Google Agrees to Limit Resolution of Israel Satellite Photos
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They aaaaaalways have to be 'special'

Xbox360 fails to outsell Gamecube in Japan
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LOL!

Xbox 360: Ripping CD's only way to store music on HDD - CD Freaks.com
The console could recognize and play MP3 songs from USB devices like memory sticks and portable media players, but we couldn't transfer songs over to the HDD. [...] I know when I read about this annoying limitation in the article, I was reminded of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Specifically, when the slightly too clever HAL 9000 computer disobeyed an order and said: "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." Of course, this sent the crew into full gear, doing what had to be done with the HAL 9000 to regain control of the situation.
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the Xbox 360 is like HAL 9000 ! xD

Slashdot | Song Sites Face Legal Crackdown
The MPA is demanding jail time for the maintainers of websites offering unlicensed song scores and lyrics.
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Incredible! at first I thought that they talked about MP3, but no, they want jail for people posting lyrics!

What happened to democracy? How can we stop those power people with lawyers?

The Unspoken Taboo - The Never Expiring Password 1/600 passwords of expired accounts from an adult site is "password"

VSO Products to be banished... - CD Freaks.com Today, French citizens may no longer be able to make a safe backup of their purchased CDs, Movies, Games, etc. or use a software/hardware reader of their choice. Tomorrow, other countries may use this law as a model. [...] “In addition to killing off the right to private copying while keeping the fees associated to it, according to the DADVSI bill, the simple act of using software to read a DVD that is not authorized by the DVD editor could lead up to a 3-year jail sentence and a 300 000 Euros fine.”

Wired News: Europe Has the Hot Hand
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And we'll use it to give the finger to other continents xD

Linux hackers: the L in Linksys’s WRT54GL is for “Linux” - Engadget - www.engadget.com
Linksys saw that they have something in that ever popular WRT54G of theirs (apparently they sell hundreds of thousands per month, which we totally believe), and after changing up their hardware in the their series 5 WRT54G, they’ve decided to continue making the Linux-friendly series 4 under the WRT54GL badge.
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here's a product with big sales thanks to Linux.

David Byrne gets RIAA warning David Byrne -- ex-Talking Head and odd music impressario -- has been targetted by the RIAA for streaming a radio station that played too much Missy Elliot
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LOL! Even music artists have to face the wrath of RIAA.

Will Sonys PS3 be the last nail in the HD-DVD coffin? - CD Freaks.com Consumers accustomed to the current generation DVD format will most likely begin the switch to Blu-ray or HD DVD in 2008
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I hardly doubt on this '2008' number. The reason: Once you've seen some movies on HDTV you can spit on regular DVDs. I am already prepared in 2005 to spend my money on High Definition.

Macrovision wants DVD Decrypter pulled from servers
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LOL! that was funny. Thanks Macrovision, now keep working on the next useless CD protection :)

Xbox 360: shortages no joke: "There were plenty of parents at Best Buy, a notable contrast to Circuit City. [...] The parents were leaving the store with sad looks on their faces. This is because one employee actually said that they do not expect to receive another major shipment of Xbox 360s until February of 2006."
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Here's the great launch of Xbox 360: available on stores when PS3 is out. lol!

Music Selling Delimma: iTunes This is real: I produced my CD back in 1999 and signed-up to sell my product online at CDNOW.com. Amazon bought CDNOW and life went on. I now see that my CD is listed at iTunes. And we won’t get one red cent!?
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so, iTunes sells his songs and he doesn't get anything.

Sony Patents Anti-Rental Tech (for Blu-Ray and PS3)The patent describes a process by which every media disc is shipped with a unique registration key. The first time the media disc is inserted into a player, that key is read and the disc is registered by the player, then the original key on the disc is rendered unreadable. Any attempt to play a registered disc in another player will fail.
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everyday we see more attempts to aleniate users from Blu-Ray, I wonder how we, users, will react to this when Blu-Ray is on sale.

