The BBC has launched the beta of iCan, its service for enabling Britons to act collectively to participate in their governments
Bill Gates has slammed moves by political parties in Australia and elsewhere to legislate the adoption of open-source software, claiming the open-source system was ‘inferior’ and said it represented a false economy in relation to lost opportunities to improve productivity. Bob Cringley explains why exactly why Microsoft doesn’t understand open-source
Mmmmmm… new iBooks from Apple.
The new iBooks now house G4 processors with speeds of 800Mhz, 933Mhz and 1Ghz with 30 – 60 GB hard drives. These guys are also shipping with OSX.3. Price wise these laptops are very tempting for me, starting at $1,899 for the low end model and $2,599 for the high end one, yes that’s aussie dollars! Oh my god an entry level Apple laptop for under 2 grand! It’s making me seriously think about giving up my indigo clam shell iBook I’ve grown to love. Maybe it could be re-purposed…
So, with entry level laptops running G4 processors now, does this mean a G5 laptop is on it’s way soonish?
On a slightly unrelated note, computerlove.net is running a poster contest for those visually expressive people out there, with first prize being an iPod.
In an effort to improve its corporate reputation, adware company Gator has launched a legal offensive to divorce its name from the hated term ‘spyware‘ — and so far its strategy is paying off. In response to a libel lawsuit, an antispyware company has settled with Gator and pulled Web pages critical of the company, its practices and its software. And other spyware foes are getting the message
Most computer hardware web sites tell you how to get your computer hardware up and running properly. Hardware Analysis takes a different approach and tells us exactly how not to install computer hardware. They document many of the pitfalls that’ll sound familiar to many enthusiasts and have some great pictures of what could go horribly wrong during an upgrade
A civil liberties watchdog group is expressing concern over the San Francisco Public Library’s plans to track books by inserting computer chips into each tome
A judge sentenced an Arizona woman to 60 days home detention for intercepting her husband’s ex-wife’s e-mail, saying the penalty is a warning to others who might be tempted to do the same
A group of geeks who reformat badly designed web sites have tackled their most ambitious project yet. They scraped the poorly designed web site for the UK Parliamentary record, Hansard, reformatted all the information and presented it in infographic Tuftean glory as The Public Whip
Researchers at NEC have taken wireless connectivity to new levels by successfully demonstrating handovers between access points while traveling past them at bullet-train speed
A growing number of angry Telstra BigPond customers have registered interest in launching a class action against the telco over delays in its email service during the past three weeks
Ashley Highfield, Director of BBC New Media & Technology, recently gave a speech at the Royal Television Society about the nature of the BBC’s ambitious and grand Internet plans:
Downloading and sharing this video is the final piece of the jigsaw and will create a killer combination that I believe could undermine the existing models of pay-TV.
The killer combination is broadband together with digital TV and PVRs, plus the ability to share this video in the same peer-to-peer model with which music files are exchanged on the net…
We are exploring legitimate peer-to-peer models to get our users to share our content, on our behalf, amongst themselves, transparently.
And as an industry, we should be more active in creating legitimate content download products, whether that’s as a pay-model, or rights-cleared for free. We need to help consumers leap-frog the illegal downloading issues that have wrecked havoc on the music industry. Here’s what we believe is the shape of things to come, a way for people to search for whatever they are interested in — perhaps in the case of a natural history for a school project — searching from Buffalos to Bears — and then download it for their use.
Another Brad Choate plugin has been installed; FormatBreaks.
A useful tool for putting the appropriate formatting tags between paragraphs and eliminating the need to hard code them for every entry. Handy for formatting comments too.
There’s a significant shift afoot in storage fundamentals, and it’s not storage area networks or network attached storage — although both will have critical roles in these new fundamentals. The shift involves the facilitating role that metadata will play in abstracting the specifics about data and where it’s stored from the applications, end users, and operating systems requiring access to it
A man so angry with his laptop that he shot it has topped an annual league table of the oddest computer mishaps. Data recovery experts say although machine failure is blamed for the majority of lost files, humans are getting more careless too. The list of the strangest ways data was lost was compiled by recovery experts Kroll Ontrack
Australia has signed an agreement with the United Kingdom and New Zealand in its continued bid to clamp down on international Internet fraud
Apple has released iTunes for Windows. To Windows users, welcome to piss easy ACC and MP3 encoding.
If you listen carefully, faint feline growlings can be heard over at the Apple site as well. Panther is due for release next weekish. 9am October 25th to be exact.
Chris Hester has done clever things with CSS borders
A new study looks the effect of speed cameras and doubling of speeding violation fines in both Australia and the UK. It finds that these measures, which are catching on in the US, have failed to produce positive results
The latest innovations developed by computer crackers on behalf of the junk e-mail profession are techniques that enable spammers — or scam artists for that matter — to create web sites that are essentially untraceable. One group in Poland is currently advertising invisible bulletproof hosting in online forums for spammers
Mozilla 1.5 has been released, this is supposed to be the last version of the old Mozilla suite. Mozilla Firebird 0.7, the stand-alone browser by mozilla.org and Thunderbird 0.3, the stand-alone version of the Mozilla mail-program also have shiny new versions. The new browser release included a bug fix for a long standing <hr> bug that promptly rendered all of the workaround <hr> code in the site invisible. The CSS has been fixed to reflect the changes
RSS – Posts