Comment But (Score 1, Funny) 50
But I don't use hantavirus on my PC.
Comment Gimmick (Score 5, Interesting) 353
From personally using/selling this computer for about a month, I can say it is nothing more than a gimmick. It's nothing more than a glorified tablet with a glossy screen. If HP were serious about trying to revolutionize an industry, chances are, they'd have to partner with Apple to use their patents. As it is now, the screen is uncomfortable, buggy, and horrifically unprecise. Plus, the computer itself is nothing special, being built on the same platform as their DV5 series of laptops. The processor is just a Core2 Duo T5750 which barely clocks at 2.0ghz. They try to make up for the mediocre processor with 4gb of 333mhz DDR2, and fail. The screen has no multi-touch capability, so using an on-screen keyboard is a pain because response time shows as much latency as someone trying to play WoW on a 28.8kbps dial-up connection.
HP will never turn novelty into a revolution. These companies do nothing more than market the norm with a little more glitz, and unfortunately, the age of the keyboard and mouse is not yet over.
Give me a capacitive multi-touch screen with haptic feedback that runs linux with Enlightenment or one of the other eyecandy desktop environments on a low profile desktop form factor, then we'll see if touch screens are the way of the future.
Archive.org Sued By Colorado Woman 797
An anonymous reader writes "The Internet Archive is being sued by a Colorado woman for spidering her site. Suzanne Shell posted a notice on her site saying she wasn't allowing it to be crawled. When it was, she sued for civil theft, breach of contract, and violations of the Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations act and the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act. A court ruling last month granted the Internet Archive's motion to dismiss the charges, except for the breach of contract claim. If Shell prevails on that count, sites like Google will have to get online publishers to 'opt in' before they can be crawled, radically changing the nature of Web search."
Submission + - A Lesson in Security:The Student vs Hacker Rematch
monkeyboy44 writes: After last years entertaining hacker vs. student showdown, InformIT.com once again covered the annual Mid-Atlantic Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition where college students are put to the test. During the three day event, small teams from eight of the areas colleges are handed insecure networks that they have to lockdown and keep running — all while a team of hackers attempt to gain access any way they can. To keep it interesting, the teams also had to perform various tasks, such as program web applications, install IDS systems and more — and if hacked, the US Secret Service was on hand to determine if their was enough data to start an investigation. Once again, the hackers dominated — but not without a few surprises.
Nanotechnology Reveals Hidden Fingerprints 26
valiko75 writes "Hidden fingerprints can now be revealed quickly and reliably thanks to two developments in nanotechnology.
The thing is that they have invented an easier way to reveal hidden fingerprints, but the explanation is rather vague. The main point is that the experiments are not very stable at the moment, but with its development this technology will probably help in discovering many criminal mysteries."
Journal Journal: SCO says GNU doesn't have a license
I was browsing SCO's website trying to figure out development tool options for SCO OpenServer 5.0.6 (I know, I know) and stumbled across this.
It describes one of the three options for OpenServer 5.0.7 as:
Caves on Mars? 99
RockDoctor writes "The BBC is reporting that the photo-surveying of Mars has revealed seven suspected cave entrances in the Arsia Mons volcanic area.
This has been hinted at before — long sinuous channels in the same region have been interpreted as collapsed 'lava tube' caves — but the scale of the suggested entrances (sheer drops of 80 to 130m from the surrounding surface) makes my troglodytic hands twitch for my abseiling gear."
Opera's Slashdot Easter Egg and Speed Dial 157
Thelomen writes "Opera Browser contains an Easter egg that is not widely known, recently reported over at OperaWatch.com: type /. in the address bar and you are taken directly to slashdot.org. Other recent news from Opera is their new Speed Dial feature, present in the most recent build from Desktop Team. At first glance Speed Dial just looks like 9 bookmarks you can open with CTRL+1 to CTRL+9. However, the pages on the Speed Dial are shown in thumbnail and are automatically pre-fetched in background — a useful thing if you have some heavy pages among your top bookmarks."
Submission + - Making Sense out of Census Data with Google Earth
mikemuch writes: "Irman Haque has developed a mashup of Google Earth with data from the U.S. Census Bureau, called gCensus. The app uses the XML format known as KML (Keyhole Markup Language), which can create shapes and colors on the maps displayed by GE. Haque had to build custom code libraries (which he's made available as open source) that could generate KML for the project. He also had to extract the relevant data from the highly counter-intuitive Census Bureau files and store them in a database that could handle geographic data. gCensus lets you do stuff like create colorful overlays on maps showing population ages, race, and family size distributions."
Googlebot and Document.Write 180
With JavaScript/AJAX being used to place dynamic content in pages, I was wondering how Google indexed web page content that was placed in a page using the JavaScript "document.write" method. I created a page with six unique words in it. Two were in the plain HTML; two were in a script within the page document; and two were in a script that was externally sourced from a different server. The page appeared in the Google index late last night and I just wrote up the results.
Feed The Hard Drive as Eye Candy (nytimes.com)
Once relegated to a back shelf in the electronics store, external units will soon don brushed aluminum cases, decorator colors and glowing lights.
Feed Palm Responds to the iPhone (nytimes.com)
The maker of hand-held computers has hired a top software designer to respond to the challenge posed by Apple’s new iPhone.
Why Dell Won't Offer Linux On Its PCs 628
derrida sends us to an article in the Guardian by Jack Schofield explaining why he believes Dell won't offer Linux on its PCs. In the end he suggests that those lobbying Dell for such a solution go out and put together a company and offer one themselves. Quoting: "The most obvious [problem] is deciding which version of Linux to offer. There are more than 100 distros, and everybody seems to want a different one — or the same one with a different desktop, or whatever. It costs Dell a small fortune to offer an operating system... so the lack of a standard is a real killer. The less obvious problem is the very high cost of Linux support, especially when selling cheap PCs to naive users who don't RTFM... and wouldn't understand a Linux manual if they tried. And there's so much of it! Saying 'Linux is just a kernel, so that's all we support' isn't going to work, but where in the great sprawling heap of GNU/Linux code do you draw the line?"
Submission + - NASA's Mars life-detector
Roland Piquepaille writes: "With the financial help of NASA, American and European researchers have developed a new sensor to check for life on Mars. It also should be able to determine if traces of life's molecular building blocks have been produced by anything alive. The device has already been tested in the Atacama Desert in Chile. And it should be part of the science payload for the ExoMars rover planned for launch in 2013.
Read more for additional details and a picture of the new NASA's Mars life-detector."
Debian Package of the Day 58
A user writes "The Debian project has started a new webpage: the 'Debian package of the day.' It does what it says — every day another package from the Debian repository is posted with an elaborate description and some nice screenshots. As Debian (and all the other distributions as well) contains way too many packages for it to be feasible to inspect all of them yourself, this is then a nice way of learning about all kinds interesting software packages."
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The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination -- but the combination is locked up in the safe. -- Peter DeVries
