Forum Projects
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(link) Wednesday, 7-January-2009 16:41:11 (GMT +10) - by Rezin
Here are some neat projects from the Modding and Worklogs and PCDB Entry Discussion forums. Some have already been on the news page, but have since had quite a few updates made to them.
Apple's share price has taken a tumble. Here's a shocker -- Apple shares slid 0.7 percent (as of this writing) after Phil Schiller concluded the company's last official keyonte address at Macworld Expo. Robert Francello, head of equity trading for Apex Capital hedge fund in San Francisco, blamed "...no true blockbusters" for the market's reaction.
Meanwhile Microsoft continues to attack the 'Apple Tax'. Microsoft Corp. yesterday again pushed its claim that consumers pay an "Apple tax" when they buy Mac hardware rather than PCs running the Windows operating system. Microsoft again pitted Mac prices against similarly configured Windows PCs from the likes of Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. Not surprisingly, Microsoft's comparisons put Apple's hardware at a disadvantage, with the "tax" ranging from 16%, or $100, for the entry-level Mac Mini to 25%, or $300, for the lowest-priced iMac desktop.
Chinese portals are set to block pornography. Leading Chinese Internet portals said Tuesday they would do what they could to stamp out pornography in line with a new government crackdown, but said it would be hard to carry out in practice. The nature of the Internet makes it difficult to stop obscene material from showing up in their search engine results, they said, a day after officials threatened to close down sites that failed to wipe out online vice.
Seagate are now shipping a 1TB HDD with only two platters. One-Terabyte drives are no longer unusual, but until now, drive vendors have needed three or more platters to hit the magic 1TB goal. Not any more. Seagate is now shipping the first 1TB hard disk to get the job done with just two platters: the Barracuda 7200.12. It jams 320 Gigabits of storage per square inch into each platter to achieve its 500GB per platter capacity. It uses a 3Gbps SATA interface and a 32MB cache to move your data around.
Wii Fit is being used as part of physiotherapy in hospitals. The Seacroft medical professionals are among the first in the country to use the Wii Fit game and balance board for rehabilitation purposes. Senior physiotherapist Lynn Hirst stated that many times patients have trouble "getting their weight through the prosthetic limb." The Wii Fit allows patients to see where their body weight is being placed aiding the process.
Apparently you can get hearing damage from playing golf. The latest generation of titanium drivers can apparently produce an ear-shattering "sonic boom" when the club strikes the ball. Impressive, yes, but also sufficient to induce temporary or even permanent cochlear damage, according to the study. Doctors even go so far as to recommend avid golfers consider wearing ear plugs.
The Japanese have re-invented the nappy. Engineers all over the world have focused their vast brainpower to overcome one major obstacle—space pooping. The Japanese think they have a solution with their fancy new wearable toilet.
I have to be careful making disparaging comments about New Zealand, in case my wife hears. But they're about to implement a copyright law which sounds like insanity. Slashdot have a nice summary of it, thanks mike-ss. Next month, New Zealand is scheduled to implement Section 92 of the Copyright Amendment Act. The controversial act provides 'Guilt Upon Accusation,' which means that if a file-sharer is simply accused of copyright infringement he/she will be punished with summary Internet disconnection.
Amusingly enough, a the NZ Herald has an article about aXXo, the famous movie ripper. Though the mainstream media ignored it, this was a landmark moment for millions of filesharers worldwide: the 1,000th movie uploaded by aXXo, the internet's most popular and enduring pirate. If you already know his name, chances are you've been doing something illegal.
Lian Li have an unusual new case inspired by the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai. However, it’s not just a pretty face, with room for a full ATX motherboard, four hot-swap hard disk drive bays, three 120mm speed controlled cooling fans and pre-stealthed drive bays. In fact the insides are deceptively compact for what is, externally , quite a large chassis. Those little twiddly bits on the top look perfect for accidently smashing off when you put it under your desk.
The journal Nature has used a 3D PDF diagram for the first time, thanks Karl. The 3D pdf format, which can be displayed by any computer with up-to-date Adobe Reader software installed, was used to present a "dendrogram" illustrating the role of gravitation in the formation of stars within mighty interstellar gas clouds.
As some of you may know, MacWorld Expo 2009 is currently happening and here are the latest reports from the floor thanks to Ars Technica. You can discuss all things Macworld Expo 2009 here.
