If the bids are real — and the eBayMotors.com auction was stopped once for fake bidding — a modified 1969 Dodge Charger, painted to look like the General Lee from the TV Show The Dukes of Hazzard
, nearly became the most expensive car ever auctioned. The auction closed at $9,900,500 at 1:00 pm Friday. That puts it just $1.1 million away from the $11 million paid for a 1931 Bugatti Type 41 Royale Sports Coupe sold by the auction house Christie’s in 1987. To date, that is the highest price ever paid for a car at auction, according to Christie’s
The Auckland City Council — frustrated at the lack of action by the private sector — is planning a 100km fibre network to provide faster and cheaper broadband across the city. All going to plan, the citywide network could be providing high-speed broadband to thousands of businesses and most residents by 2010, including a wireless network in the central city. The network would be available to customers within 200m of the proposed route, designed to be close to businesses, government departments, libraries, emergency services, schools and universities
Director Rob Reiner has created a fifteen minute sequel to his mockumentary classic This is Spinal Tap. While the short film was featured at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, it won’t be released in theatres any time soon. It is available, however, online
Yahoo has finally made a decision regarding Yahoo! Photos vs Flickr battle, and will be shutting down Yahoo! Photos by the end of the year. Even though Yahoo! Photos currently maintains a higher share of Internet visits, Flickr growth convinced the company to maintain a single photo site from now on
Research scientists at the University of Tokyo have come up with a unique sheet-like material that can transmit electrical energy over a large area to nearby devices without the need for direct contact, so it can be made into a tablecloth or wallpaper and your appliance can be anywhere on a surface to get charged. The system uses organic molecules as transistors, microelectromechanical switches, and miniature copper coils to transmit energy using electromagnetic induction — via Slashdot
Australia’s first large-scale working demonstration of a solar energy system has been given the go-ahead. The Federal Government has agreed to fund half of the $14 million project, based on research from the Australian National University. Keith Lovegrove form the ANU says four solar dishes will be constructed in the South Australian outback, and will generate large-scale electricity
There has been a mixed reaction to the Federal Government’s new Do Not Call Register which started today. Telemarketers face big penalties if they call people who have added their name to the list. For people who may be sick of fending off unwanted calls during dinner, being able to register for the Do Not Call list may now provide relief. But president of the New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties, Cameron Murphy, says the new list does not go far enough
Google and the French-language newspapers of Belgium said Thursday that they had begun discussions aimed at defusing a legal battle over what content Google could index. The newspapers complained that the search engine’s cached
links, which show material that may have been taken off the Web by the site owner, offered free access to archived material that the papers normally sell
Attempts to gag the blogosphere from publishing details of a DVD crack have led to a user revolt. The row centred on a cease and desist
letter sent by the body that oversees the digital rights management technology on high-definition DVDs. It requested that blogs and websites removed details of a software key that breaks the encryption on HD-DVDs. The removal of the information from community news website Digg was a step too far for its fans. As quickly as stories relating to the issue were removed, they were re-submitted in their thousands, in an act described by one user as a 21st Century revolt
. The site collapsed under the weight of the attack at one point
Skyfacet, a site selling diamonds rings and other jewelery, dropped in Google’s rankings and saw a $500,000 drop in revenue in only three months after the site owner paid an SEO to improve the site. Google Hell is the worst fear of the untold numbers of companies that depend on search results to keep their business visible online. Getting stuck there means most users will never see the site, or at least many of the site’s pages, when they enter certain keywords. And getting out can be next to impossible — because site operators often don’t know what they did to get placed there
Google is having to search the United States for IT workers to staff the search engine’s growing operations in Australia. The Silicon Valley-based company will host an Australian-themed open day next Tuesday at its global headquarters in Mountain View, California. The session, branded G’day Google, will urge both American engineers and some of the 100,000 Australian expats in California to help address the chronic shortage of IT workers in Australia
Canonical and Dell have announced a partnership to offer Ubuntu 7.04 on select desktop and notebook products
Michel Xhaard, A French physician and ardent Linux supporter, is the one man you can all thank for adding support for 352 webcams in Linux. The Open Source OS world may still be a bit of a mess when competing with the ease of Windows, but efforts like this make you wonder. One man with drive, tenacity, and no funding does what no one else can do. And none of the major Linux distributions back this guy’s efforts, even the big players dipping into the corporate world’s coffers — via Slashdot
While there is no immediate safety risk, Apple has released a software update to fix battery-performance issues in some of its MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks
BBC shows such as Doctor Who and EastEnders are to be made available on-demand after the BBC’s iPlayer service was given the green light. The service — which will launch later this year — allows viewers to watch programmes online for seven days after their first TV broadcast. Episodes can also be downloaded and stored for up to 30 days
The Ontario government has given approval for a California company to construct a massive solar farm
near Sarnia that will blanket an area larger than all three Toronto islands with hundreds of thousands of sun-soaking panels. It will be the largest solar power station in North America and among the most expansive in the world to use photovoltaic cells that produce electricity when exposed to sunlight. Once complete, the 40-megawatt Sarnia project will be able to supply enough emission-free electricity to power between 10,000 and 15,000 homes on sunny days
Mozilla has unveiled new details of its schedule for Firefox 3, the next major upgrade to the popular open-source browser. Alpha editions of Firefox 3 will be released monthly, said Mike Schroepfer, the company’s vice president of engineering, in a posting to the mozilla.dev.planning forum. The new schedule shows three more previews — Alphas 4, 5 and 6 — be released near the end of April, May, and June, respectively, with a feature-complete Beta 1 dropping into testers’ hands 31 July
Two security experts have discovered a way to inject false messages — some amusing and others potentially frightening — into car satellite navigation systems. Andrea Barisani, chief security engineer for Inverse Path and Daniele Bianco, a hardware hacker at Inverse Path, used off the shelf equipment to transmit messages to their car satellite navigation system warning of conditions ranging from foggy weather to terrorist attacks. They presented their findings on Friday at CanSecWest a security conference taking place this week in Vancouver
Your next eBay purchase could arrive at your door in a brown Amazon box. Amazon is expanding a program designed to allow independent sellers to use its network of distribution centres to store and ship their products, according to Jeffrey Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive. Since last fall, the program, Fulfillment by Amazon, has allowed independent sellers who list their goods on Amazon to use its network of more than 20 distribution centers around the world to fill orders. Now Amazon, which is based in Seattle, is opening the program to vendors who list their items elsewhere on the Web — on their own site, through Google, or even on Amazon’s e-commerce rival, eBay
The $100 laptop introduced by Nicholas Negroponte as part of the One Laptop Per Child program will end up costing $175. The demand for the program is apparent as seven nations have expressed interest in being in the initial wave to buy the little green-and-white XO
computers — Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Pakistan, Thailand, Nigeria and Libya — but it remains unclear which ones will be first to pony up the cash
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