. It is based on Ubuntu 8.04 which was released less than week ago. gNewSense is one of the few GNU/Linux distributions listed as free by the GNU Project."