P2P-Zone - View Single Post - The Newspaper Shop -- Tuesday edition

walktalker · 26-06-01, 06:38 PM

Yep

Physicist To Head White House Tech
President Bush has named physicist and engineering Professor John H. Marburger III to be his chief advisor on science and technology policy issues. Currently director of the Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and president of Brookhaven Science Associates, Marburger also served as president of the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1980 to 1984. If confirmed by the Senate, Marburger will join the administration at a time when it is faced with several controversial issues that will fall under his purview, including the White House's energy policy and funding for stem cell research.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167303.html

Don't Skimp On Customer Service
When the economy slows down, companies cut costs. But a new study from Jupiter Media Metrix warns that customer service should not go on the chopping block, in fact businesses should take the counterintuitive step of actually increasing spending on customer relationship management (CRM). Apparently, most companies agree - the study found that 74 percent of businesses will spend more money on CRM infrastructure in 2001 than they did last year. The majority of respondents said they would increase spending by 25 to 50 percent.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167297.html

Crackers Deface Two AOL ICQ Servers
America Online confirmed today that one of the Web servers operated by the company's ICQ instant-messaging unit was defaced. But AOL assured users of its popular Internet messaging service that their personal data was not compromised. The defaced server, located at groups.icq.com, provides information about ICQ interest groups and was running Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) software, according to AOL officials. A group calling itself Men In Hack on Monday replaced the default home page with one of its own design. The defaced page included the ICQ logo, a green flower, with the words "hacked" flashing in red capital letters across it.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167293.html

Tasini Ruling: Will It Impact Digital Music?
A U.S. Supreme Court decision Monday granting freelance writers compensation rights if their works are resold to electronic databases may reverberate in the music industry as well. In the case Tasini vs. New York Times, the Supreme Court Monday ruled 7-2 in favor of freelance writer Jonathan Tasini, saying that publishers must seek the permission and compensate writers if freelance articles are resold to online databases like Lexis-Nexis - provided that the writers' initial work contracts did not specifically grant e-publishing rights up front. The case is viewed as a major defeat for publishers, because publishers have only begun including electronic publishing rights in freelance contracts during the past several years.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167291.html

Study Depicts Hopes, Fears Of Tech-Driven Future
Will the U.S. retain its position as the world's high-tech superpower? This and other digital-future questions are posed in a study by Euro RSCG Worldwide. The survey, conducted by online advertising network RSCG in 19 cities around the world, sought insight and tech-savvy opinions about what the tech-driven future may bring. When asked if the U.S., an original pioneer of the digital age, will continue to dominate, more than half (52 percent) of British respondents said the country's reign soon would be over. But, only 36 percent of Asia-Pacific respondents agreed, and only 30 percent of Americans agreed their digital dominance soon would end.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167260.html

Site Grabs Attention By Setting Horses Free
Ryan Dohrn says a single promotional idea was the key to greatly increasing traffic on his Web site. But it isn't an easy idea to execute. Says Dohrn: "It can be a nightmare to give away animals." But, he adds, darn good marketing. Dohrn, who did promotions for a Chicago TV station, and his wife, Andre, who wrote government housing grants, quit their jobs to work full time on a Web site they started in 1996, HorseCity.com. By September, they had about 3,000 regular users. And Dohrn, 29, knew he had competition: "There are already about 7,800 horse-related sites of some significance." So he decided on a regular, monthly giveaway: A horse.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167290.html

'Author' of A.I. Recalls When Kubrick Dreamed of Making a Hit, and Spielberg Came With His Checkbook Open
In an interview, British sci-fi writer Brian Aldiss tells of his struggles with the notoriously difficult director who wanted his own Star Wars. When Spielberg took over the project and offered to buy one of his sentences, 'I fell about laughing.' It stands to reason: the first Stanley Kubrick blockbuster would be directed by Steven Spielberg. ut even before Spielberg would ever dream of partnering with his mentor, the famously difficult director of famously difficult films was confiding with a British author, Brian Aldiss, about how A.I.: Artificial Intelligence could be his big popcorn movie. The relationship began in the late 70's thanks to a fortuitous footnote -- one where Aldiss, the author of some 300 stories and novels, oddly proclaimed Kubrick ''the great SF writer of the age'' in his guide to science fiction.
http://www.inside.com/jcs/Story?arti...3576&pod_id=10

