Seagate Technology, best known as a maker of magnetic hard drives, plans to make storage components based on flash memory as well. Seagate’s decision is a significant turning point in the religious war in the storage market. The flash versus magnetic debate has been issue number one in the storage world for the past two years
Experts expect an announcement within three to ten years from someone in the now little-known field of wet artificial life
. That first cell of synthetic life — made from the basic chemicals in DNA — may not seem like much to non-scientists. For one thing, you’ll have to look in a microscope to see it — via Warren Ellis
Wal-Mart has hopped on the DRM-free bandwagon with the announcement that it will be participating in Universal’s DRM-free sales pilot. The quality looks good: 256Kbps MP3 for 94 cents apiece, but customers are likely to be turned off by the retail chain’s continued censorship — via Slashdot
John Stottlemire found a way to print duplicate coupons from Coupons.com by deleting some files and registry entires on his PC. Now he’s being sued for a DMCA violation. He says, All I did was erase files or registry keys.
Says a lawyer: [The DMCA] may cover this. I think it does give companies a lot of leverage and a lot of power.
So now the copyright cartels are saying that not only can we not copy things on our computers, but we can’t delete things on our computers? — Slashdot
Video Ezy is planning to release an electronic movie rental box in time for Christmas in an attempt to hold off online competition. Video Ezy has ordered 10,000 home media centres from data communications producer Mobilesoft, at a cost of $4.5 million. The centres will underpin its electronic rental service. Customers will use the centres to play movies they have downloaded on portable storage devices in a store. Portable storage devices will be used to download files from in Video Ezy stores, and they can be watched on the media centres
A two day outage that left millions of Skype users unable to use the internet phone service was caused by an abnormally high number of restarts after people had downloaded a Windows security update. In an update to users on Skype’s Heartbeat blog, employee Villu Arak said the disruption was not because of hackers or any other malicious activity. Instead, he said that the disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update
. As Windows updates are a regular occurence, it seems odd that this would be the cause of the problem
Pay TV sales company Multi Channel Network has cast doubt on the future of the digital video-recording platform TiVo, which is backed by the Seven Network, telling advertisers the venture may never get off the ground. Rob Leach, head of MCN’s interactive television division and formerly of British pay-TV company BSkyB, said TiVo had bombed
in Britain after proving to be a difficult product to market
partly due to high set-top box costs. The comments come after media buyers denied a report last week that 20 advertisers had paid $1 million to participate in interactive advertising trials on the TiVo platform
Four journalists and one of their family members are suing Hewlett-Packard for obtaining their personal phone records. The journalists filed lawsuits in California this week. They claim that HP invaded their privacy. HP acknowledged in a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing last year that it investigated journalists in order to find out who, inside the company, had been leaking information to the press. The actions of HP board members and contractors led to congressional hearings about pretexting, the use of deception to obtain confidential and detailed phone records. They also led to the resignations of Board Chairperson Patricia Dunn and lawyer and ethics chief Kevin Hunsaker
Two years after announcing a somewhat vague software-distribution partnership, Google and Sun Microsystems have clarified their tactics for jointly attacking Microsoft and its ubiquitous Office software. Google has quietly begun including Sun’s StarOffice suite of word processing, spreadsheets and other workplace-oriented programs for free as part of the Google Pack download
A web site is aiming at blocking Firefox users. This because a fraction of the Firefox users installed an Ad Blocker and are therefor stealing money
from web site owners that use ads. They recommend using IE, Opera or IE tab. From the site: Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers.
