A European-funded project has been launched to store electricity created from wind in refrigerated warehouses used to store food. As the production of wind energy is variable every day, it cannot easily be accommodated on the electrical grid. So the Night Wind
project wants to store wind energy produced at night in refrigerated warehouses and to release this energy during daytime peak hours. The first tests will be done in the Netherlands this year. And as the cold stores exist already, practically no extra cost should be incurred to store as much as 50,000 megawatt-hours of energy
Google quietly added a small feature to Gmail this week called Mail Fetcher. When that feature launched, Gmail became perfect. Mail Fetcher allows users to access non-Gmail email accounts from within the Gmail interface. If you have a Yahoo email account, and a work email account, etc., you can simply access that email from within Gmail, using POP settings. Gmail will now work in a very similar way as Outlook does on the PC desktop
While the US continues to hash out concerns over the Real ID Act, which aims to create a national ID by standardising state driver’s licenses, China has already implemented a massive online ID database, which they say will help prevent fraud. Anyone can now send a text message or visit the country’s population information centre’s web site, to check if the name and the ID number of a person’s identity card match. If they do match the ID card-holder’s picture also appears, said the Ministry, adding that no other information is available to ensure a citizen’s privacy is protected. Completed at the end of 2006, China’s population information database, the world’s largest, contains personal information on 1.3 billion citizens. Giving public accessing to the database is also designed to correct mistakes if an individual discovers that their name, number and picture don’t match — via Slashdot
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defence and the Army that seeks more information on a military web censorship unit called the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell (AWRAC) after the DOD failed to answer the EFF’s Freedom of Information Act request in an expedited fashion. AWRAC’s existence was revealed last October in an Army News Service piece that described the unit. The AWRAC team monitors hundreds of thousands of web sites each month and contacts webmasters and bloggers about any security concerns
Call them old fashioned, but the founding members of The Who don’t think the Internet is the future of rock, are unhappy about radio’s narrow musical focus, and convinced live music is what it is all about
Everybody needs a Violet for opening jars.
Yahoo this week debuted a new service called Pipes that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line. Reactions from a number of internet-thinkers are very positive. Tim O’Reilly has an extensive post about why he likes Pipes, and he sees it as a manifestation of ideas that have been circulating for some time now — via Boing Boing
Reports are surfacing that EMI is in negotiations with some of the leading music stores to offer a substantial portion of its music catalogue without DRM, with an announcement due as early as today. Under one scenario, music stores like Napster, Real Rhapsody, and others would fork over sizable advance payments in exchange for the right to sell music as unprotected MP3s. Another industry source reports that EMI was also discussing the possibility of selling MP3s on MySpace
Upstart search engine Powerset has just secured an exclusive license for natural language processing technology from Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. It’s a move that some are claiming will allow the small firm to someday challenge Google
A computer that carries out calculations using tiny bubbles instead of electricity has been developed by US researchers. The microfluidic
computer performs calculation by squeezing bubbles through tiny channels etched into a chip. It can perform all of the logical operations needed to make a general-purpose computer. In practise, such a computer would be much bigger than a PC and about a thousand times slower. Nevertheless, the bubble-based computer could lead to improved microfluidic technology for chemical analysis
Google’s e-mail service is almost ready to accept all comers, nearly three years after the online search leader shook up the Internet by offering users an unprecedented amount of free storage and displaying ads based on the content of the correspondence. Effective Wednesday, the Mountain View-based company removed the invitation-only restrictions on its Gmail service in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Brazil. Google opened up the service last year in several other parts of the world, including Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Russia and Egypt. Invitations to open a Gmail account are still required in North America, Asia and most parts of the South America, but Google spokeswoman Courtney Hohne said those restrictions will be lifted very soon
. Even then, Gmail will retain a beta
tag to signify the company still considers the service to be in a testing phase
A pulse of light can be stopped, transported, and restarted again using a cloud of super-cold atoms, US researchers have shown. The technique could ultimately be used for advanced computing devices or gravity detectors. The experiments demonstrate physicists’ increasing ability to manipulate light. Being able to control it in this way could be useful for optical or quantum computers — via Warren Ellis
The DNS Root Servers were attacked overnight. It looks like the F, I, and M servers felt the attack and recovered, whereas G (US Department of Defence) and L (ICANN) did less well
A new assessment from Deloitte & Touche predicts that global traffic will exceed the Internet’s capacity as soon as this year. Why? The rapid growth in the number of global Internet users, combined with the rise of online video services and the lack of investment in new infrastructure
If you’re worried about what your neighbours think of you why not follow Malaysia’s lead and ban the journalists who are intent on asking those tricky questions
The New Media division will disappear under a wide-ranging restructure announced by ABC managing director Mark Scott today. Mr Scott says the changes will enable the ABC to maintain its leadership in the digital media world. The changes to be introduced in coming weeks in consultation with staff includes pursuing the potential for new revenue streams afforded by digital technology, including video-on-demand, the digitisation of the ABC archive and partnerships to disseminate ABC content more widely
Steve Jobs has written an essay on the Apple site about DRM, iTunes and the iPod. Perhaps it was prompted by the uncomfortable pressure the EU has been putting on Apple to open up the iPod. Jobs places the blame for the existence and continuing reliance on DRM squarely on the music companies. Quoting: Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly
— via Slashdot
To help make kids aware of alternatives to proprietary software the Ile-de-France, the political district of greater Paris, will give 175,000 school children and apprentices USB keys loaded with open-source software. With a word-processing program, audio and video playback capabilities, an email client and an IM client, these are essentially computers on a stick. The council touts this as representing for students a tool of freedom and mobility between their school, cybercafes and their home or friends’ PCs
Reintroducing wild wolves to the Scottish Highlands would help the local ecosystem, a study suggests. Wolves, which were hunted to extinction in Scotland in the late 1700s, would help control the numbers of red deer, the team from the UK and Norway said. This would aid the re-establishment of plants and birds — currently hampered by the deer population, they write in Proceedings of the Royal Society B
Kodak’s revolutionary new ink can quickly create prints with an archival life of 100 years, versus standard inkjet photos that go the way of toilet paper after 15. And the ink costs half the price
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