s1LX

Australia’s Internet: nonneutral and proud of it

s1LX — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:35:00 +0000

Last week, an Australian federal judge issued a major ruling —the first of its kind worldwide—saying that ISPs aren’t required to take action against subscribers after receiving letters alleging copyright infringement. But lost in most of the discussion of the ruling is another hot topic, net neutrality. If you want a good look at what a non-neutral ‘Net looks like, take a gander at Australia. The judge’s ruling discussed the business practices of Australia’s third-largest ISP, iiNet, and in doing so reminded non-Aussie readers about a defining feature of Internet life Down Under: bandwidth caps. Such caps are common around the world, but Australian ISPs take the idea one step further by setting up partnerships with entertainment services and music download companies. Any data usage directed at one of these favored services doesn’t count against the monthly bandwidth cap.

Scrim

s1LX — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:42:38 +0000

does any clan want to have a socail scrim with my clan if so u can pm me post in this thred or x fire me “snoddy147″ note i have bout 10 peps in my clan :$

feature: The lost souls of telecommunications history

s1LX — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:30:34 +0000

When Tim Berners-Lee arrived at CERN, Geneva’s celebrated European Particle Physics Laboratory in 1980, he’d been hired to help replace the control systems for several of the lab’s particle accelerators. Almost immediately, the inventor of the modern Web page noticed a problem: thousands of people were coming and going from the famous research institute, many of them temporary hires.� “The big challenge for contract programmers was to try to understand the systems, both human and computer, that ran this fantastic playground,” he later wrote. “Much of the crucial information existed only in people’s heads.” In his spare time, Berners-Lee was working on some software that might alleviate this fragmentation and spread more useful information around. It was a little program he named Enquire, and it allowed users to create “nodes”—information-packed index card-style pages that linked to other pages.� Berners-Lee was pleased with what he eventually produced, but the PASCAL application ran on CERN’s obscure and proprietary operating system, so he didn’t take it with him when his contract expired.

Wireless carriers want crackdown on cell phone boosters

s1LX — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:43:00 +0000

“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

s1LX — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:40:00 +0000

“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

s1LX — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:27:00 +0000

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

s1LX — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:11:00 +0000

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

s1LX — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:29:00 +0000

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

s1LX — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:55:00 +0000

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

s1LX — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:28:00 +0000

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.