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Slashdot

Here Come the Linux iPad Clones: CWmike writes You can now pre-order an Apple iPad; but do you really want to, asks Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. I mean, I get why youd want an iPad. Id like one too, he writes. But, he says, when I consider

DR Congo Ring May Be Giant Impact Crater: Phrogman writes The BBC is reporting that deforestation has revealed what could be a giant impact crater in Central Africa, scientists say. The 36-46km-wide feature, identified in DR Congo, may be one of the largest such structures discovered in the

NY To Replace IT Vendors With State Workers: dcblogs writes New York state plans to replace as many as 500 IT contract workers with a new type of temporary state worker. The state estimates it can save $25,000 annually for each contracting position that is in-sourced. This is

Netflix Prize Sequel Cancelled Over Privacy Concerns: An anonymous reader writes Netflix just announced that they have cancelled the sequel to the Netflix Prize, which was promised last year. Netflix made the choice after they were sued over privacy concerns. The prize involves releasing large amounts of

China Warns Google To Obey Or Leave: suraj.sun writes with this snippet from an Associated Press report:Chinas top Internet regulator insisted Friday that Google must obey its laws or pay the consequences, giving no sign of a possible compromise in their dispute over censorship and hacking. If

Security Industry Faces Attacks It Can't Stop: itwbennett writes The takedown of the Mariposa botnet and so-called advanced persistent threat attacks, such as the one that compromised Google systems in early December, were hot topics at the RSA conference last week. What both Mariposa and the Google

University of Wyoming Studies Video Games: krou writes The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting story about how the University of Wyomings English Department is helping fund a collective called the Learning Games Initiative to study video games. Jason Thompson, an assistant professor at UW who

IBM Stops Disclosing US Headcount Data: theodp writes ComputerWorld reports that IBM has stopped providing breakouts on US employees, closing a door to data that provided insights into the bellwether companys employment shift. In its latest Annual Report, Big Blue only provides its global headcount, and

MIT Scientists Make a Polyethylene Heatsink: arcticstoat calls our attention to MIT research that has produced a version of polyethylene that can conduct heat away from computer chips. Polyethylene is the most widely used plastic. Its not clear how practical this research is for industrial-scale use,

On Social Networks, You Are Who You Know: santosh maharshi writes On social networks like Facebook, even if you have kept your profile very private, people can just look at your friends list and infer lots of vital information about you. Most of the social networks like Facebook

Hollow Spy Coins: Bruce Schneiers blog links to a few sources for hollow spy coins, one being BoingBoings Bazaar — where a nickel that can hold a microSD card costs $27. Another is Slashdots sister company ThinkGeek, where you can get hollow quarters

FCC Asks You To Test Your Broadband Speeds: AnotherUsername writes The Federal Communications Commission is asking the nations broadband and smartphone users to use its broadband testing tools to help the feds and consumers know what speeds are actually available, not just promised by the nations telecoms. At

ACM Awards 2009 Turing Prize To Alto Creator Charles Thacker: scumm writes This years Turing Prize has been awarded to Charles Thacker, whom they describe as (among other things) the creator of the first modern personal computer. From the ACMs announcement: ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Charles

Sony Begins Selling HD Movies On Its PSN: itwbennett writes Sony on Tuesday rolled out the ability to buy HD movies from the PlayStation Network, writes blogger Peter Smith. Sony claims theyre the first service to offer HD titles to own from all six major movie studios. Smith

UK Gov't Wants Facebook To Feature Child Safety Button: judgecorp writes Harriet Harman, the deputy leader of the Labour Party, has said that UK government ministers are taking action to get Facebook to add a British child protection button (called CEOP) to its site. The move comes after the

China To Tap Combustible Ice As New Energy Source: lilbridge writes Huge reserves of combustible ice — frozen methane and water, have been discovered in the tundra of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in China. Estimates show that there is enough combustible ice to provide 90 years worth of energy for

A Sad Day For the New Zealand Internet: An anonymous reader writes Another one bites the dust, as New Zealands Internet filter stealthily goes live with two smaller ISPs, and three of the largest already rumoured to have signed up to do the same. However, US Secretary of

Best Pre-Paid Data Plan For a Visit To Germany?: code prole writes With two upcoming trips to Germany, and no readily available Internet (WiFi or otherwise) in the location where well be staying, Im looking for a no-contract USB stick and pre-paid data plan. Vodafone has a huge selection

Zeus Botnet Down But Not Out: harryjohnston writes The Register points out that the takedown of a significant number of Zeus command-and-control servers, which we discussed earlier, was a short-lived victory, as about one-third of the affected servers were back on the net in less than

MetaLab Accuses Mozilla of Ripping Off UI Elements In Mockups: CWmike writes Canadian interface design firm MetaLab has accused Mozilla of stealing user interface elements for a development tool in the browser makers Jetpack project, which aims to simplify add-on making. MetaLab leveled the charges on Tuesday when the 11-person

Digg Technology

Five insights into the behaviors of social media users: Sometimes its easy to think we know everything about your everyday Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or even mobile users. However, we managed to dig up a few tidbits about these people that piqued our interest.

Google's Own Stated List of Competitors Grows from 2 to 10: Google sees an Internet far more crowded with competitors than just a year ago. At least, thats what the company is telling government regulators.

Foursquare takes lead in where-am-I apps - CNN.com: One year ago, the founders of Foursquare stepped onstage before a tech-savvy crowd in Austin, Texas, to announce their concept: a smartphone app that lets you tell friends where you are.

The War At SXSW: AT&T vs 15,000 Data-Crazed Velociraptors: AT&T’s struggles to stay up last year are well-documented. CNN recently ran a piece about how AT&T hopes to avoid a similar fate this year. But actually, “struggles” is way too kind of a word. If you were at SXSW

"Call to Action” Buttons: Guidelines and Best Practices: Call to action buttons on websites are often neglected. Designers sometimes don’t understand exactly what makes a good call to action button beyond being attractive and fitting into the overall design. But call to action buttons are too important to

China Warns Google - " Bear The Consequences": A Chinese minister made the governments strongest statement yet on Googles future in the country, warning that the U.S. Internet company will have to bear the consequences if it stops censoring its Chinese search site.

President Obama Discusses Three Strikes Anti-Piracy Law: Hollywood lobbyists are trying to launch an assault on Internet providers and fast track tougher anti-piracy legislation in the United States. Ari Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, says the industry has been discussing these

The Three-Story Washing Machine: So this was obvious: Place a few dividers into an otherwise normal front-loading washing machine, and separate your reds from your whites without washing a whole separate load.

New Site Unmasks Chatroulette Players: Does Chatroulette, the popular video chat site, lose its appeal if it loses its anonymity? Chatroulette offers a welcome break from the daily digital footprints I leave across the Web on sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz, where every

Feds: TSA Worker Tried to Sabotage Terror Database: A former Transportation Security Administration contractor is being charged in Colorado for allegedly injecting malicious code into a government network used for screening airport security workers and others. The malicious code, a logic bomb installed last October, was designed to

How soon is now? Pre-order timing for iPad confirmed, 5:30am: We asked Apple PR to help you plan your day tomorrow, and they responded:Customers can pre-order online at apple.com at 5:30am Pacific time on Friday, March 12.There you have it. 5:30 am PT, 8:30 am ET, and for those of

Apple's iPad Could Kill The Mac: The rise of the iPhone OS-based iPad could be the beginning of the end for Apples 26-year-old personal computer platform.

