IT & C News!

+- News: Amazon US Refunds Windows License Fee, Too on Friday July 31, @09:29AM

admin — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:01:20 +0000

“Today Amazon credited my card with $65.45. After ordering an Eee PC 1005 HA from amazon.com, I asked them for a refund for the cost of Windows XP via the ‘Contact us’ form. At first they told me to cancel any items on my order that I wanted a refund for, but after I explained that XP was pre-installed on the machine they got it. They asked what the cost of the OS was, and I answered that I had no idea but that Amazon UK refunded £40.00. Within a few hours I got a response saying ‘I’ve requested a refund of $65.45 to your Visa card.’ Somehow I doubt that Amazon will charge Asus or even Microsoft, but maybe they will one day if more people do this. Oh, and peeling off the ‘Designed for Microsoft Windows XP’ sticker is easy, too.”

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News: Amazon US Refunds Windows License Fee, Too on Friday July 31, @09:29AM

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admin — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 04:07:55 +0000

“A student team from Virginia Tech Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory have created a vehicle which allows the blind to drive. The vehicle uses a laser range finder to determine distances and alerts the driver through voice commands and vibration. Tomorrow [Friday] morning, the vehicle will have its first public test drive at the University of Maryland. At last, Braille on drive-up ATMs may finally be vindicated.”

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Idle: IPhone App Tracks Sex Offenders on Thursday July 30, @09:28AM

admin — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:12:15 +0000

“All 50 states in the US require the 50,000 people convicted of sexual offenses to sign a register so that their whereabouts can be tracked and monitored. The Telegraph reports that now users of the iPhone Offender Locator application can search for sex offenders living nearby a friend or colleague whose address is stored in their Apple iPhone address book, or they can type in a street address to generate a list of convicted sex offenders in the local area. ‘Offender Locator gives everyone the ability to find out if registered sex offenders live in their area,’ says the application developer, ThinAir Wireless, on its iTunes page. ‘Knowledge equals safety. They know where you and your family are…now it’s time to turn the tables so that you know where they live and can make better decisions about where to allow your kids to play.’ Offender Locator uses the iPhone’s built-in GPS to pinpoint the user’s location, and then provide a map listing sex offenders in the local area. Tapping on one of the ‘pins’ dropped on to the map brings up a photograph of the offender, as well as their address, date of birth and list of convictions.”

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Idle: IPhone App Tracks Sex Offenders on Thursday July 30, @09:28AM

EMI Only Selling CDs To Mega-Chains From Now On on Thursday July 30, @02:01AM

admin — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 06:21:35 +0000

“According to Zero Paid, record company EMI has been notifying small music stores that they will no longer be able to buy EMI CDs from EMI, and will have to buy product from Mega-Chains like Walmart. Independent Record store customers are some of the most loyal music buyers around. You are not going to find the back catalog, what used to be the staple of the music business, at your local Walmart. One wonders when the Music Business is going to run out of feet to shoot?”

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EMI Only Selling CDs To Mega-Chains From Now On on Thursday July 30, @02:01AM

Alan Cox Quits As Linux TTY Maintainer — “I’ve Had Enough” on Wednesday July 29, @03:52PM

admin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:27:25 +0000

“After a stern criticism from Linus, the long-time kernel hacker Alan Cox has decided to walk away as the maintainer of the TTY subsystem of the Linux Kernel, stating ‘…I’ve had enough. If you think that problem is easy to fix you fix it. Have fun. I’ve zapped the tty merge queue so anyone with patches for the tty layer can send them to the new maintainer.’”

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Alan Cox Quits As Linux TTY Maintainer — “I’ve Had Enough” on Wednesday July 29, @03:52PM

First MS Retail Stores Will be In Scottsdale, AZ and Mission Viejo, CA on Wednesday July 29, @03:33PM

admin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:10:39 +0000

“MS has announced the locations of its first two retail stores. The first one will be located at The Shops in Mission Viejo, CA sometime in the fall. There is an existing Apple store at the location. The second one will be located in Scottsdale Fashion Square in Scottsdale, AZ. That location does not have an Apple store. According to Corporate Communications Director Kim Stocks, the locations were picked because they were “hot markets” presumably meaning high traffic. Also the stores will sell laptops, Zunes, Xbox 360s, MS and 3rd party software. No details on which laptops were provided.”

