Intel and others plan to release a new version of the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus technology in the first half of 2008, a revamp the chipmaker said will make data transfer rates more than ten times as fast by adding fibre-optic links alongside the traditional copper wires
Google adds a PowerPoint clone called Presentation to its stable of online Word and Excel clones. Whether an online-only, browser-based presentation suite will be nearly as powerful as a native application is yet to be seen — via Gizmodo Australia
IBM’s Lotus-branded proprietary programs already compete with Microsoft products for e-mail, messaging and work group collaboration. But the Symphony software is a free alternative to Microsoft’s mainstay Office programs — Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The Office business is huge and lucrative for Microsoft, second only to its Windows operating system as a profit maker
Punk legends The Sex Pistols have announced a concert to mark the 30th anniversary of the release of their seminal album Never Mind the Bollocks. Original members John Lydon, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock will play at the Brixton Academy in London on 8 November. The group, who split in 1978, first reformed for a world tour in 1996 and last performed together in 2003
The New York Times said it will end its paid TimesSelect Web service and make most of its Web site available for free in the hopes of attracting more readers and higher advertising revenue
Apparently, SCO’s lawyers were working overtime last Sunday, because they wrote a quick plea to the bankruptcy court for permission to hire accounting temps. Why? Approximately half of SCO’s finance department has resigned or been fired. Two who resigned had over ten years of experience each. One can only assume that they know what’s about to happen to SCO — via Slashdot
A US federal court ordered the Chiquita banana company to pay $US25 million ($30 million) in fines for paying more than $US1 million in protection money to Colombian paramilitary groups between 1997 and 2004
The Federal Government recently began an unsavoury campaign to win votes by abusing parents’ concern for their children. It is trying to whip up fear about the largely non-existent threat of online sexual predators
Warner, who currently support both HD DVD and Blu-ray high definition disc formats, had also been working on a hybrid disc format — Total HD — which was originally due to debut this year, was delayed, and is now on hold indefinitely
Yahoo is buying e-mail service Zimbra for $350 million in an all-cash deal that may open a new revenue channel for the slumping Internet icon. The acquisition announced Monday represents Yahoo’s second significant expenditure this month as co-founder Jerry Yang spearheads an effort to breathe new life into the company
In one of the bolder experiments to date, SpiralFrog.com, a service scheduled to open today, will let Web surfers download songs by U2, Timbaland, Amy Winehouse and other Universal Music Group artists free. The catch: Consumers have to wait 90 seconds for each track to download, and they must answer questions each month about their buying habits. In addition, the songs can’t be played on iPods or burned onto CDs as they can with 99-cent downloads from the dominant online music store, Apple’s iTunes
A German operator of a Tor server used to anonymously route traffic over the net said he was arrested in a midnight raid on his residence that stemmed from an investigation into bomb threats said to have passed through an internet protocol address under his control
Google added 54 new countries to Google Maps ranging from Afghanistan to Yemen and has plans to add even more countries in the coming months. Along with the Google Maps addition, DigitalGlobe, provider of Google’s satellite images, is launching a new satellite on Tuesday
The $100 laptop — which was already up to a hefty $175, has gotten yet another price bump to $188. A spokesman says they’re committed to keeping the price from rising above $190, and probably below $200 if at all possible. It’s very strange that the price keeps rising, seeing as it’s been, what, two years since the project was announced, plus they’ve gotten more orders from companies so they can ramp up bulk production. Shouldn’t hardware prices have dropped instead of risen? — via Gizmodo Australia
The X PRIZE Foundation and Google has announced the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a robotic race to the Moon to win a $30 million prize purse
Two students at Central Kings Rural High School fought back against bullying recently, unleashing a sea of pink after a new student was harassed and threatened when he showed up wearing a pink shirt. The Grade 9 student arrived for the first day of school last Wednesday and was set upon by a group of six to 10 older students who mocked him, called him a homosexual for wearing pink and threatened to beat him up. The next day, Grade 12 students David Shepherd and Travis Price decided something had to be done about bullying. They used the Internet to encourage people to wear pink and bought 75 pink tank tops for male students to wear. They also brought a pink basketball to school as well as pink material for headbands and arm bands. David and Travis figure about half the school’s 830 students wore pink
Using lasers to drive spaceships has been a subject of interest for many years, but making a photonic engine powerful enough for practical use has been elusive. Dr Young Bae, a California physicist, has built a demonstration photonic laser thruster that produces enough thrust to micro-maneuver a satellite. This would be useful in high-precision formation flying, such as using a fleet of satellites to form a space telescope with a large virtual aperture. Scaled up, a similar engine could speed a spacecraft to Mars in less than a week — via Slashdot
The Rational Response Squad have lost their YouTube account, which is the account that we’ve been posting videos with ever since RichardDawkins.net lost theirs. Apparently Creation Science Evangelism Ministries
had been submitting false DMCA copyright requests and after RRS came to their defence, they were banned
The company MediaDefender works with the RIAA and MPAA against piracy, setting up fake torrents and trackers and disrupting p2p traffic. Previously, the TorrentFreak site accused them of setting up a fake internet video download site designed to catch and bust users. MediaDefender denied the entrapment charges. Now 700MB of MediaDefender’s internal emails from the last six months have been leaked onto BitTorrent trackers. The emails detail their entire plan, including how they intended to distance themselves from the fake company they set up and future strategies. Other pieces of company information were included in the emails such as logins and passwords, wage negotiations, and numerous other aspect of their internal business — via Slashdot
Technology that translates spoken or written words into British Sign Language (BSL) has been developed by researchers at IBM. The system, called SiSi (Say It Sign It) was created by a group of students in the UK. SiSi will enable deaf people to have simultaneous sign language interpretations of meetings and presentations
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