A rather surprising article hit the front page of the BBC on Tuesday: the next generation of hard disks could cause slowdowns for XP users . Not normally the kind of thing you'd expect to be placed so prominently, but the warning it gives is a worthy one, if timed a bit oddly. The world of hard disks is set to change, and the impact could be severe. In the remarkably conservative world of PC hardware, it's not often that a 30-year-old convention gets discarded. Even this change has been almost ..
Amazon's patent on one-click shopping has survived the scrutiny of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In an official notice published this month, the USPTO declared its intent to issue a reexamination certificate affirming the validity of Amazon's amended version of the patent. The patent, which was filed in 1997, describes a method of enabling consumers to purchase goods without having to provide credit card and shipping information during every shopping session. Amazon enforced the ..
There is a point when playing rhythm games such as Rock Band or Guitar Hero where you hit a kind of wall; there is only so much to learn hitting buttons as notes flow down the screen. Power Gig: Rise of the Six String in addition to having a terrible titlewants to break that wall by teaching you actual guitar skills if you choose to move past what the tradition rhythm game has offered. The guitar peripheral is an actual six-string electric guitar, although we're promised that the ..
SAN FRANCISCO At a GDC event today, Sony showed off its new PlayStation Move controller, along with a number of games. The audience response was positive, but the demos shown, including sports games and sword-and-shield-style battles, seemed both inspired and informed by what the Wii has done before. In fact, while Sony claimed that for under $100 you'll be able to get the PlayStation Eye, a motion controller, and a game, almost all the demos were played with two motion ..
It feels like quantum computers have barely been invented, and scientists are already testing how extensible the current technology is. A paper published in Nature Photonics this week describes how researchers are beginning to push the bandwidth limits of quantum memory. Using photon pulses and cesium vapor has provided bandwidths on par with broadband connections, rates 100 times those of other quantum memory systems currently being tested. However, the system's efficiency is still very low, ..
Identity theft prevention service LifeLock is not as pristine as its reputation claims after all. The company agreed to pay out $12 million to settle charges with the Federal Trade Commission and 35 states, which had said that LifeLock's identity-theft-prevention claims were false and that the company actually made its own customer data available and unsecured from theft. As it turns out, there is no way to fully guarantee that identity theft won't happen, no matter what someone puts on the ..
As part of the grand hoopla-fest building up to the release of the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan this month, the agency hosted a Digital Inclusion Summit at Washington, DC's Newseum on Tuesday. Co-sponsored with the Knight Foundation, during the course of the event the FCC disclosed more components of The Plan. These include recommending the creation of a Digital Literacy Corps "to conduct skills training and outreach in communities with low rates of adoption," and ..
A paper published in Nature Materials this week details a new method for using nanotubes to generate significant amounts of power, at least for their size. When multi-walled carbon nanotubes are covered with a material that produces an exothermic reaction, the nanotubes help conduct the heat in one focused direction. To the apparent surprise of the researchers, this created an electrical pulse, a quick surge of power, that could be put to a number of uses. When you couple a heat-activated ..
At the Campfire One event last night, Google launched the Google Apps Marketplace and demonstrated how external Web applications from other vendors can be integrated into Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and other services that are part of the search giant's Web-based productivity suite. In the quest for data liberation , Google's hosted Web services have long offered a wide range of APIs for third-party developers. With the launch of the new marketplace, however, Google Apps for domains is ..
The CodePlex Foundation has announced the arrival of several new board members, including Jim Jagielski, the Chief Open Source Officer of SpringSource. Jagielski, who was one of the original cofounders of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), brings a lot of credibility and leadership experience to the CodePlex Foundation. When the CodePlex Foundation was established by Microsoft last year, an interim board of directors was assembled to help get the organization off the ground while permanent ..
One of the most striking images from The Terminator was the weapon he carried and used in his first attempt on Sarah Connor's life: the .45 Longslide, with laser sighting. Who can forget the scene in the gun shop? The gun was likewise such a striking presence on screen it was used on the film's poster. There are T-shirts dedicated to the gun . Terminator was released in 1984, and while laser sights on weapons are common now, when the film was first shown the red laser was able to communicate ..
Apple COO Tim Cook's warning from early 2009 wasn't the only one that handset makers received before Apple sicced the lawyers on HTC last week. According to a research note from Oppenheimer analyst Yal Reiner, Apple began warning top executives at companies such as HTC and Motorola in January that it wasn't too happy about seeing allegedly iPhone-related IP showing up in proposed new products. According to "industry checks," Cook's comments last January during the quarterly analyst ..