Adobe teams up with Intel to push flash onto next-gen Blu-Ray playersAdobe and Intel turned heads in the TV and internet industry today when they announced a new partnership to bring Adobe's Flash to TVs using Intel's Media Processor CE 3100, a chip geared for next-generation entertainment centers. Adobe is looking for new platforms to extend its Flash product already dominant on the internet, and has already been reported to be moving to bring Flash to Blackberries and other smart phones. And while some companies like Apple insist Flash is insignificant, if it is Adobe certainly hasn't gotten the memo.
Crucial has announced their new line of Tri-Channel Ballistix DDR3 Memory Kits."Ballistix memory is known for its extreme performance and our new three channel kits are an excellent fit for the new Core i7 platforms. By utilising Intel's latest XMP specifications, we are delivering a product that will allow consumers to easily configure their memory for excellent performance," said Jeremy Mortenson, senior product marketing manager at Lexar Media.
Nvidia's 40nm GT212 will have 384 stream processor count and 96 texture mapping units.According to a recent report from Hardware-Infos, the specifications of Nvidia's coming flagship 40nm GT212 architecture have been identified and revealed from unnamed sources near Nvidia, as usual. To start matters off, GT212 is the successor to 55nm GT200b which is currently rolling into production. In comparison, the upcoming architecture is essentially following two similar footsteps of 65nm G92 last March - a die shrink to a smaller fabrication process and a decrease in memory interface width.
Xbox 360 users are set to get a mouse and keyboard thanks to a special mod. Xbox 360 users who've been praying for mouse and keyboard support on their pets can finally stop, as their prayers have been answered. The solution is XIM’s new mod that will finally introduce mouse and keyboard support. XIM 2 is a special mod premade for your Xbox 360 and it will most definitely make playing fps games much more fun, and offer much more precise aiming.
33 Twitter accounts have been hacked, with some of the affected accounts, belonging to prominent Twitterers such as US President-Elect Barack Obama, Britney Spears, and Fox News anchor Bill O'Riley. "This morning we discovered 33 Twitter accounts had been 'hacked', including prominent Twitterers like Rick Sanchez and Barack Obama," US-based Twitter confirmed in a statement on its company blog. "We immediately locked down the accounts and investigated the issue.
Telstra employees are set to go on strike this weekend over union-negotiated employment agreement.Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union national president Ed Husic told ZDNet.com.au today that the union was currently working out how many people were back on the job, to see whether it made sense to start action again this weekend with overtime bans.
We alerted to this story some days ago but it's now official. Independent researchers Jacob Appelbaum and Alexander Sotirov, as well as computer scientists from the Centrum Wiskunde&Informatica, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, the Eindhoven University of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley have successfully used 200 PS3's to break of one of the MD5 algorithms used in issuing security certificates for websites.Security certificates are used to confirm that a website is legitimate and not an attempt to mislead the visitor. Once the team broke though the algorithm, they were able to hack into the RapidSSL.com website. After this, the team was able to produce false security certificates that had identical MD5 hash values as legitimate certificates.
APPLE CEO, Steve Jobs has revealed that his doctors have finally found the reason behind his rapid decline in health throughout 2008. Apparently he is suffering from hormone imbalance which robs his body of necessary proteins to stay healthy. It is thought that Jobs has been pressured into coming clean about his health after Apple announced that the enigmatic front man would not be presenting a keynote at this month's Macworld exhibition. His non-attendance at what is usually the biggest Apple event of the year, and where new products are generally announced, has caused much speculation in the tech press about the health of the man credited with saving Apple.
A 17-year-old World of Warcraft player from Ohio, US allegedly told a game moderator that if he didn't get his way he would kill himself. The Blizzard representative called 911, and police and medics were dispatched to the teen's house. The teen told the police that he was frustrated by the game and the threat had been a joke "to try to get what [he] wanted." The police were not amused, and charged the teen with a first-degree misdemeanor.
LG is set to introduce TV sets that can screen Netflix movies directly from the internet.Netflix subscribers who buy one of these devices can hook it up to their TVs to watch movies that can be downloaded from the Internet instantly, as part of their monthly rental plan.
German security researcher Tobias Engel has demonstrated that it is possible to perform a denial-of-service attack, dubbed Curse of Silence, on Nokia Series 60 phones by sending a malformed email message via SMS. An advisory made public by Engel gave details of the attack. After receiving a message from a sender with an email address of greater than 32 characters, Nokia S60 2.6, 2.8, 3.0 and 3.1 devices are not able to receive any more SMS or MMS messages. S60 2.6 and 3.0 devices lock up after one message, while 2.8 and 3.1 devices seize up after 11 messages.