How SeaWorld used social media to defuse a major crisis: The recent killer whale attack at SeaWorld could have been the end of the theme park. It was that bad. But it appears by all accounts that SeaWorld will continue operating with relative normalcy. That is in large part due

Top 9 Classic Games on the iPhone: Note: To keep things fair, the original versions of these games had to be at least five years old to be included.

DING! Round 2: Foursquare & Gowalla both update iPhone Apps: In this corner, with a big head start, a huge user base, and tons of features, its ... Foursquare! In this corner, with millions of dollars in funding and a great-looking new design ... Gowalla! The two have been going

12 Types of Cell Phone Users That Drive Us Nuts: Maybe youve seen Bluetooth Johnson, the bathroom texter or Han Solo, a.k.a, the holster master, in action. But hopefully, you dont see any of these 12 annoying cell phone characters when you look in the mirror.

The Internet up for Nobel Peace Prize: Thats right, The internet is among 237 individuals and organisations nominated for the prize, advocated by the Italian version of Wired magazine for advancing dialogue, debate and consensus

A Day In The Life Of A Programmer v1.0 (COMIC): Comic by Ash.

FCC Commissioner rips ISPs on broadband prices, competition: The FCCs newest Democrat read the big ISPs the riot act on rising broadband prices and shrinking competition. Mignon Clyburn called the latest round of rate hikes a red flag for the Commission.

Super Stealth Plane Breaks Through Cost Barrier: The Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing today on the future of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and things are not looking pretty for the next-generation stealth aircraft. It now appears likely the Air Force will have to declare

CNET News.com

Consensus emerges for key Web-app standard: Indexed DB isnt a sure thing, but its got most of the right allies in the browser world to become an enabler of the cloud computing vision.

FCC tool collects broadband speed data: A new FCC tool tests whether consumers are actually getting the broadband speeds theyre paying for.

Come see Paris--in 26 gigapixels: Site, which offers a breathtaking view of Paris, enables you to pan around, see monuments, and get a high-def feel for what the City of Light is all about.

Privacy concerns derail Netflix contest: Netlix says privacy concerns have prompted the company to cancel a contest that rewards technology that best predicts a users movie-viewing preferences.

'Cloud' vs. 'source' in the battle of bland corporate names: Open source and cloud-computing start-ups have one thing in common: a tendency to wear their industry trend on their sleeves.

ICANN postpones decision on .xxx domains: Advocates for a .xxx designation for adult sites will have to wait until at least June after the ICANN board postponed a decision on the matter at its meeting Friday.

Week in review: Game on for Sony: Sony joins the motion controller wars, and broadband gets ready for a big leap. Also: SXSWi goes geolocation.

Tech finds its place at SXSWi (roundup): As the Web generation descends on the South by Southwest Interactive show in Austin, several location-based start-ups try to put themselves on the map.

Friday hiatus: CNET News Daily Podcast: There will be no News podcast today.

Google ponders split decision on China: Google appears close to deciding its future in China and might be eyeing a resolution that lets it stay in the country in some fashion even if it shuts down its search engine.

When malware strikes via bad ads on good sites: Who is responsible for malware in ads, Web site owners or ad networks and delivery firms?

Plastic Logic Que e-reader delayed till summer: Plastic Logics Que proReader was supposed to come out in April. Now its been pushed back till summer. With the iPads arrival next month, that may spell doom for this once highly-anticipated e-reader.

Obama to 'aggressively protect' intellectual property: The president says us intellectual property is countrys single greatest asset and must be protected from piracy and counterfeiting.

ISP interruptions trip up Zeus botnet: But the source of the Zeus banking Trojan is back in action after unidentified agents cut off upstream connectivity to an ISP in Kazakhstan.

Chasing efficiency in green homes: At Northeast Sustainable Energy Associations BuildingEnergy conference, the focus is on deep cuts in energy through efficiency and on-site power.

Beijing official warns Google to obey China's laws: Minister of Industry and Information Technology Li Yizhong cautions that the search giant must adhere to Chinas laws on censorship.

'Deep energy retrofits' take root in homes: The talk at an annual building conference in Boston is about how to reduce energy use in houses by more than 50 percent, which early pilots show can be done but with steep costs.

Video game pros get down to work (and play) at GDC (photos): Video game developers, artists, and producers gather to share ideas on the future of gaming at the Game Developers Conference, the worlds largest professionals-only video game convention.

Too busy at SXSW to RSVP? No problem: Maybe its a sign of SXSW excess or perhaps its a prank, but RSVP While You Sleep is advertising a $37 service that tasks overseas virtual assistants with responding to your party invites.

IE 9, Windows Phone in the Mix: At the annual Las Vegas event, Microsoft plans to show its latest browser and give developers the tools they need to write software for the forthcoming Windows Phone 7 series devices.

ZDNet

Obama lines up with copyright owners: As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama was a young technology fan who appeared to be an establishment outsider. But he now appears to have lined up on the side of copyright owners. by Greg Sandoval CNET News

Why no one cares about privacy anymore: Google co-founder Sergey Brin adores the companys social network called Google Buzz. We know this because an engineer working five feet from Brin used Google Buzz to say so. by Declan McCullagh CNET News

Judges uphold Word patent-infringement ruling: A US Court of Appeals panel has upheld a judgement that Microsoft infringed on another companys patent with its custom XML tags in Word 2003 and Word 2007. by David Meyer ZDNet UK

Three arrested over 12.7m PC botnet: Authorities in Spain have arrested three men accused of operating a massive botnet which stole credit card and bank log-in data and infected computers in half the Fortune 1,000 companies. by Elinor Mills CNET News

Target offers mobile coupons: Mobile coupons are coming to mega-retailer Target, which will allow shoppers all over the U.S. to use their mobile handset to get discounts on all kinds of products. by Marguerite Reardon CNET News

Browser choice not coming to Asia: Microsoft rivals have indicated that they will not be pushing for a similar action in the Asia-Pacific region. by Liau Yun Qing ZDNet Asia

Google boosts Chrome privacy in new beta: Google has improved privacy features and introduced automated translation of foreign-language web pages in a new version of its Chrome 4.1 beta browser for Windows. by Tom Espiner ZDNet UK

Twitter aims to filter out malicious links: Twitter is launching a new service designed to stop users of the social-media site from getting duped by phishing links that steal their login credentials and other attacks. by Elinor Mills CNET News

Potential console killer OnLive to go live June 17: OnLive, a streaming video game service that, if properly implemented, could threaten traditional console makers. by Daniel Terdiman CNET News

EMC, Intel team up on cloud security, compliance: EMC, RSA, VMware and Intel have announced a new collaboration to introduce a framework encompassing security and compliance for cloud computing in the enterprise space. by Kevin Kwang ZDNet Asia

LHC to restart following break and glitches: The The Large Hadron Collider, the worlds largest particle accelerator is to restart on Monday following a technical break and glitches in the machine. by Tom Espiner ZDNet UK

Google launches people finder for Chile earthquake: Google has launched a tool to help people locate friends and loved ones who might have been affected by the 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Chile on Saturday. by Steven Musil CNET News

Skype drops Windows Mobile and Skype Lite: Skype has announced it is pulling Skype for Windows Mobile phones and Skype Lite for Java handsets, including Android. by Jessica Dolcourt CNET News

