Mar 23 2009

Twitter Craze coming soon to Yahoo & AOL Mail / IM

In a matter of months, expect both Yahoo and AOL to come up with their own news feed offerings, likely to be embedded in their more popular web services. While Yahoo’s working on a life-streaming product called Yahoo Updates, AOL’s new offering that takes a cue from Facebook Connect is being called “Site Social” internally.

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Mar 23 2009

Apple Bluetooth Headset Quietly Discontinued

According to the Apple Store, the company’s 0 Bluetooth headset has been discontinued.

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Mar 23 2009

Tim Bray On the Future of the Web

snitch writes “In a recent interview at QCon SF 2008,Tim Bray talks about why he is not convinced with the buzz surrounding Rich Internet Applications and shares his ideas on Cloud Computing. He also expresses his opinion regarding the debate REST vs. WS-* and the future directions web technologies will be taking. Tim Bray also addresses the way web technologies are affected by the current economic turmoil and gives his insight into which paradigms he sees going forward in these challenging times.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mar 23 2009

German Police Union Chief Wants Violent Game Ban After Shooting

A recent shooting in Germany has raised the ire of many politicians and officials, and they’re turning to video games as a scapegoat after it was revealed that the shooter was a fan of Counterstrike and played Far Cry 2 the night before the rampage. First, a major retailer decided to drop mature-rated games altogether, and then the Minister for Social Affairs suggested restricting “addictive games,” such as World of Warcraft, to adults only. Despite an unfavorable reaction from gamers and game developers alike, the chief of Germany’s national police union has now spoken out against violent games as well, saying, “The world would be no poorer if there were no more killergames.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mar 23 2009

Princeton Student Finds Bug In LHC Experiment

An anonymous reader writes “A Princeton senior has found a bug in the hardware design for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In the hardware used to record and capture events in the LHC, she discovered errors that were leading to the appearances of double images because of particle streams known as jets. ‘Xiaohang Quan ’09 was working on her senior thesis when she found a miscalculation in the hardware of the world’s largest particle accelerator. Quan, a physics concentrator, traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, last week with physics professors Christopher Tully GS ’98, Jim Olsen and Daniel Marlow for the annual meeting of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). This year, however, they also came to discuss Quan’s discovery with the designers of the hardware for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, which, as part of the Large Hadron Collider, has the potential to revolutionize particle physics.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mar 23 2009

Microsoft Launches Free Web Software Eco-System

An anonymous reader writes “Microsoft, inspired perhaps by the ease of selecting and installing iPhone apps, has taken a similar approach to gather back market share of its IIS web server in a predominantly Apache/PHP market. 10 open source CMS, gallery, wiki, and blog tools were chosen to populate the eco-system, dubbed Web App Gallery. Developers must agree to principles and can now submit their PHP or .NET application for inclusion. Once an application is in the gallery, Windows users use Microsoft Web Platform Installer, released in a keynote at MIX this week, which inspects the the local system, and installs and configures dependencies like the IIS webserver, PHP, URL re-writers, and file permissions. Screenshots show this to be quite easy for the typical computer user. This could provide some real competition for WAMP and Linux shell install processes.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mar 23 2009

20 Years After Cold Fusion Debut, Another Team Claims Success

New Scientist is reporting that twenty years to the day since the initial announcement of a cold fusion discovery another Utah-based team is trying again. This announcement is being taken a little more seriously than the original, although some might say it is just more available wishful thinking. “Some researchers in the cold fusion field agree. ‘In my view [it’s] a cold fusion effect,’ says Peter Hagelstein, also at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Others, though, are not convinced. Steven Krivit, editor of the New Energy Times, has been following the cold fusion debate for many years and also spoke at the ACS conference. ‘Their hypothesis as to a fusion mechanism I think is on thin ice … you get into physics fantasies rather quickly and this is an unfortunate distraction from their excellent empirical work,’ he told New Scientist. Krivit thinks cold fusion remains science fiction. Like many in the field, he prefers to categorize the work as evidence of ‘low-energy nuclear reactions,’ and says it can be explained without relying on nuclear fusion.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mar 23 2009

25 Years of Mac: Classic Macs Still at Work

The machines are rare examples of aging Macs that are still in daily use. They are a testament to the utility and longevity of the Mac, which celebrates its 25th anniversary on Sunday.

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Mar 23 2009

Kiwis Scrap Controversial ‘3 Strikes’ Anti-Piracy Law

Following a mountain of bad publicity and strong objections from just about everyone except the entertainment industries, New Zealand’s proposed ‘guilty upon accusation’ Section 92A anti-piracy law has been scrapped.

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Mar 23 2009

10 Best Image Viewers/Editors for Linux

Some of the most widely used Image viewers/editors for Linux you can consider using. They are all unique in their own way.

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