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Comment Re:Ain't no body got time for that (Score 1) 606

by eraserewind (#46339481) Attached to: 'Google Buses' Are Bad For Cities, Says New York MTA Official

Having exchanged Japan and a 1 hour commute on a crowded train to my old MNC's office for a rural location and a 20 minute drive to my current MNC's office I can say that life in Japan is not mere existence at all. A person might miss having a plot of their own, but equally they might miss the huge range of facilities, both public and private within walking distance or at worst a short journey away that compensate for not having half an acre of your own to run around in. People have gripes wherever they live. Just because you don't want something doesn't make your blanket statement true for everyone.
Music

Submission + - Does DRM Enable Online Music Innovation?

Submitted by chia_monkey
chia_monkey writes: Here's an interesting article on "Does DRM Enable Online Music Innovation?" from Tech Law Forum that looks "at the range of legitimate online music distributors to see just how much the presence or lack of DRM affected business models." It's a rather interesting read as the author breaks down seven online music stores (iTunes, Napster, Yahoo! Music, Zune, eMusic, Amie Street, and Magnatune...four of which use DRM and three that don't). The article mainly focuses on the ownership and "renting" of the music (which can be seen with the "buy the condo downtown" and "rent a mansion in the slums" analogies) and how it applies to innovation and perceived business models.

The numbers don't lie...price-per-download is the clean winner while DRM-based models also take the lead. Will the market shift toward subscription based models in the future or DRM go the way of the dodo bird (as Steve Jobs has already proclaimed his preference for)?
Security

Submission + - TJX: biggest data breach ever

Submitted by jcatcw
jcatcw writes: Jaikumar Vijayan says that TJX is finally offering more details about the extent of the compromise, which at 45.6M cards,is the biggest ever. He's has been following the story for Computerworld since it started. The systems that were broken into processed payment card, check and returns for customers of T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods and A.J Wright stores in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, and customers of Winners and HomeSense stores in Canada and T.K. Maxx in the U.K. Customer names and addresses were not included in the stolen data. So far the company has so far spent about $5 million in connection with the breach, and several lawsuits that have been filed against it. It was sued recently by the Arkansas Carpenters Pension Fund, one of its shareholders, for failure to divulge more details about the breach.
Intel

Intel Next-Gen CPU Has Memory Controller and GPU 307

Posted by kdawson from the mmmm-threads dept.
Many readers wrote in with news of Intel's revelations yesterday about its upcoming Penryn and Nehalem cores. Information has been trickling out about Penryn, but the big news concerns Nehalem — the "tock" to Penryn's "tick." Nehalem will be a scalable architecture with some products having on-board memory controller, "on-package" GPU, and up to 16 threads per chip. From Ars Technica's coverage: "...Intel's Pat Gelsinger also made a number of high-level disclosures about the successor to Penryn, the 45nm Nehalem core. Unlike Penryn, which is a shrink/derivative of Core 2 Duo (Merom), Nehalem is architected from the ground up for 45nm. This is a major new design, and Gelsinger revealed some truly tantalizing details about it. Nehalem has its roots in the four-issue Core 2 Duo architecture, but the direction that it will take Intel is apparent in Gelsinger's insistence that, 'we view Nehalem as the first true dynamically scalable microarchitecture.' What Gelsinger means by this is that Nehalem is not only designed to take Intel up to eight cores on a single die, but those cores are meant to be mixed and matched with varied amounts of cache and different features in order to produce processors that are tailored to specific market segments." More details, including Intel's slideware, appear at PC Perspectives and HotHardware.
Operating Systems

Virtualizing Cuts Web App Performance 43% 223

Posted by kdawson from the price-to-pay dept.
czei writes "This just-released research report, Load Testing a Virtual Web Application, looks at the effects of virtualization on a typical ASP Web application, using VMWare on Linux to host a Windows OS and IIS web server. While virtualizing the server made it easier to manage, the number of users the virtualized Web app could handle dropped by 43%. The article also shows interesting graphs of how hyper-threading affected the performance of IIS." The report urges readers to take this research as a data point. No optimization was done on host or guest OS parameters.
Robotics