Mozilla patches critical Firefox bugs: Mozilla has released fixes for five security holes in older versions of Firefox, while a security company has warned of a zero-day flaw in the latest version of the popular browser. by Matthew Broersma

Drudge Report accused of serving malware: For the second time in less than six months, visitors to the Drudge Report say they got malware in addition to the Web sites usual sensational headlines. by Elinor Mills CNET News

Curt Schilling's 38 Studios, EA in Big Huge game deal: Ex-baseballer Curt Schillings developer 38 Studios has struck a deal with EA to publish an upcoming single-player role-playing game. by Tor Thorsen GameSpot

HP sues Asian firms over patents: Hewlett-Packard has filed a suit against four companies based in Hong Kong and Taiwan, accusing the defendants of patent infringement, according to various reports. by Vivian Yeo ZDNet Asia

Zeus Trojan infects 74,000 PCs in global botnet: More than 74,000 PCs at nearly 2,500 organizations around the world were compromised over the past year-and-a-half, in a botnet infestation designed to steal login credentials to bank sites, social networks and email systems. by Elinor Mills CNET News

Google Buzz gets security fix: Google has fixed a security flaw that had the potential to allow a hacker to compromise Google Buzz accounts. by Tom Espiner ZDNet UK

U.S. trade body investigating Apple, RIM over patents: The US International Trade Commission said it will launch an investigation into whether Apples iPhone and Research In Motions BlackBerry infringe on a Kodak patent. by Daniel Terdimann CNET News

Wired Technology

Video: Cold, Little Comet Is No Match for the Big, Hot Sun: A small, newly discovered comet will not get a chance to enjoy its fame for long.As you can see in this image sequence obtained by NASA’s Solar and Heliosopheric Observatory, the comet is on a collision course with the sun.

Solar Slumber May Have Been Caused by Magnetic Flows: Newly reported observations of gas flows on the solar surface may explain why the sun recently had such an extended case of the doldrums.From 2008 through the first half of 2009, the sun had a puzzling dearth of sunspots, flares

Desperate Efforts to Save Endangered Bats May Fail: A desperate attempt to keep endangered Virginia big-eared bats alive in captivity has shown just how difficult that noble task may be.The effort was prompted by the discovery of White Nose Syndrome, an extremely virulent disease that has killed more

The ’70s Photos That Made Us Want to Save Earth: << previous image | next image >>Two years after Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, the new institution sent out 100 photographers to document the nation’s environment writ large.Now, those photos have made it out of the root cellar

You Are a Tamagotchi: Turning Your Health Into a Game: In the mid 1990s, a craze swept Japan and crested its way onto American shores: Kids were going crazy for the Tamagotchi, an egg-shaped digital pet. Every few hours, users would press a couple buttons to feed their Tamagotchi, play

Quantum Computing Thrives on Chaos: Embracing chaos just might help physicists build a quantum brain. A new study shows that disorder can enhance the coupling between light and matter in quantum systems, a find that could eventually lead to fast, easy-to-build quantum computers.Quantum computers promise

Your Chilean Sea Bass Dinner Deprives Killer Whales: A one-of-a-kind killer whale population appears to be threatened by human appetites for Antarctic toothfish, better known to restaurant-goers as Chilean Sea Bass.As fishing fleets patrol their waters, catching what was their primary source of food, the whales are vanishing.

Arctic Reindeer Go Off the Circadian Clock: Reindeer adapt to the Arctic’s endless summer light and winter dark by silencing their circadian clock. The adaptation may be a general one that helps Arctic animals make the most of their weird environment.“If you are being driven through a

Ear Infections Could Cause Long-Term ‘Lazy Ear’: Some folks who don’t seem to listen may just have a lazy ear. A new study in rats shows that short-term hearing impairments at any stage of life can lead to rewiring in the part of the brain that processes

Gulf War Syndrome Shows Up in Brain Scans: SALT LAKE CITY — Nearly two decades after vets began returning from the Middle East complaining of Gulf War Syndrome, the federal government has yet to formally accept that their vague jumble of symptoms constitutes a legitimate illness. Here, at

Half-Cocked? Hermaphrochickens Challenge Gender Identit: Chicken sex doesn’t work like ours. No, not that sex — but the process by which an embryo becomes a recognizably male or female animal.Unlike mammals, it’s not hormones that dictate a chicken’s sex. It’s fundamental property of the cells

Bottled Wind Could Be as Constant as Coal: Wind power has made incredible inroads into the U.S. energy system thanks to big, efficient machines standing hundreds of feet tall. But the future of wind power may be underground.In the abandoned mines and sandstones of the Midwest, compressed-air storage

Better Than Apollo: The Space Program We Almost Had: SAN FRANCISCO — In the late 1950s, American space companies jumped into a headlong race to build an aerospace industry that could launch missiles across the world and rockets above it.In her new book Another Science Fiction, archivist Megan Prelinger

Your Computer Really Is a Part of You: An empirical test of ideas proposed by Martin Heidegger shows the great German philosopher to be correct: Everyday tools really do become part of ourselves.The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged to

Mile-High Mega-Kites Could Pull Giant, Floating Power-Plant Ships: Take a huge oceanic catamaran, stick a hydroelectric turbine underneath it, and hitch it to a 6.5 million-square-foot parafoil flying nearly a mile in the air. That’s a Korean research team’s new proposal for generating gigawatts of clean energy.As the

Low Tolerance for Pain May Be Genetic: One form of a common genetic variant may ratchet up pain sensitivity in people who have it, researchers report online March 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The discovery could lead to more powerful pain treatments that

All of Life’s Ingredients Found in Orion Nebula: The ingredients for life as we know it have been found in the Orion Nebula.By finely separating the spectrum of incoming light, astronomers are able to detect the chemical fingerprints of molecules like water and methanol. The spectrograph that their

Kindness Breeds More Kindness, Study Shows: In findings sure to gladden the heart of anyone who’s ever wondered whether tiny acts of kindness have larger consequences, researchers have shown that generosity is contagious.Goodness spurs goodness, they found: A single act can influence dozens more.In a game

Chile Earthquake Moved Entire City 10 Feet to the West: The magnitude 8.8 quake that struck near Maule, Chile Feb. 27 moved the entire city of Concepcion 10 feet to the west.Precise GPS measurements from before and after the earthquake, the 5th largest ever recorded by seismographs, show that the

How Big Waves Go Rogue: An extra-tall wave struck a cruise ship off the Mediterranean coast of Spain this week, claiming two lives and injuring one person on board. Though the wave may not qualify as a “rogue wave,” it could have been created by

Tom's Hardware

GDC 2010, Day 1: The Missing Middle: This years Game Developer Conference is in full swing, and Loyd Case is on the ground, reporting the latest goings-on. His Day 1 coverage includes AMDs push for open-standard physics, Windows Phone 7, Playstation Move, real-world gaming, and Surface.

Efficiency Explored: Core i7-980X Versus Core i7-975: Intel is preemptively launching the first hexa-core desktop CPU weeks ahead of actual availability. But how does this 32nm monster perform

Intel Core i7-980X Extreme: Hello, Six-Core Computing: Already the performance leader in desktop processing, Intel is following its quad-core Bloomfield design up with Gulftown, a hexa-core design sporting 12MB of shared L3 cache. Is the lone Gulftown model, Core i7-980X Extreme, worth a $1,000 asking price?