The ongoing military conflict between Israel and Hamas is not just limited to ground and air battles but also the internet.Israel's PR machine is gung-ho for Web 2.0, it seems; the country's armed forces (the IDF) have launched a YouTube channel filled with bomb camera footage, surveillance video, and daily video updates, most designed to show that mosques can harbor weapons caches and elementary schools can be used by mortar teams.
WMP12 beta could corrupt your MP3s.The problem only happens under the following circumstances: the first few seconds of an MP3 file will be cut if the header of the mp3 file is larger than 16 kilobytes and if metadata is written to the file. The corruption will occur either when the user edits the metadata from inside WMP12 or Explorer, or if WMP12 is set to automatically fill in missing metadata using the online service.
Interesting Forum Threads
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(link) Monday, 5-January-2009 21:27:15 (GMT +10) - by Agg
Very busy in the forums all day today - I guess the holiday quiet time is over!
It turns out to be a bad idea to shout at your hard drives. This screenshot is from Analytics on the 7410. The issue is not with the 7410, it's with disk drives in general. The disk latency here is also not suffered by the client applications, as this is ZFS asynchronously flushing write data to disk. Still, it was great to see how easily Analytics could identify this latency, and interesting to see what the cause was. There's a video, too. Discussion here.
I'm not sure if we've linked this yet, but here's an interesting use for annotations in YouTube videos: to create a choose your own adventure style video story.
It seems the UK have their own plans to filter the internet. Now, let's look at Burnham's target—the Internet. It's just like movies, TV, and video games, right? Some content, some access points, and a bunch of unsuspecting consumers who need ratings help. Not quite.
They seem to also be hacking people's PC's without a warrant, thanks dhwwwops. The hacking is known as “remote searching”. It allows police or MI5 officers who may be hundreds of miles away to examine covertly the hard drive of someone’s PC at his home, office or hotel room.
BenchmarkReviews continue their heatsink roundup. From my experience, 2008 has been a very good year for CPU coolers. We've tested the OCZ Vendetta 2 to perform as well or better than coolers twice its price, and we've discovered that the Thermaltake V14 Pro can deliver top cooling performance while looking good.
The NSW police are getting a virtual shooting range. THE NSW Police Force will spend about $2 million on a virtual reality shooting range as senior officers blame a lack of training for recruits being frightened of firearms. The police academy at Goulburn has "only six lanes" available for live fire, according to a tender request for the new training simulator. In the past, recruits have used public shooting ranges to supplement their training. "The capacity of this [Goulburn] facility has been exceeded due to an increasing number of recruits," the tender document states.
MD5 is no longer secure. Security researchers demonstrated the first known application of a years-old theoretical attack against the MD5 hashing algorithm used by companies like Verisign and Thawte to issue SSL certificates. SSL certificates use hash codes generated by a variety of algorithms, including MD5, to verify their issuer’s identity. The hash code is an important feature of public-key cryptography, which SSL is based upon, as it is essential to protecting the secret, private code that CAs use to sign SSL certificates.
Flash and Safari have failed a privacy test. Third party plug-ins like Adobe Flash do a poor job of cleaning traces of your browser sessions, rendering private-browsing features somewhat useless, according to a new study by researcher Katherine McKinley. McKinley, a researcher at iSec Partners, created a tool for testing the functionality of clearing private data after a browser session and browsing in private mode and found that some browsers — most notably Apple’s Safari for Windows — do a poor job of wiping traces of a browser session.
A trojan is combating piracy. A new trojan popped up at several torrent sites a few weeks ago, one that blocks access to The Pirate Bay and Mininova, while informing its victims that “downloading is wrong.” The trojan edits the hosts file on Windows machines, and redirects the BitTorrent sites to localhost, making them impossible to load. The trojan in question (Troj/Qhost-AC) identified by anti-virus company Sophos, is a rather unusual one. It doesn’t seem to install spyware or traditional malware, but instead blocks access to the two most popular BitTorrent sites.
Audi have created the first 100% LED car. Of course we all know efficient LEDs will eventually find their way into every automobile, but the Audi R8 V12 takes the prize for being the first commercial vehicle to sport LEDs in everything. Headlights, running lights, turn signals—you name it there's an LED shining bright inside. And not just shining, but "smartly" shining and adapting to the driver's needs. "We're striving to create intelligent headlights and taillights which think and anticipate in the interest of enhancing a driver's safety and comfort."
Nanotechnology is being used to create better pictures. Researchers in Scotland have been given nearly half a million pounds to try to improve digital camera images. The team, lead by scientists at the University of Glasgow, are developing small nanostructures that would be used on light detecting image sensors. These new hi-tech chips would be used in camera equipment to produce sharper and more colourful images. The project is being funded by a £489,234 grant from the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council.
