Yesterday we wrote about the minor glitches spotted thanks to computers not knowing that Congress moved out Daylight Saving Day. However, there was an odd time glitch over in the UK that is worth examining. Apparently, at Gatwick airport, computers were all screwed up because they hadn’t changed times properly. You see, in the UK this past weekend was the conclusion of British Summer Time, the equivalent of our Daylight Saving Time. So what happened here? My guess is that the systems that run the computers at Gatwick were patched… for the US change. In other words, while the computers would have made the change properly beforehand, somehow there was some confusion and a patch meant for US users was applied (or some other setting indicated that it was a US-based computer system), meaning that the computers didn’t switch — not because of confusion over the date of the hour shift, but because the system had been patched for the wrong country.

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The latest news in the patent dispute between Sun and Network Appliance is that Sun is trying to move the case to California. NetApp filed the lawsuit in east Texas, a favorite location for patent holders, since the judges there are known for fast trials that almost always end with the patent holder coming out on top. Even if companies have no real presence in east Texas, they figure out how to get something resembling a presence there in order to file the lawsuit there. Amusingly, patent reform in the early 80s was designed to stop this type of jurisdiction shopping at the appeals court level, but all it seems to have done was push it down to the district court level. In trying to move the case, Sun points out that both it and NetApp have headquarters approximately 10 miles away from each other in California — and there seems to be no reason whatsoever to have the case filed in east Texas unless you were jurisdiction shopping. There’s been some talk lately suggesting that the folks in east Texas are getting a little annoyed at their reputation for being so friendly for patent holders, so hopefully they’ll agree that this case really belongs in California.

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Patri Friedman points to a fascinating post by a Yahoo employee (speaking only for himself) speculating on the reasons Google is clobbering Yahoo in the search ad market. In a nutshell, Google was a lot quicker to figure out the benefits of ranking ads by ad quality rather than simply auctioning off the top slot to the highest bidder. Given that online advertisers pay on a per-click basis, more relevant and useful ads can generate more clicks — and therefore more revenue — than lower-quality ads. Because ads with higher click-through rates became more highly ranked, advertisers began to compete on relevance as well as price. They began to optimize their ads to generate higher click-through rates. The average quality of ads on Google began to improve. And here's the really important point: as the quality of Google ads got better, users started to discover that Google ads were actually useful and relevant, and they got in the habit of looking at them. This is an example of a principle Techdirt has been emphasizing for years: ads are content, and they're a lot more effective if they contain information people actually want. Google's experience belies the conventional view that ads are a necessary evil users have to put up with as the cost of getting the content they want.

Nowhere is that conventional view of advertising more entrenched than in the television industry, which is constantly wringing its hands (and filing lawsuits) over the detrimental impact of devices like the TiVo and Replay TV that include ad-skipping technology. I think the Google example demonstrates how short-sighted that attitude is. With a little ingenuity, TV networks could be using devices like TiVo the same way Google uses click-through statistics: as a way to gather data on user attitudes toward different ads. If networks priced ad inventory the same way Google does, giving a discount to advertisers whose ads had lower skip rates, advertisers would respond by trying to make more entertaining and relevant ads. And as ads became more entertaining and useful, viewers would be less likely to pick up the remote and push the "30-second skip" button.

Even more radical, the networks could be using TiVo-like devices to distribute shows and ads directly over the Internet. In that case, the device could display a different set of ads to each viewer, with the ads chosen based on the individual viewer's show-watching and ad-skipping history as well as some basic demographic characteristics. For example, users who frequently skip car ads would be shown fewer car ads. Viewers under 40 would never be shown ads for adult diapers, and all-male households would never be shown ads for feminine hygiene products. Such a system would be a win-win for both advertisers and viewers: viewers would find ads more useful and less irritating, while advertisers would be willing to pay higher rates for ads that were precisely targeted at relevant subgroups. And that would solve the "TiVo problem" once and for all: not by forcing users to watch ads they'd rather avoid, but by finding ways to show users ads they actually find entertaining and useful.

