thorwil writes "Brainstorm is a new site where everyone can submit and vote on ideas for Ubuntu. It's inspired by Dell's Ideastorm. By default, you see the ideas submitted by the community sorted by popularity. Each idea is accompanied by arrows so you can vote it up or down (you have to log in first). You can only click once per idea. So this is an easy way to submit ideas and see what people are really wanting."

An anonymous reader writes "'The LEGO brick turns 50 at exactly 1:58pm today. This cool timeline shows these fifty years of building frenzy by happy kids and kids-at-heart, all the milestones from the Legoland themed sets to Technic and Mindstorms NXT, as well as all kind of weird curiosities about the most famous stud-and-tube couple system in the world.'" Of course, it all peaked in 1979 with the space set. These kids these days with their bionacle. bah.

techie writes "OSWeekly.com has published a review of Beryl, a very cool looking UI for Linux. Matt Hartley writes, "This release, in my opinion, was the most over-hyped and bug-filled to date. You will have to really hit Technorati to see more of what I'm talking about, but Feisty is as buggy as the beta I tested a short time ago. After completely tossing into the wilds of the ubber-buggy "network-manager," anything running with Edgy supported RT2500 driver shows up, but it will not connect without a special script. Those of you who are on Feisty and need help with your RT2500 cards are welcome to e-mail me for the bash script."

An anonymous reader writes "When CPU manufacturers ran up against the power wall in their designs, they announced that 'the Gigahertz race is over; future products will run at slower clock speeds and gain performance through the use of multiple cores and other techniques that won't improve single-threaded application performance.' Well, it seems that the gigahertz race is back on — a CNET story talks about how AMD has boosted the speed of their new Opterons to 3GHz. Of course, the new chips also consume better than 20% more power than their last batch. 'The 2222 SE, for dual-processor systems, costs $873 in quantities of 1,000, according to the Web site, and the 8222 SE, for systems with four or eight processors costs $2,149 for quantities of 1,000. For comparison, the 2.8GHz 2220 SE and 8220 SE cost $698 and $1,514 in that quantity. AMD spokesman Phil Hughes confirmed that the company has begun shipping the new chips. The company will officially launch the products Monday, he said.'"

wattsup writes "The LA Times reports that a single wrong command sent to the wrong computer address caused a cascade of events that led to the loss of the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft last November. The command was an orientation instruction for the spacecraft's main communications antenna. The mistake caused a problem with the positioning of the solar power panels, which in turned caused one of the batteries to overheat, shutting down the solar power system and draining the batteries some 12 hours later. 'The review panel found the management team followed existing procedures in dealing with the problem, but those procedures were inadequate to catch the errors that occurred. The review also said the spacecraft's onboard fault-protection system failed to respond correctly to the errors. Instead of protecting the spacecraft, the programmed response made it worse.'"

stalebread writes "Faced with opposition from conservative groups and some pornography Web sites, the Internet's key oversight agency voted Wednesday to reject a proposal to create a red-light district on the Internet." From the article: "In a split 9-5 board decision, the organisation acted ruthlessly, against its own previous position, in order to put an end to an increasingly difficult and controversial issue - the approval of a .xxx top-level domain. The .xxx registry application has been the focus of enormous political pressure on ICANN for the past six months and was used at one point as a political football in a wider tussle for power within the internet."

The Nintendo conference seemed to be the perfect opposite of Sony's conference yesterday. It was polished, the presenters were poised, and the demos conveyed exactly the message they were aiming for. Notable info includes 27 playable Wii titles on the E3 floor, a speaker in the Wii controller, a StarFox title for the DS, and a confirmation of motion sensor in the nunchuck attachment. There will be two versions of Twilight Princess (one for Wii, one for GC) and they'll both be out on Wii launch day. Launch is slated for Q4 of this year. The presenters kept the launch price and date under wraps as the tone of the event was inspiration, not information. The number of playable games available this week confirms their commitment to a launch date this year, and the hilarious tennis game played onstage by the Nintendo honchos and the contest winner made their 'playing = believing' slogan really hit home. More flash than substance, but a solid presentation overall

GnoWay writes "Macworld is reporting that the IRS has charged Symantec Corporation with about a 900 million dollar tax bill due to the charge that Symantec and Veritas (purchased by Symantec last year) under-reported the value of intellectual property which they had transferred to their two Irish subsidiaries. Another $100 million is connected to Symantec's 2003 and 2004 reports."

At last year's GDC Nintendo President Iwata made the claim that the company was reaching out to everyone, in an attempt to expand the gaming market. They were planning to appeal to hardcore gamers, folks who used to play games, and folks who have never played a game in their lives. At the time, it sounded like a tag line. Today, I have impressions from three titles which suggest they've got what it takes to make us all into gamers. Hardcore players can sink their teeth into Metroid Prime Hunters, and have one of the most intuitive FPS experiences ever to come to a console. Folks looking for some nostalgia can enjoy Tetris DS, blockstacking like it's 1985. Even your grandmother can try Brain Age, proving to her bridge club that even though her license says she's 80 she's got the brain of a 20 year old. Read on for my impressions of three titles that give powerful evidence to support Iwata's grand claim.

Mr. Fahrenheit writes "CNN has a story about how Oracle's effort to port their database to Linux may be helping them to out pace IBM." From the article: "In its biennial survey of the world's largest databases, WinterCorp, a database research and consulting company, reported that Oracle dominated its list of 175 large databases. For the first time, databases running on Linux appeared on WinterCorp's list -- and all of them came from Oracle."

News.com has an article up looking at something I find interesting and somewhat confusing. The Vcom ATM is an attempt to make people's lives more convenient by adding unexpected functionality to the standard Teller Machine. Besides dispensing cash, new ATMs can fulfull the roles of PayPal (by sending money to people), bank (by cashing checks on the spot), and cellphone store (by selling Verizon services). From the article: "The Circle K and Exxon Mobil machines are far more basic than 7-Eleven's Vcoms, which have been called overengineered. Several dozen customers polled informally outside a 7-Eleven in Winter Springs, Fla., recently said that they had never used the Vcom inside, and one woman who said she did use it once to withdraw cash complained that it was 'confusing' and 'complicated,' and added that she would not use it again. 'There were just too many steps,' said the woman, Peggy Baker, who teaches French in Winter Springs. 'And the $1.75 transaction fee was too much--it was painful.' She said she was not interested in the other Vcom features, which require users to enroll and enter a Social Security number on a touch screen."

Mercury News has details of a San Francisco judge's decision that Google should give the DoJ some details on its search engine, but is not required to turn over records to the government. From the article: "McElvain emphasized the study would be more meaningful if it included search requests processed by Google, which by some estimates fields nearly half of all online queries in the United States. Ware concurred with the Justice Department on that point, writing in his order that 'the government's study may be significantly hampered if it did not have access to some information from the most often used search engine.' But Ware said the government didn't clearly explain why it needed a list of search requests to conduct its study, prompting him to conclude the Web site addresses would be adequate." Reaction to the news is available on the Google Blog.