Add Oscar to Long List of Napster's Courtroom Foes
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has sued the file-swapping service -- take a number -- saying that unauthorized recordings of live performances from the award show are being traded. It was bound to happen: The entertainment-related organization most protective of its copyrights has sued the entity most accused of copyright infringements. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences took Napster to court on Monday, claiming the online file-swapping service is allowing users to copy live performances recorded during the last three Oscar ceremonies. The suit states that within hours of the Academy Awards broadcast, sound recordings of live performances from the show were made available for downloading. Some of the recordings made available on Napster have not yet been released to the public, the suit adds.
http://www.inside.com/jcs/Story?arti...3558&pod_id=10

U.N. agrees to global AIDS plan
Two decades into the AIDS epidemic, all 189 member nations of the U.N. General Assembly have agreed upon a global blueprint for action on HIV/AIDS and will formally adopt it on Wednesday, U.N. officials have told MSNBC.com. “It is an extremely strong document of commitment” that maps out a worldwide strategy to halt the disease’s spread and reverse the epidemic, said Kathleen Cravero, deputy executive director of UNAIDS.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/592884.asp

Army Chow Know-How
In Star Trek, the crew of the starship Enterprise could instantly acquire any meal by ordering up their preference on the food-producing "replicator." Now that was a Meal-Ready-to-Eat. Such technology may seem like a pipe dream of the far future , but it provided inspiration for scientists developing high-tech food ideas for Army troops. In a newly released scientific report commissioned by the Army, scientists suggest, among other ideas, that soldiers could one day carry specially engineered seeds that would sprout from the ground in a matter of days, instead of weeks. plus capable of fighting off disease and making warriors glow.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scite...ood010626.html

MP3 owners get stroppy with open source coders
MP3 Pro is proving just as popular as its predecessor - the MP3 digital audio format. Pro has only been available for just under two weeks, and the software has already been downloaded above 600,000 times. So says co-developer Thomson Multimedia, which posted demo software on 14 June. The demo release is limited to 64Kbps encoding - but can generate files half the size of a 64Kbps MP3 encoder. That said, feedback from Register readers suggests that while MP3 Pro does indeed sound better than MP3, subjectively, WMA 8 has the advantage on quality. The MP3 partners won't win themselves any friends for their licensing policy, which has seen them bashing open source MP3 encoder development efforts.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/19982.html

Maxtor plans 137GB+ hard drives
Maxtor today set out its stall in the heavy duty hard drive market, saying it planned to surpass the 137GB interface for ATA drives by the end of the year. The vendor has joined forces with other IT companies, such as Compaq, Microsoft, VIA Technologies, ONTRACK Data International and StorageSoft, to support the latest standard by the American National Standards Intstitute (ANSI) T13 technical committee. The standard allows the future development of capacities of up to 144 petabytes (PB) of storage, or drives that can access around 100,000 times more data than the current 137GB interface standard.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/19994.html

Radiohead bassist slams Cubase software
Radiohead's bassist Colin Greenwood has kicked loose with his hardware and software preferences during an interview with UK site Culturelab. Colin says all the band have Powerbooks, which you might have guessed, and he's also got an Atari ST. On the Powerbooks the band run eMagic's Logic music production software "because it never crashes, unlike Cubase." Other things he likes are "an Akai MPC 60 for those like hiphop, swing moments and an Akai S3000 200XL just because everything sounds great. They're just things to play with instead of playing on the Playstation."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/19990.html

Fancy a 1GB flash disk the size/weight of a plastic lighter?
Fancy a 1GB flash memory disk that plugs straight into your USB port and is the size and weight of a plastic lighter? It'll set you back £990.95 ex VAT, and you can't get it off a bloke standing outside the tube station holding a tray, but it is on sale in the UK. The downside is a read transfer rate of 750KB/second and a write rate of 450 KB/second. Well you can't have everything. The device, called OnlyDisk, comes in sizes from 8MB to 1GB, and a 2GB device is on the cards. A 32MB disk will set you back £49.88 ex VAT.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/19986.html

The Era Of Living Wirelessly
It's late March in Hannover, Germany, and the mammoth high-tech industry shindig known as CeBIT is primed for a coming-out party. An emerging short-range wireless networking standard, named Bluetooth after a fierce 10th-century Viking king, is planning a massive demo. The organizers of CeBIT — a worldwide trade show whose name is the German acronym for "Center for Office and Information Technology" — are promising to turn Kmart-sized Exhibition Hall 13 into the "world's largest Bluetooth mobile communications network." That means folks with specially equipped handhelds will be able to exchange information via radio waves, without cords. But Bluetooth has bitten off more than it can chew. The network never networks; gadgets don't gab. The throngs in the hall instead witness a throbbing technological toothache.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167279.html

Done !

