Cody Taylor

Olympus Imaging’s Akira Watanabe says 12 megapixels is enough for most users. Ars thinks he’s on to something.

A couple years back, Jobs, who doesn’t like touching anyone, embraced Bono on stage. Bono joined The Edge for a couple of songs. Flash forward to today: Bono is a partner in venture firm Elevation Partners which owns 39 percent of Palm.

Vigile writes “To many observers, the success of the GPGPU landscape has really been pushed by NVIDIA and its line of Tesla and Quadro GPUs. While ATI was the first to offer support for consumer applications like Folding@Home, NVIDIA has since taken command of the market with its CUDA architecture and programs like Badaboom and others for the HPC world. PC Perspective has speculation that points to ATI addressing the shortcomings of its lineup with a revised GPU known as RV790 that would both dramatically increase gaming performance as well as more than triple the compute power on double precision floating point operations — one of the keys to HPC acceptance.”

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An anonymous reader writes “Campbell Smith, CEO of the RIAA equivalent in New Zealand, has written an opinion piece for one of New Zealand’s largest daily papers, in which he tries to justify the new ‘presumed guilty’ copyright law. This law allows recording industry members to watch file-sharing activity and notify ISPs of users who are downloading material. The copyright holder can then demand that an ISP disconnect that user — without the user ever having a chance to demonstrate their evidence.”

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In a recent blog post, CNet’s Jon Oitsik has called for a policy shift with respect to data encryption. A new standard by the Trusted Computing Group promises the availability of self-encrypting hard drives soon, leading some to call for immediate adoption. Will this create even more security problems due to lazy custodians, or should someone responsible for keeping your information safe be required to move to the new hardware? Hopefully the new hardware comes with a warning to continue to use other data protection measures as well.

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brothke writes “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America is the third of James Bamford’s trilogy. Bamford started this with The Puzzle Palace in 1982 and Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency in 2001. The Shadow Factory is likely the last book Bamford will find the NSA cooperative to, given his often harsh treatment of the agency and its directors. It is also doubtful that former NSA Director Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden will grant Bamford additional dinner invitations, given his portrayal of Hayden as a weakling who could not stand up to Dick Cheney and other in the Bush administration.” Read below for the rest of Ben’s review.

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ScienceDaily is reporting that a new ice chain structure may provide a better method for seeding clouds and causing rain. “Ice structures are usually built out of simple hexagonal arrangements of water molecules and this hexagonal building block motif is easily observed in the structures of snowflakes. However, during their studies Dr Angelos Michaelides and co-workers from the Fritz Haber Institute, Berlin, and the University of Liverpool have discovered a natural nanoscale ice structure formed of pentagons.”

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Rather, these days, you’re far more likely to find a product that almost does it right, but is still plagued by some singular fatal flaw that causes it to be buggy, frustrating, or even physically painful. Here are five recent gadgets whose designs failed in some simple way.

The KOffice developers have released their seventh beta for KOffice 2.0. This release may be the last of the many betas. A decision on whether there will be another beta or if the next version will be the first Release Candidates will be made next week.

With the latest seed of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Apple has made dramatic changes to QuickTime Player in both interface and features. Changes to the interface has gotten the most attention with a description posted by AppleInsider. The new QuickTime X playback window appears to be minimalistic with all user-interface pieces fading away, leaving…