The site is owned by a loony fundie by the name of Danny Carlton, so we know intelligence was a big part of his cunning plan — via Slashdot
It’s a battery that looks like a piece of paper and can be bent or twisted, trimmed with scissors or moulded into any shape needed. While the battery is now only a prototype, the researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who developed it have high hopes for it in electronics and other fields that need smaller, lighter power sources. Unlike other batteries, Prof Linhardt explained, it is an integrated device, not a combination of pieces. The battery uses paper infused with an electrolyte and carbon nanotubes that are embedded in the paper. The carbon nanotubes form the electrodes, the paper is the separator and the electrolyte allows the current to flow
When implanted in the eye, mini-telescopes could help aging individuals with macular degeneration, a disorder of the retina affecting more than 1.75 million people in the United States alone. The implant was a huge help for two thirds of more than 200 patients who participated in a recent clinical trial. The developers of the technology, VisionCare Ophthalmic Technologies, hope that FDA approval for the mini-scope is imminent — via Boing Boing
Andy Brice, a UK-based software developer, packaged up a little text file full of the words This software does nothing
as an EXE and named it awardmestars
. So far his self-proclaiming useless program has garnered sixteen 5-star awards from download sites he submitted it to. Brice concludes that many of the download sites are just electronic dung heaps, using fake awards, dubious SEO and content misappropriated from PAD files in a pathetic attempt to make a few dollars from Google Adwords
— via Slashdot
A Russian court has found the former boss of www.allofmp3.com not guilty of breaching copyright, in a case considered a crucial test of Russia’s commitment to fighting piracy. The allofmp3.com web site angered Western music companies by undercutting the price of downloads in deals they said breached copyright law. Denis Kvasov, head of MediaServices which owned the site, was put on trial after entertainment companies EMI Group, NBC Universal and Time Warner pressed for a prosecution
Canberra telco TransACT will be deploying fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) in the city from this month, with more FTTH tenders on the table. TransACT will switch on its fibre-to-the-home network on a test basis, with the service set to go live officially at the end of the month. The fibre network will be used in a new development in Forde, in the Gungahlin district of Canberra, and is expected to cover up to 1500 users within the next three years. As well as free-to-air TV and video on demand, residents of Forde will be offered a choice between two broadband packages using the fibre network — a 10Mbps/2Mbps, for mum and dad
users, and a 30Mbps/10Mbps, aimed at power users and businesspeople working from home
The future of iPlayer, the BBC’s new online on-demand system for delivering content, is continuing to look bleaker. With ISPs threatening to throttle the content delivered through the iPlayer, consumers petitioning the UK government and the BBC to drop the DRM and Microsoft-only technology, and threatened legal action from the OSC, the last thing the BBC wanted to see today was street protests at their office and at the BBC Media Complex accompanied by a report issued by DefectiveByDesign about their association with Microsoft — via Slashdot
Minuscule wind engines could help to take computing power to the next level. US researchers have developed a prototype device that creates a breeze
made up of charged particles, or ions, to cool computer chips. The ionic wind
, the scientists say, will help to manage the heat generated by increasingly powerful, yet ever-shrinking devices
Google is shutting down a service that sold and rented online video, ending a 19-month experiment doomed by the proliferation of free clips on other web sites like Google’s own YouTube subsidiary. The decision, confirmed late on Friday, underscores Google’s intention to concentrate its financial muscle and brainpower on developing an advertising format to capitalise on the immense popularity of online video. YouTube, which Google bought last year for $US1.76 billion, is expected to be the focal point of the company’s expansion into video advertising. Google executives hope to settle on an effective advertising system for video ads by the end of this year
An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organisations that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that the CIA was involved in editing entries. Wikipedia Scanner allegedly shows that workers on the agency’s computers made edits to the page of Iran’s president. It also purportedly shows that the Vatican has edited entries about Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. The tool trawls a list of 5.3m edits and matches them to the net address of the editor. Most of the edits detected by the scanner correct spelling mistakes or factual inaccuracies in profiles. However, others have been used to remove potentially damaging material or to deface sites
Much of Sydney’s CBD as it appears in the satellite images on Google Maps Australia has been fuzzed out, just weeks before the APEC summit. Google says the imagery was downgraded as a result of a commercial issue
with a supplier, but the move has aroused speculation it was done at the request of police in order to minimise the risk of a terrorist attack during the September summit, where Sydney will play host to 21 world leaders including Bush
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