Four Compression And Archiving Solutions Compared: Would you rather use 7-Zip, FreeArc, WinRAR, or WinZip? We put four of the most popular file archiving tools to the test, analyzing compression ratios and performance. Spoiler alert: WinZip 14, the latest version of this popular title, gets creamed.

Presented By:

Updated: Tuning Cool'n'Quiet: Maximize Power And Performance: Think your Athlon or Phenom processor is already tuned to deliver the best balance between performance and power consumption? Think again.

Presented By:

Best Graphics Cards For The Money: March 2010: With three new Radeon HD 5000-series cards launched last month, older models being put out to pasture. And an

3.5” Enterprise Hard Drive Development Analyzed: SSDs might be the fastest storage option today, but by no means is it the most popular. Magnetic media offers high throughput and

Two Portable 500GB Drives Benchmarked (And Dropped): If youre the sort of power user whos hard on technology, especially out in the field, then ruggedized mobile storage might be apropos. Today, were looking at a pair of portable disks that can take drops and spills, while serving

Web Browser Grand Prix: The Top Five, Tested And Ranked: Weve put Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox, and Opera through a gauntlet of speed tests and time trials to find out which Web browser is truly the fastest. How does your favorite land in our rankings?

Presented By:

Intel Core i5-750S: Since When Does The S Mean Slow?: Intel has S-models for several Core 2 processors that offer lower power consumption and comparable performance. However, the first S-model in the Core i5 family is actually slower than its regular counterpart—and its even less efficient, overall!

AMD 890GX Unveiled: Three Motherboards Compared: AMD’s new chipset promises big performance increases with its Radeon HD 4290 graphics core and built-in SATA 6Gb/s controller. Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI sent their latest motherboards to help us find out how well 890GX and SB850 deliver on those

Perfect Consumer Backup With Seagate And Rebit: Seagate’s Replica is a portable hard drive with automatic backup, versioning, and disaster recovery features to make backup a no-brainer. The product works so well that it deserves our rare Best of Tom’s Award.

Value DDR3 For Intel's P55: Six 4GB Kits Rounded Up: The exceptional value of LGA 1156-based platforms demands memory modules equal in value. Testing Newegg’s six cheapest 4GB dual-channel kits revealed some surprisingly good parts. Were comparing them today, with a definitive winner youll want to see.

Enthusiast P55: Eight LGA 1156 Boards Between $150 And $200: Upper-range P55 motherboards cost around $100 less than similarly-equipped X58 products, but are these still good enough for enthusiasts? We take a closer look at eight different models, dissect their features, benchmark them, and come away with a winner.

Part 1: Building A Balanced Gaming PC: What does it mean to build a truly-balanced PC? How great would it be to piece together a machine bottlenecked by

Batman: Arkham Asylum: GPUs, CPUs, And PhysX Performance: Batman: Arkham Asylum is purported to be the definitive Batman game. Were testing it on a range of mainstream graphics cards, a number of CPU settings, and with PhysX on and off. Youll walk away from this one knowing whether

Picking A Hard Drive For Your NAS: New Green Beats Old Speed: When it comes to mechanical hard drive performance, 7,200 RPM drives are considered the fastest. But does that convention apply in a NAS environment as well? We compare network storage performance with a handful of Samsungs green drives to see.

Ars Technica

Netflix settles privacy lawsuit, ditches $1 million contest: Netflix has canceled its $1 million contest aimed at finding a better recommendation engine in the wake of a privacy lawsuit settlement. The company informed its users today via the company blog, noting that it had reached an understanding with

New Zealand relies on BGP router protocol to filter the 'Net: New Zealands government-run Internet filtering system is now running, and two ISPs are already using the system. Seven thousand websites are on the list, most dealing with child sexual abuse, bestiality, and

China and Google playing game of Chicken over censorship: Chinese authorities are pounding their desks over compliance with the law as Googles C-Day approaches. The C is for Censorship, of course, which Google plans to lift in China sometime in the near future. The company has been in talks

Science journo quits writing to fight chiropractic libel suit: The UKs libel laws, which place the burden of proof onto those who have published inflammatory statements, have had a chilling effect on journalism in that nation, and have led to a

Bed readers rejoice: iPad gains last-minute rotation lock: When Apple first introduced the iPad in late January, we noted with much disappointment that the device had no way to lock the screen orientation. This is apparently no longer the case, however—according to an updated iPad specs page, there

Firefox 3.6 sees 100M downloads, now pushing notifications: Firefox 3.6—the latest version of the popular open source Web browser—was officially released in January, but there are still many users who have not yet updated. In an effort to increase awareness about the availability of version 3.6, Mozilla announced

Five insights into the behaviors of social media users: We do a decent amount of social media coverage here at Ars, but not everything that happens with Facebook, Twitter, and the like is worth its own story. Sometimes, though, we happen

New WMAP data can't erase "dark flow": About 18 months ago, we discussed a mysterious darkflow that was seen in early releases of the data from theWilkinsonMicrowave Anisotropy Probe data. At that time, we remarked that it waslittle more than a cosmic curiosity and possibly a statistical

Comcast-NBCU merger: how the regulators will decide: Good morning, this hearing will come to order, and we welcome all. I notice that there are a few people in the room, declared Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV). Were here to discuss

Hands on with Bit.Trip Runner: don't watch, listen: The bit.trip series of games combines simple graphics with catchy songs, and then blends both together into an addictive soup. The past games in the series for the Nintendo WiiWare service have all been gold, and at GDC we were

Beautiful innovation: the first 20 hours of FF XIII: Final Fantasy games often seem like a mixed bag. One one hand, they tend to take too long to get into; the first ten hours or so always feel like something you

Family of four gets their genomes sequenced: Late last year, we described a genome sequencing technique that brought the price of consumables down to under $5,000. That technique, offered by Complete Genomics, has now been put to use: all

SOCOM 4, played with PlayStation Move: our thoughts: We played with the PlayStation Move at the party last night, but at Sonys more intimate gathering at the W Hotel today it was easier to get a better picture of the peripheral. The main games on the floor were

Or will I go from rags to riches? Hands-on with Mafia 2: With Mafia 2, developer 2K Czech is leaving the optimism to Tony Bennett: this is not intended to be a rags to riches crime story. Don’t expect golden dreams to come true.

OpenGL 4 spec arrives with Direct3D 11 feature parity: At GDC the Khronos Group announced not one but two new OpenGL specifications. The headline release, OpenGL 4, includes a raft of new features bringing OpenGL in line with Microsofts Direct3D specification.

iPhone still second-place US smartphone while Android grows: The latest data from market research firm comScore shows Apple holding on to a quarter of the US smartphone market, which grew roughly 18 percent over the last six months. That makes the iPhone the number two smartphone in the

Intel's NAS-specific Atom platform hastens PCification: Intels announcement last week that the company is planning two versions of its Atom processor specifically for the NAS market was easy to overlook. After all, there are a few Atom-based NAS

iPhone OS 4.0 may finally bring multitasking nirvana: One complaint commonly leveled against the iPhone is that it cant run multiple apps at the same time. However, sources for AppleInsider say that Apple is finally planning to incorporate a task manager that will integrate with the established iPhone

Canonical's design team responds to theme criticisms: Canonical is burying Ubuntus traditional brown theme and is adopting a new visual style for version 10.04, which is scheduled for release in April. The new theme was revealed last week as part of Canonicals broader effort to overhaul Ubuntus

