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You mean, like this

From here : At a Senate hearing in June, Larry Cunningham, a New York prosecutor who is now a law professor, defended laptop searches--but not necessarily seizures--as perfectly permissible. Preventing customs agents from searching laptops "would open a vulnerability in our border by providing criminals and terrorists with a means to smuggle child pornography or other dangerous and illegal computer files into the country," Cunningham said.

What I want to know is who exactly "smuggles" child pornography around on a laptop. They may have it on their laptop, but they're not "smuggling" it into the country. They more than likely downloaded it from someplace that's already accessible to anyone in the country anyway.

You may be able to prosecute them for it, but it's not going to save any children. Anyone that wants it will just hide it better, and you'll end up arresting people that have a suspect image or three in their browser cache that they've probably never even seen. This is just more bullshit fear-mongering to further strip us of our liberties.

Yes I agree with this statement, I was stopped and had my laptop searched for about 1 hour. When they found images of me, my girlfriend, and two other girls ( a great threesome I had ) the officer begin to take his time searching my drive.

The worse thing about it were the questions, "are you sure she was 18", "are there any other images", all the while the other passengers walking by and viewing everything on my laptop screen.

Quite humiliating. Since then I travel with a vanilla laptop and do everything remote to my home.

You just combined a whole set of hairy issues that have nothing to do with the MIT talk. If government contractors design systems at ridiculous cost, thats a separate problem that i wish would be addressed ever. If theres a ton of equipment thats a bitch to patch, thats the original developers problem as they should not have sold it with the flaws in the first place, or at least started working on FIXING it as soon as all this came to light.

If they were willing to have MIT POSTPONE this talk for a reasonable amount of time instead of the aggression they encountered, i would be more sympathetic. From the sounds of their representative in the previous article their intent is to NOT bother fixing anything (IE: not until they make a brand new system).

There's a big difference between saying "we know its broken but refuse to fix it" as opposed to "Give us a chance. You know what its like dealing with government crap, but we'll get to it". Personally i applaud MIT for making the public aware that the paying customers may be subsidizing those who are riding for free on a known flaw. If the cost of the system is proportioned to volume in terms of pricing it will raise prices artificially for those who ARE legit to make up for those who aren't.

This is what they don't want their customers thinking about as its definitely FAR less overhead for them to simply increase the standard fares to make up for the costs of the system until those paying balance it out than to try to fix the system.

Basically, its like people who do friggan nothing at work getting the same wage because you get dumped with all their slackage. One group gets the value, but an entirely different group gets the cost.

In addition, what looked like a black-and-white faxed copy of the entire presentation was entered as evidence in publicly available court records available on the Web on Saturday, meaning any attempt to limit its distribution further will encounter an additional hurdle.

You were saying?

There are already iPhone knockoffs (Sprint's Instinct, the HTC Touch)

I'm not claiming the HTC Touch is superior to the iPhone (or vice versa), but...

• HTC Touch: launched June 5, 2007 and reviewed by CNET on June 7.
• iPhone: launched July 29, 2007.

I guess HTC designed and released their Touch in the 5 months after the iPhone's January Macworld announcement. Or maybe HTC breached Apple's legendary secrecy and started designing their "knockoff" before the iPhone announcement.

Or maybe Apple wasn't the first to make phones with touchscreens (especially outside the USA). Maybe HTC's TouchFLO interface, which is designed with one-handed operation in mind, isn't so similar to the iPhone and wouldn't be considered a "knockoff" even if it was released after the iPhone (and it wasn't).

The Pipistrel won $250,000 from NASA last year http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9758741-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20/

And in TFA:

One of the biggest prizes it granted was $50,000 for aircraft safety to the lone returning competitor, the Slovenian-built Pipistrel known as Virus. The plane, which was the big winner at the 2007 event, had added such precautions as a cabin integrated with Kevlar and an installed ballistic parachute system, or a deployable rocket that would launch a parachute 100 feet above the plane in the event of an emergency

But in answer to your question (again from TFA!):

The Pipistrel, for example, used a carbon-fiber propeller on its aircraft this year to reduce its noise by at least 10 percent, but that shift cut the plane's fuel-efficiency by as much as 50 percent.

It'll be interesting to see whether Dutch-style openness or Soviet-style secrecy prevails in Las Vegas.

Injuction was already granted. Insert Soviet joke here.