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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wwrmn writes “There’s a debate going on over at bugs.launchpad.net on whether it’s the Ubuntu, BIOS, hard-drive manufacturer, or pick-any-player’s fault, but Ubuntu (and perhaps any OS) may be dramatically shortening the life of your laptop’s hard drive due to an aggressive power-saving feature / acpi bug / OS configuration. Regardless of where the fault lies or how it’s fixed, you might want to take some actions now to try to prevent the damage.”

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I’ll admit it. I’ve never quite understood the rationale behind the $100 laptop (or OLPC or whatever it’s being called these days). Yes, it’s a noble goal to get technology into the hands of people around the world with the hope that they can do something productive with it — but a big top down attempt to build something without much actual user feedback seems destined to fail. At the same time, we’ve noted that the market seems to be doing a pretty damn good job on its own of driving the price of computers down such that a special project may not make as much sense. So it’s a bit amusing to now find out that while computer prices are dropping the price of the “$100 laptop” keeps rising. In fact, the price is now $200 per laptop, showing a rather rapid climb. The $100 laptop was never actually $100. Back in February, project backers said it would be $150. In April, they bumped the price up to $176. Just two weeks ago, they said it would be $188… and now it’s $200. And we thought technology was supposed to drop in price over time. Perhaps if they’d acted more like a startup from the beginning things would be moving in the right direction.

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Ponca City, We Love You writes “The New Scientist reports that palaeontologists have excavated a fossil trackway in Shandong Province in China 100 to 120 million years old that contains footprints left by six Dromeosaurs, the more formal name for raptors, showing evidence of group behavior. Up until now, the popular stereotype from Jurassic Park of raptors hunting in packs has had no fossil evidence to back it up. The paths of the six 90 kilo raptors do not overlap where the animals walked alongside a river or stream. ‘”The odds of these tracks being made by different individuals that just happen to be moving in the same direction, without their tracks stepping on one another, are small,” said Jerry D. Harris, director of paleontology at Dixie State College. “Groups that do that usually have relatively sophisticated behavior, and they’re relatively intelligent,” Harris added. “By moving together in groups, it’s entirely possible that they hunted in groups.”‘”

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The Slashdot 10 Year Anniversary Charity Auction for the EFF is at an end and the numbers are in. We are still waiting for payment on one of the six items, but the grand total for the auctions is $9186.83. The big surprise was the anonymous reader who bought the Swag Bag AND the Low UID: he decided to donate an extra $1200 beyond his bids! Thanks to Daniel Peacock (who bought Hemos’s burnt copy of Watchmen) and Michael Ravnitzk who bought Triton, the case of the first x86 that ran Slashdot in Feb 1998. He then turned around and told us to shelve it, to try to sell it again later. Instead he got a box of shirts. We’re still waiting for payment on the email address, but hopefully nobody would be so crappy that they would scam a charity auction. And lastly, we would like to give special thanks to the University of Advancing Technology (here’s a Coral Cache link) who paid $3,550.00 for that hyperlink you just read past. They wanted to express their support for Slashdot and for the EFF, and I think both of us appreciate it. Thanks to everyone who bid on items and congratulations to the winners. And the rest of you – don’t feel bad that you missed it. You can always make a donation later – the EFF does good work. Tell them Slashdot sent you.

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It’s been almost exactly four years since Linden Lab announced that the digital goods anyone created within Second Life were owned by whoever created them — effectively bringing the outside world’s laws into the virtual world. While this move received cheers from those who thought it was better than the company that ran the game owning everything, we felt that it was only going to lead to some serious problems. Specifically, our concern was that this was effectively bringing existing problematic laws, such as copyright, into this new world — or, rather, pulling those issues out of this world and throwing them onto the US justice system. It appears that’s coming true.

A new lawsuit has been filed by a woman who uses Second Life, claiming that another member of Second Life was “stealing” the computer code used to build products that she sold in the virtual world. Of course, that’s not all that surprising, as digital goods are easily copied — and in the past we’ve even pointed out systems like copybot that made that process quite easy. In the end, it does come back to the same basic economics that we discuss around here all the time. If you’re betting your livelihood on selling digital goods that are easily copied with zero marginal cost, you’re going to have to deal with people copying your products sooner or later no matter what. It’s just not a very good business to be in. While it may feel like “theft” to some, it’s hard to justify that as being theft since no one is missing anything. In other words, the economics at play in the virtual world are entirely different than those in the real world — and yet, we’re now going to expect the real world laws to handle a lawsuit involving digital world economics. It doesn’t make for a good combination.