Green Day: Rock Band coming June 8, supports full exports: Green Day: Rock Band has a release date, so you can finally exhale. The game is coming to the PlayStation, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii on June 8, for $59.99 on the two high-definition systems and $49.99 on the Nintendo

Hard OCP

DRM is Dead, RIAA Says: The RIAA says DRM is dead. Wait. What? Who are you people and what have you done with the real RIAA?For years the RIAA has defended the use of DRM, much to the dislike of millions of honest customers who

Undercover Cop Arrests Undercover Cop: You have to wonder how effective an undercover operation is when one undercover cop arrests another undercover cop for trying to sell him drugs. Regardless, once the newspaper ran this story, everyone’s cover was blown. If either police department bothered

Apple Approves Marijuana App: Let’s see, you can’t get an iPhone app showing boobies but you can get an app to help you find weed. I guess I’m not surprised by an iToke app, we are after all talking about Apple here. You now

Microsoft Responds to Obama’s Xbox Criticism: Damn you Xbox machine for making our kids stay up late and be stupid. If my kid ends up being a high school drop out, we know who to blame now! For our kids to excel, we must accept our

New Pirate Bay to Be Based on Give-And-Take Models: Does anyone seriously think this is going to work? Remember how much everyone loved Napster? Remember how much they liked it once it became a legit site? Yeah, that’s what is going to happen here too. The more you give,

Creating Font Using a Car: Here is your creative font of the day (its free too). A group of people made a new font using a computer, a sophisticated camera tracking system and a car. I use my car all the time to make fonts

Ping Pong Table-Door: From the why didn’t I think of that files comes the amazing ping pong table/door! From the looks of it, this amazing product not only makes you popular, it gets you chicks too! Comments

Company Offering "Buy-Back" Program For Electronics?: This is either the greatest idea in the world or the most retarded, I’m not sure which one it is just yet.Here’s how the program works: For prices ranging from $19.99 to $249, depending on the electronic gadget, customers can

Intel 34-nm 320GB SSD Coming Soon: Engadget has the scoop on Intels Postville-family progress and has some good news for people that want an Intel SSD but dont want to fork over the big bucks for the X25 line. Check out the article for more details.Still,

Distracted Driving is Dangerous... and People Don't Care: The New York Times takes a look at distracted driving and found that many people just dont seem to care. Its a long article but well worth the read. Earlier today my wife had to get out of the way

Amazon Deletes Illegal Orwell Books from Kindles: Much has been made about Amazon deleting copies of George Orwells 1984 and Animal Farm books from Kindle devices and refunding the owners for those purchases. However, this CNET blogger takes them to task by checking facts and finding that

Big Week Coming as Tech Companies Report Earnings: IBM & Google got things rolling last week by reporting their most recent quarterly earnings for 2009 and next week has more coming. The Associated Press has an article about other earnings reports that are due next week and what

Urine-Powered Cars Coming Soon?: A scientist has developed a catalyst that can extract hydrogen from urine and says it could be used to power hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in the near future. Garadine Botte hasn’t received much federal funding for her project, though she’s

Microsoft Changes IE8 Default Settings: While Microsoft battles the European Union over antitrust allegations, eWeek reports that MS went ahead and changed the default browser settings for IE8 to allow users to more easily change the default browser on a system. Sounds like they’re just

VisionTek Responds to Rumors of Bankruptcy: The below statement is a response to our earlier posted rumors of VisionTeks possible bankruptcy. As was later explained to us by credible sources, VisionTek has received an infusion of venture capital money in order to move its business forward

Verizon Wireless Introduces New Novatel EVDO Card: Verizon Wireless and Novatel Wireless announced that the PC770 2-in-1 PC Card and Express Card will be available on Sunday at www.verizonwireless.com, through business sales channels and by calling 1-800-2 JOIN IN. The PC770 gives customers access to Verizon Wireless

EVGA Launches InterView Dual-Display: EVGA Corporation announced the availability of the InterView, with two rotatable super-thin high resolution 17 TFT LCD displays supported by one desktop stand. Designed for business presentations, researchers, physicians, financial consultants or creative professionals, the 1440 x 900 resolution screens

IBM Reports 2009 2Q Results: IBM announced second-quarter 2009 diluted earnings of $2.32 per share compared with diluted earnings of $1.97 per share in the second quarter of 2008, an increase of 18 percent. The earnings per share results were the highest for any first,

Google Chrome Update Fixes Flaws: I just wanted to let all you Chrome users know that version 2.0.172.37 has been released. This latest build fixes a handful of minor bugs as well as two serious security flaws. A compromised renderer (tab) process could cause the

Riot Police Raid Facebook Party: If you are planning a BBQ with friends and family, do not…I repeat…do not make a Facebook post alerting everyone or SWAT will show up (helicopter and all). I don’t know why this guy is complaining, in Texas, it’s not

AnandTech

Intel Core i7 980X Overclocking Update: Breaking 4GHz With 6 Cores: Our initial 980X overclocking results were bad, so we put in more time and managed to push the chip past 4GHz....

The Core i7 980X Review: Intel's First 6-Core CPU: Its got 6 cores, 12 threads and its good. Meet Intels Core i7 980X, the first Gulftown CPU. If youve got the money, theres nothing better....

ASUS M4A89GTD Pro - A Core Unlocking 890GX for $140: With less than a week of public release mileage under its belt, how close have ASUS come to hitting a home run with the M4A89GTD Pro? ...

AVA Direct Clevo X8100 SLI Gaming Notebook: AVA Direct, the custom computer manufacturer, has announced their most powerful notebook for gamers. The powerhouse notebook is an update of the older Clevo M980NU, replacing the Intel Core 2 Duo and NVIDIA GTX 280M SLI with a Core i7

Dell M6500: A Precision Strike on Bling: The Dell Precision M6500 is what we expect from a mobile workstation: high on quality and low on fluff. It’s also very expensive, but the cost of the hardware likely pales in comparison to the software it’s designed to run....

10Gbit Ethernet: Killing Another Bottleneck?: More cores (32 to 48) in medium-range servers results in 20 to 50 VMs on one virtualized server. We investigate if 10Gbit Ethernet is finally ready to solve the NIC I/O bottleneck. Is 10Gbit Ethernet still a technology for the

NVIDIA 196.75 Driver Alert: As many of you are aware, NVIDIA has hit some snags with their latest round of WHQL drivers. The drivers have been interfering with the fan operation on certain NVIDIA video cards, resulting in the GPU overheating. NVIDIA has taken

THX Certified HDTVs - Useful or Just Marketing?: THX is well known for its audio standards. But when you see THX on an HDTV panel, what does that mean? Loyd digs in to find out....

Dell Inspiron 1564: Mobile i3/i5 for the Masses: Dells 15-inch Inspiron line has evolved over the years; gone are the bulky grey-and-white monstrosities, replaced by sleeker, more colorful designs. The latest Inspiron 1564 also sports an i3/i5 CPU, providing a powerful platform thats not as heavy as the

Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue Review: WD Enters the Consumer SSD Market: Late last year Seagate announced its first SSD, and today Western Digital is introducing its first SSD for the mainstream consumer market. We find out who makes the controller and how well it performs....

AnandTech Giveaway: Win a Lenovo ThinkPad X100e Powered by AMD!: Were giving away a brand new ThinkPad X100e! Enter to win!...