� Broadband states all vote Democrat, dial-up states vote Republican | IT Facts | ZDNet.com

Music exec: quit whining and dump Mac, Linux | The Register Mac owners and anyone who runs the Linux operating system should quit whining about DRM and copy-protection technologies that are incompatible with their systems and "consider purchasing a regular CD player".
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When this 'music exec' complains about piracy I'll say to him "quit whining and go to work"

Wired News: My IPod for a Random Playlist: "if there are 23 randomly selected people in a room, there is a better than 50-50 chance that at least two of them will have the same birthday. The point: Mathematical randomness often contradicts our intuitive expectations of randomness."

More on RIAA admitting bootleg CDs more a threat than P2P - CD Freaks.com
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at least, som common sense coming from RIAA

Slashdot | Google Blacklists CNet Reporters Apparently, Google was angered by an article published earlier by Cnet where all sorts of personal information about Google CEO Eric Schmidt was included. The information was obtained from Google searches.
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That's Funny!

Generation 'X & Y' still want that physical CD for music - CD Freaks.com
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Specially because buying music online is more expensive that getting the physical CD

Firefox: Doing it for love - ZDNet UK Insight We're excited about Microsoft launching IE 7 — it will remind a lot of people that if they want better features they have to spend hundreds of dollars upgrading. [...] Ben Goodger [the lead Firefox engineer] implemented some awesome installation tools so you could copy over your favourites, settings etc. It made Firefox seem like an upgrade for IE.

Students refuse to buy a single song from Napster | The Register

Live 8 concerts cause CD album sales to rocket up to 1,343% - CD Freaks.com: "So far the music industry thinks the only proper way to prop up sales is by eliminating free illegitimate sources, adding copy protection measures to media and so on. Well, the Live 8 concert has really shown the way to boost sales by giving their gusts (and others) what they really want - Enjoyable music. "

ABC News: Now, the Sun Prevents Skin Cancer -- Right?: "people need to coat themselves with sunscreen whenever they're in the sun. Doing that may actually contribute to far more cancer deaths than it prevents, some researchers think."
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I am tired of all this non-sense, couldn't 'researchers' agree on something???

Slashdot | Owner of the Word Stealth 'Protecting' Rightshe has pursued it vigorously in the courts and has even managed to shut down "stealthisemail.com" (Steal This Email.com) because the URL coincidentally contains the word "stealth".
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how can this happen?????

2000_jan_a3: "I once worked for a company that replaced their drafting boards with a CAD system. But not a dime was spent to train their people. They struggled, secretly drawing on paper, and copying that into the computer. Then the managers complained that they weren't seeing the productivity improvements promised by the CAD vendor."

Slashdot | Amazon Patents User Viewing Histories If a customer views product A, and then later views product B, and you use that to infer a relationship between A and B, then you've infringed on this patent. [...] When will this stupidity end?

Slashdot | Yahoo! Orders Wikipedia Hardware wow!

What I stole from you and why - The Peer-to-Peer Weblog - p2p.weblogsinc.com _

iTunes used by more people that most P2P networks

This should give some idea to those RIAA idiots of how wrong they are: paid online music has more users that most free P2P networks.

Wired News: Music Muffled in Star Wars Game players of multiplayer online game "Star Wars Galaxies" can't compose music because lawyers envision a legal nightmare if they could. That's funny

Slashdot | Who Should Help LinuxFund Distribute $126,155.29? Linux project closes, but its Credit Card keeps running and the bank deposits money as time passes (some kind of charity CC), that's bizarre!

SPCR :: View topic - Zalman's new 9500 LED CPU cooler @ Computex Taipei

US gov wants to refang Patriot Act | The Register

USA was about Freedom once, now is all about control.

Anti-Anti-Piracy Seal: WARNING! Artists Supports Filesharing - The Peer-to-Peer Weblog - p2p.weblogsinc.com _ Some artist created the "Anti-Anti-Piracy" seal, I hope I see it next time I go shopping :)

A Gamers' Manifesto, some good points in that list.

Sony president says Xbox 360 is more like an Xbox 1.5 - CD Freaks.com

Don't be over confident with your machine Sony, or you'll lose the battle.

