Archive for March, 2008

Inside UC Berkeley’s High Tech Joke Recommender

Monday, March 31st, 2008

alphadogg writes "Every day is something like April Fools' Day at the University of California, Berkeley joke recommendation site, dubbed Jester. Now on Version 4.0, the site tosses visitors a handful of jokes to rate on a scale of "less funny" to "more funny." It then recommends jokes based on ...

Clandestine Operations at Google

Monday, March 31st, 2008

eldavojohn writes "The San Francisco Chronicle is running an interesting story about Google's involvement with the CIA, NSA, NOAA and several other agencies. This has been speculated before although now Google seems to have several contracts open with several agencies. From the article, "When the nation's intelligence agencies wanted a ...

Ray Tracing To Debut in DirectX 11

Monday, March 31st, 2008

crazyeyes writes "This is breaking news. Microsoft has not only decided to support ray tracing in DirectX 11, but they will also be basing it on Intel's x86 ray-tracing technology and get this ... it will be out by the end of the year! In this article, we will examine ...

Adobe Joins Linux Foundation, Develops AIR for Linux

Monday, March 31st, 2008

2muchcoffeeman writes "Adobe announced Monday that it is joining the Linux Foundation and alpha-released a Linux version of its new Adobe Internet Runtime environment, which allows Internet-enable applications to run on Windows and Mac OS desktops, for Linux. According to Adobe, the alpha version lacks some key features that will ...

World’s Fastest Net Link ‘Used to Dry Laundry’

Monday, March 31st, 2008

praps writes "Last summer a 75-year-old woman from central Sweden became the envy of the IT world with her scorching 40Gbps internet connection. 1,500 simultaneous HDTV channels or a whole high definition DVD downloaded in two seconds were hers for the taking. Now Sigbritt Löthberg could soon be treated to ...

3G iPhone Going Into Production In May

Monday, March 31st, 2008

A few folks noted the rumor mill churning over 3G iPhones coming soon. Apparently they might be going into production as early as May, and announced somewhere in the 2nd quarter. Hopefully they manage to stick a GPS and another 16 gigs of memory in this one.

The Man Who Guards Clinton’s Wikipedia Entry

Monday, March 31st, 2008

Timothy found a profile in The New Republic of Jonathan Schilling, a 53-year-old software developer from New Jersey who works to keep Hillary Clinton's Wikipedia entry clean and fair throughout the election season. "After he started editing her page in June 2005, Schilling became consumed with trying to capture her ...

Murdoch’s Hacker Speaks Out

Monday, March 31st, 2008

This article from a Swiss newspaper recounts the appearance of Christopher Tarnovsky at the European Black Hat conference (link is to a Google translation of the French original). Next month Tarnovsky will testify in a lawsuit brought by a maker of satellite TV encryption systems (Kudeslki) against an Israeli company ...

Why the RIAA Really Hates Downloads

Monday, March 31st, 2008

wtansill recommends the saga of Jeff Price, who traveled from successful small record label owner to successful Internet-era music distributor. His piece describes clearly what the major record labels used to be good for and why they are now good for nothing but getting in the way. "Allowing all music ...

What Are Must-Sees For Open Day At the LHC?

Monday, March 31st, 2008

ribasushi writes "The last open day at the Large Hadron Collider is one week away. While I have a solid chance to go, I am dumbstruck by the insane amount of things to see during the 10 hours of the event. Since I do not know all that much about ...