The DVD Forum, which oversees the DVD format, approved a blue laser-based format, to be called HD-DVD. Unlike Blu-ray, the Toshiba/NEC system retains backwards compatibility with today’s DVD specification. While Sony and Toppan Printing have been working for about a year on printing data onto Blu-ray discs made mostly of paper. The companies are aiming to produce lower-cost discs and expand the use of the technology. The 25GB discs will be able to store more than two hours of high-definition video
He can’t quite make money grow from trees, but Christopher Anderson, an environmental geologist from Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, has devised a way to harvest gold from plants. The idea: Use common crops to soak up contaminants in soil from gold-mining sites and return the areas to productive agriculture. The gold harvested from the process pays for the cleanup — with money left over for training in sustainable agriculture
Film subtitles that can be tailored to suit small sections of an audience could go on general release at the end of 2004
Dotcom entrepreneur Karl Suleman will spend at least 12 months behind bars after NSW District Court Judge Peter Berman sentenced him to 21 months in jail for fraud
German police have detained a man and confiscated an axe he was throwing for his dog to retrieve. Passers-by spotted the barefoot 36-year-old enjoying his dangerous game of go fetch
in a park and alerted police
A month ago, a trial version of a little-known Linux application called CoLinux was released that is the first working free and open source method for optimally running Linux on Microsoft Windows natively. It’s the work of a 21-year-old Israeli computer science student and some Japanese open source programmers; in Israel, analysts are already saying it could help transform the software world
The Onion‘s deadpan satirical news-stories, much-forwarded and chuckled over, have frequently been reported as fact by various news agencies, law-enforcement departments, and pressure groups
A University of Illinois research team is working on turning pig manure into a form of crude oil that could be refined to heat homes or generate electricity. Years of research and fine-tuning lie ahead before the idea could be commercially viable, but results so far indicate there might be big benefits for farmers and consumers
A very nice example of public art.
Several beautiful examples of trompe l’oeil paintjobs on streetside utility boxes, either traffic light switching boxes or telephone punch-down racks.
No idea where they come from, although the text on the books suggests Israel.
3M has shipped tranparent gaffer tape. Kevin Kelly‘s been playing with it and he says it holds up as good as the silvery stuff, but strong uptake would pretty much kill the old Star Wars joke:
Duct tape is like The Force: It has a dark side and a light side and it holds the Universe together.
- Grab the nearest book
- Open the book to page 23
- Find the fifth sentence
- Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions
I have an overflowing bookcase behind me, but the book with the pretty blue cover called to me: No Shitting in the Toilet by Peter Moore. Aptly enough, the fifth complete sentence on page 23 is:
But then I’m an Australian and our dollar’s about as useful as an Albanian lek.
A family garage and most of its contents have been saved in the Victorian town of Sunshine, thanks to the efforts of the family dog. Hudson, a short-haired German pointer, started barking just before 3:00am AEST and alerted his owners to a fire burning in their Hall Street garage
You are engaged in a chat session with some friends and colleagues, when one of them makes a witty remark or imparts a pithy bit of information. You hit CTRL-A and select the conversation, then copy it to a document that you save. Under a little-noticed decision in a New Hampshire Superior Court in late February, these actions may just land you in jail
The National Australia Bank is shedding its tarnished image from such IT disasters as the integrated systems implementation, with the aim of becoming a world-class technology leader by 2007. In the midst of major upheavals at the bank following its $360 million foreign exchange scandal, NAB is working to wipe away past disasters, and experimenting with new technologies that for the first time will involve sharing innovation across the group
E-mail provider Everyone.net says it has a new program to protect e-mail users from one by-product of the spam plague: bounced messages. The firm is announcing an enhanced e-mail protection service called Total Protection 2.0 at the ISPCon conference in Washington, DC this week. The new service includes a technology called Email Fingerprint that can stop bounce storms
, in which e-mail users who have had their e-mail address stolen by spammers or e-mail worms receive a flood of returned e-mail messages
Sun Microsystems has discontinued development of two planned chips as it retrenches in a difficult era for the company. Santa Clara, California-based Sun has stopped work on the UltraSparc V, a server chip that was supposed to come out late next year, and Gemini, a dual-core chip for Web servers
Remember how online music stores were going to route around the music industry? The pigopolists have barely got their feet under the table and already demanding more. The Wall Street Journal reports that the major five labels think that 99 cents per song is too cheap, and are discussing a price hike that would increase the tariff to $1.25 up to $2.99 per song
By the year 2010, file-sharers could be swapping news rather than music, eliminating censorship of any kind. This is the view of the man who helped kickstart the concept of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing, Cambridge University‘s Professor Ross Anderson. In his vision, people around the world would post stories via anonymous P2P services like those used to swap songs. They would cover issues currently ignored by the major news services
Do you want to create your own crater on the moon? Orbital Development is putting a personalised moon crash for sale on eBay. The bid opens with $6 million which will enable the highest bidder to stuff up to 10kg worth of stuff on a space craft and lob it to the moon. The condition of the cargo is not guaranteed as it crashes on the moon at 4000mph
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