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PoliTech passed us a PC World link, noting that the newest version of OS X, Leopard, has already been adapted to run on a PC. “The OSx86 Scene forum has released details of how Windows users can migrate to Apple’s new OS, without investing in new hardware — even though installing Leopard on an PC may be counter to Apple’s terms and conditions. The forum is offering full instructions on how to install the system, including screenshots of the installation process. Not all the features of Leopard function with the patch — Wi-Fi support, for example, is reportedly inoperable. Historically, Apple’s likely next move will be to track down and act against those behind the hack.”

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An anonymous reader writes “The Globe and Mail is reporting that net privacy advocates are spurring ICANN into scrapping WHOIS. The advocates complain that the system doesn’t do enough to protect domain owner information from spammers and fraudsters, and compare the problems to those being experienced on a broader scale by email users. ‘WHOIS, much like e-mail, is an age-old Internet relic that comes from a time when the Internet was almost considered a network of trustworthy users. E-mail has, quite clearly, some massive problems coping in the modern age, but it’s still here. It stands to reason, then, that WHOIS won’t be going anywhere any time soon. Just like e-mail, it’s prone to abuse. But again, just like e-mail, it’s too useful to axe.’”

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An anonymous reader writes “AT&T has long been associated with advances in the programming arts as well as communications. They’ve recently brought those disciplines together to create a powerful datamining language called Hancock. Hancock is a C variant developed to mine gigabytes of the company’s telephone and internet records for surveillance purposes. ‘The manual for the language includes a Hello World variant that shows you how to write a program that will parse logs of IP addresses and record them into permanent hashes. The program for parsing millions of records as they flow into permanent data farms sounds oddly close to the data mining the NSA performed after 9/11 to find targets for its warrantless spying on American citizens calls and emails.”

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marcan writes “Comcast users are reporting ‘connection reset’ errors while loading Google. The problem seems to have been coming and going over the past few days, and often disappears only to return a few minutes later. Apparently the problem only affects some of Google’s IPs and services. Analysis of the PCAP packet dumps reveals several injected fake RSTs, which are very similar to the ones seen coming from the Great Firewall of China [PDF]. Did Google somehow get caught up in one of Comcast’s blacklists, or are the heuristics flagging Google as a file-sharer due to the heavy traffic?”

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Recent reports from both the GAO and the OECD have both suggested that claims about the cost of “counterfeit” goods to industries are highly exaggerated. The actual research suggested that it was a much, much smaller problem than the numbers that were often bandied about by lobbyists trying to create stricter laws. And, unfortunately, since those numbers are the only ones around, they’re often used as fact even when they have no support. Michael Geist, who has written about this issue numerous times — including in the Toronto Star newspaper, seems a little surprised to find out that the Toronto Star now has an entire special section on what a big problem counterfeiting is. The section doesn’t seem to include a single opposing viewpoint, and the whole thing is sponsored by an anti-counterfeiting lobbying group in Canada. The articles in the section appear to be written by Toronto Star staff reporters, but it sure looks like an advertorial. This isn’t to deny that counterfeiting isn’t an issue for many businesses — but it seems a little odd that the recent studies questioning the severity of the problem don’t seem to make an appearance, and the fact that these lobbyists’ ads are plastered everywhere. The website for the lobbyists even links directly to the “special” issue.

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destinyland writes “‘The khaki bandit’ posed as an office worker at several corporations and successfully stole over 130 laptops which he later sold on eBay. The ease of theft from the corporate offices (including FedEx and Burger King) shows just how bad corporate security can be. In some cases, the career thief just walked into the office behind an employee with a security badge. Two million laptops were stolen just in 2004, and of those 97 percent were never recovered. Ultimately it was the corporate headquarters of Outback Steakhouse who caught the thief with a bugged laptop that notified them when he re-connected it to the internet.”