... There is no market for Linux versions of Adobe apps. There cannot be a market for what doesn't exist. There can be a demand. Demand does not create a market. Only the combination of supply and demand create a market.

If you wish to say that Adobe does not feel the demand is great enough to bother creating the market, than say so. Don't try to insinuate that Adobe hates open systems or that they are in bed with MS.

Even without using the correct definition of a market (supply + demand) you figured it out. No I do not wish to say that I think that Adobe does not feel the demand is great enough to bother creating the market. Neither you nor I can say what Adobe execs really are thinking.

What can be said is that there is demand for Adobe applications for Linux, natively. There is also enough demand that Photoshop has been a goal of WINE. There is demand, but strangely no supply.

Regardless, I don't have to insinuate. I can make accusations based on circumstances and past transgressions. It could be something as simple as an NDA for some MS SDK which prohibits work on competing platforms, like the NT SDK appeared to do for OS/2.

For several decades, MS has put pressure on software houses and OEMs to curb their activities with competing systems. Even Apple, which has an on-again, off-again, relationship with the Microsoftians was under strong pressure to drop technologies MS was gunning for. That includes Quicktime and the now defunct OLE-like OpenDoc, and quite possibly the OpenDocument Format.

the percentage of Blu-Ray that is PS3 is high. I don't know how high, but it's high, dropping a bit now though.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080118-new-nlu-ray-2-0-spec-makes-ps3-the-most-future-proof-player.html

At CES, the Blu-ray Disc Association announced that 3.5 million Blu-ray players had been sold to date. Of those, 3 million were PlayStation 3s, the most future-proof Blu-ray player on the market.

As for quality, the PS3 is one of the top blu-ray players, It may not have the highest picture quality, that award usually goes to samsung in the writeups, but with all the other features BD-Live,gaming etc.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/147209/the_best_bluray_players.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9874808-7.html

http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/03/blu-ray-sony-tech-personal-cx_mji_0403blu.html

http://buy.blorge.com/2008/07/15/buyers-guide-to-blu-ray-players-help-clear-up-the-confusion/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10005897-1.html

a quote:

If you've been following CNET's Blu-ray coverage, it shouldn't be shocking that standalones are struggling. The PS3 holds the top spot on our best Blu-ray players list, and every time we review a new Blu-ray player we use the PS3 as our reference. It's the best Blu-ray player we've tested so far, plus you get a high-def gaming console and a well-featured media streamer for $400. Yes, there are a few reasons why you may not want to use a PS3 as your Blu-ray player, but for the vast majority of people the PS3 is just a better value. And with standalone players at current price levels, it seems like consumers agree with us.

They're even saying forgo the dedicated video streamers like the AppleTV for PS3's and Xboxes, because you can rent and download HD content on them via PSN and XBoxLive

And even this article on six reasons NOT to use a PS3 as your blu-ray player still says it's the best one out there:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9941740-1.html

And a recent firmware update fixed some of the issues listed in that article.

And here's another thing. I'm responding to your post with Firefox 3.0.1 running on a PS3 with a Yellow Dog Linux install.

Like the PS2 Linux kit was the best $200 gaming related purchase I made all those years ago, because it increased the functionality of my PS2 even further beyond PS1 games, PS2 games and DVD's The PS3 trumps it.

the percentage of Blu-Ray that is PS3 is high. I don't know how high, but it's high, dropping a bit now though.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080118-new-nlu-ray-2-0-spec-makes-ps3-the-most-future-proof-player.html

At CES, the Blu-ray Disc Association announced that 3.5 million Blu-ray players had been sold to date. Of those, 3 million were PlayStation 3s, the most future-proof Blu-ray player on the market.

As for quality, the PS3 is one of the top blu-ray players, It may not have the highest picture quality, that award usually goes to samsung in the writeups, but with all the other features BD-Live,gaming etc.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/147209/the_best_bluray_players.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9874808-7.html

http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/03/blu-ray-sony-tech-personal-cx_mji_0403blu.html

http://buy.blorge.com/2008/07/15/buyers-guide-to-blu-ray-players-help-clear-up-the-confusion/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10005897-1.html

a quote:

If you've been following CNET's Blu-ray coverage, it shouldn't be shocking that standalones are struggling. The PS3 holds the top spot on our best Blu-ray players list, and every time we review a new Blu-ray player we use the PS3 as our reference. It's the best Blu-ray player we've tested so far, plus you get a high-def gaming console and a well-featured media streamer for $400. Yes, there are a few reasons why you may not want to use a PS3 as your Blu-ray player, but for the vast majority of people the PS3 is just a better value. And with standalone players at current price levels, it seems like consumers agree with us.