AMD's 890GX Chipset - Same Graphics, Better South Bridge: AMDs 8-series chipsets are upon us and despite the name, all of the innovation is in the south bridge. Graphics performance and feature set are unchanged but are the new South Bridge and SATA controller enough to make this interesting?...

NVIDIA's Next Generation ION: Next generation products are always better... just look at Star Trek! At least, thats the theory behind the new NVIDIA ION platform, and it looks like the best thing for your netbook woes starting later this month....

Intel DH57JG “Jet Geyser” - Intel's First Mini-ITX H57: Intel delivers mini-ITX without the frills and fuss......

Zotac H55-ITX Review - The World's First mini-ITX H55 Motherboard: Zotac unleashes the first H55 based mini-ITX board on the market, we take a look......

OWC Mercury Extreme SSD - First Look at a 50GB SandForce Drive: OWC sent us its 50GB Mercury Extreme SSD based on the same SandForce controller in OCZs Vertex LE. We try to find out if the 50GB drive is really significantly slower than the 100GB Vertex LE....

AMD’s Radeon HD 5830: A Filler Card at the Wrong Price: To close the 5850/5770 gap, today AMD is introducing the 5830, a further cut-down Cypress. Today well see why this card embodies the idea that there is no such thing as a bad card, only a bad price...

New MSI Classic Notebooks: MSI, best known for their PC components, have launched their latest Intel Arrandale equipped notebook offerings. We discussed some of the initial products in our CES coverage, and these are now shipping and available at retailers like Newegg and Amazon.The

NVIDIA's GTX 400 Series Gets A Launch Date: March 26th: On the heels of a rather unusual (and poorly received) announcement this morning that theyd be showing off the GTX 400 series at PAX East this year, NVIDIA has made a second and much more to-the-point announcement today. The GTX 400

Windows Phone 7 Series Takeaway: Microsoft has finally unveiled its platform to return to feature competition in the smartphone space. Is it enough to hang with the likes of Android, iPhone OS and webOS?...

O'Reilly Network

Personalization and the future of Digg: I recently talked to Joe Stump, CTO of SimpleGeo, about a number of topics related to location and databases. However, in the course of the interview, we also got around to discussing Digg. Previous to launching SimpleGeo, Joe was the

Lookup Performance in R: Recently, I became interested in maximizing lookup performance in R. Many problems require looking up values in tables. I decided to perform some tests to show how different lookup mechanisms performed in R. If youre not familiar with R, heres...

Four short links: 12 March 2010: Flickr Flow -- a season wheel, showing the relative popularity of colours in Flickr photos at different times of the year. Beautiful. (via gurneyjourney) Light Peak -- optical peripheral cabling and motherboard connections. (via timoreilly on twitter) British Museum Pilots

End every helpdesk request on a good note: One thing weve learned from the (relatively) new field of behavioral economics is that people tend to remember the pain towards the end of something, not the total pain. Thus if a painful surgery ends with a long period of...

NHIN Direct: Open Healthcare and Government as a Platform: In my advocacy around Government 2.0, Ive been focused on the idea that government should act like a platform provider rather than a complete solution provider. That is, government should lay down rules of the road, create core functionality that

How crowdsourcing helped Haiti's relief efforts: Tech-minded volunteers quickly pitched in with a variety of communication and data services in the days following the Haiti earthquake. One company -- crowdsourcing platform CrowdFlower -- repurposed its service as a text-message translation tool to aid Mission 4636. CrowdFlower

Four short links: 11 March 2010: Digital Inclusion: How Do You Tell? -- either means nor skills are simple binary states. A while ago, I was talking to a young man looking for a job, and asked him why he didn’t look online. Because it’s two

Selfishness and Rubies - Two steps forwards and one back?: CSS selectors, WebKit, HTML5 and Ruby Annotations.

What is a Packrat Parser? What are Brzozowski Derivatives?: I see the upcoming Scala 2.8.0 comes with a packrat parser. Packrat parsing is an implementation technique where you have a backtracking parser with memoization. Derivatives are a technique used in RELAX NG validators. Here is a little example of

Velocity 2010: Fast by Default: O'Reilly Conference Opens Call for Participation: Sebastopol, CA, November 23, - Great engineers and developers recognize the big picture. They see web performance and operations as a whole organism, while still keeping their eyes on the smallest component. OReillys Velocity, the Web Performance and Operations Conference,

Gov 2.0 invades Harvard: A report from #gov20ne: Last Saturday, several hundred folks gathered at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government to spend the day discussing Open Government. I attended, and Laurel Ruma (OReillys Gov 2.0 Evangelist) was one of the organizers.

echotracker as an aggregation tool for different user integrations: A developer preview was just released of a new open source tool calledechotracker that aims tocollect interesting information about the people you communicate withand present it to you as youre reading your email.

We're about to scratch the real-world data itch: Folks in the web world are accustomed to granular information, yet brick-and-mortar businesses are still largely in the dark on the data front. But what if business owners could gather hard data? What if they could use that information to

Four short links: 10 March 2010: The Future of Book Publishing Business Models (Stephen Walli) -- some good thoughts about the book publishing industry and ebooks. When does Amazon create the iPhone/Android app and the programme that will allow bookstores to receive a cut of every

The state of open government in Canada: David Eaves, a public policy entrepreneur and a speaker at this weeks Gov 2.0 International online conference, discusses the rise of open government in Canadas cities. He also looks at the countrys federal inertia, and he explains how a beta

Four short links: 9 March 2010: Cooperative Behaviour Spreads Through a Group, But So Does Cheating (Not Exactly Rocket Science) -- Fowler and Christakis suggest that people tend to mimic the actions of those they played with. They could be directly imitating the actions of other

Truly Open Data: Im kicking myself. I have spent a non-trivial number of hours talking to government departments and scientists about open data, talking up an open source approach to data, pushing hard to get them to release datasets in machine readable formats

Simple Log Review Checklist Released!: The log cheat sheet presents a checklist for reviewing critical system, network and security logs when responding to a security incident. It can also be used for routine periodic log review. It was authored by Dr. Anton Chuvakin and Lenny

Three lessons from the Chipotle iPhone app: The iPhone app from Chipotle, the restaurant chain best known for its burritos, is an interesting mix of simple design, e-commerce functionality and location tools. Digging into the apps development reveals three aspects that could prove useful for businesses and

Four short links: 8 March 2010: Chinas Cyberposse (NY Times) -- is vigilante justice ok if the cause is right? Is it okay if there wouldnt be justice without it? Does the end justify the means? Many interesting questions raised by this large-scale Internet-based human-flesh-search in

VNU Net

Cisco launches Intercompany Media Engine: Dan Worth, V3.co.uk, Friday 12 March 2010 at 17:21:00Networking giant continues to promote business video communicationCisco has unveiled itsIntercompanyMedia Engine (IME), claiming that the system will allow its unifiedcommunications (UC) tools to be used

Avnet seals LSI deal: Sara Yirrell, CRN, Friday 12 March 2010 at 17:17:00Distributor signs pan-European deal with storage and networking vendorAvnet Technology Solutions has signed a pan-European agreement with storageand networking vendor LSI.Under the terms of the agreement,

FPB offers smaller firms a helping hand: Sara Yirrell, CRN, Friday 12 March 2010 at 17:09:00Forum of Private Business aims to help SMEs handle issues on areas such asHR, finance, marketing, legal and health and safety with latest packageThe Forum of

