My Writings. My Thoughts.

Wireless carriers want crackdown on cell phone boosters

// February 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

“This is ‘Magic’ and this is ‘Jack’,” the little girl says in the video ad , holding her two cute puppy dogs up to the camera. The girl’s father, magicJack inventor Dan Borislow, then asks her, “Kylie, did you know that your dad is going to let everybody try a magicJack in the whole country for free?” Free for 30 days, that is. magicJack is a popular service comparable to VoIP , except that after you hook its app into a USB port on your broadband connected computer, you plug the USB gadget to the RJ11 slot in your telephone. The cost: $39.95 for the initial year and $19.95 for subsequent years to make local and long distance phone calls.

Survey tries quantifying iPad hype, suggests interest waning

// February 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

“iPad hoopla” has passed, according to a survey by electronics shopping site Retrevo, and consumers have lost interest after the product’s unveiling less than two weeks ago . More than twice as many respondents said they were uninterested after the iPad was announced compared to a week prior. Of course, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics—three times as many said they were confident they would buy one after finding out the product’s details. Retrevo did similar surveys to gauge interest in Apple’s new portable touchscreen device both before it was announced and after. The week prior to Apple’s big media event, 26 percent of those surveyed said they knew about the device but weren’t interested. After the announcement, that number jumped to 52 percent. However, 3 percent said they would buy an iPad sight unseen. The number that would buy an iPad after Steve Jobs showed it off went up to 9 percent.

Biofuel expansion would send cattle into the rain forest

// February 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Biofuel production in the US has met with fairly mixed success, as the cost and fossil fuel use of corn-based ethanol has severely cut into the benefits provided by avoiding the use of fossil fuels. It’s been a somewhat different story in Brazil, which has embraced ethanol derived from sugarcane and seen more promising results. The government has set aggressive targets for both ethanol and biodiesel production, but a study that will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science later this week urges caution: unless the goals are met through an integrated agricultural strategy, they’ll drive deforestation that will offset most of the benefits. The study looked at the expansion of the two crops that are expected to drive biofuels growth in Brazil: sugarcane for ethanol, and soy beans for biodiesel. To reach the country’s 2020 goals, there will have to be a major increase in the production of both of those crops. Even assuming major increases in the efficiency of their production (the authors assume an increase at double the rate of the past 20 years), there’s simply no way to get there without expanding the amount of land devoted to farming them, and there’s no way to do that without secondary consequences.

Mozilla dropping 10.4 support with next Firefox release

// February 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

The next major release of Firefox will not be compatible with Macs running Mac OS X 10.4, also known as Tiger. This comes from a mozilla.dev.planing discussion on Google Groups started by Josh Aas, a Mozilla-employed developer working on the project. The change will go into effect later this year when the browser’s Gecko rendering engine makes the jump from 1.9.2 to 1.9.3. The Mozilla Foundation estimates that there are currently about 1.4 million Tiger users using Firefox 3.5 every day and approximately 36,000 using version 3.6. Those numbers total a little under 24 percent of daily Mac Firefox use. According to the discussion, Mozilla stopped supporting Tiger on mozilla-central, the most “cutting edge” repository, in September of 2009. Much of the old code was left, however, in case Mozilla had a change in heart. The decision means that the code specific to the old operating system will be removed soon, along with any hope of future 10.4 support. Users of the open source Web browser who are still using Tiger will be able to continue to use Firefox 3.6 for as long as they want, but the browser will stop receiving updates “several months” after the release of the next major update. This means that any security issues found in the browser after that date would be unlikely to be addressed by the team, and, in turn, left unpatched. Unsurprisingly, there is a vocal minority speaking out against the move. Individuals with older hardware are no doubt concerned that their old hardware will become even more obsolete and less usable as the rest of the world soldiers on. Mozilla isn’t concerned however, citing past data that shows no significant market share loss occurs after support for an older version of the Mac OS has been dropped. The company also claims that it usually supports older versions of Mac OS X longer than most companies. 