They're even saying forgo the dedicated video streamers like the AppleTV for PS3's and Xboxes, because you can rent and download HD content on them via PSN and XBoxLive

And even this article on six reasons NOT to use a PS3 as your blu-ray player still says it's the best one out there:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9941740-1.html

And a recent firmware update fixed some of the issues listed in that article.

And here's another thing. I'm responding to your post with Firefox 3.0.1 running on a PS3 with a Yellow Dog Linux install.

Like the PS2 Linux kit was the best $200 gaming related purchase I made all those years ago, because it increased the functionality of my PS2 even further beyond PS1 games, PS2 games and DVD's The PS3 trumps it.

the percentage of Blu-Ray that is PS3 is high. I don't know how high, but it's high, dropping a bit now though.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080118-new-nlu-ray-2-0-spec-makes-ps3-the-most-future-proof-player.html

At CES, the Blu-ray Disc Association announced that 3.5 million Blu-ray players had been sold to date. Of those, 3 million were PlayStation 3s, the most future-proof Blu-ray player on the market.

As for quality, the PS3 is one of the top blu-ray players, It may not have the highest picture quality, that award usually goes to samsung in the writeups, but with all the other features BD-Live,gaming etc.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/147209/the_best_bluray_players.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9874808-7.html

http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/03/blu-ray-sony-tech-personal-cx_mji_0403blu.html

http://buy.blorge.com/2008/07/15/buyers-guide-to-blu-ray-players-help-clear-up-the-confusion/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10005897-1.html

a quote:

If you've been following CNET's Blu-ray coverage, it shouldn't be shocking that standalones are struggling. The PS3 holds the top spot on our best Blu-ray players list, and every time we review a new Blu-ray player we use the PS3 as our reference. It's the best Blu-ray player we've tested so far, plus you get a high-def gaming console and a well-featured media streamer for $400. Yes, there are a few reasons why you may not want to use a PS3 as your Blu-ray player, but for the vast majority of people the PS3 is just a better value. And with standalone players at current price levels, it seems like consumers agree with us.

They're even saying forgo the dedicated video streamers like the AppleTV for PS3's and Xboxes, because you can rent and download HD content on them via PSN and XBoxLive

And even this article on six reasons NOT to use a PS3 as your blu-ray player still says it's the best one out there:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9941740-1.html

And a recent firmware update fixed some of the issues listed in that article.

And here's another thing. I'm responding to your post with Firefox 3.0.1 running on a PS3 with a Yellow Dog Linux install.

Like the PS2 Linux kit was the best $200 gaming related purchase I made all those years ago, because it increased the functionality of my PS2 even further beyond PS1 games, PS2 games and DVD's The PS3 trumps it.

CNET is saying the laptop wasn't stolen: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10008094-83.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

It was just misplaced...

It's not just Vermont, you liberty lover.

Oklahoma and a few other states are against it too.

From here : At a Senate hearing in June, Larry Cunningham, a New York prosecutor who is now a law professor, defended laptop searches--but not necessarily seizures--as perfectly permissible. Preventing customs agents from searching laptops "would open a vulnerability in our border by providing criminals and terrorists with a means to smuggle child pornography or other dangerous and illegal computer files into the country," Cunningham said.

What I want to know is who exactly "smuggles" child pornography around on a laptop. They may have it on their laptop, but they're not "smuggling" it into the country. They more than likely downloaded it from someplace that's already accessible to anyone in the country anyway.

You may be able to prosecute them for it, but it's not going to save any children. Anyone that wants it will just hide it better, and you'll end up arresting people that have a suspect image or three in their browser cache that they've probably never even seen. This is just more bullshit fear-mongering to further strip us of our liberties.

In our (as a country) fear of Terrorism and our fear for the safety of our children, we are slowly strangling ourselves of our vitality. Soon, we as a country will be like scared little children hiding under our beds from a thunderstorm. And in the meantime, the rest of the World will eventually pass us by.

First quad-core laptop hits U.S.

Xtremenotebooks launches quad core laptop

Quad-core notebook

Dell launches new quad-core laptop

Build your own quad-core laptop

That way you won't have to see the cute internet police on your browser every 30 minutes.

