Nokia Australia has moved to appease angry customers and the NSW Department of Fair Trading after the mobile phone maker admitted to selling defective handsets to consumers
The Van Gogh Voghs site has a fun, if long-winded, 404 error message
Law enforcement agencies are developing interception agreements with large ISPs, as the Federal Government prepares to introduce new laws on data spying
British Telecom’s lawsuit against the US internet service provider Prodigy Communications for infringement of its hyperlink technology patent is the kind of litigation the W3C is battling to avoid with its royalty-free patent policy
A clock-work chess-playing machine
named The Turk wowed Europe and the US in the 18th and 19th century, beating Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon, among others. Although it turned out to be a cleverly designed trick, the device is credited with inspiring Charles Babbage — the father of the computer — who played and lost to the automaton in 1820, with the idea that a mechanical engine could be programmed to perform tasks
The ACCC has taken court action against domain name reseller Internet Name Group, alleging misleading and deceptive conduct. auDA has suspended ING’s provisional accreditation following the ACCC’s announcement that it is taking legal action against the company in the Federal Court
Optus has confirmed it intends to launch a residential ADSL service if negotiations with Telstra are successful
AltaVista and Google will remove from their search engines hyperlinks to a web site with articles detailing how to sabotage railway systems after Deutsche Bahn, the German national railway operator, threatened to take legal action
Ever wondered how fast CD-ROM drives can spin their CDs before the CD will self-destruct due to centrifugal force? Jorgen Stadje has, he discovered that 52x was enough for most manufacturers CDs to blow up in a rain of plastic particles
Trying to get broadband speeds out of a dial-up modem is like cramming a watermelon through a garden hose. But that’s exactly what Artera Group International does with its Artera Turbo service — kind of
The Earth Simulator at the Marine Science and Technology Centre in Kanagawa records the fastest floating point calculation speed — over 35 trillion calculations per second. This is five times faster than the previous record holder, IBM’s ASCI White system
An experiment in minimally directed self-learning has been going fairly well. To test his ideas, Sugata Mitra launched something 13 months ago he calls the hole in the wall experiment. He took a PC connected to a high-speed data connection and imbedded it in a concrete wall next to NIIT’s headquarters in the south end of New Delhi. The wall separates the company’s grounds from a garbage-strewn empty lot used by the poor as a public bathroom. Mitra simply left the computer on, connected to the Internet, and allowed any passer-by to play with it… he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net
Eric Flint talks about the effects of posting his books for free on the Baen Free Library. Specifically, he uses his own royalty statements to show that sales for his books have gone up whenever he has made them available for free
Businesses have been warned to brace themselves for a major attack on Microsoft ISS within the next week
OQO’s modular computer crams processor, memory, battery and storage into a five-by-three inch box. They say the Ultra-Personal Computer can operate as a Palm-style wireless handheld. But it can also become a desktop replacement when connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse
AMD is to add XP to the name of its mobile Athlon chips. The Mobile AMD Athlon XP is the first CPU to roll off the 0.13micron production line. That means less heat, more performance and cheaper to produce than AMD’s chips built using the 0.18micron process
Adobe has begun shipping its newest version of Photoshop, updating the well-regarded image editing software by adding a painting engine with many customisation options and new file-management functions
According to Kenya’s Internet Service Providers Association, Africa is being forced by Western companies to pay the full cost of connecting to world-wide networks. And this extra cost is partly to blame for slowing the spread of the internet in Africa and helping sustain the digital divide
Today CompuServe launched CompuServe 7.0 with Netscape as the underlying browser. CompuServe started testing Komodo, a Gecko-based client, last year, and is now experimenting with Gecko-based AOL clients. CompuServe’s 3 million-member user base is seen as a testbed before turning AOL’s 34 million members into Netscape users later this year
A Georgia Tech student who almost flunked his intro to comp sci course for just discussing his homework with someone else. Note that no one, including the faculty, accused him of actually copying any code from anyone. However, the honour code
at Georgia Tech forbids its introductory computer science students from seeking any help from other students on their homework
. The faculty recorded part of his violation on the forms as He was trying to learn it
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