GCHQ lost track of 35 laptops in 2008: Dan Worth, V3.co.uk, Friday 12 March 2010 at 16:33:00Intelligence and Security Committee attacks cavalier attitude to securityGovernment Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) lost track of 35 laptops in2008, including three classified as top secret, the Intelligence

Report claims E&Y knew about Repo transactions: Mario Christodoulou, Accountancy Age, Friday 12 March 2010 at 16:25:00E&Y said it did not set up or approve repo arrangementErnst & Youngs US arm was aware of Lehman Brothers practice ofoffloading liabilities, a central plank to the banks alleged attempts

IBM gets tough on ‘black sheep’: Doug Woodburn, CRN, Friday 12 March 2010 at 15:54:00Persistent sources of grey market kit could face expulsion from Big Bluespartner programmeIBM has vowed to come down hard on authorised partners found to haverepeatedly flouted

DECC awards undisclosed sum to energy giants to support CCS plans: James Murray, BusinessGreen, Friday 12 March 2010 at 15:48:00E.ON and ScottishPower receive funding to help complete design anddevelopment studiesPlans to build the UKs first Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) plant moved astep closer today

Innovations in collective licensing boost payments for UK publishers: IWR News Desk, Information World Review, Friday 12 March 2010 at 15:47:00This month, the Publishers Licensing Society (PLS), the not-for-profitsociety representing UK publishing industry is distributing £4.3m to publishersfrom the business sector, up from £3.4m for the previous equivalent distributionThis

Senate extends controversial biodiesel tax credit: BusinessGreen.com staff, BusinessGreen, Friday 12 March 2010 at 15:26:00Industry urges legislators to move bill to the presidents desk as quickly aspossibleThe US biodiesel industry was celebrating this week after the Senate approvedthe extension of

PwC's Newberry appointed MCA president: Kevin Reed, Accountancy Age, Friday 12 March 2010 at 15:18:00Pat Newberry in as president of the Management Consultancies AssociationPwCs Pat Newberry has been elected president of the Management ConsultanciesAssociation.Newberry has worked at the firm for 32 years with more than

Top 10 articles, 12 March 2010: V3.co.uk staff, V3.co.uk, Friday 12 March 2010 at 15:14:00Microsofts i4i court defeat and rumoured Courier tabletThe latest twist in the David and Goliath battle between Microsoft and i4iwas the most popular story this week

PwC suffers Satyam setback: Raghavendra Verma in New Delhi, Accountancy Age, Friday 12 March 2010 at 15:13:00Regulator rejects auditors offerPricewaterhouseCoopers has taken yet another knock in the $1bn SatyamComputer Services scandal. India’s stock market regulator, the Securities andExchange

HMRC signs IT development deal with Accenture: Nicola Brittain, Computing, Friday 12 March 2010 at 15:05:00£10bn partnership deal will see HMRC IT staff improve servicesHM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) has signed a £10m partnership deal withAccenture to develop its in-house IT

Climate Exchange sees shares climb on encouraging results: James Murray, BusinessGreen, Friday 12 March 2010 at 13:54:00Pre-tax profits exceed expectations at carbon exchange specialistFaltering confidence in the global carbon market received a shot in the armthis morning as the worlds largest exchange

Twitter turns on geo-location feature: Rosalie Marshall, V3.co.uk, Friday 12 March 2010 at 13:47:00Micro-blogging site responds to burst of interest in location appsTwitter turned on its new geo-location feature yesterday, although it iscurrently available only to some users.If a

Apple updates Safari browser code: Iain Thomson in San Francisco, V3.co.uk, Friday 12 March 2010 at 03:32:00Safari 4.0.6 fixes 16 security holesApple and Mozilla have both updated their browsers today with a variety ofsecurity and stability patches.Safari 4.0.5 fixes

Earthquakes and automobiles dominate spam picture: Shaun Nichols in San Francisco, V3.co.uk, Friday 12 March 2010 at 02:23:00Localized attacks rise in popularity amongst criminalsCurrent events and a rise in phishing attacks were among the big issues inthe spam world last

Report points to iPhone multitasking: Shaun Nichols in San Francisco, V3.co.uk, Friday 12 March 2010 at 02:21:004.0 update could allow multiple apps to run at onceApple may be preparing to allow multi-tasking on the iPhone handset,according to media reports.Apple

Allaple malware author jailed for online attacks: Iain Thomson in San Francisco, V3.co.uk, Friday 12 March 2010 at 02:09:00Estonia gets nearly three years for revenge DDOSAn Estonia man has been jailed for two years seven months after being foundguilty of using

Tax break to flip switch on US smart grid roll out: Rachel Fielding, BusinessGreen, Friday 12 March 2010 at 00:15:00Smart grid projects expected to get underway after US Treasury confirms taxbreaks for federal grantsThe emerging US smart grid industry has vowed to accelerate the roll

Kuro5hin

Ogg Frog Magazine #6: ____ _________|\___\_ |\.-------| | |\ | \\ \|_|\\ | \\ \\ | \\ ____________\\

The Secret: A Review of Dulcinea Technologies Corporation's Debut Product: After weeks of e-mails and days of phone calls, yesterday I drove to San Jose for a demo of Michael David Crawfords secret project. Michael was eager to show off his work, but urged me not to share my interest

Cars, Value Engineering, and Bugs: Two trends in automotive development, value engineering and drive-by-wire have the potential to reduce driver safety. Toyotas recent travails provide some food for thought.

Hopeless romantic Chinese Ph.D candidate arrested: He did it for love and he is a model employee with his employer The Rutgers University according to his friends and colleagues And the TSA security officer that should have been stationed where the trespass occurred is on administrative

The Jarmidor, Part 3: Having discovered that Im not the only pipe-faggot on Kuro5hin I decided to see whether I could get my loose shag as moist as a 14 year old baptist girl at her first Jonas brothers concert. Unfortunately my girlfriend doesnt

15 Yards: The Unsportsmanlike Tax Evasion of the NFL: Superbowl XLIV approaches, pitting two potent offensive teams against one another. The inimitable Peyton Manning, this years winner of the National Football Leagues MVP award (his fourth, most of any player all time), will try to use his bottomless well

Obama The First Year: Hes accomplished quite a lot his first year. Heres my list of the most talked about on liberal blogs.

Our Trip to Cuba: Its next to impossible to get an objective opinion on Cuba. Most Americans cant go there and form their own opinion. We went there because it promised to be an affordable family vacation with a direct flight from Quebec that

Applying the First Amendment to Corporations: Well established and a good idea: Theres been much hang-wringing about the recent Citizens United U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down a ban on direct electioneering by corporations in a window before elections. Much of the buzz, especially from left-leaning corners, sees it as a

Tweaking K5: Some loosy penis has loads of fun shitting around page-lenghtening and/or widening comments or diar(rh)ies. I suggest Rusty fixes that annoyance by adding a tiny bit of code in K5.

Building Houses - One Bullet at a Time: I almost went to New Orleans back in 05. I feel like the guy who took the next train, only to realize the train is slowing down because theres a wreck ahead on the line. At the time, it was

Firefox Has Too Many Developers: In its last several releases, everyones favorite Open Source browser has become an unstable mess of add-ons, plugins, and other hacks that chew up memory like a fat kid with a chocolate-dipped corn dog. In fact, just last week, SecurityFocus

NetBSD: Bankrupt Software Distribution: Hot on the heels of their NetBSD 5.0.1 release, the NetBSD organization is gearing up for NetBSD 6.0, due in about half a year (The sixth major release for the six month of 2010!).To make that happen, NetBSD is asking

Time to Update the Ol' LARP Résumé: Eric poured the first of his new bottle of Jägermeister into a glass tumbler, making sure not to spill any drops of the precious thick brown liqueur.He was warm all over from drinking the last bottle and sweat formed like

Some lessons in online affiliate sales.: I recently read a thing about someone who made $200 a month through an Amazon affiliate store. This struck me as an interesting way to make some folding money. Could I do the same thing? The short answer: no.