Have you seen the latest in portable consoles? Some Xbox 360 mods are the product of serious craftsmanship, some are rather silly, and some -- like this Suzuki automobile console / Xbox 360 game console hybrid -- really give one pause. This isn't the sort of thing that one spends moments / hours / weeks on, after which he reflects for a moment ("Aren't I rather clever?"), and then hides it safely in the closet (or sells it on eBay). No, this is an automobile.
Finally, this lego creation from the land of crazy. Lego Middle Earth brewery? Check. Lego beer, check. Drunk Lego knights and peasants, check (me included). Glowing Lego ogres, check. Half naked Lego pole dancer that actually moves her booty around? ASFFGGAGADGAFGDH!!!
Forum Projects
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(link) Monday, 5-January-2009 12:54:24 (GMT +10) - by Agg
Who would have thought that 'space faking' could ever be a problem? THE growing trend of online "space faking", where users masquerade as other people, has reignited concerns about the safety and security of social networking sites. While space faking is not a crime, federal Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus said such activity could be a precursor to identity theft. "This sort of activity can be innocent but you only have to take it a few steps forward to commit an identity crime," he said. "Clever people may be able to use fake identities to gather clues about your identity and then go on to commit a crime.
Psystar is claiming that Apple never copyrighted Mac OS X. So, what is this nonsense about Apple failing to copyright OS X? That’s what Psystar – the fly-by-night illegal Mac clone maker that Apple has sued for copyright infringement for rebundling OS X software with its computers – is claiming in the latest gambit to avoid getting shot out of the water in U.S. District Court. Psystar also made additional antitrust allegations, claiming that Apple inserts secret code to disable non-Apple hardware running OS X.
Apple continues to gain ground in the OS market. Microsoft's share of the operating system market is dropping, while Apple computers and handhelds have topped 10 percent for the first time, according to a new report on Internet-connected computers. Apple's share is just over 10 percent, if one combines the market share for both Macs and iPhones. Macs account for 9.63 percent of computers online. (Windows Mobile devices are included in the 88.7 percent figure.)
2008 was a really bad year for the music industry. Music fans have gone digital in a big way. It used to be that a music collection spanned numerous CD cases. Today, even the largest music collections can be stored on a single MP3 player. With the massive growth in digital music sales, the music industry is seeing profits drop significantly. Reuters reports that statistics released this week by Nielsen SoundScan show that 2008 was the worst year for music sales since 1991 when the firm began monitoring the category. The numbers show that total album sales fell 14% over the year with 428.4 million units sold during the 52 weeks ending on December 28.
But the music industry is fighting back. The music industry has taken some extreme measures to counter piracy, but it hasn’t found the silver bullet yet. The key is to come up with a service that will fulfill the needs of music lovers, and one that would even be embraced by the most hardcore pirate. With Spotify, this might just become possible. Spotify is a music service that gives users access to a huge library of music, through a lightweight application that looks like a mashup of the best parts of iTunes and Last.fm. Music is streamed, partly supported by P2P technology, but it plays instantly, like we’ve never seen before.
With another new year just past us, lets look back and laugh at Y2K. Another New Year has come and gone. This is the last year of the first decade of the 21st Century. It also means that we’ve had 9 years of computing since the Y2K bug was supposed reduce all technology to a smoldering puddle and leave the entire planet living like the Amish. I found a video that recaps some of the Panic In The Streets mentality that lead up to New Years Day 2000. Although nothing came of it, there was legitimate fear - most of it based on ignorance, technological fear, and religious fervor.
Virgin Galactic has found itself a spaceport. Virgin Galactic has signed with the state of New Mexico to build the nation's first rocketplane spaceport for flinging wealthy customers out of Earth's atmosphere. The suborbital-tourism firm owned by British billionaire Richard Branson inked the 20-year lease agreement this week to establish its HQ at the planned state-funded facility, dubbed Spaceport America. Construction of the $198m spaceport is expected to begin as early as April, thanks to the Federal Aviation Administration granting a launch license to the New Mexico Spaceport Authority just days before the pact with Virgin Galactic.
The Mars Rovers are 5 years old. The US space agency's (Nasa) Mars rovers are celebrating a remarkable five years on the Red Planet. The first robot, named Spirit, landed on 3 January, 2004, followed by its twin, Opportunity, 21 days later. It was hoped the robots would work for at least three months; but their longevity in the freezing Martian conditions has surprised everyone. The rovers' data has revealed much about the history of water at Mars' equator billions of years ago.
All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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