The Newspaper Shop -- Tuesday edition

[walktalker]

Girls hates me... NOT

Real seeks leg up with open source
In a glitzy San Francisco hotel meeting room Monday, RealNetworks announced it would enlist the open-source community in the company's long-running battle against Microsoft. Calling it his biggest move since releasing his first Net audio player seven years ago, CEO Rob Glaser spoke glowingly of the power of individual programmers to help produce stable software. In doing so, he joined a lengthening list of companies bruised by Microsoft competition that have turned to the open-source world for support, opening access to their own protected programming code in return for help. It's a tactic with mixed results at best. Netscape Communications, Sun Microsystems, and a string of smaller companies have blazed this trail before.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-945878.html

Nvidia open-sources developer tools
Graphics chip maker Nvidia announced Tuesday that it will make some of its Cg development tools for programming high-level graphics effects available as open-source software. Nvidia introduced Cg last month as part of a new focus on programmability in graphics chips. Thanks to advances in Microsoft's ubiquitous DirectX library of graphics instructions, graphics chips are beginning to handle computing tasks on their own rather than simply taking orders from the PC's main processor. For game developers and other graphics professionals, that means being able to achieve greater realism through programming high-level visual effects such as pixel shading. Taking advantage of such capabilities, however, will require development tools that eliminate the drudgery of doing painstaking "assembly language" coding.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-945880.html

Intel pushes faster for new Pentium 4
Intel is pushing up the release of faster Pentium 4 processors in an effort to speed even further ahead of rival Advanced Micro Devices. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker will come out with a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 for desktops later this quarter, and a 3GHz Pentium 4 in time for the holiday buying season, said sources close to the company. Earlier, the company said it would come out with a 3GHz Pentium 4 in the fourth quarter. Intel will also accelerate price cuts on older chips to make way for the faster Pentium 4 lineup, analysts said. According to Salomon Smith Barney analyst Jonathan Joseph, Intel will cut prices on its top-end 2.53GHz Pentium 4 chips by 63 percent when the faster chips launch.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-945718.html

Industry group wants 3D Web standards
A consortium of hardware manufacturers and software developers has banded together to establish a standard for bringing the world's library of computerized 3D images to the Web. The CAD (computer-aided design) 3D Working Group, which includes Microsoft, Intel, ATI Technologies and Dassault Systems, is working on a technical standard that will let furniture designers, car manufacturers and other companies post their CAD drawings to the Web, as well as permit software developers to create standardized software browsers that will let customers read those images, according to Rick Benoit, a technical manager in Intel's Microprocessor Labs.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-945725.html

Hollywood heads up anti-piracy charge
Hollywood's lobbyists are readying a new legislative push on Capitol Hill. On Monday, a lawyer for the Motion Picture Association of America said to expect new bills soon to assail illicit peer-to-peer file trading and curtail the piracy of digital TV broadcasts. Fritz Attaway, the MPAA's senior vice president for government relations, told an intellectual property conference that his group would, with the help of its powerful congressional allies, attempt a three-pronged approach this fall. Because Congress only has about five work weeks left before it is scheduled to adjourn for the year, the movie studios' effort has limited hopes of success until 2003.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-945720.html

Dow Chemical boosts display technology
Dow Chemical will increase the supply of a key material that is used in next-generation displays, boosting prospects for the emerging technology. Dow's Advanced Electronic Materials announced Tuesday that it is expanding a facility in Midland, Mich., to increase production of polymers used in organic light-emitting diode displays (OLED), which are expected to challenge liquid crystal displays in the flat-panel monitor market. While analysts don't expect OLED technology to pose a serious challenge to LCD technology for about 10 years, the increased supply of light-emitting polymers from the Dow Chemical facility should help the nascent OLED technology.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-945828.html

Could Hollywood hack your PC?
Congress is preparing to consider a proposal, backed by the entertainment industry, that would authorize copyright holders to disable PCs used for illicit file trading. A draft bill seen by CNET News.com marks the boldest political effort to date by music labels and movie studios to disrupt peer-to-peer networks that they view as an increasingly dire threat to their bottom line. Sponsored by Reps. Howard Berman, D-Calif., and Howard Coble, R-N.C., the measure would permit copyright holders to perform nearly unchecked electronic hacking if they have a "reasonable basis" to believe that piracy is taking place. Berman and Coble plan to introduce the 10-page bill this week.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-945923.html?tag=fd_lede