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An anonymous reader writes “According to InformationWeek, Web 2.0 is even worse than outsourcing for IT jobs. The article talks about corporations that have laid off IT staff and replaced them with technologies like mashups and wikis that can help people get things done without involving IT. Most IT people still think Web 2.0 is an overhyped buzzword, but that might not matter: So many Web 2.0 apps are sold (or given away for free) by software-as-a-service companies like Google that people can bypass IT altogether, and IT might not even know until it’s too late.”

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Peace protesters were unable to leave the country to speak in Canada because their names had been added to a database of criminals. There’s a serious due-process violation here because a listing in this database is equivalent to an “infamous” conviction. “‘The FBI’s placing of peace activists on an international criminal database is blatant political intimidation of US citizens opposed to Bush administration policies,’ says Colonel Wright, who was also Deputy US Ambassador in four countries. ‘The Canadian government should certainly not accept this FBI database as the criteria for entering the country… The list is supposed to be for felony and serious misdemeanor offenses. We don’t qualify — it’s for sex offenders, foreign fugitives, gang violence and terrorist organizations, people who are on parole…’”

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The chipmaker says its new method allows extraneous silicon to be utilized rather than discarded.

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Prized by journalists, researchers and law enforcement officials as a reliable resource for tracking down website owners, it is criticized by privacy advocates for the same reason. A proposal in front of ICANN would essentially scuttle the ship.

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It’s been really disappointing to watch NBC make pretty much all the wrong moves in the digital entertainment space over the last few years. Recently, it’s been getting more and more ridiculous in its bizarre attempts to blame everyone else for its problems — and I think it’s time to pin the problem squarely on NBC boss Jeff Zucker’s shoulders. Zucker took over the top spot at NBC earlier this year, and immediately bashed YouTube just as other NBC execs were talking about how useful YouTube was, and how when embraced it was a huge opportunity for the company. Then, NBC execs started blaming ISPs and the government for failing to protect NBC’s obsolete business model, even to the point of absolute ridiculousness, when a senior NBC exec had to say with a straight face that file sharing was harming poor corn farmers (despite the fact that corn farmers are doing quite well).

Zucker’s latest blame target? Apple. Apparently Apple has “destroyed the music business.” That’s funny, most people would note that Apple actually helped to save the digital music business after Zucker’s friends over at the record labels tried their best to kill it. Besides, Zucker’s flat out wrong. As we’ve seen time and time again, the music business is doing phenomenally well in every single aspect, save CD sales. More music is being created. More music is being heard. More bands are making more money through touring and alternative business models. Businesses that sell complementary products are doing amazingly well as well. Musical instrument sales are apparently up significantly and lots of folks are spending tons of money on equipment to listen to music (sometimes to ridiculous lengths).

And that’s the crux of Zucker’s second problem with Apple. He’s pissed off that the company picked the right business model, while his company picked the failing business model. That is, he’s blaming Apple for selling iPods and not giving the entertainment industry a cut of the hardware: “Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content, and made a lot of money. They did not want to share in what they were making off the hardware….” In other words, Apple understood the basic economics of content and how that would play out inevitably in the trends facing the industry and NBC was caught clueless.

It’s unclear why anyone should then feel pity for NBC. It screwed up, and it’s blaming the company that was successful. The fact that Zucker is still lashing out and blaming everyone for his own company’s failure — and then asking the gov’t to protect its business model rather than innovate — suggests that he’s the wrong man for the job. NBC should look to hire someone who actually has some sort of forward-looking vision, rather than a backwards looking protectionist who feels everyone else should pay up for his own failures. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Zucker was bad news for NBC even before he took over. Last year he was quoted as saying that NBC clearly had a better business model than Google. It’s possible that NBC could create a better business model, but the old, failing, obsolete one needs a big, big makeover, and blaming everyone else for your problems isn’t a part of that process. I know that there are plenty of folks who work under Zucker who read Techdirt (sometimes they leave angry comments). Why don’t you give us a call. We’ll help you sort out your strategy.

