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4G iPhone Misplacer Invited To Germany For Beer 164

eldavojohn writes "You may recall the hapless engineer who left a fairly sensitive iPhone at a bar recently. Well, in a PR stunt, Lufthansa has invited him to visit Germany on their dime after citing his latest Facebook status, 'I underestimated how good German beer is' as well as his obvious passion for German beer and culture. It's not clear if Gray Powell has decided to 'pick up where he last left off' (as the letter puts it). I know what my decision would be."
Software

Optical Character Recognition Still Struggling With Handwriting 150

Ian Lamont recently asked Google if they planned to extend their transcription of books and other printed media to include public records, many of which were handwritten before word processors became ubiquitous. Google wouldn't talk about any potential plans, but Lamont found out a bit more about the limits of optical character recognition in the process: "Even though some CAPTCHA schemes have been cracked in the past year, a far more difficult challenge lies in using software to recognize handwritten text. Optical character recognition has been used for years to convert printed documents into text data, but the enormous variation in handwriting styles has thwarted large-scale OCR imports of handwritten public documents and historical records. Ancestry.com took a surprising approach to digitizing and converting all publicly released US census records from 1790 to 1930: It contracted the job to Chinese firms whose staff manually transcribed the names and other information. The Chinese staff are specially trained to read the cursive and other handwriting styles from digitized paper records and microfilm. The task is ongoing with other handwritten records, at a cost of approximately $10 million per year, the company's CEO says."
Media

Motley Crue Single Does Better On Rock Band 127

Erik J writes "Remember about six weeks ago when Motley Crue and Rock Band partnered to release a new single premiering first in the game before anywhere else? Come to find out their song 'Saints of Los Angeles' was downloaded over 47,000 times on the Xbox version alone, beating out digital services iTunes and Amazon, which were tapped only 10,000 times for the single."

Comment Come out again?! (Score 5, Interesting) 384

I was under the impression that due to the relativistic effects, stuff (photons, matter, information, whatever) wasn't so much destroyed by a black hole as indefinitely delayed, owing to the massive bending of space-time by the singularity. Or do they mean by "eventually" what I mean: it might eventually come out, but the time it takes approaches infinity.
Mozilla

Mozilla Inks Deal With Chinese Search Giant 131

nm writes "The Mozilla Corporation's subsidiary in China has signed a deal with Chinese search engine giant Baidu. Baidu is already included as an option in Firefox's Chinese localization, but this deal formalizes the relationship between Mozilla and and the search company. Mozilla has established several other initiatives in China to help increase Firefox adoption, particularly in universities. The article notes that Firefox has seen limited uptake in China; the browser Maxthon is the second most popular after Internet Explorer. Maxthon is thought to have as much as 30 percent of the Chinese browser market."

French National Assembly Embraces Open Source 88

eldavojohn writes "The French National Assembly is in the news as they have recently switched to Linux, OpenOffice.org & open source software at the request of several deputy members. Bernard Carayon wrote it it into the proposal entitled 'On Equal Terms' [French PDF]. From the article, 'IT staff at the National Assembly have almost six months to prepare the switch to open source.' The same document urged France to adopt ODF as a standard. Hopefully things go more smoothly for them than the Birmingham library effort."

Workplace Romance A No-No at Gates Foundation 70

theodp writes "The past week has brought NY Times coverage of the workplace romance of Gates Foundation co-chairs Bill and Melinda Gates, as well as Newsweek coverage of the workplace romance of Gates Foundation CEO Patty Stonesifer and her subordinate, Slate Editor-in-Chief Michael Kinsley. So the Foundation's Conflict of Interest Policy comes off as just a tad hypocritical: 'Additionally, certain types of relationships between co-workers may create impermissible conflicts of interest. For example, a romantic relationship in the workplace may raise perceptions of bias and favoritism.'"

The Treo 700p Confirmed 107

Tam Hanna writes "People have been rumoring about the Treo 700p for quite some time, Now, HandMark has "officially" confirmed the Treo 700p's existance on their home page. While developers have had access to the machine for quite some time; this is the first "real" sighting""

Pen-Based PDA Market on Death Bed 281

An anonymous reader writes "The traditional pen-based PDA market is destined to evaporate within the next four years, according to HP, and it will be focusing its handheld efforts on converged smart phone devices, such as its latest BlackBerry rivals unveiled this week -- the iPAQ rw6800 and the iPAQ hw6900." From the article: "This won't come as a surprise to many, as HP hasn't given its traditional pen-based product line a refresh since the launch of the iPAQ hx4700 towards the middle of 2004. It released the iPAQ rx1950 in September of last year, but this was very much an entry-level product and made few waves among the high-end, tech-savvy consumers that dominate the PDA segment."
User Journal

Journal Journal: I'm a man 15

It's time to tell the truth. I am a 55 year-old man. My name is Andy Kaufman, and I live in New York City.

I am sincerely sorry to everyone for all my lies.

--Andy

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