The Geek Factor

Flawed iTunes Stands Out Among Apple's Products

Slashdot - 2 hours 16 min ago
waderoush writes "On top of all the other features that it has crammed into iTunes, Apple this week added Ping, a Facebook-like social network for music discovery. It's all part of the company's plan to dominate the world of consumer media, but Xconomy argues that this time, Apple may have gone a bridge too far. iTunes, nearing its tenth birthday, started out merely as a program for ripping CDs, and has grown increasingly creaky and impenetrable as Apple has added more and more cruft, the article argues. The company won't have a stable base for its new media empire until it rebuilds iTunes from scratch — perhaps along the lines suggested by its other new product this week, the revamped Apple TV."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Categories: The Geek Factor

All the week's <i>Reg Hardware</i> reviews

The Register - 2 hours 31 min ago
Can you handle the truth?

In the past seven days, Reg Hardware reviewed many products from the worlds of consumer electronics and mobile communications.…

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Categories: The Geek Factor

Gordon Brown joins World Wide Web Foundation

The Register - 2 hours 37 min ago
That's Doctor Brown to you, says unemployed PM

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has buddied up with the Greatest Living Briton by becoming a director of the World Wide Web Foundation.…

Categories: The Geek Factor

Northrop Grumman Says 'I'm Sorry' For Virginia IT Outage

Slashdot - 2 hours 57 min ago
Lucas123 writes "After a storage area network in a data center run by Northrop Grumman went down last week, crippling 26 state agencies' websites — some for more than a week — Northrop Grumman has now apologized to Virginia, saying it will learn from its mistakes in order to recover systems faster in the future. Northrop's $2.6 billion service contract with Virginia's government has come under harsh criticism in the past for service outages, along with project delays and cost overruns."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Categories: The Geek Factor

Is a HAMR blow falling on Seagate?

The Register - 2 hours 58 min ago
The opposite of NIL desperandum

Seagate may be facing the abandonment of a favoured future technology as the price for hard disk drive (HDD) industry unity.…

Categories: The Geek Factor

Joy Division designer tackles England footie strip

The Register - 3 hours 4 min ago
'I've lost the ball again...'

Football minnows Bulgaria face an uphill struggle in their forthcoming clash with England, because not only will they confront some of the most talented, hard-working and successful players in the history of the beautiful game, but their opponents will be clad in a new strip created by former Joy Division designer Peter Saville.…

Categories: The Geek Factor

Desktop pleasure, desktop pain

The Register - 3 hours 41 min ago
Evolution and management of the client computing environment

Let's face it, the desktop and laptop environment is one of the major points at which the rubber meets the road when it comes to business computing.…

Categories: The Geek Factor

Wells Fargo hops NFC train

The Register - 3 hours 42 min ago
Joins BoA and Visa in trials

Wells Fargo is joining the effort spearheaded by Visa to help NFC break in the difficult American market.…

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Categories: The Geek Factor

Google's Schmidt satirised as privacy pervert

The Register - 3 hours 46 min ago
Run for your lives, kids. The ice cream man is coming!

Eric Schmidt has been portrayed as a depraved privacy pervert by the US-based ConsumerWatchdog.org, which is running an advert in New York’s Times Square that mocks the Google boss.…

Categories: The Geek Factor

Major Battle Brewing Between French Gov't and ISPs

Slashdot - 3 hours 46 min ago
Dangerous_Minds writes "Drew Wilson has been following HADOPI (France's three strikes law) a lot lately, and the latest developments are that the French ISPs and the French government are edging closer to a full-on war over compensation. The French government apparently requested that ISPs send an invoice of the bills after a certain period of time, but the French ISPs don't feel this is good enough — probably because of worries that the compensation the government will ultimately provide won't be enough. The ISPs are demanding adequate compensation, and if the government doesn't give it to them, they simply will not hand over evidence required to enforce HADOPI law. While HADOPI demands that ISPs cooperate, speculation suggests that if the government takes ISPs to court, the ISPs will simply rely on constitutional jurisprudence to shield them from liability (translation)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Categories: The Geek Factor

IT workers getting back to work - sort of

The Register - 4 hours 44 sec ago
June and July not as bad as all that

The US Department of Labor kicked out its monthly jobs report, and there's some good news for once. First of all, private sector employers added 67,000 jobs last month, although the overall economy shed 54,000 jobs as the federal government winds down the 2010 census and lays off temporary workers hired to count heads.…

