Comment How will this work? (Score 1) 150
How exactly is this supposed to work? What will be the costs, since most books are already cheap?
Submission + - Acacia sues Amazon over Fire (cnet.com)
walterbyrd writes: "A company called Smartphone Technologies filed the suit last Friday in Texas Eastern District Court accusing the Fire tablet of violating four of its patents. Smartphone Technologies is owned by Acacia Research, a firm that buys and licenses patents and is seen by many as a patent troll."
Submission + - Opera ditches browser scrolling for "pages" (pcpro.co.uk)
Barence writes: "Opera has unveiled a new Reader system that ditches scrolling on websites in favour of flippable pages. The Norwegian browser maker is looking to remove the side scroll bar for documents or articles in favour of "pages" of a set-size, similar to an ebook. Text can be reflowed into a column layout, and ads will be moved into the right spot in the text, with different ones displayed depending on the orientation of the device. Pages are flipped with gestures on tablets or with mouse clicks on the desktop. It's an “opportunity to rethink the ads on the web and the user interface”, said Hakon Wium Lie, Opera's CTO."
Submission + - Cloned drug sniffing dogs prove successful in S. K (singularityhub.com)
Rexdude writes: A prize drug sniffing dog at Incheon Airport in S Korea was cloned 4 years ago, and now the clones have proved to be much more successful at becoming sniffer dogs themselves compared to regular dogs. Not as controversial as human cloning, but are we going to see genetic copyrights on prized animal breeds in the future?
Submission + - New USB Specification Promises 100W of Power (thinq.co.uk)
Blacklaw writes: The group behind the USB 3.0 specification has announced a tweak which could lead to impressive new devices, including large-format displays, printers, and even laptops that are powered entirely from a USB port.
Apple Sued Over OS X Quick Boot 196
An anonymous reader writes "With a patent originally owned by LG in tow, a Florida based company called Operating Systems Solutions LLC recently filed suit against Apple claiming that OS X's use of quick booting infringes the aforementioned patent."
The company in question is a bit suspicious — having formed very recently — and so others are speculating it was created for a proxy battle against Apple by LG.
Submission + - Chinese Magical Hard-Drive (jitbit.com)
jamax writes: From TFA: "A Russian friend .... works at a hard-drive repair center in a Russian town, located near the Chinese border. A couple of days ago a customer has brought a broken 500Gb USB-drive that he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price. But the drive was not working: if you, say, save a movie onto the drive, playing the saved movie back resulted in replaying just the last 5 minutes of the film."
Apparently the contents of the external HDD box included: two nuts, glued to the inner surface of the box with a 128MB flash drive wedged between them (image)..
And it was a clever hack too — if ever an attempt was made of writing a file that's too large it got sort of cycled — rewriting itself over and over from the beginning, while leaving the existing files intact. And it reported everything correctly — file sizes and all!
Apparently the contents of the external HDD box included: two nuts, glued to the inner surface of the box with a 128MB flash drive wedged between them (image)..
And it was a clever hack too — if ever an attempt was made of writing a file that's too large it got sort of cycled — rewriting itself over and over from the beginning, while leaving the existing files intact. And it reported everything correctly — file sizes and all!
Comment Re:Overtaken... (Score 2) 500
Most people don't care about open/closed devices. As long as it reads email, has a calendar, contact list and sync support why should they? I'd say Apple is losing ground for not evolving their iOS as fast as Android is.
Comment Re:Feature (Score 0) 49
It's a feature, not a bug...
It's not a bug, it's Microsoft.
Submission + - Sony Plans Serial Keys for PlayStation3 Games (thinq.co.uk)
Stoobalou writes: Rumour has it that Sony is looking to the PC games market to help solve its growing piracy problem on the PlayStation 3 — with the introduction of serial keys to its games.
According to 'a very reliable source' quoted by PS3-Sense, Sony is attempting to address the recent revelation that it failed to properly secure the private signing key for its flagship console — leading to clever tinkerers producing third-party firmware that allows unofficial software and illegitimately downloaded games to run on unmodified hardware — by looking to the PC retail market for solutions.
Unlike the PS3, the PC doesn't have a hardware DRM system built in to it — despite attempts by groups like the Trusted Computing Group, formerly the Trusted Computer Platform Alliance, to introduce such a thing — relying instead on software-based DRM and a surprisingly old-fashioned guarantee of a game's uniqueness: a serial key.
According to 'a very reliable source' quoted by PS3-Sense, Sony is attempting to address the recent revelation that it failed to properly secure the private signing key for its flagship console — leading to clever tinkerers producing third-party firmware that allows unofficial software and illegitimately downloaded games to run on unmodified hardware — by looking to the PC retail market for solutions.
Unlike the PS3, the PC doesn't have a hardware DRM system built in to it — despite attempts by groups like the Trusted Computing Group, formerly the Trusted Computer Platform Alliance, to introduce such a thing — relying instead on software-based DRM and a surprisingly old-fashioned guarantee of a game's uniqueness: a serial key.
Submission + - Google Discontinues On2 Flix Engine Video Encoder (on2.com)
trawg writes: Google have recently discontinued sales of the Flix Engine, the last remnants of the purchase of On2 that they were selling directly to users. On2, developers of the VP8 video codec that formed the basis of their new WebM video format, was bought by Google early in 2010. The Flix Engine was a comprehensive API for Windows and Linux that allowed integration of On2 encoders directly into any software product. While you can still buy some On2 products from another company, it's not clear what effect this will have on Google's ultimate video strategy.
Submission + - Apple Removes jailbreak detection in iOS (softview.co.in)
srimadman writes: Six months after introducing the feature, Apple has disabled its inbuilt jailbreak detection API inside its iOS operating system and removed the feature from iOS.
Hi-Tech Nativity Security 110
To combat vandalism and theft of their holiday displays, many churches and cities are turning to a technological answer. After one of their cows was stolen, St. Marks Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, Ill. installed GPS devices in the figurines of its nativity scene. This year the village of Wellington, Fla. added security cameras to protect their display. From the article: "BrickHouse Security in New York City offered churches and synagogues free GPS and cameras to protect their displays this season. Seventy have signed up so far. About 24 of them are also installing security cameras. In Merrick, N.Y., the Chabad Center for Jewish Life is putting GPS in its 8-foot menorah on display in a park."
Submission + - Japan’s Robot Picks Only the Ripest Strawber (singularityhub.com)
kkleiner writes: The Institute of Agricultural Machinery at Japan’s National Agriculture and Food Research Organization, along with SI Seiko, has developed a robot that can select and harvest strawberries based on their color. Ripened berries are detected using the robot’s stereoscopic cameras, and analyzed to measure how red they appear. When the fruit is ready to come off the vine, the robot quickly locates it in 3D space and cuts it free. From observation to collection, the harvesting process takes about 9 seconds per berry. Creators estimate that it will be able to cut down harvesting time by 40%.
Australian R18 Games Rating Gets Gov't Support 87
dotarray writes "Even with the news last week that an Australian Government study found no conclusive link between video games and violence, it's still a little surprising that the federal Labor government has announced today that they support the move for an adult R18+ rating for video games in that country."
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