MSN TV prank creating "emergencies"
MSN TV users are inadvertently calling emergency services after falling prey to a prank program that changes the daily dialup number on their set-top boxes to 911. The program arrives in an e-mail message with the subject line "NEAT" and has been plaguing users since at least April, according to posts on newsgroups regarding WebTV, the former moniker for Microsoft's interactive TV service. The prank is not the first time that a malicious program has been used to call 911. In April 2000, the National Infrastructure Protection Center warned that a computer virus was causing infected PCs to dial emergency services.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-945911.html?tag=fd_top

Price cuts boost game machine sales
Sales of Microsoft's Xbox and competing video game consoles jumped substantially following price cuts in May, according to sales figures compiled by research firm NPD Funworld. Sales of Microsoft's Xbox and competing video game consoles jumped substantially following price cuts in May, according to sales figures compiled by research firm NPD Funworld. Xbox sales increased 131 percent in the two months following the price cut, NPD analyst Richard Oh said, compared with a 114 percent jump in the same period for Sony's PlayStation 2 and a 68 percent increase for Nintendo's GameCube. "All three got really healthy increases," he said, "especially considering that summertime is usually considered the slow season for the game industry."
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-945834.html?tag=fd_top

Computer Games as the Tools for Digital Filmmakers
The nascent genre will soon have its first film festival, organized by a small group of devotees known as the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences and planned for Aug. 17 in Mesquite, Tex. The festival is to include screenings of the raucous comedy "Hardly Workin' " and Mr. Hancock's "Eschaton: Nightfall," based on the fantasy novels of H. P. Lovecraft. The event will end with an awards ceremony. The festival's location outside Dallas is no accident. The earliest machinima movies were based on the computer game Quake — still the most-popular platform for the genre's directors — and Mesquite is home to Id Software, Quake's maker, and to QuakeCon, an annual convention for the game's most avid combatants. The film festival will coincide with this year's QuakeCon.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/22/arts/22ARTS.html

Is Internet Radio Dying?
Broadcasting on the web, or webcasting, allows audio to be streamed in real time to the listener, eliminating the wait times for downloads. Wharton public policy and management professor Gerald Faulhaber notes that many people listen to Internet radio at work, where broadband connections are more readily available. As reported in USA Today, research firm GartnerG2 estimates that 16% of the 156 million adults who use the Internet at work and at home listen to the thousands of radio stations available on the web. While some Internet radio offerings are affiliated with large media companies, like Radio@AOL, much of it is provided by small sites that focus on particular formats or musical genres. But the days of independent radio on the Net could be numbered, say some experts.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/a...0&homepage=yes

Finding patent truth in JPEG claim
A small videoconferencing company is laying claim to the ubiquitous JPEG format, igniting a backlash from some consumers and from a standards organization. Austin, Texas-based Forgent Networks posted a press release to its site earlier this month claiming to own a patent covering the technology behind JPEG, one of the most popular formats for compressing and sharing images on the Internet. According to the firm, the devices covered by the patent include cameras, cell phones, camcorders, personal digital assistants, scanners and other devices. It took a little more than a week for the statement to find its way to the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) committee, which denounced any attempts to derive fees from the standard.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-945686.html?tag=cd_mh

Privacy advocates look to state laws
With consumer-privacy efforts stalled in Congress, one expert is arguing that those who fear that intimate details of their private lives could be exposed already have plenty of protection through existing common law. More than 100 years of civil lawsuits in courtrooms around the country have provided a broad understanding of privacy rights, allowing consumers to sue for damages and encouraging companies to refrain from invasive practices, said Jim Harper, editor of conservative think tank Privacilla.org. In a report due to be released on Tuesday, Harper argues that lawsuits -- or the fear of lawsuits -- have largely held abusive marketing practices in check, while allowing companies to develop new techniques that result in savings for the consumer.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-945590.html?tag=cd_mh