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On the heels of the beta of NBC’s and News Corp.’s less-than-killer Hulu music store, NBC’s chief Jeff Zucker is speaking out and saying the darnedest things. First, news.com reports, with derision, that Zucker demanded a cut of Apple’s iPod revenue. That’ll sure happen. Next, AppleInsider caught Zucker urging colleagues to take a stand against Apple’s iTunes, charging that the digital download service was undermining the ability of traditional media companies to set profitable rates for their content online.

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While the FTC has gone after some spyware/malware providers, they’re somewhat limited by current laws over how much they can fine those companies. That’s why we’ve seen stories of such firms getting fines that are a tiny fraction of the actual money they made. Now, the FTC is pushing Congress to change the laws to give the FTC the ability to actually punish these firms with large fines, rather than just being able to go after profits. The article linked here frames it as a debate over whether or not Congress should pass anti-spyware laws, but why can’t the FTC use current laws concerning deceptive marketing techniques to punish these firms? Does it really need a special separate law that tries to define spyware?

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sioux_chance writes to recommend an article up on ReadWriteWeb comparing Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services with Google AdSense. (They are not the first to coin the term “HaaS” for hardware as a service.) The analogy is that Google increased the granularity of (the article invents the term “fragmentized”) the revenue side of the Web business, whereas Amazon’s HaaS does the same for the cost side. A comment to the blog posting points out that NearlyFreeSpeech.net has been selling fine-grained hardware capacity for years, but Amazon does bring a greater scale to the business.

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Though geneaology is one of the most popular activities on the Internet, family historians in the UK are used to going to the Family Records Centre in London and doing research the old fashioned way, by looking through the written records of births, deaths and marriages. So, their decision to cease all access to paper records this weekend has caused quite an uproar amongst researchers. The records are still available via microfiche, but researchers claim that the microfiche is illegible for many of the records on file. The project to provide online access to all of the records is slated to complete sometime in mid-2009, but that timeline, as with most IT projects, could slip further. The question remains though, while searching through the records may be aided with its digitization — the project will create an online index of 250 million births — how accurate will the digitized data be? The paper records are being stored permanently in Christchurch, so the project, outsourced to India are using the same illegible microfiche currently available in place of the paper versions. Or, perhaps the researchers will find that the ease of use afforded by online technologies will actually lead to them finding data more easily, which not only make their jobs easier, but also expose many more people to the joys of researching their pasts.

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Orson Welles doesn’t intend to perpetrate a hoax, or to panic his listeners. But to a 1938 radio audience unused to the intrusion of hysterical reporters, the dramatization seems real enough.

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Researchers use X-ray scanners to create 3-D models of prehistoric creatures preserved inside rocks.

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James Murdoch, second son of you-know-who and executive director of British Sky Broadcasting, has added screaming-fast DSL broadband to the flagship satellite TV service, creating an engine that channels both content and interactivity. Wired talks with Murdoch at his headquarters west of London to learn about a bitfest Americans can only dream of.

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Mastered every chord? Check. Perfected your hold, memorized every pattern and conquered every level? Check, check and check. In August 2007, Wired guided you to maximum star power in our How To Rock at Guitar Hero — now it’s your turn. Follow this link to the How To Wiki and tell us how you rock at RedOctane’s latest, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.

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Wired dishes the top ten conspiracy theories. Is Paul McCartney really alive?

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The International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology is the world’s only laboratory dedicated to plant intelligence. No, it’s not a joke: The lab does serious work into plant sensing and communication.

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E1ven writes “Ars Technica has published their in-depth review of the newest version of Mac OS X. John Siracusa both covers the user-visible features such as the new UI tweaks and Time Machine, and dives into the increased use of metadata and the new APIs introduced and what they mean for the future of OS X.”

