Google has snapped up the rights to an advanced text search algorithm invented by a University of NSW student. The algorithm, or search engine tool, is called Orion and was developed by UNSW PhD student Ori Allon at the university’s School of Computer Science
ABC will make a number of its most popular programmes available online at no cost. Beginning 30 April, a redesigned ABC.com web site will allow web surfers to watch full episodes of programs such as Lost, Desperate Housewives and others starting the morning after they air on ABC. In addition, programming from other Disney-owned networks will be made available online over the next couple of months. All programs will be shown in their entirety, including commercials which cannot be avoided. Aside from being unable to avoid commercials, watching the programs will be similar to watching timeshifted content in that viewers will be able to pause, fast forward, and rewind
Popular social-networking site MySpace is responding to concerns about teen safety by bringing a security officer on board and hiring more employees to handle inappropriate content
What happens when your satellite navigation system in your car gives you bad advice on which road you should take? In Britain, these systems have been directing drivers down a road near the (aptly named) town of Crackpot that is strewn with boulders and has an unprotected 100ft dropoff on one side. The locals are worried someone’s going to go off the edge
The competition watchdog has rejected Telstra’s proposed charges for connecting and disconnecting broadband ISPs’ access to its basic copper wire
Open Source Development Labs is previewing work that attempts to make life easier for software companies by bridging GNOME and KDE, the two competing graphical interfaces most widely used with Linux
A Republican controlled committee has defeated a bill that would have guaranteed fair access and stopped companies like AT&T and Verizon from charging high-bandwidth sites for allowing their customers to have priority access to them
The Australian Consumers Association has savaged the federal Government’s plans for the full roll-out of digital television services as part of its media reforms
Playing games on teh intarwebs is quite fashionable of late, and it sometimes seems like all the cool kids are grinding levels on World of Warcraft, collecting a +3 loincloth of smiting, an epic beagle, and perhaps some sort of lemony potion. After playing three Final Fantasies in a row, the appeal of this sort of thing has diminished for me, and now I favour something more sedate: turn-based board gaming.
For those of us with slower reflexes, those who are content to sip a cup of earl grey and make one or two mouse clicks per hour on a 16-colour virtual gameboard, board gaming by web is quite rewarding.
As a mathematics student, otaku, and young intellectual, my game of choice is go, which I like to play at the Dragon Go Server. There are plenty of places to play go online, but I like this one best of the turn-based servers. The WoW players among you will like the fact that DGS awards you a ranking, which shifts up and down with your gaming fortunes. It’s a bit like experience points, except that they go away when you lose a match. Which would make the other player some sort of wight or revenant, if we stick with the RPG motif.
Another good’un, which I’ve just recently discovered, is Spiel By Web. SBW features hip Eurogames like Reef Encounter (in which you take the role of a deranged parrotfish gobbling up the Great Barrier Reef) and Tikal (in which you take the role of an old fashioned archaeologist looting the Americas).
And finally, for those who prefer the traditional games, there’s ItsYourTurn.com, which serves up turn-based chess, backgammon, and ‘Jamble’ — a game as similar to Scrabble as the rule of law will allow.
I heartily encourage you to abandon your expensive MMOs and join me on all of the above.
Lou Slaughter, the chief executive of GigaBeam, a technology company in Herndon, Virginia, has come up with millimetre-wave technology, which transmits data over wireless connections at one gigabit per second – 1,000 times as fast as a DSL connection
In Sweden, a new political party — the Pirate Party — is pushing a platform that would abolish patents and free creative works from copyright protections after five years, instead of the 50 to 100 years typically associated with a creator’s exclusive rights
Apple Computer said on Wednesday that it has released a public beta version of Boot Camp, software that enables Microsoft Windows XP to run natively on Intel-based Macs
Australia’s screen culture — from Alvin Purple
to home video of Queen Elizabeth’s 1954 royal tour — will be available online from next year. In a collaboration aimed at increasing the Australian public’s knowledge of their audiovisual heritage, more than 1000 clips from film and television programs and radio broadcasts will be available on a web site. Associated scripts, interviews and oral histories will also be available as education material
The movie download firms Movielink and CinemaNow have made a deal with the big five studios to ensure that downloads will coincide with DVD releases at Blockbuster and WalMart. Unlike previous deals, these will be full purchase downloads, and not merely for a rental period. The move is aimed at stemming the rising tide of pirate downloads, and DRM will be in force to prevent copying the movies to DVD. The first batch of downloadable movies will include Brokeback Mountain
, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
and King Kong
. The drawback is that they’ll be DRMmed, Windows-only and twice the price of DVDs
Telemarketers will have to abide by a national Do Not Call register in 2007, after the federal government announced it would soon introduce legislation to protect consumers
Click on an eBay auction listing, and you could get an unwanted result: a fake eBay login page, created by scammers looking to pilfer your username and password
Believe it or not, Emilio Gonzalez, a Spaniard amateur began his crater search at home after reading an article about the discovery of Kebira, the biggest one found in the Sahara. After a couple of minutes he located two craters. After checking the records, he realised these were completely new, and now two geologists confirm his findings. And there is more, these craters may be part of a chain studied by NASA geologist Adriana Ocampo, so if it’s confirmed that these new ones are part of the same episode, it could mean the definitive evidence for her theory of an asteroid broken into pieces fallen in that area — via Slashdot
The keeper of the biggest collection of indigenous Australian art and cultural history is digitising its catalogue in a project designed to help preserve its ageing archives
Movie studios want to punish legitimate customers for legally purchasing content, while the real pirates go right on stealing. ZDNet’s George Ou writes: There seems to be a persistent myth floating around the board rooms of the movie companies and Congress that analog content is the boogie man of music and video piracy. In fact, they’re so paranoid about it that they’re considering a mechanism called ICT (Image Constraint Token) that punishes law-abiding customers for content that they legally purchased. But ironically, the real content pirates who make millions of bootleg movies have no intention of ever taking advantage of the so called ‘analog hole’ because that is the slowest and lowest quality method of stealing content
— via Slashdot
The line between living organisms and machines has just become a whole lot blurrier. European researchers have developed neuro-chips in which living brain cells and silicon circuits are coupled together
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