Foxtel subscribers will soon be able to download programs on demand using the internet, and also transfer these programs to other devices. The changes, due to be introduced in the first half of 2009, were revealed yesterday by chief executive Kim Williams at a briefing for the company’s dominant shareholder, Telstra
The startling case of an AIDS patient who underwent a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia is stirring new hope that gene-therapy strategies on the far edges of AIDS research might someday cure the disease. The patient, a 42-year-old American living in Berlin, is still recovering from his leukemia therapy, but he appears to have won his battle with AIDS. Doctors have not been able to detect the virus in his blood for more than 600 days, despite his having ceased all conventional AIDS medication. Normally when a patient stops taking AIDS drugs, the virus stampedes through the body within weeks, or days
Detailed information on the web pages people view will be retained for possible future criminal investigations if telecommunications operators comply with a letter from the Garda Commissioner
Developers working on Mozilla’s next browser have added a privacy mode to the still-under-construction Firefox 3.1, a major milestone in the development of the upgrade. The most recent test build of Firefox 3.1 adds what Mozilla calls Private Browsing
An inch-long array of some of the tiniest solar cells ever built has been successfully tested as a power source for microscopic machines. Instead of using silicon, Xiaomei Jiang of the University of South Florida and her colleagues turned to a polymer (a long organic molecule made of repeating structural units). The polymer they selected has the same electrical properties as silicon wafers, but can be dissolved and printed onto flexible material
A bottle of cheap tequila is good for making margaritas or forgetting a night out. But a team of Mexican scientists have discovered a new use for the potent liquor: forming diamonds. It just so happens that the popular Mexican alcohol is the ideal compound for creating one of the hardest substances on Earth via io9
In a technical session on Thursday afternoon, Microsoft provided the clearest public indication that it is planning on getting Windows 7 completed in time to run on PCs that ship for next year’s holiday buying season
The video website YouTube is preparing to link up with Hollywood to show full-length films for free over the internet, it has emerged. The site — already used by millions of people every day to watch short video clips — confirmed that it was in negotiations with major studios as it gets ready to launch an online movie service. Free films, running with advertising, would mark a radical advance for the video-sharing website as it looks to profit from its massive popularity
I ran across Brian Dereu’s hollow spy coins via boingboing and was fascinated
Had a chat to Brian and asked if he only made them up according to historical spy coins or could do requests. I’m quite fond of Buffalo nickels and Brian was happy to make me up a Buffalo nickel spy coin. It arrived this week and is seriously geeky cool
Under Government plans to monitor internet traffic, raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database. The vision was outlined at a meeting between officials from the Home Office and Internet Service Providers earlier this week. It is further evidence of the Government’s desire to have the capability to vet every telephone call, email and internet visit made in the UK, which has already provoked an outcry
Security researchers say they’ve developed a way to partially crack the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption standard used to protect data on many wireless networks
An application has expectedly quit. Windows 3.x has come to the closing moments of its long life. On 1 November Microsoft stopped issuing licences for the software that made its debut in May 1990 in the US. The various versions of Windows 3.x (including 3.11) released in the early 1990s, were the first of Microsoft’s graphical user interfaces to win huge worldwide success. They helped Microsoft establish itself and set the trend for how it makes its revenues, and what drives the company until the present day
Solid-state drives with random write speeds as much as 100 times faster than existing systems. That’s the promise of a next-generation patented flash management system
unveiled by SanDisk
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have created nanoscale particles that can self-assemble into various optical devices. By controlling how densely the tiny silver particles assemble themselves, the researchers can make several different kinds of devices, including photonic crystals. The self-assembling materials could be made cheaply and on a large scale. As a result, the silver nanoparticles could be used to make metamaterials, color-changing paints, components for optical computers, and ultrasensitive chemical sensors, among many other potential applications
Britain’s code-cracking and computing heritage has won a lifeline in the form of a donation from English Heritage. The grant of £330,000 will be used to undertake urgent roof works at Bletchley Park — where Allied codebreakers worked in World War II. Discussions are also in progress on a further three-year, £600,000 funding programme for the historic site
The search-advertising marriage between Google and Yahoo has been called off. Google wasn’t willing to go forward with the deal in the face of promised Department of Justice action
The Cooperative Research Centre for Sugar Industry Innovation say it is close to commercialising an unusual by-product of sugar cane — biodegradable plastic
Inventor Mitch Altman explains why he open-sourced his TV-B-Gone kit, the original stealth keychain fob for defeating TVs in public places. The title of the article is Patent-B-Gone
and perhaps the most interesting fact is that Mitch’s brother is a patent attorney, but he still decided to release an open source hardware version of the TV-B-Gone, with pretty impressive results — via Slashdot
Ministers have been forced to order an emergency shutdown of a key Government computer system to protect millions of people’s private details. The action was taken after a memory stick was found in a pub car park containing confidential passcodes to the online Government Gateway system, which covers everything from tax returns to parking tickets. An urgent investigation is now under way into how the stick, belonging to the company which runs the flagship system, came to be lost
Any mad scientists planning to genetically engineer Dracula this Halloween should look to the vampire bat for inspiration. New research pinpoints some of the genetic changes that allowed them to evolve to subsist on a diet of pure blood. Key among those is a knack for keeping their meals from coagulating. They do so with the help of a gene found in other animals — plasminogen activator. In humans the gene protects against heart attack by producing proteins that bust up blood clots and clear vessels. Previous research had shown that vampire bats activate the gene in their saliva, too
RSS – Posts