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In the last few years, every time a massive data breach is reported, you can be assured of one thing: a few weeks after the initial report comes out, a second report will come out admitting that the breach was worse than previously expected. We saw it with Choicepoint. We saw it with the VA. It seems to always happen. In fact, with the now infamous TJX breach, we’d already mentioned that the problems were worse than originally announced — making it the largest such breach ever reported. This wasn’t surprising once you found out just how incompetent the company was — failing to comply with nearly all of the credit card company’s security guidelines and leaving their entire system wide open to anyone who could hack a simple insecure WEP WiFi system (something that’s quite easily done). The data from the breach (unlike many other widely announced breaches) has already been used in numerous frauds, costing upwards of $60 million. With such astounding incompetence and a breach so large, should it come as any surprise that even the updated breach numbers weren’t complete? That’s right, thanks to documents being filed in the lawsuits against TJX, it’s now coming out that the breach has impacted even more people than was earlier announced. Of course, the question still remains whether or not the punishment the company receives will matter. It doesn’t seem like anything is really done to stop companies from being so careless, and there’s no indication that’s going to change in this case either.

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Fishbat writes “In a cutting message to the Foundations of Mathematics mailing list, Stanford’s Vaughan Pratt has pointed out an elementary mistake in the recently announced proof that Wolfram’s (2,3) machine is universal.” Update: 10/30 04:18 GMT by KD : Ed Pegg Jr. from Wolfram Research points to this response to Dr. Pratt’s note, which has been submitted to the FoM mailing list but has not yet appeared there due to moderation.

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There’s been renewed interest in music industry business models now that we’re seeing a number of top musicians experimenting with changing business models. The backlash to those early reports was somewhat amusing and seemed to fall into one of two camps. First, there were those who said that these business models would only work for big, well-known bands, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. Then, there were those who would pick apart each business model to point out why that particular business model wouldn’t work for other bands. One of the things that we’ve tried to do around here is make it clear that there no longer is just one business model that works — but that there are many different business models that all are based around the idea of the music being free and then charging only for scarce goods. However, if we gave an example of bands making money off of concerts, people would say that some bands don’t like to tour. If we gave an example of a band making money through merchandise, we’d hear that some bands don’t want to sell merchandise. That’s fine. The point is that there are lots of different business models, and bands can find the ones that work for them. Two articles that came out over the weekend help to highlight this.

The first is in the NY Times, and it talks about how big bands are embracing all kinds of new business models from having their music used in TV commercials to selling other related goods (beyond the typical t-shirts and CDs), such as branded drinks. The second article focuses on less well known bands, and how they’re adopting all kinds of new business models that focus on getting fans to pay up. In fact, it mentions one band that appears to be using a close variation on the subscription fan club model we suggested years ago. What these two articles show, however, is that both big and small bands are learning there are all sorts of ways to make money in making music even if the music itself isn’t where the money comes from. You provide the music to build up a fan base, which helps build up the value of lots of other things as well. It’s nice to see more musicians recognizing this trend — even if the RIAA continues to deny it.

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spiffyman writes “The New York Times is reporting that on Wednesday the FCC will end exclusive contracts to provide cable service to apartment buildings. Commission Chairman Kevin J. Martin is quoted as saying that cable prices have risen ‘about 93 percent in the last 10 years’ and that the FCC hopes to see more competition out of this move. This is a step in the right direction. In my apartment, for example, I have (dead) outlets for one cable company but am forced to go with the higher-priced firm. Moves like this will help those who live in areas where competition — even minimal competition — exists. The article also discusses the impact this may have on low- to middle-income families, who disproportionately live in apartment complexes.”

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Back in the spring time, we noted how there was as lot of hype coming in the press about how the change in when Daylight Saving Time started would be just like another Y2K. In the end, it turned out to be pretty much exactly like Y2K: a lot of hype, a few minor issues that were easily taken care of and no major problems. Given that, it appears the press didn’t bother to whip everyone up into a frenzy for this past weekend, which is when the latest time shift would have happened if Congress hadn’t changed the schedule. In fact, we hadn’t heard anything at all, but it didn’t seem to change the results. Joseph Beck writes in to let us know of assorted minor time change problems including screwed up parking meters. In other words, basically the same totally minor problems that happened in the spring… or in years past when people simply forgot to change their clocks. My cell phone was among those that got the time shift wrong, but it wasn’t too difficult to figure out the problem and fix it Sunday morning when I noticed it had the wrong time. So, basically, hype or no hype, every time there’s a time change, there are going to be a few minor problems, but it’s no “aclockalypse now”.
>

