| Friday, 11 February 2005, 7:03 am Tags: Blogging |
News is next on LeoTV.
The first hospital in the US was opened in Pennsylvania on this day in 1752. Robert Fulton patented the steam boat in 1809. Nelson Mandela was freed in 1990.
Thomas Edison was born in 1847. Tina “Ginger” Louise was born in 1934.
- Carly Fiorina is out at Hewlett-Packard, saying she quit in a dispute with the board over the future direction of the company. The board’s chair was quoted in the NY Times as saying “These things always seem precipitous when they occur. But the board has been deliberating the company’s performance, and the C.E.O.’s performance, for quite some time.” But don’t cry for me Fiorina, Carly’s getting a severance package worth $21.1 million. HP shares closed at 21.53 up nearly 7% on the news. When Fiorina started with HP in 1999 the stock price was over 40.
- The Motion Picture Association of America has taken over LokiTorrent. The bittorrent tracker site was attempting to raise money to fight the MPAA, but a court order shut it down yesterday. Even more chilling, the court ordered LokiTorrent to give the MPAA their domain and all the server logs. The site now features the threat, “You can click but you can’t hide. Stealing movies leaves a trail. The only way not to get caught is to stop.” Makes me want to steal a movie right now.
- Just in the nick of time, Philips has developed a way to fingerprint films so they can be tracked on P2P networks.
- The FCC has told cable companies that they needn’t carry all the digital channels offered by local television stations. The shift to digital has made it possible for a single TV station to broadcast several shows at once, creating an issue for cable companies who don’t have the benefit of the additional bandwidth.
- FreeBSD is retiring its daemon logo. A public competition will be held to choose a replacement. Toy Story director John Lasseter created the earliest versions of the daemon – the current version is copyrighted by Marshall Kirk McKusick. I kinda like it, but then I like Underwood Deviled Ham, too.
- There’s a big flaw in nearly all of Symantec’s products on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and AS400 systems and Brightmail clients. The flaw could allow an attacker to run arbitrary code on these systems. Symantec has patches so run LiveUpdate now.
- Temco is suing a web site that published hacks to its Xbox game Dead or Alive Xtreme Volleyball. The hack allowed users to strip the game’s characters naked. And this hurts game sales how?
Listen in tomorrow at 7:45a Pacific for my weekly news commentary on KFI 640 AM in Los Angeles.
| Tuesday, 8 February 2005, 8:52 pm Tags: Camera Phone |
| Tuesday, 8 February 2005, 7:49 pm Tags: News, Technology |
N ewslicious.
Finally, I know how to get where I’m going, thanks to the new Google Maps.
Friedleib F. Runge, father of paper chromatography, was born on this day in 1795. Science fiction author Jules Verne was born in Nantes, France, 1828.
- Watch out Intel and AMD. Forget the G5. IBM, Sony and Toshiba unveiled details yesterday of a new microprocessor that contains the equivalent of eight CPU cores around a central coordinating core based on PowerPC. The Cell processor, in development since 2001, starts at over 4 gigahertz, has nearly twice the transistors of the Pentium 4 and can deliver 10 times the performance. Look for it in the new Sony Playstation 3, TVs from Toshiba, and IBM high-end workstation computers coming later this year. Apparently there are several operating systems already running on the Cell in the labs, including Linux. With its PowerPC heritage, it shouldn’t be hard to port OS X to it – now that would be a killer product.
- The FCC released a list of web sites that send cell phone spam on Monday. The sites have 30 days to stop or face fines of $11,000 per violation.
- The Superbowl spurred the sales of 1.4 million TVs according to the TV Retail Advertising and Marketing Association, many of them high-end flat screens.
- Microsoft will release 13 patches for Windows XP today, including nine critical updates. Make sure to run Windows Update.
- But don’t believe an email claiming to be from Microsoft with an attached “security” program. It’s spyware from Romania, one of many scams circulating the net right now taking advantage of Microsoft’s announced “Windows Genuine Advantage” program. Microsoft says it never sends out updates via email.
- The record industry has hit a new low. They’re suing a dead woman. According to her daughter, the 83-year-old West Virginia woman hated computers. According to the RIAA, she traded 700 pop, rap, and rock songs online under the screen name smittenedkitten. The RIAA says they’ll drop the case.
- University of Calgary students will be learning how to create spam and spyware. The university already has a course on virus creation. Now why didn’t they teach that kind of stuff when I was in school. Oh, yeah. Because you can’t create spam with a slide rule.
| Monday, 7 February 2005, 11:01 pm Tags: Camera Phone |
Listen to the podcast from Bella Luma (with my apologies for the sound quality – next time I bring my recording equipage).
Swag