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First MS Retail Stores Will be In Scottsdale, AZ and Mission Viejo, CA on Wednesday July 29, @03:33PM

Bill Gates Remembers 1979 on Monday July 27, @10:14AM

admin — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:04:24 +0000

“Last week Gizmodo had a special celebration of 1979, the last year before a digital tsunami hit, that put Bill Gates in a nostalgic mood this week. Bill chimed in with his own memories of that seminal year when everything changed. ‘In 1979, Microsoft had 13 employees, most of whom appear in that famous picture that provides indisputable proof that your average computer geek from the late 1970s was not exactly on the cutting edge of fashion,’ wrote Gates. ‘By the end of the year we’d doubled in size to 28 employees. Even though we were doing pretty well, I was still kind of terrified by the rapid pace of hiring and worried that the bottom could fall out at any time.’ What made Gates feel a little more confident was that he began to sense that BASIC was on the verge of becoming the standard language for microcomputers. ‘By the middle of 1979, BASIC was running on more than 200,000 Z-80 and 8080 machines and we were just releasing a new version for the 8086 16-bit microprocessor. As the numbers grew, we were starting to think beyond programming languages, too, and about the possibility of creating applications that would have real mass appeal to consumers.’ Gates remembers that in 1979 there were only 100 different software products that had more than $100 M in annual sales and all of them were for mainframes. ‘In April, the 8080 version of BASIC became the first software product built to run on microprocessors to win an ICP Million Dollar Award. Today, I would be surprised if the number of million-dollar applications isn’t in the millions itself’ writes Gates. ‘More important, of course, is the fact that more than a billion people around the world use computers and digital technology as an integral part of their day-to-day lives. That’s something that really started to take shape in 1979.’”

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Bill Gates Remembers 1979 on Monday July 27, @10:14AM

Jeff Bezos Offers Apology For Erasing 1984 on Monday July 27, @08:02AM

admin — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 12:59:14 +0000

“From the down-but-not-out NYT comes an article (warning: login may be required) about user backlash against Kindle’s embedded DRM: ‘Last week, Jeffrey P. Bezos, chief executive of Amazon, offered an apparently heartfelt and anguished mea culpa to customers whose digital editions of George Orwell’s “1984″ were remotely deleted from their Kindle reading devices. Though copies of the books were sold by a bookseller that did not have legal rights to the novel, Mr. Bezos wrote on a company forum that Amazon’s “’solution’ to the problem was stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles.”‘ Bezos’s post is here.”

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Jeff Bezos Offers Apology For Erasing 1984 on Monday July 27, @08:02AM

Hacker Group L0pht Making a Comeback on Sunday July 26, @01:24PM

admin — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:06:24 +0000

“The news report begins with shots of a tense space shuttle launch. Engineers hunch over computer banks and techno music pounds in the background. There is a countdown, a lift-off, and then you see a young man in a black T-shirt and sunglasses, apparently reporting from ’space.’ This is the Hacker News Network, and after a decade offline it is lifting off again, this time with a quirky brand of video reports about security. Hacker News Network is one of the side projects of the Boston-based hacker collective known as L0pht Heavy Industries. They’re the guys who famously told the US Congress that they could take down the Internet in about 30 minutes, and who helped invent the way that security bugs are reported to computer companies.”

Is Jupiter Earth’s Cosmic Protector? on Sunday July 26, @11:18AM

admin — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 03:23:25 +0000

“Last Sunday, an object, probably a comet that nobody saw coming, plowed into Jupiter’s colorful cloud tops, splashing up debris and leaving a black eye the size of the Pacific Ocean — the second time in 15 years that this had happened, after Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 fell apart and its pieces crashed into Jupiter in 1994, leaving Earth-size marks that persisted up to a year. ‘Better Jupiter than Earth,’ say astronomers who think that part of what makes Earth such a nice place to live is that Jupiter acts as a gravitational shield, deflecting incoming space junk away from the inner solar system where it could do to humans what an asteroid apparently did for the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. ‘If anything like that had hit the Earth it would have been curtains for us, so we can feel very happy that Jupiter is doing its vacuum-cleaner job and hoovering up all these large pieces before they come for us,’ says Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley, who first noticed the mark on Jupiter. But others say the warm and fuzzy image of the King of Planets as father-protector may not be entirely accurate. In 1770, Comet Lexell whizzed by the earth, missing us by a cosmic whisker after passing close to Jupiter. The comet made two passes around the Sun and in 1779 again passed very close to Jupiter, which then threw it back out of the solar system.”

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Is Jupiter Earth’s Cosmic Protector? on Sunday July 26, @11:18AM