A survey of Oracle Users Group attendees finds two-thirds have never applied one of Oracle's quarterly Critical Patch Updates. Oracle, meanwhile, prepares to release its next quarterly CPU on Tuesday.

This week's patent applications include a pen that really puts your feelings on the page, an artificial self-assembling fly's eye, and a way of tracking eye movements using MRI scans

One of the roadblocks for electric motor technology is that as operating temperatures go up, the magnets in the motors get weaker, resulting in a drop in power. Scientists have now developed a new magnetic alloy that maintains its strong magnetic properties even at high operating temperatures approaching 400 degrees F.

Baby boomers know all too well that "ringing in the ears" often comes with aging and hearing loss. Tinnitus can be the buzz that somatosensory neurons from the head and neck, like too many phone callers, create when they overcompensate for lost auditory signals from the ear, an animal study suggests. This nimble response to hearing loss, in which neurons adapt to changed conditions, is an example of the brain's "plasticity." Results in animals suggest that acupuncture and trigger point therapy may be effective treatments for people plagued by tinnitus.

Researchers have found that a key protein in the body's dendritic cells can stop the virus that causes AIDS from "budding" -- part of the virus' life cycle that is crucial to its ability to replicate and infect other cells.

For the first time astronomers are able to see indirect evidence of dark matter and how this invisible force impacts on the crowded and violent lives of galaxies. They have produced the highest resolution map of dark matter ever captured. Dark matter is an invisible form of matter that accounts for most of the Universe's mass.

Researchers have found new clues to why some people overeat and gain weight while others don't. Examining how the human brain responds to "satiety" messages delivered when the stomach is in various stages of fullness, the scientists have identified brain circuits that motivate the desire to overeat. Treatments that target these circuits may prove useful in controlling chronic overeating.

Seeking to sell chip designs to Chinese military

A US federal grand jury has charged two computer engineers with stealing microchip designs to sell to the Chinese military.

The One Laptop Per Child project has been struggling to meet the lofty expectations it set for itself a couple of years ago. India decided not to participate in the program last year, and Nigeria and Brazil have apparently backed out of the program as well. A year ago they were expecting orders of five to ten million laptops; now they're struggling to reach 3 million orders. They're trying to jump-start things by offering Westerners a deal: buy a laptop for a third-world child and get one for your own use. It's a smart idea, and it's a shame they didn't try this strategy from the outset. The OLPC project is essentially a tech startup (albeit a non-profit one) and they might find more success if they acted more like other tech startups: first get the product in the hands of some real customers so you can get some real-world feedback. Only after you've learned how the product performs in the real world do you start worrying about producing them in volume. For example, there are plenty of schools here in the United States that might be interested in a $200 laptop. Few American kids experience the level of poverty experienced in Nigeria, but there are certainly kids here who don't have a computer at home. If they'd started out by selling a few thousand laptops to districts—or even individual schools—here in the United States, they could have demonstrated the product's usefulness in real classrooms and gotten feedback about how the product could be improved.

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

A math problem in Excel 2007 crops up when presenting data, not when processing it, Microsoft says.

The US GPS system set its 'Selective Availability' levels to zero back in May 2000, and now the DoD is permanently removing the feature that allows the US to degrade GPS signal accuracy at will. While this probably saves US taxpayers a few pennies by not having to include some unnecessary signal processing parts in new GPS satellites, the decision also seems to mark a turning point in the availability of wireless location data. With more and more location based services cropping up that don't actually rely on GPS signals, such as the location-aware mobile search from Sprint and Microsoft which triangulates a caller's position between cell towers, the access to accurate location data is becoming commonplace. In fact, as more terrestrial wireless signals broadcast potentially-useful location data everywhere, the idea of using far away satellites to tell us where we are seems like an archaic concept -- and projects like Galileo begin to sound even more redundant. The adoption of GPS (or location-aware) devices reduces the uncertainty in several aspects of our lives -- giving users the sense that they *can't* get lost. So interestingly, the DoD's decision to switch from possibly hiding location information in order to keep Americans safer -- now to accepting that accurate position data is a critical component of our economy's future efficiency -- indicates a tacit admission that the open accessibility of information really does make us more secure.

Filed under: Networking

At around 7 p.m. on Monday, ISPs around the country experienced a period of slowdown, which seemed inexplicable until workers discovered that fiber optic lines in Cleveland, Ohio -- reportedly owned by a company called Level 3 Communications -- had been the target of sabotage... by gunfire. Anders Olausson, a TeliaSonera AB spokesman, said that the company had lost the northern leg of its network, and when technicians pulled up the lines to inspect, it was apparent that, "Somebody had been shooting with a gun or a shotgun into the cable." The damage was spread out over nearly two-thirds of a mile along the lines, and the effect was felt across multiple networks. Cogent Communications warned customers that they would be experiencing outages, and blamed the disruptions on "cut lines," and Keynote's Internet Pulse Report showed that the provider was experiencing significant latency. As of now, the saboteurs remain anonymous and their motives unknown, but undoubtedly scores of WoW players wait in fear of their next attack.

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