Except for the fact that every character you type into the gmail compose field gets sent over the network in clear text, as does your session key. Google does it so they can provide on the fly features like spellcheck and suggestions etc, but it is a huge risk.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9755575-7.html

Because this is not a copyright issue, there is no sixty year timeframe involved.

I'm just going by what the various articles have said. Like this one, which says "News wire service Reuters is reporting Hasbro and Mattel are demanding that Facebook remove the popular Facebook application Scrabulous due to copyright infringement." Or this one, which says "Hasbro on Thursday filed a copyright and trademark lawsuit in New York against the creators of the ad-supported Scrabulous application, which boasts an astonishing half-million daily users." Or this one, which says "Hasbro, the Rhode Island company that owns the trademark to the 60-year-old board game, Scrabble, on which Scrabulous is closely based, has also asked Facebook to remove the game under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ..."

But, hey, some random stranger on Slasdot assures me this has nothing to do with copyright, so I guess I'll just go with that.

As a game designer, I would like to remind you that in the eyes of the law, for a very good reason, game designs are not art.

As an intelligent human being who has actually looked around and noticed what happens in the real world, I would like to remind you that a can of Campbell's soup can be art. Art is not a thing, it is the act of creation and appreciation. I've even taken some pretty artistic dumps in my day.

Spend less time worrying about what should or should not be, and more time understanding the situation correctly.

Spend more time actually reading up on the subject we are commenting on, and less dispensing unsolicited advise to people who didn't ask for it.

Yea, that's going to be real effective. Do you know how tough modern memory cards are?

Anything that will destroy a card will be extremely hard to pass off as an accident by a cop. "...The subject was being belligerent so I took his camera away from him, and then I accidentally dropped it, stomped on it for a few minutes, ran over it with my car, then set it on fire. Accidentally."

Here is exactly that. Banks (Bank of America), uploaded, via FTP, customer data to Acxiom, which got stolen and used by spammers. Could have been worse, this guy seems to have thrown away everything he didn't need to send spam. The original investigation was a different gent who accessed customer info while a contract employee at Acxiom.

Attempts were made to make it a legal requirement to notify the public after such a breach, I don't know the status of those laws.

They aren't used to having to pay for their OS directly and suddenly having to do so may prove to be a psychological barrier to a lot of them.

So, your saying that Microsoft will use an ad based business model, like they do for Windows.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9687999-1.html Yep, it happened.

By installing software from this company you acknowledge you understand that we're a 90% owned subsidiary of EMC, a BSA member company and our auditors can come in to bankrupt you at any time if you can't prove on the spot that the license is valid."

Is there anything else you need to know about this? Really?

No need to guess, if you had bothered to follow the link, you would have seen that the hardware used was a HP Pavilion dv2000 with 2 GB RAM. As you can tell from the specs, this is a low-end laptop with only a Core Duo T2400 processor and Intel integrated graphics.

I can see the purpose behind this kind of test - it's very, very popular to hate Vista even though there are very few actual problems with the OS (especially since SP1). We switched to Vista at work right after it came out and while there were a few rough edges to start with, I never felt like going back to XP. Vista is simply better in every way except performance on low-end systems.

Of course, with the anti-Vista hatefest still going on, there's little Microsoft can do but try new marketing approaches to get that message across. They're hardly running out of money, after all. Unfortunately this means that Windows 7 will likely be Vista with a new name and some of the rough edges smoothed out, to pull the same trick as the "Mojave Experiment" - give Vista a different name and people might like it.

Hopefully you uneducated around here will understand that OLPC hardware will eventually catch up to Vista.
Hardware gets cheaper over time(duhhh), but if you have been using Linux you probably wouldn't understand anyting about hardware upgrades as you have been left in the dark without drivers.

Basically, the cold hard reality is that OLPC used to be a Linux project and it is hilarious now to come here to see all the bitterness towards it now that XP has taken over.