Skype: be afraid

Wired News: My Great Big Console Adventure: "Square Enix said it is working on Final Fantasy XI for Xbox 360, which might have been more impressive if the company hadn't just told Sony's crowd it is working on Final Fantasy XII for the PlayStation 3."

Wired 13.06: The Xbox Reloaded, interesting article

How Hilary Rosen learned to stop suing and hate Apple's iPod | The Register

Neowin.net - Where unprofessional journalism looks better - Microsoft Readies a 'Lean' Windows Client this stripped down XP focuses on enterprises currently running Windows 2000 (or worse) who don't want to upgrade their hardware.


It seems kind of strange that Microsoft new business idea is to focus on enterprises with old hardware that don't want to upgrade.

Apple pays no homage to Catalonia

Apple has raised the ire of perhaps ten million Europeans - because it chose not to deliver Catalan localization within Mac OS X 'Tiger'.

The move means Apple has ignored a local campaign in the 68,730 square kilometre Catalan region, which extends across parts of Spain, France, Andorra and Italy. The language is spoken by over seven million and understood by ten million people.

What renders the pill bitterest of all to swallow is that Apple has released Mac operating systems localized for Catalan in the past, systems between OS 7 and 9 offered this.

It gets worse: The company that localizes Mac OS X for Spanish, Portugese and French is based locally; in Catalonia.

TrustedReviews - The UK's Premier Source for IT Reviews & News: "There’s no doubt that the Athlon 64 X2 4800 is very impressive indeed."

Slashdot | CMU Professor's Rebuttal Against RIAA Propaganda jsc writes "On Sunday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an article by Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, stating that university students are hijacking Internet2 to pirate copyrighted works, and schools who don't actively combat file-sharing are teaching their students bad values like "acceptance of theft". The Post-Gazette didn't let Sherman get away with it, though... Today they published a letter to the paper from Roger Dannenberg, a professor of Computer Science and Music at Carnegie Mellon University, reminding everyone how past/present behavior of the RIAA and its members is an even worse model of values..."

Zeropaid.com - Bush signs law targeting P2P pirates: "File-swappers who distribute a single copy of a prerelease movie on the Internet can be imprisoned for up to three years, according to a bill that President Bush signed into law on Wednesday."

Samsung and Microsoft introduce hybrid hard drive (HHD) how’s it work? It’s outfitted with a 1Gbit NAND flash buffer (instead of the usual 8-32MB buffer of volatile memory), and it only spins up the platters and writes to the drive when its good n’ full.


mmmm......... looks interesting! :)

French court rules in favor of DVD copying - Engadget - www.engadget.com /: "apparently a French court has ruled that adding anti-copying mechanisms to a DVD violates the rights consumers have to make private copies of media that they’ve bought and paid for."

IMAX Theaters Refused To Show Volcanoes Of The Deep Sea: "Several IMAX theaters in the South have refused to show a science film on volcanoes because of concerns it might offend evangelicals who don't believe in evolution."

We have definitely a lot more creation public than evolution public

when religion invades truth.

Media boycott week April 24-30

P2P fuels bandwidth demand, MPAA tactics backfiring research indicates that “in North America … there has been virtually no change in P2P traffic levels,” despite industry crack-downs. Furthermore, the publicity created by the MPAA has actually increased P2P use in some parts of the world. Sweet irony.

Linus Torvalds in bizarre attack on open source | The Register

Blu-ray format wars could hurt an already timid audience - CD Freaks.com It seems that some analysts and those in the know at big corporations, think Blu-ray is years off from becoming the successor to the DVD.

: "Apple, meanwhile, must struggle against teenagers who must violate the Geneva Convention in order to extract information about mind-blowing new products such as pastel socks."

Great sentence for the real situation: someone reveals secret information about new products from Apple, who wants to stop this too often leak.

10 Features Longhorn needs - A WinCustomize Article by Brad Wardell

Discs Are So Dead Two new formats aim to bury the DVD. But Web distribution will kill them all.

Hitachi goes perpendicular, promises 1TB PC drives, 20GB Microdrives by 2007 - Engadget - www.engadget.com.

I'll be waiting!