Microsoft: your battery is the problem, not Windows 7

// February 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Last week , Microsoft said it was investigating issues in Windows 7 that affect batteries on certain notebooks after hundreds of users reported they thought the OS was to blame. Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live Division, has posted a lengthy response on the Engineering Windows 7 blog. “At this time we have no reason to believe there is any issue related to Windows 7 in this context,” Sinofsky writes. Here’s his explanation: Several press articles this past week have drawn attention to blog and forum postings by users claiming Windows 7 is warning them to “consider replacing your battery” in systems which appeared to be operating satisfactorily before upgrading to Windows 7. These articles described posts in the support forums indicating that Windows 7 is not just warning users of failing batteries - as we designed Windows 7 to do this - but also implying Windows 7 is falsely reporting this situation or even worse, causing these batteries to fail. To the very best of the collective ecosystem knowledge, Windows 7 is correctly warning batteries that are in fact failing and Windows 7 is neither incorrectly reporting on battery status nor in any way whatsoever causing batteries to reach this state. In every case we have been able to identify the battery being reported on was in fact in need of recommended replacement. Sinofsky goes on to explain that PC batteries inherently degrade in their ability to hold a charge and provide power, and ultimately batteries must be replaced to restore an acceptable battery life (batteries usually have a warranty of 12 months). Windows 7 taps into a feature of modern laptop batteries which have circuitry and firmware that can report the overall health of the battery in Watt-hours power capacity. Windows 7 then calculates the percentage of degradation from the original design capacity; the threshold is set at 60 percent degradation, so if the battery is performing at 40 percent of its designed capacity then users will see Windows 7 report that it might be time to change the battery. Further, he notes that Windows 7’s new “Consider replacing your battery” message does not exist in Windows XP and Windows Vista, so many users would probably not have been aware of their batteries degrading. This would also explain why some users were seeing the battery indicator in Windows 7 builds prior to the RTM release while others only saw it in the RTM. Finally, Sinofsky asks users who believe they are receiving this error because their battery is new or in great shape to contact Microsoft via the TechNet forum , the Microsoft Answers forum , or to visit support.microsoft.com to find how to contact Microsoft assisted support in their region.

Dante’s Inferno interview: of marketing and Gods of War

// February 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Dante’s Inferno has weathered its share of criticism for its aggressive marketing campaign, as well as its topical resemblance to the God of War titles. To be fair, much of that criticism came from us . Jonathan Knight, the game’s executive producer, was kind enough to talk to Ars about the game before its release. We picked his brain on the marketing campaign, dealing with a property with as much history as Dante’s Inferno , and why gaming can be a transitory art form. It was an interesting discussion, and proved that the game may not be as easily dismissed as we might have thought.

AMD reveals Fusion CPU+GPU, to challege Intel in laptops

// February 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

SAN FRANCISCO—The “Llano” processor that AMD described today in an ISSCC session is not a CPU, and it’s not a GPU—instead, it’s a hybrid design that the chipmaker is calling an “application processor unit,” or APU. Whatever you call it, it could well give Intel a run for its money in the laptop market, by combining a full DX11-compatible GPU with four out-of-order CPU cores on a single, 32nm processor die. Details on the highly parallel vector hardware—the “GPU” part of the device—have yet to be disclosed, but AMD is focusing today’s revelations on the CPU part of the design. In a nutshell, AMD has taken the “STARS” core that’s used in their current 45nm offerings, shrunk it to a new 32nm SOI high-K process, and added new power gating and dynamic power optimization capabilities to it. Each out-of-order core has a bit under 35 million transistors, and a 1MB L2 cache that’s not included in that number. AMD is targeting sub-3GHz operation, and a power consumption range of 2.5 to 25 watts.