Vista is bloat though, it is just too bad the dummies around here tested it on crappy old hardware for 5 seconds when it works perfectly fine on modern hardware made in the last 2-3 years. Your agenda is showing and when you mentally stress out your mind enough that you hate Microsoft, you just turn into a stamping robot that is predictable.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-9998336-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Since this seems to be the "flaws" thread: My biggest concern with the robocars is mentioned at the very beginning of one of the articles, who owns the car and who controls the car. Every time I get in a car service car or Taxi here in NYC I am photographed by a camera in the car. It's there to help find/reduce taxi driver muggers. But if this is put into a robocar, maybe the camera will be linked into a wireless online system, to catch terrorists or something. In fact I would rather expect the robocars to be sending various chunks of information to a central real time database. It makes sense for traffic, maintainence, robocar gone haywire, etc. My concern is more along the lines of getting in a robotaxi and having some central computer tell it to lock the doors and drive me to a police station or the like. Yes I know it's Orwellian paranoia, but given the DHS mindset it's almost impossible to not try to have such a useful tool at the disposal of the police and the Feds. Just plug a wanted persons biometrics into the central robocar monitoring system and when the internal cameras get a match, they deliver the person right to the authorities; what could be better for law enforcement? Of course there would be laws passed that make it more and more difficult/expensive to maintain a private vehicle instead of using a robocar. Congestion tolls, HOV lanes, etc. Now when you combine that technology with the new reality of thoughtcrime and the loss of Habeas Corpus well it makes Orwell look optimistic. You visited a webpage that had a link to kiddeporn/terrorist recuitment/drug dealers/hategroups, the next day your ride to work takes you to a police station for a "debriefing".

The harder case for Hasbro is the copyright claim -- games have "thin" copyrights. In general, the only elements that are protected are (a) the text of the instructions and (b) the graphical elements. So, if Scrabulous didn't copy the Scrabble instructions and didn't copy the graphical elements, they should be fine.

I think they did, and I expect either those will be changed, or Hasbro will be successful in shutting them down.

But here's the kicker: the game makers are citizens and residents of India, while the legal jurisdiction is the US. They can just sit back and let the money roll in until the tap gets turned off without any fear of losing anything. From the original article:

...the defendants could simply ignore it if they [have] no U.S. assets to seize, and aren't worried about Indian courts enforcing a default judgment.

If the patent is really like that it is useless

Ding ding ding! PageRank's patent is simply one of thousands upon thousands of useless patents exactly like this. Take, for instance, this lawsuit over this patent. Read the line items there, and tell me how one would go about creating a "video codec" using "a single semiconductor chip". I'm almost willing to bet that this "Advanced Video Technologies" couldn't tell me either, but I'm sure they thought that it sounded like it would be a good idea.

Of course they store user wishlists in a db, but they're rich, there's no way anyone would go after them first...

Just think, Amazon sued over the One-Click Buying patent ten years ago. Wouldn't it be bad karma, poetic justice, or Ironic if they were in fact sued over this?

http://news.cnet.com/2300-1044_3-6239928-1.html

Yeah, even the fact that Gates said it in an interview is (10 year) old news:

"Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software," he said. "Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

Have you had a chance to read the new article about Child porn and Cable companies letting a private organization dictate their content?

Check this out

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-9994159-46.html

This scares me a hell of a lot more than usenet. Usenet is basically used by the more "in" technical crowd.

Standard websites and family photos of bathing children etc have in the past been called Child Porn when parents try to develop harmless photos. This went away for a long time because of the digital age... Now these buggers will be able to repeat the same crap with more innocent photo's against parents who are not doing anything wrong.

There is real child porn out there.. I get that.. and kids should be protected... protect the children ... yata yata...

But giving an unsupervised private organization complete control over the vast majority of US web space content is pretty scary stuff.

Chrysler is planning in-car 802.11 "hotspots" on all their new vehicles, you wouldn't even need to install anything in the vehicle to find out where it's been. All it would take is setting up a network of fixed access points in monitor mode (kismet or something similar) along intersections that tracks and logs the vehicle's SSID/MAC address OUI's, and you could effectively and cheaply be able to monitor a slew of vehicle's whereabouts without the owner even knowing. I think this new in-car wifi fad will have some (un)intended consequences to privacy.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9833743-37.html

You are absolutely correct!

This is slightly off-topic, but Genarlow Wilson was a 17-year old high school football player who received consensual oral sex from a 15-year old girl and was sentenced to prison for 10 years for aggravated child molestation. He received several scholarship offers and was an excellent student. (Source)

There are also many stories of 16/17 year olds exchanging nude photos of each other and being charged with child pornography. (Source)

I think kiddie porn (pics of young children) is absolutely disgusting and people seeking it need serious psychiatric help, but our laws need to distinguish between those looking to exploit children and kids that are just sending pictures of themselves over the internet without realizing the consequences.

buzzword-compliant computing. I hate stories like this, which are really just cover for somebody's marketing.

word. cloud computing - precedes rain computing - hides sun computing (not to be confused with Sun microprocessors - which is dead) ... blah blah blah...