26-06-01, 06:38 PM	#4
walktalker The local newspaper man Join Date: Aug 2000 Location: Montreal Posts: 2,036	I'm a news-obsessed person hehehe Yep Physicist To Head White House Tech President Bush has named physicist and engineering Professor John H. Marburger III to be his chief advisor on science and technology policy issues. Currently director of the Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and president of Brookhaven Science Associates, Marburger also served as president of the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1980 to 1984. If confirmed by the Senate, Marburger will join the administration at a time when it is faced with several controversial issues that will fall under his purview, including the White House's energy policy and funding for stem cell research. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167303.html Don't Skimp On Customer Service When the economy slows down, companies cut costs. But a new study from Jupiter Media Metrix warns that customer service should not go on the chopping block, in fact businesses should take the counterintuitive step of actually increasing spending on customer relationship management (CRM). Apparently, most companies agree - the study found that 74 percent of businesses will spend more money on CRM infrastructure in 2001 than they did last year. The majority of respondents said they would increase spending by 25 to 50 percent. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167297.html Crackers Deface Two AOL ICQ Servers America Online confirmed today that one of the Web servers operated by the company's ICQ instant-messaging unit was defaced. But AOL assured users of its popular Internet messaging service that their personal data was not compromised. The defaced server, located at groups.icq.com, provides information about ICQ interest groups and was running Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) software, according to AOL officials. A group calling itself Men In Hack on Monday replaced the default home page with one of its own design. The defaced page included the ICQ logo, a green flower, with the words "hacked" flashing in red capital letters across it. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167293.html Tasini Ruling: Will It Impact Digital Music? A U.S. Supreme Court decision Monday granting freelance writers compensation rights if their works are resold to electronic databases may reverberate in the music industry as well. In the case Tasini vs. New York Times, the Supreme Court Monday ruled 7-2 in favor of freelance writer Jonathan Tasini, saying that publishers must seek the permission and compensate writers if freelance articles are resold to online databases like Lexis-Nexis - provided that the writers' initial work contracts did not specifically grant e-publishing rights up front. The case is viewed as a major defeat for publishers, because publishers have only begun including electronic publishing rights in freelance contracts during the past several years. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167291.html Study Depicts Hopes, Fears Of Tech-Driven Future Will the U.S. retain its position as the world's high-tech superpower? This and other digital-future questions are posed in a study by Euro RSCG Worldwide. The survey, conducted by online advertising network RSCG in 19 cities around the world, sought insight and tech-savvy opinions about what the tech-driven future may bring. When asked if the U.S., an original pioneer of the digital age, will continue to dominate, more than half (52 percent) of British respondents said the country's reign soon would be over. But, only 36 percent of Asia-Pacific respondents agreed, and only 30 percent of Americans agreed their digital dominance soon would end. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167260.html Site Grabs Attention By Setting Horses Free Ryan Dohrn says a single promotional idea was the key to greatly increasing traffic on his Web site. But it isn't an easy idea to execute. Says Dohrn: "It can be a nightmare to give away animals." But, he adds, darn good marketing. Dohrn, who did promotions for a Chicago TV station, and his wife, Andre, who wrote government housing grants, quit their jobs to work full time on a Web site they started in 1996, HorseCity.com. By September, they had about 3,000 regular users. And Dohrn, 29, knew he had competition: "There are already about 7,800 horse-related sites of some significance." So he decided on a regular, monthly giveaway: A horse. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167290.html 'Author' of A.I. Recalls When Kubrick Dreamed of Making a Hit, and Spielberg Came With His Checkbook Open In an interview, British sci-fi writer Brian Aldiss tells of his struggles with the notoriously difficult director who wanted his own Star Wars. When Spielberg took over the project and offered to buy one of his sentences, 'I fell about laughing.' It stands to reason: the first Stanley Kubrick blockbuster would be directed by Steven Spielberg. ut even before Spielberg would ever dream of partnering with his mentor, the famously difficult director of famously difficult films was confiding with a British author, Brian Aldiss, about how A.I.: Artificial Intelligence could be his big popcorn movie. The relationship began in the late 70's thanks to a fortuitous footnote -- one where Aldiss, the author of some 300 stories and novels, oddly proclaimed Kubrick ''the great SF writer of the age'' in his guide to science fiction. http://www.inside.com/jcs/Story?arti...3576&pod_id=10 Add Oscar to Long List of Napster's Courtroom Foes The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has sued the file-swapping service -- take a number -- saying that unauthorized recordings of live performances from the award show are being traded. It was bound to happen: The entertainment-related organization most protective of its copyrights has sued the entity most accused of copyright infringements. