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Australian Student Balloon Rises 100,000 Feet, With a Digital Camera 174

Posted by timothy from the shame-about-the-iso-setting dept.
hype7 writes "An Australian student at Deakin University had a fascinating idea for a final project — to send a balloon up 100,000ft (~30,000 metres) into the stratosphere with a digital camera attached. The university was supportive, and the project took shape. Although there were some serious hitches along the way, the project was successful, and he managed to retrieve the balloon — with the pictures. What's really amazing is that the total cost was so low; the most expensive part was buying the helium gas for approximately AUD$250 (~USD$200)."
The Courts

Toyota Claims Woman "Opted In" To Faux Email Stalking 667

Posted by timothy from the give-marketing-new-prescriptions dept.
An anonymous reader writes "ABC News is reporting that a California woman is suing Toyota for $10 million for sending her email that appeared to be from a criminal stalker. The woman claims the emails terrified her to the point that she suffered sleeplessness, poor work performance, etc. Toyota says the ruse was part of a marketing campaign for the Toyota Matrix. A Toyota spokesman says they are not liable for the woman's distress, because 'The person who made this claim specifically opted in, granting her permission to receive campaign emails and other communications from Toyota.'"
Censorship

China Strangles Tor Ahead of National Day 297

Posted by timothy from the not-so-much-into-liberty-y'see dept.
TechReviewAl writes "Technology Review reports that the Chinese government has for the first time targeted the Tor anonymity network. In the run-up to China's National Day celebrations, the government started targeting the sites used to distribute Tor addresses and the number of users inside China dropped from tens of thousands to near zero. The move is part of a broader trend that involves governments launching censorship crackdowns around key dates. The good news is that many Tor users quickly found a way around the attack, distributing 'bridge' addresses via IM and Twitter."
Data Storage

MS Says All Sidekick Data Recovered, But Damage Done 279

Posted by timothy from the small-favors dept.
nandemoari writes "T-Mobile is taking a huge financial hit in the fallout over the Sidekick data loss. But Microsoft, which bears at least part of the responsibility for the mistake, is paying the price with its reputation. As reported earlier this week, the phone network had to admit that some users' data had been permanently lost due to a problem with a server run by Microsoft-owned company Danger. The handset works by storing data such as contacts and appointments on a remote computer rather than on the phone itself. BBC news reports today that Microsoft has in fact recovered all data, but a minority are still affected (out of 1 million subscribers). Amidst this, Microsoft appears not to have suffered any financial damage. However, it seems certain that its relationship with T-Mobile will have taken a major knock. The software giant is also the target of some very bad publicity as critics question how on earth it failed to put in place adequate back-ups of the data. That could seriously damage the potential success of the firm's other 'cloud computing' plans, such as web-only editions of Office."
Quake

Scientists Use Quake 2 To Study the Brains of Mice 185

Posted by Soulskill from the god-help-us-if-they-learn-how-to-rocket-jump dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In this week's issue of Nature, scientists from Princeton University trained mice to navigate around a virtual environment using a setup that resembles a combination of a giant trackball and a mini-iMax theater displaying a virtual world rendered using a modified version of the Quake 2 open source game engine. (Here's the academic paper, subscription required.) They hold the mouse's head still atop a giant trackball, which the mouse turns by running. The scientists use the rotations to move the mouse around in the virtual environment, and when he reaches certain places, he gets a reward. Because they are able to hold the head still, they can stick microscopic glass electrodes into individual neurons in the hippocampus of this mouse as it 'navigates.' They find the neural activity that resembles activity during real life navigation, and learned new things about the inputs and computations that are going on inside these neurons, which weren't known before. No word as of yet whether the scientists plan on giving the mice control of the gun. Wonder whether John Carmack ever envisioned this when he opened up the Quake code?"

Comment Re:What's a CRM? (Score 1) 100

by Sathias (#17567270) Attached to: Microsoft Offers Peek At Next-Gen CRM
At the very base level it is a web-based database of Contacts. It stores various information about these contacts, as well as the Account they belong to.

On top of this there are several different modules that can be used with these contacts. The Sales module allows the user to store and create activities, eg emails can be sent within CRM and can then have the replies to that email automatically tracked in the database. Appointments can be set up which automatically synchronise with Outlook. Various opportunities and leads can also be stored, classified, shared between teams, and reallocated to other members of the organisation.

Then there is the Service module which can track and organise various resources of the company, organise knowledge base articles, and manage service calls.

Then there is a marketing module which can be used to organise marketing campaigns, either quick campaigns like sending out a newsletter to a group of the client base, all the way up to organising major events with trackable invitations, which also ties into the resouce management of the Service module.

The major strengths of the platform is its customisability and its interoperability with the rest of office. New tables can be created by someone with a decent knowledge of the product (with no coding) and it can be customised further through the SDK inside VS.NET.

I have been working with MSCRM since 1.2 came out (for a MS partner company) doing installations and customisations and the product has matured a lot since then. CRM 1.2 was quite workable but some parts were a dog's breakfast, particularily the outlook client. CRM 3.0 has seen the outlook client improve by miles (you can run it either in outlook with off-line synchronisation capabilities or through the browser client) but still the platform had some annoying bugs. The latest update rollup has fixed most of these issues making it quite a robust package.

Well, since you asked ;)

Elder Scrolls Oblivion Gold 179

Posted by Zonk from the squeee dept.
Gamespot has word that Bethesda's upcoming release Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has gone gold. It is due out on the 20th. They also have a rundown on some gameplay. From the article: "In true Elder Scrolls fashion, you start Oblivion rotting in a jail cell. Don't worry--Oblivion plunges you into the action and story faster than any Elder Scrolls game to date. We'll get into some minor spoilers here, though many of the following facts have already been revealed publicly. Once again you'll play as a character burdened by destiny to save the world, this time from a demonic invasion from the hellish plane known as Oblivion. Before you know it, you'll go from the dungeon cell to exploring a dank underground, killing rats and assassins while also getting some welcome introductory exposition from Emperor Uriel Septim VII, voiced by Patrick Stewart himself." I know I don't normally mention gold releases, but I'm really looking forward to this one. You know a guy is committed when he buys new RAM for a game.

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