Sanity check: 5 reasons why Windows Vista failed
From Brick to Slick: A History of Mobile Phones
It has been more than 35 years since Martin Cooper placed the first call on a mobile phone to his rival at Bell Labs while working at Motorola. Heck, it’s been nearly 20 years since Saved by the Bell’s Zack Morris placed a phone call to Kelly Kapowski from his locker. In that time, phones have come a long way.
Snow Leopard screenshots show interface tweaks
Music Industry Orders BitTorrent Blackout
Throughout Europe, music industry lobbyists have tried to convince ISPs to block file-sharing sites, and not without success. The Irish ISP Eircom is the first to cave in to the pressure of the music industry, and without any argument will block all file-sharing related websites – starting with The Pirate Bay.
Combining BitTorrent With Darknets For P2P Privacy
CSEMike writes “Currently popular peer-to-peer networks suffer from a lack of privacy. For applications like BitTorrent or Gnutella, sharing a file means exposing your behavior to anyone interested in monitoring it. OneSwarm is a new file sharing application developed by researchers at the University of Washington that improves privacy in peer-to-peer networks. Instead of communicating directly, sharing in OneSwarm is friend-to-friend; senders and receivers exchange data using multiple intermediaries in an overlay mesh. OneSwarm is built on (and backwards compatible with) BitTorrent, but includes numerous extensions to improve privacy while providing good performance: point-to-point encryption using SSL, source-address rewriting, and multi-path and multi-source downloading. Clients and source are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.”
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Microsoft Unveils "Elevate America"
nandemoari writes “In response to the current economic crisis, Microsoft Corp. has come out with a stimulus plan of their own. Their goal is to help a large group of individuals use their computers to land employment in ways other than to generate a compelling resume. The new online initiative, Elevate America, is set to equip close to 2 million people (over the next three years) with the skills needed to succeed in the field of technology.”
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NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory Set For Launch Tomorrow
bughunter writes “The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) is slated for launch tomorrow, February 24, 2009. OCO is the first earth science observatory that will create a detailed map of atmospheric carbon dioxide sources and sinks around the globe. And not a moment too late. Popular Mechanics has a concise article on the science that this mission will perform, and how it fits in with the existing ‘A-train’ of polar-orbiting earth observatories. JPL’s page goes into more detail. And NASA’s OCO Launch Blog will have continuous updates as liftoff approaches and the spacecraft reports in and checks out from 700km up.”
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BASH 4.0 Released
An anonymous reader writes “The widely used Bourne-Again Shell (BASH) version 4.0 is out. The new major release fixes several remaining bugs in the 3.x releases, and introduces a bunch of new features. The most notable new features are associative arrays, improvements to the programmable completion functionality, case-modifying word expansions, co-processes, support for the `**’ special glob pattern, and additions to the shell syntax and redirections. The shell has been changed to be more rigorous about parsing commands inside command substitutions, fixing one piece of POSIX non-compliance. Most of us will probably wait for the distros to test the new version and upgrade gradually, but you always have the option of grabbing the source and compiling it yourself. Enjoy.”
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