Categories: The Geek Factor

Paul Allen's patent madness not worth single penny

The Register - 4 hours 28 min ago
Execution wins. Not ideas

Open...and Shut Businesses aren't built on ideas. They're built on execution. Google didn't win because it was the first to the search market. It won because it did search better than anyone else, and devised an ingenious way to monetize it.…

Categories: The Geek Factor

German gov pooh-poohs biometric ID card hack

The Register - 4 hours 36 min ago
Nicht ein biggie

German hackers successfully used off-the-shelf kit to extract personal data from the federal government's supposedly secure ID cards, but the government has downplayed the significance of the attack.…

Categories: The Geek Factor

Hurt Locker File-Sharing Subpoenas Begin

Slashdot - 4 hours 37 min ago
In May we discussed news that producers of the film The Hurt Locker filed a lawsuit against 5,000 John Does, known only by their IP addresses at the time, for sharing the movie over peer-to-peer sites. Now, reader suraj.sun notes that subpoenas for the lawsuit are finally going out. "Qwest Communications on Monday notified a customer in Denver that the Internet service provider has received a subpoena from lawyers representing Voltage Pictures, the production company that made The Hurt Locker. ... In legal documents, Voltage Pictures has blamed the movie's relatively poor domestic performance on illegal file sharing. As of March 21, the movie had grossed $16 million domestically, but took in $40 million overall. According to reports, the film's production budget was $15 million. The film leaked to the Web five months before the movie's US debut. ... For allegedly downloading The Hurt Locker, DGW told the Qwest customer from Denver that settling the case early would cost $2,900, according to documents reviewed by CNET."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Categories: The Geek Factor

TomTom drums up upgrade for iPhone app

The Register - 4 hours 50 min ago
Follow that photo!

An update for the TomTom app on the iPhone is "coming soon".…

Categories: The Geek Factor

HP Backs Memristor Mass Production

Slashdot - 5 hours 10 min ago
neo12 writes with news that Hewlett-Packard is teaming with Hynix Semiconductor, the world's second-largest producer of memory chips, to mass produce memristors for the first time. Quoting the BBC: "HP says the first memristors should be widely available in about three years. The devices started as a theoretical prediction in 1971 but HP's demonstration and publication of a real working device has put them on a possible roadmap to replace memory chips or even hard drives. ... Steve Furber, professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester, explained that the potential benefits lie in the fact that memristors are 'much simpler in principle than transistors. Because they are formed as a film between two wires, they don't have to be implanted into the silicon surface — as do transistors, which form the storage locations in Flash — so they could be built in layers in 3D,' he told BBC News. 'Of course, the devil is in the detail, and I don't think the manufacturing challenges have been fully exposed yet.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Categories: The Geek Factor

Ex-spook jailed for selling secrets

The Register - 5 hours 38 min ago
12 months for CD & USB shenanigans

Ex-MI6 worker Daniel Houghton has been sentenced to 12 months in prison for unlawfully disclosing top secret material, in breach of the Official Secrets Act.…

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Categories: The Geek Factor

Apple TV: Third time unlucky, Mr Jobs

The Register - 5 hours 41 min ago
Going down for the last time

Comment This is the day that Apple lost the war for Over The Top content, not only in America, but globally. The winner can’t yet be announced, but this was the shot that Apple had to get it right, and to us it’s bungled it.…

Categories: The Geek Factor

Wireless Power Group Has 'Qi' Prototypes

Slashdot - 6 hours 8 sec ago
judgecorp writes "Steady progress on inductive wireless charging. There are now certified prototypes of chargers for Blackberry and iPhone devices that meet the Qi specification of the Wireless Power Consortium, which was announced last year. The spec has advanced from version 0.95 to 1.0, too."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Categories: The Geek Factor

Vulture 1 Mk 2 release mech prepped for testing

The Register - 6 hours 8 min ago
Coming soon: Hypobaric chamber - The Revisiting

The Paper Aircraft Released Into Space (PARIS) team is preparing to turn down the pressure with a second visit to Qinetiq's hypobaric chamber.…

Categories: The Geek Factor
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