SPCR :: View topic - New Thermalright XP-90C good discussion about aluminium versus copper in heatsinks.

SPCR :: View topic - Monster Cars in the US get BIG tax incentives tax deductions for the least efficient cars, and paltry tax incentives for energy efficient vehicles.

good luck america :P

Slashdot | Software Development Practices At Google "It's widely known that Google allows its engineers to spend 20% of paid work time on personal projects (that are nevertheless considered property of the company)"

Well, I didn't know that, interesting fact. :)

EU sleuths think Microsoft sabotaged Windows

Fiona Apple’s “lost album” surfaces on P2P

Sony exec's don't release an album, two years later that album is on P2P. Now, who is hurting the artists?

Apple de-socializes iTunes | The Register: "Bit by bit, Apple is tightening the DRM noose, reducing the amount of freedom its own customers enjoy."

Welcome back eMule :D

Wanted: Cheap giant bit barrel What we need is a handy-dandy storage appliance into which you just plug drives, and which takes care of the details itself.

Online poker - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Slashdot | 'Online Poker' Googlebomb

Neowin.net - Where unprofessional journalism looks better - The chronicles of a futile battle: Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD "As far as entertainment is concerned, the maximum video resolution DVD could provide, 720x480, was shortly overcame by the progress pace and new technical features of new TVs, multimedia projectors or other image display devices. But the main problem remains the poor security. DeCSS and DivX came as major surprises, and lessened the DVD enthusiasm. The IT industry wasn't very excited either by the new disc, all things considered. The DVD R/RW vs. DVD-R/RW battle, born, all in all, still in the entertainment area, generated a lot of confusion and lead to a much lower than expected PC technology implementation ratio. Combining both technologies in combo devices was a last resort solution, unable to generate much enthusiasm either."

TrustedReviews - Supersize Me"We’ve all got digital cameras these days, and I’m sure I’m not the only one with an unfeasibly large number of pictures waiting to be organised. These days just getting them off my memory card and in a place that I’ll one day be able to find them again is an achievement in and of itself"

hehehe, this is soooo true!

Slashdot | P2P (More) Legal in France: "A french appeal court ruled yesterday in favour of somebody who downloaded about 500 movies, on the ground that those were private copies, and that he didn't redistributed them, and that a tax was payed on blank media."

MS calls for US patent reform | The Register Microsoft yesterday called for reform of the US patent system, claiming that the long-term health of the system is threatened both by a flood of patent applications and an "explosion of sometimes-abusive litigation".

wow, surprise! surprise! did you know that Microsoft wanted to patent FAT32 file system? (and failed)

Israel’s kosher phone, when religion gets crazy

EC OKs software patents | The Register "Despite opposition from open sourcers, the European Parliament, Denmark, Poland and Portugal and support from almost no-one but Bill Gates KBE the European Council of Ministers has approved passage of the software patents bill."

WHATTT????

Wired News: England's EBay for Sex "Users must create a free account to browse the services offered. Users can rate the services they've tried, or even offer their own services. Like eBay, AdultWork takes a cut of all transactions, which are processed through the web bank Nochex."

Wired 13.03: Why Your Broadband Sucks Governor Ed Rendell signed into law a bill prohibiting the Reds in local government from offering free Wi-Fi throughout their municipalities. [...] Some are discovering that free wireless access increases the value of public spaces just as, well, streetlamps do. And just as streetlamps don't make other types of lighting obsolete, free wireless access in public spaces won't kill demand for access in private spaces. In economoid-speak, these public services may well provide positive externalities. Yet we will never recognize these externalities unless municipalities are free to experiment.

new concept "unauthorized linking", here's the ilegal link

Music download prices to rise | The Register The market for downloaded music is strong enough to take a price rise, according to the major music labels. <-- And I thought 1$/song was too much. Anyway, this is the prove that they don't care about P2P. Years and years crying about "ilegal downloads" and now they want paying users to go back to P2P. Music labels deserve the worst.

Ready or not, Windows XP update is coming | CNET News.com Microsoft is alerting customers that it will soon start delivering Windows XP Service Pack 2 to all customers using Automatic Update, whether they want it or not. <-- wow, that's funny!