Raoul Castro only recently started opening the country up to new technology. It's hard to believe, but until he came to power computers, DVD players, and cell phones were banned.

And Cuban policy- Gizmodo.com> and cnet.com

I RTF article yesterday:

Google balked over the issue of turning over information that would include data about videos employees watched or uploaded to YouTube

After Viacom pointed out why they wanted the IPs, Google really couldn't say no. It still appears Google's original request to strip IPs was motivated by self interest more than anything.

Yes - http://news.cnet.com/2100-1016_3-6041804.html?hhTest=1
they - http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/03/windows_steals_top_server_os_s.html
actually - http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/32706.html
do - http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6041804.html

But thanks for coming out.

what are you talkin here....there's already an instant on OS provided via motherboard.

The rest, I agree: integrity check = bad idea. I disagree that for whatever reason long bootup times should just be considered acceptable.

For reference's sake: it only starts at a minute, it ends at multiple minutes after patches, changes, etc. especially on windows and consoles. Not so much on linux.

-- and of course nothing whatever can go wrong with a *nix based platform used in the same environment.

There is also the small natter of FDA approval:

The 8-pound in-home gadget connects caregivers and patients outside of hospitals or clinic settings. It manages vital-sign collection, patient reminders, educational content, and motivational messages. The device has a 40GB hard drive. Information collected by the device is sent to the health care professional, and from there, physician and doctor can engage in video conferencing to discuss health issues. Doctors monitor and remotely care for their patients via an online interface using software called the Intel Health Care Management Suite. It currently runs on Windows XP only.
With the ability to hook up to wired and wireless monitors, such as glucose or blood pressure gauges, a caregiver can schedule times to remotely measure vital signs, or patients can check their own. The encrypted information is sent to a remote database, as long as the device connected to the Internet via broadband.
The Intel Health Guide PHS6000 received FDA clearance to enter the market after years of development and research, including pilot studies in the United Kingdom and the U.S. Intel said it expects the product to be commercially available from health care providers by late 2008 or early 2009 Intel's in-home health device gets FDA nod [July 10. 2008], Intel Health News

The purpose of the device is to support home care for the chronically ill. Home care is cheaper. Patients tend to remain more active, engaged and independent.

The 500+ figure includes each e-book as a separate "app", but still there's a pretty good showing with much more to come. A lot of it is free or very cheap.

It also includes the doubling up of the free apps -- poking around, it looks like almost half of them are "free" demos, and there's a second premium app you have to buy.

It also includes some pretty crappy apps that surprisingly made the launch day cut: "seven tip calculators, three flashlight applications, nine Bible-related entries, two Zen garden applications, five blackjack games, and almost 10 percent of the entries are ebooks. There is an application to simulate the playing of a tiny violin to console your friends, a Light Saber emulator, an application that gives you a cartoon eye, and two applications that simulate the look of a beer mug."

A $0.99 "flashlight" app that does nothing but turn the screen white seems like a dubious inclusion in the "500+" claim. Others include a $2.99 app called "Looky" that provides Google Suggest capability, which Google provides for free. My favorite is "Hold On!", which records how long you can hold your finger on an on-screen button (with "records").

As for the "doubling up of the free apps," I see more free "ad-supported" versions than "demos." Double-counting "demos" would be really obnoxious, but fully-functional ad-supported versions are less so, IMO. One nice-looking example for Flickr users: Exposure (free ad-supported, $9.99 w/o ads), a Flickr browser that has a "Near Me" feature which uses the iPhone's location capabilities (including 1st-gen iPhones) to browse photos near you.

You were the one that started with the rudeness,your entire reply was basically how wonderful Vista was and how i didn't have a clue what i was talking about. does Intel not have a clue too? because Intel is skipping Vista. And i can find you example after example of the same thing. We have NEVER had Fortune 500 companies elect to stick with an old OS rather than simply upgrade when the 3 year cycle comes around,ever.

