Telstra has signed a deal with Microsoft that appears to add further credibility to the theory that the best way to negotiate with Microsoft is to explore moving to Linux
Apple’s Jobs has cancer surgery
Poor Steve. At least they found the tumour in time by the looks of things, and he’ll be back in time to see the new iMac G5 line rolled out. All black turtle neck sweaters are to be rolled down at half mast.
On a brighter note, new iPods. Yep new click wheel, bigger capacities, longer battery life and cheaper.
On a selfish note, work has given the go ahead to buy me a mac, W00T! It aint a G5 like my first preference, but hey a dual 1.25Ghz G4 with 20″ Apple Cinema Display is not to be snezzed at, especially the monitor, very happy about the monitor (insert happy dance with a couple’o cart wheels*).
*cart wheels and dancing may not actually take place.
Five types of memory cards were dipped into cola, put through a washing machine, dunked in coffee, trampled by a skateboard, run over by a child’s toy car and given to a six-year-old boy to destroy. All came through with flying colours. They didn’t survive the extra tests of being smashed by a sledgehammer and nailed to a tree, but it was still possible to retrieve photos from the xD and Smartmedia cards
There’s a new fad sweeping the underground: guerrilla drive-ins [BugMeNot]. Essentially, someone sets up a DVD player, LCD projector, and wireless transmitter next to any blank wall (preferably on someone else’s property — to make it more fun), and people come to watch movies. As you would expect, the movie studios aren’t too thrilled
Two years after Microsoft executives began urging managers to outsource software development work to India, a Washington state technology union says the company has sent increasingly high-level jobs overseas, including some related to Longhorn, the next version of Windows — via Triode Internet
Lukas Grunwald, a senior consultant with DN-Systems Enterprise Solutions GmbH, is warning retailers that the RFID technology that they are quickly adopting can easily be hacked with the appropriate tools
Can you live without a pulse? Yes, now you can. The reason why we have a pulse is because it’s hard for evolution to result in turbines or continuously spinning things. The next generation of artificial hearts may have no pulse. They also have no bearings, so they should last much longer than previous attempts. In fact, engineers don’t give a predicted lifespan on these models
US researchers have unearthed what they say may be the oldest known brewery in the Andes, a pre-Incan plant at least 1000 years old that could produce drinks for hundreds of people at one sitting. The University of Florida said its archaeologists and researchers from the Field Museum in Chicago found the brewery at Cerro Baul, a mountaintop religious centre of the Wari empire that ruled what is now Peru hundreds of years before the Incas
Tubesville is a custom amp shop in NYC that builds whimsical custom amplifiers like this Victrola-like iPod amplifier / speaker cabinet combination.
You can also connect the old CD Walkman upto it instead — via boingboing
Human rights organisation Reporters sans Frontières has accused Yahoo! and Google of deliberately conspiring to censor the Web. RSF called the pair irresponsible
for blocking some content labelled as subversive by the Chinese government — sites relating to Tibet’s independence, for example. Such sites disappear from the Chinese language version of Yahoo and a Yahoo-parented search engine, Yisou, while a local search engine that Google now owns a share of, Baidu, also censors its results
Karlheinz Brandenburg, director of Germany’s prestigious Fraunhofer Institute for Media Technology, known for his contribution to the invention of the MP3 codec, has demonstrated a new technology that could create super-realistic sound for theatres, theme parks and home-entertainment systems. Iosono is described as true three dimensional audio, which can give the impression that a noise occurring in a movie sounds exactly like someone shouting from outside the theatre walls. The best surround sound speakers on the market today can approximate this for a sweet spot
of only a few feet wide, but Iosono would create the same realistic illusion for all the people sitting in a theatre
While studying ground squirrels, researchers noticed that some of them made faint whispering sounds, as if they had lost their voices. But when these silent screams
were processed by a bat detector, an abundance of ultrasound was detected. The researchers believe the whispers might be secret alarm calls — that the squirrels’ predators cannot hear — via meta-roj blog
A new-born baby rhinoceros in a Berlin zoo is in plaster after his mother carelessly trod on his foot one day after his birth. Patna, born last week to mother Betty and father Belur, will have to wear a plaster cast on his left lower leg for up to five weeks to heal a broken leg
Little Tikes Commercial has created a playground structure called the Infinity Climber, which is a climbable double twist strip for kids.
It also recently won a 2004 Industrial Design Excellence Award — via boingboing
An ICANN arbitration panel has rejected Google’s challenge of a Web site named Froogles.com, meaning that the Froogles.com name will remain with the current owner. Also, the current owner is opposing Google’s attempt to register Froogle with the US Patent and Trademark Office, contending the mark would be an infringement of his Froogles.com mark. Google has filed 18 domain name disputes at the ICANN panel, challenging names like googlesex.com
, google.biz
and googleme.com
. It has won every challenge but Froogles.com
Major Internet search engines were crippled Monday morning in the US by a variant of the MyDoom worm, rendering Google inaccessible to many users and slowing results from Yahoo
Three founders of Australia’s largest and crappest Web hosting company, WebCentral, will walk away with AU$18 million in cash when they sell their shares to listed tech company FTR Holdings
The Kalashnikov, like vodka, seems quintessentially Russian. But, as with vodka, plenty of other countries make versions of the assault rifle, and Russia’s arms export agency isn’t flattered. It doesn’t help that the foreign versions come cheaper
ACLU have an excellent piece of short speculative fiction presented as a flash animation depicting pizza ordering in a near-future United States — via boingboing
The clever clogs over at engadget have figured out how to hack an iPod into a universal remote. Basically, we recorded
the sounds
an infrared remote makes on a PC and then put them on an iPod as songs. Adding a special sound-to-IR converter then turns those sounds back to IR and allows you to use your iPod as a remote control. As an added bonus, it works up to 100 feet. A very handy mod that certainly beats fumbling through a multitude of loose remote controls — via boingboing
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