The rock act Nine Inch Nails is offering its new album, The Slip
, through its Web site for free. This appears to be the first time a superstar act has distributed an entire album without any opportunity for people to pay for it
Google has taken down the open-source project CoreAVC for Linux due to a DMCA complaint. The CoreAVC codec is a commercial high-definition H.264 DirectShow filter for windows provided by CoreCodec. The CoreAVC for Linux project provided various patches for Linux applications (mplayer, MythTV, xine) to use these DirectShow decoder filters in Linux. The takedown is quite controversial, as the CoreAVC project did not provide any copyrighted material — only the means to use the DirectShow filters in Linux — via Slashdot
Australian credit card customers will soon have the option of signing their name or keying in a personal identification number (PIN) when shopping
The world’s data centers are projected to surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020. Over that time, the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the electricity consumed by fast-expanding data centers will rise fourfold, the study estimates. The greenhouse gas impact of data centers is not yet counted and likely to be very significant
Microsoft is withdrawing its offer for Yahoo after talks between the two companies broke down on Saturday. Microsoft hiked its offer to $33 a share, but Yahoo was holding out for $37 a share. The two sides met face to face again Saturday, but remained far apart
British defence giant BAE Systems is creating a series of tiny electronic spiders, insects and snakes that could become the eyes and ears of soldiers on the battlefield, helping to save thousands of lives. Prototypes could be on the front line by the end of the year, scuttling into potential danger areas such as booby-trapped buildings or enemy hideouts to relay images back to troops safely positioned nearby. Soldiers will carry the robots into combat and use a small tracked vehicle to transport them closer to their targets
Microsoft has withdrawn Vista SP1 from automatic delivery in the wake of news that XP SP3 can cause data corruption in business apps
Amazon.com has filed a lawsuit challenging New York state’s new law forcing online retailers to collect sales tax on shipments to state residents. On Friday, Amazon filed a complaint in the trial-level state Supreme Court in Manhattan objecting to the law, which was approved as part of the $122 billion state budget that Governor David Paterson signed last week. The law is expected to raise about $50 million
Even criminal hackers want to protect their intellectual property, and they’ve come up with a method akin to copyrighting — with an appropriate dash of Internet thuggery thrown in
This week, the world marks an anniversary that has changed the face — and other anatomical regions — of e-mail inboxes everywhere: the first known spam e-mail was sent 30 years ago on Saturday
Computers that boot instantly to the exact place where you left off and mobile devices that don’t need recharging for weeks. These are only some of the possibilities resulting from Hewlett-Packard research that proves the existence of what the company described as the fourth fundamental circuit element in electrical engineering
Yet another NSW Government infrastructure project has bit the dust, with the Minister for Commerce today announcing the promised free wireless broadband network for the Sydney CBD and other major centres would be scrapped
A substantial hunk of IP address space has apparently been taken over by notorious mass e-mailing company Media Breakaway, formerly known as OptInRealBig, via means that are at best questionable. The block in question is 134.17.0.0/16, which has been documented in depth in an independent investigation — via Slashdot
PC giant Dell has turned to Officeworks to help unseat its closest rival Hewlett-Packard in a bitter market share war in Australia. After months trying to woo the the retail gods, Dell has found its match in Officeworks. Officeworks will start selling Dell computers, laptops, printers and flat panel displays next week. The PCs will cost between $999 and $1800
Microsoft likes digital photography enthusiasts as customers, and plans to release a free new utility designed to keep them wedded to Windows. Pro Photo Tools is geared for photography professionals and enthusiasts, and its first notable feature is the ability to geotag photos, or add geographic information showing where the picture was taken. Geotagging is an onerous chore with today’s technology, but camera makers are working to build it into cameras, and it can pay off down the road
MySpace has won a legal decision against so-called spam king
Sanford Wallace after he failed numerous times to turn over documents or attend hearings
Microsoft on Tuesday said it is delaying the release of Windows XP Service Pack 3 because of a newly uncovered glitch. The software maker said there is a compatibility issue
between the XP service pack and Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System, a retail chain management program for small and midsize businesses. Microsoft finalised the code for Windows XP SP3 last week and had planned to make it broadly available starting Tuesday
Cray and Intel announced Monday a multiyear agreement to develop new high-performance supercomputers with future Xeon and other Intel processor technologies. Cray will still use AMD chips
A University of Arizona (UA) team is working with NASA to design self-healing computer systems for spacecraft. The UA engineers are working on hybrid hardware/software systems using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to develop these reconfigurable processing systems. As the lead researcher said, Our objective is to go beyond predicting a fault to using a self-healing system to fix the predicted fault before it occurs
— via Slashdot
The sharp acceleration of speculation in Internet names, a practice known as domain tasting
in which names are registered by the millions and tested for their advertising prospects, is under scrutiny
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