Um,you do know that dual cores with 2Gb of RAM aren't what you find at Dell,Best Buy,Wal mart,etc,right? In fact the big market is right now a Celeron or Sempron with 1Gb of RAM,although I still see plenty of machines with 512Mb,although those are finally being fazed out. You do realize that one core is pretty much dealing with Vista,right? Here is a little experiment you can do to see the difference between Vista and XP: make an image of your HDD. benchmark Vista,then install XP and benchmark it. The performance gains will probably make you cry. And as for gamers switching to Vista? I have had a few build $2000+ SLI rigs switch to Vista for DX10,although I have had two come back and ask for dual boot simply because of performance and compatibility issues. The biggest thing I have been seeing here is the hacked DX10 on XP trick. I recently played Halo 2 and Juarez on a customers new gamer rig and DX10 ran great.

And finally what does the EEE have to do with it? Are you kidding? Surely you can't be serious,unless you want us to honestly expect us to believe you are not a shill. Laptops are selling like hotcakes,and they aren't those Alienware monsters. I have personally seen my college campus spread with EEEs and other minibooks in less than a year. I have had Housewives,salesmen,office managers,etc come to me to order them machines in the last 12 months,and the first thing out of their mouths after saying they want a laptop is "Can you get one of those EEEs?" Companies like Intel and Nvidia don't spend the serious R&D money required to build new chips without doing serious market research. People want cheap,small,eay to use laptops that they can slip in a handbag or briefcase and just go. Vista is bloated(15Gb default install,WTF?),sucks power,and on mini machines like the cloudbook,EEE,Mininote,etc it is simply too slow to use. Do you really think all these companies are coming out with netbooks because there is no market?

IMHO the only thing you got right in your post was the Apple iPhone,and I think they will end up the future,which scares the hell out of MSFT. I am betting within the next two years you'll see all the cell phone providers offering small EEE style laptops for free with a 2 year service agreement to use their wireless data plan. The phone companies can lock in all those customers,and for what the average person is using a laptop for(webmail,surfing,document editing) any lightweight Linux distro with Open office will work beautifully. Why do YOU think MSFT is so disparate to get into the ad business? Because they know if Win7 isn't a hit they are going to be seriously hurting. Most folks aren't buying gamer rigs,they are buying based on price. And on what you get from Dell,HP,etc for a basic PC Vista is a truly painful experience.I have already had two customers bring in single core Dells that the HDD literally thrashed itself to death.

If you have read anything put out by Ballmer in the last three years or any of the emails in the class action suit you know that Vista wasn't designed for users,its "protected path" top to bottom DRM was designed to appeal to big media in the hopes of becoming the iTunes of video. But folks by and large are not using their pc as a HTPC,they are watching their videos on their Chinese DVD player or their PS3. All MSFT has done by trying to force eveyone into the same DRM overloaded box is p*ss off a large portion of their customers,who are know looking at alternatives. Whether that alternative will be Linux or Apple,or MSFT getting its act together with Win7 I

Well, higher-res, actually. 1024x600 is just not enough pixels. 1280x768 would give it the same amount of screen real estate as many full-size notebooks. And it's not impossible; there have been notebooks in the past with small WXGA screens, such as the Fujitsu P2120, with a 10" WXGA screen (and that was five years ago!)...

As another poster stated. It's not just about resolution. The megapixel seems to be the megaherz of digital cameras.

For your average vacation shots a real HDR sensor would be much more valuable than yet another megapixel. See eg.

Panasonic sensor tackles key photo problem--dynamic range

from cnet we have:

The specs on the two cameras, however, show the lower-resolution version to be faster: 1.4 seconds per capture for the H3DII-39 over 1.1 seconds for the H3DII-50. That could simply be implementation-specific, though.

Indeed, 1.4 seconds is a very long time to not move. Only useful for objects and scenery, certainly not going to do people or wildlife.

I do not think that means what you think it means.

It has nothing to do with shutter speeds. You just can't shoot again until 1.4 seconds, which is how long it takes the camera to process and write the image to the card. The camera has a frame rate of about 0.7 FPS.

from cnet we have:

The specs on the two cameras, however, show the lower-resolution version to be faster: 1.4 seconds per capture for the H3DII-39 over 1.1 seconds for the H3DII-50. That could simply be implementation-specific, though.

Indeed, 1.4 seconds is a very long time to not move. Only useful for objects and scenery, certainly not going to do people or wildlife.

The times refer to saving the photos, not exposing them.

from cnet we have:

The specs on the two cameras, however, show the lower-resolution version to be faster: 1.4 seconds per capture for the H3DII-39 over 1.1 seconds for the H3DII-50. That could simply be implementation-specific, though.

Indeed, 1.4 seconds is a very long time to not move. Only useful for objects and scenery, certainly not going to do people or wildlife.