Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Vista's actual launch? Think whisper, not bang


The actual New York City release of Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system, at midnight on Tuesday, couldn't have been more different from the prelaunch events that filled up many a reporter's business and social calendars on Monday.

All day, Microsoft had presented an agenda of glitz, glamour, and unusual spectacles. There was a performance by aerial dancers forming the Vista and Office 2007 logos on the wall of a building; a press lunch hosted by Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer at the posh Cipriani restaurant (the sea bass was great, by the way); and finally, an official launch party at the Nokia Theater in Times Square that featured a live performance by the alternative-rock band Angels and Airwaves.


But the launch itself was a quiet affair in a midtown CompUSA store (the chain had organized midnight events at several of its stores), where it seemed like there were just as many reporters and camera crews as there were customers hoping to take home a copy of Vista.


Source: news.zdnet.com
Vista by ReynoldsM 2

Tags: prelaunch | York City | Whisper | performance | Midnight | launch | business | BANG | Vista | Times Square | Technology | New York City | New York | Monday | Microsoft

Monday, January 29, 2007

The year hacking became a business


IT was the year when cyber-criminals targeted everything from MySpace to Wikipedia, and even a website maintained by a local boy scout troop wasn't safe.

Computer security experts say 2006 was also the year hacking stopped being a hobby and became a lucrative profession practiced by an underground of computer software developers and sellers.


Like true business people, hackers not only broadened their reach by attacking popular social networking sites, but they also diversified their product line by launching attacks through popular software applications such as PowerPoint and Adobe Reader.


Software makers who try to stop online crooks say they are bracing for a new level of nastiness in 2007, including malicious websites that are booby-trapped with software that automatically loads itself to machines of users who just visit a site.


Source: australianit.news.com.au
Web security isn't taken seriously enough

Tags: Website | underground | Security | networking | hacking | Computer | business | Wikipedia | Technology | software

Adobe looks to have full PDF spec become ISO standard


Adobe Systems Inc. is taking the first step toward having its entire Portable Document Format specification recognized as a global standard by the International Standards Organization (ISO).

The vendor today announced plans to submit the full PDF 1.7 specification to the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) with the hope that the enterprise content management nonprofit organization will recommend that ISO adopt it as an international standard.


The move was driven in part by a growing proliferation of ISO standards around different subsets of the PDF specification, said Sarah Rosenbaum, director of product management at Adobe. "It was becoming a bit of an alphabet soup dependent on industries or uses of the specification," she said.


Source: computerworld.com


Having PDF 1.7 as an ISO standard should make life easier for organizations that need to comply with government-mandated strategies to use the format. "The entire spec will be available as an umbrella standard," Rosenbaum said.

Source: computerworld.com



Adobe

Tags: specification | Standard | spec | looks | become | Technology | SERVICE | PDF | Organization | Management | information | iso | association | Adobe

Google Halts ‘Miserable Failure’ Link to President Bush


First, the anodyne impressionist Rich Little was selected to address the White House correspondents’ dinner as a follow-up to the scathing routine last year by Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert. Now a favored online tactic to mock the president — altering the Google search engine so the words “miserable failure” lead to President Bush’s home page at the White House — has been neutralized.

Google announced on Thursday on its official blog that “by improving our analysis of the link structure of the Web” such mischief would instead “typically return commentary, discussions, and articles” about the tactic itself.


Indeed, a search on Saturday of “miserable failure” on Google leads to a now-outdated BBC News article from 2003 about the “miserable failure” search, rather than the previous first result, President Bush’s portal at whitehouse.gov/president.


Such gamesmanship has been termed “Google bombing,” and is not unique to President Bush, or even politics. John F. Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, was linked to the search “waffles,” while other Google bombs have been elaborate jokes or personal vendettas.


Source: nytimes.com
Googlebombing and the US midterm elections President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Speaker Pelosi at the 2007 State of the Union

Tags: Halts | tactic | president | failure | Politics | miserable | link | Google | Bush

Breakthrough spurs microchip arms race


Intel has long planned to begin making chips with 45-nanometer circuits later this year, and it said last week it has successfully produced working processors on that scale, putting it on track to meet its timetable.

Although the firms use Moore's Law as a guide, the shrinking process is far from automatic.


Each generation poses new challenges, and engineers are now dealing with such tiny sizes that they continually need to tweak basic elements of chip design.


Last Friday's developments involve replacing a silicon-based material used in one layer of chips since the 1960s with a substance based on hafnium, an exotic metal used in the nuclear industry.


Ross said that although AMD has a much smaller research effort than Intel, its partnership with IBM had given it some tricks to keep it competitive.


Source: boston.com
Old HDD Electronic - Intel chip 1980

Tags: nanometer | hafnium | transistor | SILICON | microchip | chairman | breakthrough | Technology | San Francisco | intel | ibm | AMD

Saturday, January 27, 2007

Scientists find brain's addiction spot


Damage to a coin-sized spot deep in the brain seems to wipe out the urge to smoke, a surprising discovery that may shed important new light on addiction.

The research was inspired by a stroke survivor who claimed he simply forgot his two-pack-a-day addiction -- no cravings, no nicotine patches, not even a conscious desire to quit.


