The popularity of low-cost PCs around the world is driving explosive growth
for SSDs (small capacity solid state drives), Samsung said Wednesday as it announced three new models of the device. The market for low-density SSDs will grow by 57 percent per year annually until 2011, due mainly to brisk demand for low-cost PCs, Samsung said
Google is considering allowing users of its search engine to tinker with query results by re-ranking them and commenting on them. The company has already run public tests on its search-results pages that contain up and down arrows next to listed links, as well as buttons that allow users to append comments to results
An investigation is under way into how a computer containing bank customers’ personal data was sold on eBay
In a crowded laboratory painted in gray and cooled like a cave, half a dozen specialists embarked this week on an historic undertaking: digitally photographing every one of the thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aim of making the entire file — among the most sought-after and examined documents on earth — available to all on the Internet
iPrimus will help its customers avoid nasty excess usage fees by shaping its mobile broadband plans once the limit is reached. Primus claims to be the first telco in Australia to offer shaping on 3G broadband, which it says will offer dialup speeds once the limit is reached. However, Virgin Mobile also offers a shaped service, though they only have a single 5GB plan
Google dropped Bluetooth and the GTalkService instant messaging APIs (application program interfaces) from the set of tools for the first version of the mobile phone OS, Android 1.0, according to the Android Developers Blog. But the company made clear that handsets using the Android OS will work with other Bluetooth devices such as headsets, for example
Steve Knightley is one half of Show of Hands
, an award-winning acoustic and folk duo from the UK. Steve says he is thankful to the people that pirate the band’s music and go out of their way to promote the band. In fact, he says the band utterly depends on them
Privacy advocates think the next version of Internet Explorer, the program that connects most of us to the Web, is a step in the right direction. Advertisers? Well, they’re not so sure. The advertising industry is bracing for trouble from the next version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, details of which were announced today, because it will offer a feature that blocks some ads and other content from third-parties that shows up on Web pages
Google’s calculator has some trouble handling math with some large numbers, an issue that’s not unheard of in computing circles but that might not sit well at a supremely nerdy company that’s named after a humongous number
Australians living in metropolitan areas may be logging on to the internet using the Government’s $4.7 billion national broadband network as early as next April, although regional users will not be so lucky
Internode has begun selling naked DSL on its own DSLAMs, including to customers living far away from their exchange
Kevin Kelly has an interesting post about an archive designed with an estimated lifespan of 2,000 -10,000 years to serve future generations as a modern Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta disk contains analog human-readable
scans of scripts, text, and diagrams using nickel deposited on an etched silicon disk and includes 15,000 microetched pages of language documentation in 1,500 different languages, including versions of Genesis 1-3, a universal list of the words common for each language, and pronunciation guides. Produced by the Long Now Foundation, the plan is to replicate the disk promiscuously and distribute them around the world in nondescript locations so at least one will survive their 2,000-year lifespan. This is one of the most fascinating objects on earth,
says Oliver Wilke. If we found one of these things 2,000 years ago, with all the languages of the time, it would be among our most priceless artifacts. I feel a high responsibility for preserving it for future generations
— Slashdot
A judge in New Zealand has banned the press from reporting online the names of two men accused of murder. The names of the men will be allowed to be reported in print as well as through Television and Radio broadcast. It would seem he has taken this step to prevent someone googling
these peoples names in the future and finding them linked to a crime if found innocent — Slashdot
A UK-built solar-powered plane has set an unofficial world endurance record for a flight by an unmanned aircraft. The Zephyr-6, as it is known, stayed aloft for more than three days, running through the night on batteries it had recharged in sunlight. The flight was a demonstration for the US military, which is looking for new types of technology to support its troops on the ground. Craft like Zephyr might make ideal platforms for reconnaissance
An international criminal gang has pulled off one of the most audacious cyber-crimes ever and stolen the identities of an estimated eight million people in a hacking raid that could ultimately net more than £2.8billion in illegal funds. A Sunday Herald investigation has discovered that late on Thursday night, a previously unknown Indian hacker successfully breached the IT defences of the Best Western Hotel group’s online booking system and sold details of how to access it through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia. It is a move that has been dubbed the greatest cyber-heist in world history. The attack scooped up the personal details of every single customer that has booked into one of Best Western’s 1312 continental hotels since 2007
The National Centre for State Courts, a nonprofit organisation, has sent file-sharing propaganda [PDF] to thousands of students. The supposedly educational
materials, presented in the form of a comic strip, are intended to frighten students with gross exaggerations of the legal consequences of sharing music online (lose your scholarship to college, go to jail for two years, and more) — via Slashdot
Middle-class families in Mexico are having tiny transmitters implanted under their skin so that satellites can track them if they are kidnapped. Sales of the device have jumped by 13 per cent this year after kidnappings surged by almost 40 per cent in the country between 2004 and 2007
The winner of several Eureka Science Awards in Australia is a crafty chick who devised a way to create solar cells cheaply using a pizza oven, nail polish and an inkjet printer. This was developed to address the high cost of cells and in particular for the world’s poorest regions. She wanted to give the ~2 billion people around the world who don’t have electricity the gift of light and cheap energy. This could have profound (and a good profound) implications for education and health in those in the poorest regions in the world. And it all started with her parents giving her a solar energy kit when she was 10
Even as more and more information goes digital, there is currently no sure-fire way to ensure that such data will be accessible in the future. But today, scientists are working on a solution. Pergamum uses individual building blocks consisting of a hard drive, a small, low-power processor similar to the kind used in an iPod, a flash memory card, and an Ethernet port. These units, called tomes
, are connected using relatively inexpensive Ethernet switches. Each tome is like a minicomputer, but with very low power demands
Acknowledging that most online shoppers cannot be bothered with auctions, eBay announced changes to its fee structure Wednesday that emphasised fixed prices over bidding. The move is intended to help eBay compete more effectively with Amazon.com and other big online retailers
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