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The “Living Dead Dolls” Sadie Pencil Sharpener is a favorite of artist and sharpener aficionado Matthew James Taylor —and it doesn’t take much to see why. Insert a pencil into her eye socket and watch her regurgitate the shavings at the push of a button. It is tons of wholesome fun for the well adjusted adult. You can have one of your own for as little as $2.99 when they become available. [Product Page and MJT via Neatorama]

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Thanks to the folks at Blackfriday.info, you can take an advance look at the Sears post-Thanksgiving flier. Not all of the stuff available is what I would call a “deal” —but there are definitely a few gems in there. [Blackfriday via Wired]

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Exclusive deals between landlords and cable companies that force tenants to use a specific cable provider are being terminated by the FCC, which hopes the move will spur competition and drive down cable prices. According to the NYT, the move will be a boon for low-income and minority families, who have “seen cable prices rise about three times the rate of inflation over the last decade,” as “40 percent of households headed by Hispanics and African-Americans live in” buildings with 50 or more residents. The more cynical take on the FCC’s agenda (as opposed to a snowy white heart filled with consumer advocacy) is that it’s partially in response to telcos like Verizon and AT&T who’ve started to offer TV aren’t feeling too shiny about being shut out. But if it really does push down prices, it’s definitely not a bad thing, whatever inspired the FCC. [NYT via Gadget Lab

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SK writes to tell us that a new streetcar, powered by lithium battery, has been invented by the Railway Technical Research Institute in Kokubunji, Tokyo. The new transport is capable of speeds of 40 kph for 15 kilometers and can convert 70 percent of its deceleration energy into electricity which is then sent back to the battery which can recharge in under one minute.

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Samsung’s Super-WriteMaster may not be the fastest burner for regular DVD+Rs (Line-Ons can burn 20x too), but its dual-layer burning seems to be tops. Jumping up from an 10-12x found in other burners, the SH-203 has 16x dual-layer burning, along with 20x for DVD+ and -R, 12x DVD-RAM, 8x DVD+RW and 6x DVD-RW. It runs off a SATA interface so make sure your computer was made some time after the second Spider-man movie before picking one up for $79. [Samsung via DigitalTrends]

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A newly unearthed paper shows how AT&T researchers working to combat fraud developed an extension of the C programming language called Hancock. It can comb through masses of telephone and internet data and plot relationships, opening the door to a new type of warrantless data-mining.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Wired Top Stories

During the OLPC price hike from $175 to $188, a spokesman said they were committed to keeping the price below $190, and probably below $200 if possible. This was in September—a month and a half ago. Guess they weren’t trying very hard, since the laptops have just made the jump to $200. Besides being symbolic for being twice as much as they originally guessed, the fact that the price keeps rising is just embarrassing for the organization. Our estimate now is that the price will continue rising to a possible, $230~$250 level. What’s your guess? [Reuters]

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Gizmodo

When Shai Agassi left SAP earlier this year, he talked about how he was inspired to do something in the alternative energy space. He apparently didn’t waste much time in moving forward. He’s now raised $200 million to try to build electric charging stations for electric cars around the world. It appears that the working theory here is that one of the things that’s held back the success of the electric car is the lack of more widespread infrastructure to support it. There are gas stations everywhere, but electric charging stations are still quite rare (though, there are some). Of course, some might argue that there really are electric charging stations everywhere: they’re called outlets. The second part of the plan is apparently that the company will own the batteries and charge people a service fee or rental fee to use and charge them at the stations — lowering the upfront cost to consumers of buying an electric car. No matter what, this is definitely a “big bet” type of operation, and when you think about it, you could even ask if $200 million is even close to enough to actually accomplish the goal (meaning that the company is likely going to have to raise a lot more money). However, a bigger question is whether or not it really is the lack of these stations that are holding back the electric car industry. If you believe it’s a chicken and egg issue, perhaps Agassi is onto something by getting folks to bet on building a bunch of chickens. But if the problem is that the eggs don’t work right yet, then it may be quite a long time before the chickens matter. It would be nice to see this succeed, but it’s a timing play. If Agassi is right about the timing, then this could become a huge business. If not, this could become another Iridium, with billions of dollars spent on mis-timed infrastructure, eventually left to rot away or sold for pennies on the dollar.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Techdirt