Perl, sed, grep, gawk, uniq, host and dig: another look: None of the above programs are sexy or buzzword compliant. Because of modern scripting languages they are largely ignored or at best under utilized. A number of years ago, I was mentored by a Unix guru who knew his way

Obama in China in Retrospect: Complete Fail: James Fallows is a stupid faggot, albeit probably more stupid than faggot. In a recent blog post he sarcastically writes that We All Know that Obama was humiliated and stonewalled by the haughty Chinese leaders, in contrast to the titanic

Techdirt

Screenwriters Claim Sony Copied Their Plot For A Video Game: The entitlement some people feel because someone else had a somewhat (but not really) similar idea to what they had, and then actually executed on it better, is really astounding. For years, weve seen people claim that various filmmakers, TV

UK Paper Ghost Wrote Blatantly False Facebook Attack Article By 'Child Protection Expert': Not too long ago, we wrote about a bizarre situation where a UK newspaper was caught flat out making up a story that was completely wrong. It had interviewed an American professor whose findings were the exact opposite of what

Australian Trademark Tribunal Tells Apple That It Can't Stop Other Products From Using The Lett(...): Late last year we noticed that Apple seemed to be getting needlessly (and at times ridiculously) aggressive over its trademarks in Australia. There was the software developer who had a product named iPodRip, which had been around for years, which

MPAA Brags About How Awesome The Movie Business Is; Right After It Claims File Sharing Is Destr(...): You gotta love the MPAA for the sheer Hollywood brashness of two recent press releases, that the Washington Posts Rob Pegoraro decided to compare and call the MPAA on its blatant dishonesty. The first press release, from back in December,

James Murdoch Is Very, Very Confused About Copyright Infringement (And So Is His Dad, Rupert): TorrentFreak has an article about how Ari Emanuel, brother of Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and the inspiration for Jeremy Pivens Ari Gold character in the show Entourage, is claiming that hes talking to President Obama about implementing a

Unwilling To Compete, Canadian Booksellers Association Tries To Block Amazon Distribution Center: jprlk was the first of a few of you to send in the news that the Canadian Booksellers Association is apparently so afraid of competition from Amazon, that its asking the government to block the company from building a distribution

Energizer Introduces USB Battery Charger With Bonus Rootkit Feature: Someone, who prefers to remain anonymous, alerts us to the news that Symantec has discovered that a USB battery charger from Energizer installs a dangerous rootkit after installing the required driver. You would think that legit companies would know better

Newspapers Gaming Google With Questionable Tactics: There was some hubbub earlier this month when sex columnist Violet Blue discovered that one of her old columns for the SF Chronicle had been altered by the Chronicles online site, SFGate.com. She was upset that the changes implied the

Forget The Doom & Gloom; Look How Good Things Are In The Book Business: The book publishing business really does seem to be going through the same process that the recording industry went through not so long ago. That is, its crying about all the doom and gloom. Layoffs are rampant, and there are

Classical Music Composers Debating The Value Of Free Too: scott mc laughlin alerts us to an interesting blog post from the composer Kyle Gann, discussing his feelings on posting musical scores as free PDFs online. Gann does this happily, but a publisher he was speaking with was upset that

Turkish Reporters Finally Point Out That The Gov't Should Drop Its Silly YouTube Ban: Turkish courts have been really quick to ban various websites for flimsy reasons. A few years ago it went back and forth a few times before banning YouTube entirely, just because of a juvenile video on the site. However, its

Brazil Moves Forward With Plan To Ignore US Patents And Copyrights After US Refuses To Abide By(...): Two years ago, we noted that Brazil had asked the WTO for permission to ignore certain US patents and copyrights as a retaliation against the USs refusal to abide by a WTO ruling. This is, of course, typical of the

Lessig Gives A Well-Timed Speech To The Italian Parliament On Internet Freedom: We have noted, recently, that Italian laws and politicians seem to have a somewhat troubling view of the internet, where they are quick to blame the internet for anything bad that happens, and then look to pass laws that would

Leaked Documents Show UK Web Censorship Proposal Written By Record Labels: Lobbying groups and activists write proposed legislation all the time -- its part of how the process works. But with controversial legislation, you would at least think that politicians would be sensitive to some of the concerns of others before

Skype Deliberately Crippling Functionality of iPhone and WinMo and Verizon Apps?: Theres something anti-competitive afoot in the VoIP over 3G space this year. Let me run you through a timeline, and see if you cant spot the dirty pool:Skype has had a highly functional VoIP client for Windows Mobile devices for

Obama: We Must Move Forward On ACTA: With the EU Parliament soundly voting against ACTA secrecy and current proposals, lots of folks have been wondering how the US was going to respond. So far, its not looking good. The USTR gave a giant no comment, and President

Because Only The Record Labels Are Supposed To Get Away With Not Paying Their Musicians...: So lots of people have been submitting versions of the story about how Pink Floyd is suing EMI, claiming that EMI isnt paying the band what it owes for iTunes downloads. Id avoided posting this, because its basically the same

FCC Scammed Out Of Millions In Telco Scam: If youre going to pull a telco scam, perhaps targeting the FCC isnt the best idea. However, some employees at a couple of video relay services apparently scammed the FCC out of a few million dollars. In case you dont

Where's The Outrage Over The Gov't Brushing Mass Privacy Violations Under The Rug?: I have to admit that Ive been a bit in shock over Congresss decision to simply renew the Patriot Act, recently, without a single safeguard to protect against abuse. Thats because just before all this happened, we wrote about how

Society Doesn't Know How To Deal With Abundance: Theres a great post about a recent Clay Shirky talk that highlights one of the key reasons why I think so many people have trouble understanding the economics of abundance. In the talk Shirky points out that, as a society,

X-bit labs

Intel Has a Luxury of Releasing Larrabee in Its Own time - Larrabee Engineer: Intels Larrabee Set to Come Back with a Vengeance

Court Puts on Hold Legal Battle Between Apple and Nokia: Court Will Only Hear Apple Vs. Nokia Case in 2012

Coolink Corator DS: Cooler with Gapless Direct Touch Technology: The new air cooler for CPUs proves remarkably efficient at a low level of noise and costs less than the renowned leaders in this field. Read more in our new review!

Smartbooks with Google Chrome Will Be More Expensive than Windows Netbooks - Analyst: Analyst Expects Google Chrome to Fail on the Market

Intel Previews Six-Core Gulftown Platform at Game Developers Conference: Intel Spotlights Core i7-980X Microprocessor at GDC

AMD Expands Open Physics Initiative with New Tools: AMD Unleashes New Tools As Part of Open Physics Program

Khronos Releases OpenGL 4.0: Improves Functionality, Adds Performance: OpenGL 4.0 Specification Gets Released

All credits go to the authors of these sites. Without their hard work Original Signal would not exist. Last updated on March 12th 2010 22:43 | Contact