Cisco Develops Mobile Robots for Wireless Nets 51

Posted by samzenpus from the can-you-follow-me-now dept.
coondoggie writes "Cisco has developed a set of small smart robots, which can act as wireless communications relays, that sense when a mobile user is moving out of service range, and can follow the user to maintain connectivity. According to Dave Buster, product marketing manager for the Cisco Global Government Solutions Group, the robots can follow a user almost anywhere to maintain connectivity. Published reports said the robots were part of Cisco's "Information on the move" initiative — a wide ranging plan to secure all things wireless. Whether or not the systems has an enterprise application, it is of interest to the military and initiatives such as the Army's Future Combat Systems which uses a variety of advanced systems to achieve battleground superiority."
User Journal

Journal Journal: AI: What if the First Self Aware System... 3

Journal by eno2001

...was developed by the spam industry? One of my hats at work, is mail admin. We've been using a Barracuda Spam Firewall for the past few years and it's been doing an admirable job. But, I've noticed some very interesting trends in the past year or two regarding spam. You know how much of the spam you receive just happens to have a From that you could argue is an amalgamation of a few people you know? And you know how sometimes the subject lines relate to personal interests of yours? Well las
Power

Boeing Working on Fuel Cell Aircraft 163

Posted by samzenpus from the 12,000-AA-batteries-not-included dept.
"Boeing is working with development partners on a fuel cell-based small aircraft. It seems like a logical use of the technology. Now if they can come up with a quiet, personal-sized VTOL craft a la Paul Moller's Skycar (which is anything but quiet), we'll really have something." From the article "A Boeing research director was quoted as saying, "While Boeing does not envision that fuel cells will provide primary power for future commercial passenger airplanes, demonstrations like this help pave the way for potentially using this technology in small manned and unmanned air vehicles."
Space

New Horizons Photographs Earth Sized Storm 31

Posted by samzenpus from the bring-an-unbrella dept.
Matthew Sparkes writes "The New Horizons spacecraft has taken the closest ever photos of Jupiter's Little Red Spot, which is actually a storm the size of Earth which has been raging since 2005. New Horizons targeted the storm when it passed Jupiter to gain speed for its journey to Pluto. The source of the red hue remains an open question. Some scientists believe hurricane-like winds lift material from beneath Jupiter's cloud-tops up to an altitude where radiation from the Sun can chemically alter it, producing the red colour. Scientists have estimated that winds in the storm were whipping around the atmosphere at 180 metres per second."
Security

New IAB Chair Defends DNSSEC 49

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the chickens-and-eggs dept.
bednarz writes "Olaf Kolkman, the new chair of the Internet Architecture Board, says that DNSSEC — an approach to authenticating DNS traffic that has been slow to take off — is not a failure. 'It is taking a while to percolate into software, and for that software to percolate into the market, and for people to adapt their environments to deploy and operate DNSSEC. The deployment is hindered by a chicken-and-egg problem'."
United States

US No Longer Technology King 815

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the i-coulda-been-somebody dept.
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that according to a recent report from the World Economic Forum the US has lost the leading spot for technology innovation. The new reigning champ is now apparently Denmark with other Nordic neighbors Sweden, Finland and Norway all claiming top spots as well. "Countries were judged on technological advancements in general business, the infrastructure available and the extent to which government policy creates a framework necessary for economic development and increased competitiveness."
Microsoft

Microsoft to Buy DoubleClick? 195

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the double-or-nuthin dept.
roscoetoon writes to tell us Bloomberg is reporting that Microsoft is in talks to buy DoubleClick. Seen as a move to compete against the Google advertising engine Double Click owners Hellman & Friedman are seeking a $2 billion payday. "The purchase would give Microsoft tools to battle Google Inc. for ads that appear on Web sites. DoubleClick works with advertisers to create online campaigns, such as streaming video clips to promote New Line Cinema's movie "The Number 23." The New York-based company's Dart technology monitors the performance of Internet ads for marketing companies."

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