Cody Taylor

The latest version of Ubuntu includes some nifty embellishments to the GNU Screen program. These improvements make some of Screen’s more sophisticated features accessible to users and simplify

Thanks to a new 40nm manufacturing process and GDDR5, ATI manages to bring a lot of performance to the sub-0 price point.

The new service will offer download speeds of 101 megabits per second and upload speeds of 15 Mbps for a cost of .95 per month. It will be available May 11 to all 5 million of the people in areas served by Cablevision, mainly in the New York City suburbs. In Japan, J:Com uses the same technology to offer 160 Mbps service for 6,000 yen ()/mo.

A man convicted of swindling more than 9,000 using fraudulent eBay listings and other venues was ordered to serve 52 months in federal prison and pay 2,000 in restitution.

Launching as a private beta on Tue, Vine is designed to keep family and friends in touch when other communication methods are either broken or not particularly efficient. Times of crisis usually involve a breakdown in mobile phone or other key communication infrastructures, and Vine is designed to be as hardy as possible to keep people connected.

ericatcw writes “Some OpenOffice.org insiders say Oracle’s purchase of Sun is reinvigorating the long-stymied push to spin off the open-source project into a 100% independent foundation. Freeing itself from Sun’s (and soon to be Oracle’s) orbit will attract more developers and more vendor support, two perennial problems due to Sun’s tight grip on the project, say supporters, who wonder which foundation model might work best: Mozilla, Apache or Linux. Others prefer to take their chances under Larry Ellison, saying Oracle’s take-no-prisoners salesforce and grudge against Microsoft could benefit OpenOffice.org. Version 3.0 of the Microsoft Office competitor has garnered 50 million downloads in the last six months.”

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nandemoari alerts us to news over at DSLReports that Cablevision will be offering subscribers 101-Mbps download service, a new US record. That’s fast enough to download an HD movie in less than 10 minutes. The package, known as “Ultra,” will launch on May 11 and will cost .95 a month. Upload speed is 15 Mbps and there are no monthly limits. Cablevision is also doubling the speed of its Wi-Fi service, which is available free to subscribers using hotspots across the Northeast. “…the company will be launching a new ‘Ultra’ tier on May 11. The new tier features speeds of 101Mbps downstream and 15Mbps upstream for .95 a month. That’s an unprecedented amount of speed at an unprecedented price, suggesting that Cablevision just took the gloves off in their fight against Verizon FiOS. … Cablevision spokesman Jim Maiella confirmed for me that the .95 price is unbundled, and the new tier does not come with any kind of a usage cap or overage fees.”

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Miracle Jones writes “In an interview with Professor (and former Microsoft employee) James Grimmelmann at the New York Law School, who is both setting up an online clearinghouse to discuss the Google book settlement and drafting an amicus brief to inform the court about the antitrust factors surrounding “orphan books,” he revealed that Google will be able to moderate the content of its book scans in the same way that they moderate their YouTube videos, leaving out works that Google deems “inappropriate” from the 7 million library books it has scanned. The Fiction Circus has called for a two-year long rights auction that will ensure that these “inappropriate” titles do not get left behind in the digital era, and that other people who are willing to host and display these books will be able to do so. There is only one week left for authors and publishers to “opt out” of the settlement class and retain their rights or raise objections, and Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive has been stopped from jumping on board Google’s settlement as a party defendant and receiving the same legal protections that Google will get. A group of authors, including Philip K. Dick’s estate, has tried to delay the settlement for four more months until they get their minds around the issue.” In related news, Google is seeking a 60-day extension to the period in which it’s attempting to contact authors to inform them of their right to opt-out of the terms of the settlement.

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