Give a geek a hug
If you're like most people, when your computer crashes you groan, issue a string of expletives, and then wait idly by until your trusty information technology person rescues you from blue-screen hell. On Friday, it's time for you to show your appreciation for those geeks in shining armor.Ted Kekatos has created System Administrator Appreciation Day, a time to honor the people whom neither rain, nor snow, nor bizarre "illegal operation" errors can keep from fixing your machine. Kekatos, a droll system administrator in Chicago, was inspired to create the special day by a Hewlett-Packard ad he saw a few years ago.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-945573.html?tag=cd_mh

Creative to ship cable-free MP3
Singapore's Creative Technology will soon ship a tiny MP3 player that does away with cables when downloading music from a computer. The Nomad MuVo is a thumb-sized device with a detachable storage portion that can be inserted directly into a computer's USB port, allowing for drag-and-drop file transfer. Besides music files, the flash-memory storage can also hold any type of data file. Creative is riding on this to market the product as an all-around portable data-storage gadget. "You can transfer and store music, share digital images and data or back up your files in just seconds -- no need to burn a CD or send files through e-mail," said Craig McHugh, president of U.S. subsidiary Creative Labs.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-945759.html?tag=cd_mh

Motorola plans to Mickey Mouse around
Walt Disney has teamed with Motorola to produce a line of consumer electronics featuring popular cartoon characters.
First out of the gate this year will be a two-way radio and a cordless telephone, which will replace industry-standard electronic call tones with voices of Disney characters such as Cinderella, Mickey Mouse and Buzz Lightyear. The products, which are aimed at children, are being developed with the help of Frog Design. Disney plans to launch more products in 2003, featuring items from other categories that "uniquely combine Disney content and technology."
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-945752.html?tag=cd_mh

Canada shutters "mod chip" operation
Sony announced Monday that Canadian authorities have shut down an operation selling "mod chips" that allow the company's PlayStation 2 game console to play pirated discs. Federal prosecutors charged Robert Garby of Ottowa with selling illegal mod chips and pirated games through his "Kustum Komputers" business. He pled guilty in Ontario Court of Justice in Ottawa to six counts of criminal code violations and copyright law infringement and was fined $17,000 and sentenced to a year of probation. Sony is one of several game machine makers fighting manufacturers of mod chips, console add-ons that typically have to be soldered to the console's main circuit board. Once installed, the mod chips typically defeat copy protection measures, allowing machines to play illegally copied discs and discs intended for other regions.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-945540.html?tag=cd_mh

Making Your Bad Tunes Sound Good
In late June, Sweden's Propellerhead Software released the eagerly awaited new version of Reason, its virtual music studio program. It includes software samplers, synthesizers, a drum machine, a sequencer, digital effects and more. For $399, anyone with a computer and a song in their head can create music with professional audio quality. Reason is far from the only option for a budding bedroom studio whiz. Musicians now can buy not only studio packages like Reason, but also looping tools like Acid and Ableton Live; software synthesizers like Reaktor; samplers like GigaStudio; and recording packages like Cubase, Logic Audio and Pro Tools. In many ways, the explosion in the power and popularity of these programs is a parallel to the explosion of MP3s and digital distribution of music.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,53341,00.html

Matter, Antimatter, Other Matters
People who put together an international conference know that place is of the essence -- and the more resort-like and tropical that essence, the better. But sometimes a cooler location, like a groovy European city, can prove romantically compelling to weary travelers wearing sweat-sticky, itchy suits (or jeans, if the well-funded scientist is determined to seem teeth-gleamingly Californian). At the 31st International Conference on High Energy Physics, which opens Wednesday in Amsterdam, about 850 physicists representing more than 200 institutions from maybe 45 countries have signed up to attend, according to particle physicist Ger van Middelkoop, a longtime driving force in Dutch physics and chairman of the organizing committee. A quarter of the participants are American.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,53962,00.html

How to Preserve Digital Art
Digital technology is so ephemeral that an artwork created using a G4 Mac, Flash 4.0 software and C++ coding today may no longer be viewable 10, 20 or even 200 years from now. Film canisters are collecting dust after 75 years of nonuse, video formats from the 1980s are becoming unreadable and Web projects created just minutes ago are already becoming stale. As the half-life of these media becomes shorter and shorter, variable media art is in a race against technological obsolescence. That's why it's critical that these artworks are documented and preserved now, before they are lost indefinitely, observers say.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,53712,00.html

