Microsoft’s Tokyo office was raided by Japan’s Fair Trade Commission, which is investigating whether the world’s largest software maker violated the country’s anti-monopoly law
Submitted to Slashdot, but you’ll probably only read it here 🙂 Gaming rumours site CVG is reporting that the the black and white buttons will be removed from the Xbox 2 controller. This would seem to support the reports of no backwards compatibility in Xbox 2. The site also has some interesting PS3 controller rumours: wireless control as standard, and a dedicated ‘trigger’ button for FPS games (in addition to the existing shoulder buttons).
Disney and Microsoft are joining an industry group in Japan to help decide which next-generation DVD format should be used in the home video market. DVD Forum, said that Disney and Microsoft would join 18 other members on its steering committee. Membership, now dominated by Sony and other companies that support the Blu-ray Disc format, gives the companies a vote on how data should be stored on the new discs, thus enabling them to set a standard for the industry
The Australian consumer watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, has issued Telstra with an advisory notice over concerns that the communications giant has breached competition laws by dropping broadband retail prices below their wholesale charges
An Anti-Felon Identification system is used so criminal use of the Advanced Taser can be traced from evidence dispersed by the device itself to provide the exact identification of the Air Cartridge purchaser. No other self-protection device in the world — guns, chemical and pepper sprays, touch-stun devices or batons — can be traced from evidence at the scene of the crime directly to the registration of the user
Lucky me, I missed the LiveJournal comment spamming campaign to promote Mel Gibson’s dodgy vanity pic. The poorly thought out spamming campaign pissed off a lot of LiveJournal users, including reddragdiva, who has posted a googlebomb countermeasure using the same wording as the original spam:
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079470/"> The Passion of The Christ </a>. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079470/"> Trailers </a>. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079470/"> Good Website </a>. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079470/"> Protesting Gibson's Passion Lacks Moral Legitimacy </a>.
The Passion of The Christ. Trailers. Good Website. Protesting Gibson’s Passion Lacks Moral Legitimacy.
Enjoy — via Pagan Prattle
A new game category has been added to the blog, so I thought it very fitting to post a link to this Strong Bad email, complete with some flash games at the end featuring everyone’s favourite sexy mexican wrestling mask clad guy — Strong Bad.
If you don’t who Strong Bad is, than your are seriously missing out and I pity you in tremendous amounts. You also need a recent flash player and to check out the rest of homestarrunner.com. There are also other games worthy of playing in the games section, such as Trogdor the Burninator!, awxome cross and population: tire.
NEC is working on a concept PC, called P-ISM, that uses five different pens to make a computer. One pen is a CPU, another a camera, one creates a virtual keyboard, another projects the visual output and thus the display and another a communicator or phone. All five pens can rest in a holding block which recharges the batteries and holds the mass storage. Each pen communicates wirelessly with the others
Aspects of the controversial Total Information Awareness DARPA program, officially shut down by the US Congress in September 2003 after a public outcry, seem to have survived. Some projects from Poindexter’s TIA effort were transferred to US intelligence offices, congressional, federal and research officials. In addition, Congress left undisturbed a separate but similar $64 million research program run by a little-known office called the Advanced Research and Development Activity, or ARDA, that has used some of the same researchers as Poindexter’s program
The Enigma-E is a kit that enables you to build your own electronic variant of the famous Enigma coding machine that was used by the German army during WWII. It works just like a real Enigma and is compatible with an M3 and M4 Enigma as well as the standard Service Machines. A message encrypted on, say, a real Enigma M4 can be read on the Enigma-E and vice versa
In a ruling released Friday, Judge Susan Illston granted Hollywood studios’ request for an injunction against 321 Studios, saying the small software company has seven days to stop distributing its DVD-copying products on the grounds that they are illegal
My job contract has come to an end, but due to the way our enterprise agreement is structured, it can’t be rolled over to another year as before. Instead, I’m on six weeks holidays as of Friday while they write a position description and advertise a permanent version of my contracting job. It should be sorted out by the beginning of May (my birthday!), and as the incumbent I’ll have a very good shot at getting it, but in the meantime I am bewildered and at a loose end. So it’ll proabably turn out to be a good thing, but the timing sucks. My student fees are due soon and the landlord is trying to put my rent up. Bleh.
On the upside I’ll finally be able to read Homer’s Odyssey like I’ve been meaning to, and my RSI will have some time to heal.
Grow is a strange little Rube Goldberg-like game where you try to determine the order in which to drag various items into the middle. Each time you drag an item, the items you’ve already placed grow and interact with each other. The goal is to drag all the items in the right sequence to advance them all to their maximum levels. The maximum score is 20,000, I haven’t managed to get that far. There are quite a few possible sequences that do this, as well as some sequences that don’t reach the maximum but do produce fun effects
Aloysius, apparently sharing my love of penguins, has found another silly, yet addictive, Flash game where you throw snowballs at penguins. If you hit the penguins, they get embedded in the target and their little feet wiggle. Entertaining
The page cannot be fucking displayed
This is without a doubt one of the best error pages ever!
Remember, Microsoft just bought the Catholic Church.
Lindows, the company that provides a Linux OS for the desktop, has changed its name to Lin—s — pronounced Lindash
— in compliance with court orders in Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg
Perl, a high-level programming language that was critical in the initial construction of the Internet, is undergoing major renovations from author Larry Wall with the help of the Perl development community. The general release is about 18 months away. Although Wall still is designing Perl 6, there is a good sense of what it will include. One thing is certain: Perl 6 will look vastly different from its predecessor
The music industry considers Michele Scimeca a pirate. The Morris County mom has her own term for record executives: Racketeers. In what legal experts described as a novel strategy, Scimeca is citing federal racketeering laws like the one that jailed mob boss John Gotti to counter-sue record labels that accused her in December of sharing some 1,400 copyrighted songs over the Internet
The Brightmail Reputation Service, monitors hundreds of thousands of e-mail sources to determine how much mail sent from these addresses is legitimate and how much is spam. The company gathers information from user reports and from its Probe Network — a collection of decoy e-mail in-boxes designed to catch spam — to determine whether a given IP address sends valid or junk messages. The service creates a profile of each e-mail source from which administrators can decide whether to block mail from these sources or allow it into the company. Brightmail also will make available a safe list
of e-mail addresses that have never sent spam to users of the Reputation Service free of charge
The Australian Communications Authority has introduced a new method of penalising telecommunications companies that breach the law, in a move designed to reduce the number of court cases
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