NEC and Hitachi are teaming up on a liquid cooling system for hard drives. The goal is to cut down on noise levels while providing more efficient cooling. ‘Hitachi and NEC are developing the water-cooled hard drive systems for desktop computers mainly to reduce noise levels to 25 decibels, 5 decibels quieter than a whisper. To do this, NEC and Hitachi actually wrap the hard drive in noise absorbing material and vibration insulation — via Slashdot
Amazon is announcing the launch of another web service that should appeal to developers. The previously rumoured Flexible Payments Service provides everything developers need to set up payments on their sites, far more so than the Paypal API — from one-time to recurring transactions, transactions limited by date, by the amount and much more
Elton John is whining that the internet is destroying good music and stopping people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff
. He laments the way that the internet and the emerging industry of digital music has created a cold and impersonal world for artists to create new music in. Poor Diddums
Microsoft has announced plans to pre-install an ad-laden version of Works on some manufacturers’ PCs in coming months. Works is Microsoft’s lightweight docs-and-spreadsheets software. The manufacturers involved were not disclosed. The adware Works will come with a pre-installed cache of ads that will be refreshed when the machine is online. Microsoft will decide by mid-2008 whether it can afford to forgo the $40 normally charged for Works
So, you get arrested for running an illegal online pharmacy and the judge orders you to stop selling medication over the Internet. Don’t sit around and do nothing before the trial. Run off to the Dominican Republic on a false passport, withdraw money from an account ordered frozen, and start up another online pharmacy
. It didn’t end well for 27-year old Christopher William Smith, also known as Rizler
. The world-reviled spammer and Internet drug dispenser received a 30-year sentence from a federal judge — Slashdot
Ask someone to name a website and it’s a virtual certainly they will say something ending with dot com
: Amazon.com, eBay.com, Facebook.com, it doesn’t matter what, it’s the same suffix. Dotcom is the internet for most people. But that may all change next year when the top level of the net — the part after the dot — is liberalised. From 2008, anyone wanting their own piece of the internet is welcome to apply for it. It won’t be cheap (there will an application fee of around $100,000) and it won’t be simple (you have to prove you are capable of running a complex piece of the net’s infrastructure) — but it could mean a change in the way the online world works
Dismissing a defamation suit brought by the inventor of DOS against a British writer, a judge has left unchallenged computer industry lore that holds the operating system Microsoft licensed to IBM in the 1980s — thereby launching Bill Gates’ multibillion dollar software empire — was a knock off. In a book on American innovation, author Sir Harold Evans wrote that DOS inventor Tim Paterson relied heavily on an existing OS called CP/M (Control Program/Monitor) created by a programmer, Gary Kildall, who has since died. Microsoft in 1980 struck a licensing deal with Paterson’s company — Seattle Computer Products — to obtain access to DOS and resell it to IBM
The New York Public Library has just installed an Espresso book-on-demand machine and they’ll print 20 public domain titles from the Open Content Alliance free of charge for any patron — via Boing Boing
Google Transit is a journey-planner for public transit systems in nine US cities and all of Japan. It works more or less like Google Maps’s driving directions, but for transit systems, and includes itineraries and maps. Weirdly, it doesn’t include the NYC subway/bus network, nor the London networks, though London is superbly served by the Transport for London journey planner — via Boing Boing
The results of Australia’s only live commercial internet content filtering trial will never be known because the exercise, championed by the federal Government, was quietly abandoned. The trial was expected to go ahead in Tasmania last year but the major internet filtering technology supplier for the project, Internet Sheriff, has revealed that it was abandoned because Australia’s two largest ISPs, Telstra and Optus, refused to participate. Internet Sheriff chief executive David Ramsay said the project was commercially risky without support from the two carriers
A group from Northwestern University in Illinois has a new process for creating carbon-based paper that’s stronger than nanotubes, and incredibly easy to use to make sheets of any desired sizes. Huge implications for aircraft, automobiles and the ever-sought-after space elevator — via Slashdot
The BBC have made it official — they have been corrupted by Microsoft. With the launch of the iPlayer, the BBC Trust has failed in its most basic of duties and handed over to Microsoft sole control of the on-line distribution of BBC programming. You will now need to own a Microsoft operating system to view BBC programming on the web. And you must accept the DRM that the iPlayer imposes. Engadget commenters report that FairUse4WM strips DRM from BBC iplayer downloads so they can be watched in VLC on the MAC — via Boing Boing
Dell is working on getting better ATI drivers for Linux for use in its Linux offerings. While it is not known whether the end product will end up as open source, with big businesses like Google and Dell now behind the push for better Linux graphics drivers, hopefully ATI will make the smart business decision and give customers what they want
MozillaZine is reporting that Mozilla Thunderbird is to move to a new separate organisational setting
as the Mozilla Foundation focuses more and more on Mozilla Firefox
Bloggers making Freedom of Information Act requests to the CIA will likely get them processed for free under new rules that broaden the definition of who is part of the news media
. Professional journalists have long been able to request free processing of their FOIA requests of the intelligence agency. As a general rule, they don’t have to pay fees for searching and retrieving files, although they may be charged for duplication costs — via Billboard
The blueprint for a tiny, ultra-robust mechanical computer has been outlined by US researchers. The energy-efficient nano computer is inspired by ideas about computing first put forward nearly 200 years ago. The scientists say the machine would be built from nanometre-sized components, just billionths of a metre across. Chips based on the design could be used in places, such as car engines, where silicon can be too delicate
Equipment failure Tuesday afternoon knocked out electricity to tens of thousands of Pacific Gas and Electric customers on the Peninsula and in San Francisco — including PG&E’s own office and the Financial District. 365 Main, a data centre on the edge of San Francisco’s Financial District, was affected by the outage, taking down a lot of its clients sites including; Six Apart’s TypePad, LiveJournal, Vox, TypePad and MovableType; Craigslist; local listings site Yelp; and blog search engine Technorati; have experienced downtime today due to a power outage in San Francisco. Still not as amusing as the early rumours of a drunk employee killing the servers or the comments on the SFGate article claiming that zombies had taken over San Francisco and the argument over whether or not zombies are cannibals
Five years after the concept was first proposed, the so-called $100 laptop is poised to go into mass production. Hardware suppliers have been given the green light to ramp-up production of all of the components needed to build millions of the low-cost machines. Previously, the organisation behind the scheme said that it required orders for 3m laptops to make production viable. The first machines should be ready to put into the hands of children in developing countries in October 2007
Flash memory is in nearly every handheld gadget, from digital cameras to iPhones. Now Nanosys, a startup based in Palo Alto, CA, says it has found a material that can double the capacity of flash memory found in conventional chips by adding self-assembled metal nanocrystals to the flash manufacturing process. Nanosys, which has shown that the tiny particles of metal are compatible with today’s manufacturing processes, has deals with flash makers Intel and Micron Technologies and expects that metal nanocrystals will be in products as early as 2009
Microsoft said that it expects Windows XP, the operating system supposedly made moot by Windows Vista, to make up a significantly larger part of sales in the coming year
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