Recent developments make it easier than ever to install third-party applications on an iPhone or iPod Touch. But why bother? Is there a killer app that makes the risk worthwhile? Cast your vote in our online poll.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Wired Top Stories

PJ1216 writes to mention that vinyl seems poised to make a comeback in the music industry. Some are even predicting that this comeback coupled with the surge in digital music sales could possibly close the door on CDs. “Portability is no longer any reason to stick with CDs, and neither is audio quality. Although vinyl purists are ripe for parody, they’re right about one thing: Records can sound better than CDs. Although CDs have a wider dynamic range, mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible: It’s the so-called loudness war. Since the audio on vinyl can’t be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound. Another reason for vinyl’s sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove, Nyquist’s theorem to the contrary.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

It looks like AT&T’s impressive growth of 2 million additional wireless subscribers didn’t take too much away from Verizon, who posted 1.8 million net additional subscribers for a total of 63.7 million, trailing AT&T’s total by 2 million. Quarterly net income was down over half a billion, to $1.27 billion from $1.92 billion last year, though revenues of $23.77 billion beat Wall Street’s bet of $23.6 billion.

FiOS rates are also growing, adding 202,000 TV subscribers for 717,000 total (wonder where this comes in), with FiOS internet pulling in 229,000 newbies. But FiOS rollout continues to scratch Verizon’s piggy bank, knocking earnings down by 9 cents a share. The DSL front on the other hand is pretty bleh, with “unimpressive” growth, though it’s obviously less important than growing out FiOS subscribers, given the amount of money they’re dumping into the network. [Reuters]

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Gizmodo

Today’s most popular headlines are Clever Water Bottle Contains More Than Meets The Eye (28,041 views today), How to Fall Up an Escalator (21,416) and No In/Out Aboard Airbus A380 Double Bed Suites (16,050).

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Gizmodo

OLED fans will have to be patient, as Samsung’s roadmap for the technology shows them only in small handheld devices for this year and next, ramping up to laptop and desktop displays in ’09 and finally 40-inch TVs in 2010. After these TVs invade your home and take all your money in the process, Samsung will follow up with flexible OLED displays by 2012. The point? The tech will have lower costs than LCDs or Plasmas eventually, once production ramps up and enough units are out there. But in the mean time, plan for your next TV purchase to be a non-OLED display—unless of course you manage to wed an old millionaire socialite for her money. If you do, please think of your old friend Jason. [Nikkeibp]

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Gizmodo

Hulu.com, the online video venture from NBC Universal and News Corp., has launched a private beta program. Early reports suggest it’s far from being a YouTube killer. “Although Hulu’s parent companies have done a lot of things right with the service, the scheduling leaves something to be desired. For the time being, the site will only feature five weeks worth of content for any given show. From there, it’s assumed that older content will get the boot in favor of newer episodes and movies. This isn’t necessarily a deal breaker for us, but for a lot of viewers this will prevent the service from becoming with online video Shangri-La they’d imagined. Furthermore, with the lack of user-generated content, it falls short of the end-all be-all site for online video. Viewers are still going to go to YouTube and still click their ads — but in terms of piracy a minor rebellion may have been quelled.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Slashdot

Retrodata, a data-recovery company, has just issued a warning for Apple MacBook owners with Seagate hard drives that were manufactured in China and have a firmware version of 7.01. Apparently these have a fatal flow that cause their read/write heads to fail mechanically, scratching up the hard drive surface as pictured and making data unrecoverable (even by professionals such as themselves). If you’ve got a MacBook, you should check to see if your internal drive is a Seagate and back up your data accordingly. There’s no official word yet from Apple on whether or not this actually a problem, but better safe than crying over lost nudie photos. [Retrodata - Thanks Eric!]

Originally Syndicated via RSS from Gizmodo