A typical neuroscience paper (or a typical report on one) is a laundry list of structure:function relationships between brain regions and the mental tasks they perform. The amygdala deals with registering rewards, the hippocampus handles memory, and so on. These relationships have been the result of over a century of work, starting with rare cases of brain injury and building through modern medical imaging, which can detect ever-smaller lesions and associate neural activity with specific ..
Google's recent announcement of a 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home testbed has communities across the US salivating but imagine what the Internet might be like if that connection to your home were even faster. Say... 100Gbps. In less than 20 years, such speeds will be possible, but only for companies who installed the right sort of fiber architecture. The UK telecoms regulator Ofcom commissioned a lengthy report on the future of fiber (PDF) (or "fibre," in this case) from the firm Analysys Mason. ..
Apple subsidiary FileMaker has released version 11 of its flagship FileMaker Pro database. The updated software purports to make building and maintaining databases even easier, while acknowledging that many users are accustomed to using spreadsheets for database purposes by including pivot table-like reporting and Excel-like charting features. FileMaker Pro Server has also been updated, dropping the simultaneous client access limit for the Advanced version. FileMaker Pro already laid claim to ..
The European Parliament is fed up with the secrecy surrounding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Today, representatives from all the major parliamentary coalitions introduced a resolution demanding that the European Commission release all negotiating texts, inform Parliament about the negotiating process, and absolutely refuse to countenance any sort of "three strikes" Internet disconnection penalty for online copyright infringement. The measure comes up for a vote tomorrow and ..
The .xxx domain is back on the table. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ( ICANN ) will reconsider the top-level domain during a meeting in Kenya this week, nearly three years after it was shot down and nine years after it was first introduced as a way to identify pornography sites and hopefully confine them to their own Internet red-light district. The .xxx domain was first proposed in 2001 and approved in 2005 for exclusive (but voluntary) use by the adult entertainment ..
Government and industry bureaucrats addicted to spewing out mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations, be very afraid; Edward Tufte is coming to Washington, DC. The Obama administration has appointed Tufte to serve on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, which will suggest ways that the $787 billion stimulus program's watchdog accountability board can do its job. "I'm doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service," Tufte explained on his website on ..
Mozilla's high-performance TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which was first introduced in 2008, has lost a lot of its luster as competing browser vendors have stepped up their game to deliver superior performance. Firefox now lags behind Safari, Chrome, and Opera in common JavaScript benchmarks. In an effort to bring Firefox back to the front of the pack, Mozilla is building a new JavaScript engine called JägerMonkey. The secret sauce that will drive Mozilla's new JavaScript engine engine into ..
Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch claims that the company's ubiquitous Flash plug-in doesn't ship with any known crash bugs. One can only assume that he has never used the software. As Adobe representatives exhibit an increasingly dismissive attitude about Flash's technical deficiencies, the browser vendors have stepped up to address the problems and are finding ways to insulate their users from Flash's poor security and lack of stability. Several mainstream browsers isolate Flash and other plug-ins in ..
India Talkies Malaysia Hindu wins custody row with .. - Indiatalkies AP A Malaysian court Thursday granted an ethnic Indian woman custody of her child in a bitter dispute with her Muslim-convert husband, in a ruling that could ease religious minorities' worries about their legal rights.
NEWS.com.au Corey Haim was 'tormented soul' - News The Lost Boys actor Corey Haim was a "tormented soul", friend and fellow actor Corey Feldman has said. Paying tribute to the star, Feldman said he wept when he heard Haim had died at a California hospital on Wednesday aged 38.
AFP Dodd Ends Talks, Says Financial Bill Will Include .. - Google March 11 (Bloomberg) -- Senator Christopher Dodd, who today ended three weeks of talks with Republican Bob Corker on legislation to overhaul financial regulations, said elements they worked out will be in the bill he introduces next ...
The Guardian Brain scans 'can distinguish memories', .. - Guardian Scientists say they have been able to tell which past event a person is recalling using a brain scan. The University College London researchers showed people film clips and were able to predict which ones they were subsequently thinking about.
BBC News Inside the mind of a Russian hacker - Bbc He's a reformed Russian hacker . Back hunched, eyes fixed on the computer screen in front of him, he demonstrates what he can do. "Look, here's the log-in ...
The Hindu Protect your kidneys and control diabetes .. - Beta The Hindu Posters displayed to create awareness among the people in Bangalore on the occasion of World Kidney Day on Thursday. Photo: K. Bhagya Prakash You are reading this on World Kidney Day and the doctors are telling you to mind your blood sugar.
Ananova Anna Nicole Smith - the opera - Ananova The life of Playboy centrefold Anna Nicole Smith is to be turned into an opera. The production - co-written by one of the creators of Jerry Springer: The ...