Enhanced Versatile Disc declared national standard in China - CD Freaks.com EVD's physical specifications are like that of a DVD with a 12cm disc diameter, same UDF file system and disc capacity of around 8.5GB. In fact an EVD can even be read in a PC’s DVD-ROM drive. [...] By using these alternative codec’s, the overall royalty charges per EVD player are less than one-fifth of that than for each DVD player. Besides different codec’s, the EVD format supports HDTV due to ON2's much more efficient video compression compared with MPEG2 as used on DVD. The EAC audio format supports 1, 2 and 6 (5.1) channel configurations.

CD Freaks takes a look at Philips DVDR16LSK/00 LightScribe [2/3] print DVD-R discs!!!

Google's toolbar and content modification Google doing it the Microsoft way (or even worse) :(

Google's toolbar and content modification Google doing it the Microsoft way (or even worse) :(

Joel on Software - Camels and Rubber Duckies Some words about how to price programs you develop. Interesting reading.

Slashdot | Google Donating Bandwidth and Servers to Wikipedia OMG !!!!

Slashdot | Court Docs Reveal Kazaa Logging User Downloads kazaa logged users downloads!!!!!!!!!!!! argghhhhhhhhhhh!!!!

Slashdot | Fallout From Japanese Patent On Help Iconthe use of a help icon to invoke a help function infinges on one of their patents. incredible, do we want software patents?

How to treat a Li-Ion battery

Six firms form the HVD Alliance around 1TB disc - Engadget, welcome HVD, I was waiting for you!!!!!!!!

Wired News: Hide Your IPod, Here Comes BillApple's music player apparently is wildly popular on Microsoft's campus. Thousands of Microsofties own the devices, to the great irritation of management. By Leander Kahney.

Norway rules MP3 linking is illegal - CD Freaks.com

textually.org: Internet and cell phone tax plan to finance US war on terror

In the wake of Suprnova and MPAA, BitTorrent getting biggerIn December, the MPAA puts together a major effort to dent BitTorrent by sending out cease and desist letters. As a result, big trackers like Suprnova shut down. What happens? Traffic on the network goes up

California looks to create a new crime : P2P

Wired News: Desperately Seeking Cybersex: "researchers John Bargh and Katelyn McKenna conclude that a rise in depression upon first using the internet is followed by increased happiness and real-world social activity among regular internet users"

Battery life isn’t going to get better anytime soon

US Losses - Photos Hidden By US News Media

Altnet (Kazaa) sues over patents, how ironic - The Peer-to-Peer Weblog - p2p.weblogsinc.com we can’t help but smell the irony in the a firm closely associated with a company sued for intellectual property issues (Kazaa) using patent law to defend its own IP within the P2P marketplace.

Wired News: Real World Doesn't Use a Joystick: "'I just knew the first time I played Burnout 2, the crash part, that I probably shouldn't get behind the wheel of a car for an hour or so afterwards,' Taylor said, 'because you're expending so much effort on deliberately trying to make your car crash.'"

Porn industry to have big influence on HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray - CD Freaks.com

New York City Transit Authority Board to Ban Photography "the transit police would have the authority to arrest anyone using a camera on a bus or subway including tourists, artists, and journalists."

Gigantic Bittorent site list

Overpeer seeding peer networks with popups and adware via WMA files - The Peer-to-Peer Weblog how come everything related to Microsoft turns into crap?

Bye CSS hello ACCS: The next protection for optical media? - CD Freaks.com: "This is the next big thing for content protection, sorely needed by content providers ever since a young Jon Johansen unravelled the present Content Scrambling System or CSS. Now, anyone can copy a DVD movie with just a bit of effort, despite the encryption scheme. This is not going to be acceptable with a new generation of discs about to hit the streets. Discs that will this time will hold master quality content!" LOL!!!!

Haya o no negociación, plan de soberanía vasca irá a referendo - Prensa Latina

Why IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo - Engadget "IBM managed to lose nearly a billion dollars selling personal computers over the last 3 1/2 years."