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences took Napster to court on Monday, claiming the online file-swapping service is allowing users to copy live performances recorded during the last three Oscar ceremonies. The suit states that within hours of the Academy Awards broadcast, sound recordings of live performances from the show were made available for downloading. Some of the recordings made available on Napster have not yet been released to the public, the suit adds. http://www.inside.com/jcs/Story?arti...3558&pod_id=10 U.N. agrees to global AIDS plan Two decades into the AIDS epidemic, all 189 member nations of the U.N. General Assembly have agreed upon a global blueprint for action on HIV/AIDS and will formally adopt it on Wednesday, U.N. officials have told MSNBC.com. “It is an extremely strong document of commitment” that maps out a worldwide strategy to halt the disease’s spread and reverse the epidemic, said Kathleen Cravero, deputy executive director of UNAIDS. http://www.msnbc.com/news/592884.asp Army Chow Know-How In Star Trek, the crew of the starship Enterprise could instantly acquire any meal by ordering up their preference on the food-producing "replicator." Now that was a Meal-Ready-to-Eat. Such technology may seem like a pipe dream of the far future , but it provided inspiration for scientists developing high-tech food ideas for Army troops. In a newly released scientific report commissioned by the Army, scientists suggest, among other ideas, that soldiers could one day carry specially engineered seeds that would sprout from the ground in a matter of days, instead of weeks. plus capable of fighting off disease and making warriors glow. http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scite...ood010626.html MP3 owners get stroppy with open source coders MP3 Pro is proving just as popular as its predecessor - the MP3 digital audio format. Pro has only been available for just under two weeks, and the software has already been downloaded above 600,000 times. So says co-developer Thomson Multimedia, which posted demo software on 14 June. The demo release is limited to 64Kbps encoding - but can generate files half the size of a 64Kbps MP3 encoder. That said, feedback from Register readers suggests that while MP3 Pro does indeed sound better than MP3, subjectively, WMA 8 has the advantage on quality. The MP3 partners won't win themselves any friends for their licensing policy, which has seen them bashing open source MP3 encoder development efforts. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/19982.html Maxtor plans 137GB+ hard drives Maxtor today set out its stall in the heavy duty hard drive market, saying it planned to surpass the 137GB interface for ATA drives by the end of the year. The vendor has joined forces with other IT companies, such as Compaq, Microsoft, VIA Technologies, ONTRACK Data International and StorageSoft, to support the latest standard by the American National Standards Intstitute (ANSI) T13 technical committee. The standard allows the future development of capacities of up to 144 petabytes (PB) of storage, or drives that can access around 100,000 times more data than the current 137GB interface standard. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/19994.html Radiohead bassist slams Cubase software Radiohead's bassist Colin Greenwood has kicked loose with his hardware and software preferences during an interview with UK site Culturelab. Colin says all the band have Powerbooks, which you might have guessed, and he's also got an Atari ST. On the Powerbooks the band run eMagic's Logic music production software "because it never crashes, unlike Cubase." Other things he likes are "an Akai MPC 60 for those like hiphop, swing moments and an Akai S3000 200XL just because everything sounds great. They're just things to play with instead of playing on the Playstation." http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/19990.html Fancy a 1GB flash disk the size/weight of a plastic lighter? Fancy a 1GB flash memory disk that plugs straight into your USB port and is the size and weight of a plastic lighter? It'll set you back £990.95 ex VAT, and you can't get it off a bloke standing outside the tube station holding a tray, but it is on sale in the UK. The downside is a read transfer rate of 750KB/second and a write rate of 450 KB/second. Well you can't have everything. The device, called OnlyDisk, comes in sizes from 8MB to 1GB, and a 2GB device is on the cards. A 32MB disk will set you back £49.88 ex VAT. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/19986.html The Era Of Living Wirelessly It's late March in Hannover, Germany, and the mammoth high-tech industry shindig known as CeBIT is primed for a coming-out party. An emerging short-range wireless networking standard, named Bluetooth after a fierce 10th-century Viking king, is planning a massive demo. The organizers of CeBIT — a worldwide trade show whose name is the German acronym for "Center for Office and Information Technology" — are promising to turn Kmart-sized Exhibition Hall 13 into the "world's largest Bluetooth mobile communications network." That means folks with specially equipped handhelds will be able to exchange information via radio waves, without cords. But Bluetooth has bitten off more than it can chew. The network never networks; gadgets don't gab. The throngs in the hall instead witness a throbbing technological toothache. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/167279.html Done ! __________________ This post was sponsored by Netcoco, who wants cookies, cookies, cookies and, you guessed it, more cookies