p2pnet World Headlines: Feb 8, 2010

// February 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // p2p

More tainted milk found in latest crackdown China Daily More than 170 tons of milk powder have been recalled amid a 10-day nationwide crackdown on melamine-tainted dairy products, authorities have said. The recall is the latest of dairy products to resurface from a 2008 contamination scandal that hit the country. Two dairy companies in the Ningxia Hui autonomous region were closed for selling tainted milk powder on Saturday, while candies made with tainted milk powder were found in Jilin province yesterday. The two affected companies are the Ningxia Tiantian Dairy Co Ltd and Ningxia Panda Dairy Co Ltd, Ningxia’s regional government said in a press conference on Saturday. Ningxia police also found that another company outside the region paid the Ningxia Tiantian Dairy Co Ltd last July about 170 tons of milk powder – melamine-tainted products left over from the 2008 scandal that should have been destroyed – as debt payment. Google Spanner — instamatic redundancy for 10 million servers? The Register Google’s massively global infrastructure now employs a proprietary system that automatically moves and replicates loads between its mega data centers when traffic and hardware issues arise. The distributed technology was first hinted at — in classically coy Google fashion — during a conference this summer, and Google fellow Jeff Dean has now confirmed its existence in a presentation (PDF) delivered at a symposium earlier this month. The platform is known as Spanner. Dean’s presentation calls it a ’storage and computation system that spans all our data centers [and that] automatically moves and adds replicas of data and computation based on constraints and usage patterns.’ This includes constraints related to bandwidth, packet loss, power, resources, and ‘failure modes’. China to crack down on ‘thriving’ online gambling Xinhua China will conduct a nationwide crackdown on online gambling from February to August, an industry the country’s security ministry has described as “thriving.” According to a statement from the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) released Monday, the campaign will target “major and severe cases, arrest domestic and foreign groups that organize online gambling and severely punish criminals.” The campaign will also focus on underground banks and third-party payment platforms that provide banking services for the gambling groups. Website operators offering connection to the services will also be targeted. Online gambling has caused large amounts of money to flow out of China and disturbed the country’s social and economic order, the statement said. The ministry said illegal online gambling has continued to thrive despite authorities’ crackdowns. Indie cinemas battle for Berlin’s spotlight The Local Indie cinemas are a dying breed the world over… except in Berlin, home to nearly 60 small arthouse and neighbourhood venues. The fight for survival is brutal. But as Exberliner magazine’s Alice Harrison reports, some of them are even getting the red carpet treatment at the Berlin International Film Festival. British Library to offer free ebook downloads Times Online More than 65,000 19th-century works of fiction from the British Library’s collection are to be made available for free downloads by the public from this spring. Owners of the Amazon Kindle, an ebook reader device, will be able to view well known works by writers such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, as well as works by thousands of less famous authors. The library’s ebook publishing project, funded by Microsoft, the computer giant, is the latest move in the mounting online battle over the future of books. Symantec hit with class-action lawsuit over auto-renewals Computerworld A New York man has sued security software maker Symantec for automatically renewing his subscription to Norton Antivirus, alleging that the company did not notify him before charging $76 to his credit card. The lawsuit comes seven months after the New York Attorney General’s office fined Symantec $375,000 for the practice and ordered it to give notice before renewing any subscription. The Fight Over Who Sets Prices at the Online Mall New York Times On some pages of e-commerce sites selling products like televisions, digital cameras and jewelry, a critical piece of information is conspicuously missing: the price tag. To see how much these items cost, shoppers must add the merchandise to their shopping carts — in effect, taking it up to the virtual register for a price check. The missing prices are part of a larger battle sweeping the world of e-commerce. Wary of the Internet’s tendency to relentlessly drive down prices, major brands and manufacturers — and now, book publishers — are striking back, deploying a variety of tactics and tools to control how their products are presented and priced online. - … .. … and identi.ca More First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi February, 2010 Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. Subscribe to - | | rss feed: http://-/feed -? -

All that user-generated content? 95% is malware, spam

// February 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

The latest research from Websense Security Labs paints a dreary but familiar picture of the state of online security threats. Echoing the bad news of other such recent reports , it seems the vast majority of the Web consists of malware and spam. Worse yet, even legitimate, well-known sites are being used to pump malware, SEO poisoning, or phishing attacks. Websense uses a global network of systems to scan and analyze over 40 billion websites every hour, tracking malware and other unwanted content. The results for the latter half of 2009 show a 225 percent increase in malicious websites. Worse, 71 percent of websites found to contain some malicious code were in fact legitimate websites that had been compromised in some way.

2010 Superbowl: Megan Fox in a bathtub

// February 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // p2p

p2pnet view P2P | Advertising:- “I wonder where Annie Leith (right) is today and what she thinks of her appearance?” – I said in p2pnet last summer. “Does she believe it was right for Apple and Pepsi to hold her and her friends up to be falsely accused by Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music’s RIAA as criminals in front of hundreds of millions of people in a warped iPod commercial?” – I asked, going on: “The iTunes /RIAA / Pepsi advertising connection has been forgotten by most people. But the RIAA is still trotting out kids and their parents as thieves. “And it’s still getting away with it.” The occasion was the 2004 Super Bowl and it’s that time again — but without the deeply perverted Apple – RIAA – Pepsi campaign. This time around, “YouTube delivered on its promise to upload all the Super Bowl Ads as soon as they aired today, with users voting to choose which one will grace the YouTube front page on Thursday,” says Mashable , adding: “The tech and web ads were a mixed bunch: Both the established GoDaddy ‘Too Hot for TV’ schtick and Motorola’s decision to put Megan Fox in a bathtub stuck to the ’sex sells’ mantra, while Monster.com returned with a ‘Fiddling Beaver.’ Intel went for a quirky ‘lunch room’ ad while Vizio chose star power in its Beyonce (beyonce) commercial. We don’t know what inspired Boost Mobile’s ad, meanwhile, but the humor appears to miss the mark.” Mashable has them all — except, for some reason, the beer ads. Not that it didn’t try. But “This video has ben removed by users”, say the GooTube embeds. - … .. … and identi.ca More First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi p2pnet – Apple, Pepsi and the RIAA SuperBowl scandal, July 5, 2009 Mashable – Super Bowl Ads 2010, February 8, 2010 Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. Subscribe to - | | rss feed: http://-/feed -? -

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