"The quitting is like a light switch that went off," said Antoine Bechara of the University of Southern California, who scanned the brains of 69 smokers and ex-smokers to pinpoint the region involved. "This is very striking."


The finding, reported in yesterday's edition of the journal Science, points scientists toward new ways to develop anti-smoking aids by targeting this little-known brain region called the insula. And it sparked excitement among addiction specialists who expect the insula to play a key role in other addictions, too.


Source: taipeitimes.com
300,000 in the USA afflicted by ailment; most don't know it

Tags: research | Nicotine | finding | Discovery | brain | addiction | southern | Health | California

IBM, AMD and Intel Fight for Supremacy in 45nm Chip Technology


Intel claims major advancement in the 45nm technology for processors, but IBM and Intel’s rival AMD had already claimed the same thing last December.

The 45 nanometer (45 nm) process is the next milestone (to be commercially viable in mid 2007 to early 2008) in CMOS fabrication. Intel stated in 2003 that high-k gate dielectrics may be introduced at the 45 nm node to reduce gate leakage current. However, chipmakers have since then voiced concerns about introducing these new materials into the gate stack.


Intel’s researchers say their advancement in the 45nm technology represents the most significant change in the materials used to manufacture silicon chips since Intel pioneered the modern integrated-circuit transistor more than four decades ago.


The company claims to be one of the first chip makers to implement these new materials in its process technology. Using an undisclosed thick hafnium-based material for its high-k films in gate-stack applications, Intel claims that it is able to boost the overall performance, while also reducing transistor leakage by more than 10 times over current silicon dioxide technology.


Source: playfuls.com
Old HDD Electronic - Intel chip 1980

Tags: leakage | transistor | Technology | SILICON | nm | milestone | gate | advancement | SUPREMACY | intel | ibm | CHIP | AMD

Friday, January 26, 2007

Fire Guts Papi's Ristorante In Steveston

RICHMOND by Frank Dawson :



Fire gutted Papi's Ristorante on No. 1 Road in
Steveston around 3 a.m. Friday morning. The fire was confined to the
inside of the restaurant. Fire inspector was going the remains to
determine the cause of the fire.



At this time no cause has been determined . The investigation continues.

Tags: Papi's Ristorante | fire | Richmond | Place

Arrest made in 1964 Klan kidnappings


As a deacon at Bunkley Baptist Church, Charles Marcus Edwards was responsible for opening up for Sunday school. And so on that sultry Mississippi morning, he and his wife were the first to arrive at the tiny brick chapel.

A minivan pulled into the gravel drive behind them. A black man got out and approached, followed by a younger white man carrying a video camera.


Source: dfw.com

Tags: kidnappings | ESCORT | camera | U.S. | Mississippi | Miss. | klan | Jackson | Crime | arrest

Fox subpoenas YouTube over "Simpsons," "24" - WSJ


News Corp. studio Twentieth Century Fox subpoenaed Google Inc.'s YouTube video service to learn who uploaded pirated copies of episodes of television shows "24" and "The Simpsons," The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

The subpoena, filed January 18, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, asks YouTube to hand over information to identify the subscriber so Fox can stop the infringement, the Journal reported.


The four-episode season premiere of thriller show 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland, appeared on the site ahead of its TV broadcast, and 12 episodes of the Simpsons were being distributed on YouTube by a subscriber called "ECOtotal," the subpoena's declaration said, according to the paper.


Source: today.reuters.co.uk

Tags: Twentieth Century Fox | Northern District | video | Subpoena | YouTube | U.S. District | Stuff | Simpsons | News Corp. | New York | money | Google | California

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Follow-ups on birth control drugs urged


Government advisers recommended against setting specific requirements for the reliability of new hormonal contraceptives on Wednesday, saying that might keep useful approaches off the market.

The panel did recommend, however, that the Food and Drug Administration ask drug companies to conduct follow-up studies on some new methods after they go on the market to identify any safety or reliability problems that failed to show up during initial testing.


The recommendations came a day after the panel recommended testing new hormonal contraceptives on women who are more representative of the general population, including, for example, women who are overweight.


The panel also urged that the agency require drugmakers to test any new approaches on smokers, teenagers, women older than 35 and others to get a more realistic assessment of their effectiveness and risks.


Source: sfgate.com

Tags: Follow-ups | urged | testing | reliability | Panel | HORMONAL | drug | BIRTH | Washington | Health

Monday, January 22, 2007

Drupal Party

On January 20th, there were a great party in a conference center to celebrate the 6th birthday of Drupal, with the new version of 5.0 released on January 15th.

We talked about the new features of Drupal, that made the new version 5.0 not 4.8. There were a great conversation on what the new version is capable for, including the new user interface that got more user friendly, the theming system changes that made it more customizable and other features that made it far better than it's ancestors. The presenters: István Palócz (pp) and Gábor Hojtsy (Goba) showed the various features and the capabilities that can be achieved just using the core modules of the system.

On the second part we celebrated the birthday with a cake with Druplicon - the Drupal's symbol - sign on it. Then there were a conversation on some problems that might emerge upgrading to or using the new system, along with some specific problems not directly connected to any specific version of Drupal but the system itself, like special user login, registration and content creation methods.

Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party Drupal Party

Tags: party | birthday | Technology | hungary | Drupal | budapest