Self-Publish Stigma Is Perishing
Before 1998, it was rare for established publishing companies to bid on self-published fiction. But in the last 18 months, thanks in great part to authors' ability to use the Internet to market themselves, more than three dozen self-published novels have been picked up by major houses. Both authors had failed to get interest from agents or publishers when the books were in manuscript form. But there was no problem once the books had online attention and promising sales figures. When the effort to get an agent and a major New York publisher has failed, it can make sense to self-publish, said Edghill's agent, Anna Ghosh, of the Scovil Chichak Galen Literary Agency.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,53996,00.html

Gene patents "inhibit innovation"
Patents on DNA sequences "inhibit innovation and development" and should be the exception rather than the norm, says a panel of leading UK bioethicists. In the past, biotech companies have said that without such patent protection they would not have the economic incentive to invest in expensive research towards new drugs. A discussion paper, produced by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics (NCB), says that too many patents are of doubtful validity because they are being issued for genetic discoveries that are not adequately inventive. It recommends a number of significant changes to the way patents in the field are granted in the future and to limit possible adverse effects of those already issued.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992580

Race to launch first "spaceplane" hots up
The race to launch the world's first commercial spacecraft intensified on Tuesday with a deal that could let tourists pay $98,000 for a flight to the edge of space. US company Space Adventures has signed an agreement to sell seats aboard a sub-orbital spacecraft designed by the US aerospace company XCOR. XCOR's proposed space vehicle, called Xerus, could begin flights within three years, the company says. But completion of the spacecraft will depend on getting financial backing. XCOR is just one of a number of companies trying to develop a commercial space vehicle. In March 2002, Space Adventures signed deal with two Russian companies that hope to build another sub-orbital spacecraft, called Cosmopolis 21. But while the C-21 was little more than a mock-up, the XCOR's vehicle design has impressed space experts.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992582

Triangle Boy Still a Threat to Internet Filters
A Calif.-based software company Friday issued a warning for network administrators who think they have total control of content flowing in and out of their systems: Triangle Boy is alive and well... Triangle Boy is a peer-to-peer application that users can download for free. The user connects to a Triangleboy-enabled network of computers acting as servers in a way that lets them get around nearly all Internet filtering products. The Oakland-based SafeWeb developed the Triangle Boy software for use with its project with Voice of America in an effort to circumvent foreign governments (including Saudi Arabia, China, and the United Arab Emirates) that block free speech.
http://siliconvalley.internet.com/ne...le.php/1430141

Lawmakers Seek Rules to Stop Redistribution of Digital TV
Leading members of Congress are urging the Federal Communications Commission to intervene in a dispute between the entertainment and technology industries over how to prevent television viewers from redistributing digital broadcasts over the Internet. In a letter Friday to Michael K. Powell, the chairman of the F.C.C., Representative Billy Tauzin, a Lousiana Republican who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Representative John D. Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, wrote that the agency should move quickly to require computer and consumer electronics manufacturers to include anti-piracy technology that would prevent a program from being redistributed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/23/te...gy/23DIGI.html

More news later on

[butterfly_kisses]

haha suckers First post!
































whoops, sorry wrong forum

TA! walkertalker great post as always!

[TankGirl]

WT.............

Originally posted by walktalker
Creative to ship cable-free MP3
Singapore's Creative Technology will soon ship a tiny MP3 player that does away with cables when downloading music from a computer. The Nomad MuVo is a thumb-sized device with a detachable storage portion that can be inserted directly into a computer's USB port, allowing for drag-and-drop file transfer. Besides music files, the flash-memory storage can also hold any type of data file. Creative is riding on this to market the product as an all-around portable data-storage gadget. "You can transfer and store music, share digital images and data or back up your files in just seconds -- no need to burn a CD or send files through e-mail," said Craig McHugh, president of U.S. subsidiary Creative Labs.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-945759.html?tag=cd_mh

Competition to iPod... drag & dropping stuff from Windows Explorer to the device sounds good. 128 MB is not much memory, good only for a single hi-bitrate album. Even then the detachable storage section should make real world album swapping easy. You could copy every day a new album to your player and swap the memory cards (or the whole players ) head-to-head with a friend or a colleague.

- tg