News

Mac has quietly slipped a new Xwindow system for OSX (Sounds like O.S. Sex right?). This will allow more Unix proggies to run natively.

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X11 provides a windowing environment that lets Unix programs run on Mac OS X essentially the same way they do on their native operating systems. The tool also makes the process of developing a native OS X application faster, while allowing programs to run on a Mac in the meantime. Also, X11 running on OS X gives Unix users a portable option they might not have with Unix.

Let me just clean out the inbox again. I'm going to work on ASEville articles, and more.

CES coverage @ Designtechnica.
Kingwin 450Watt PSU @ PC Abusers.
Aerocool heatsink @ MTB.
Black Ice Pro @ Nexus Hardware.
Albatron Ti4680p @ 3DV.
A black case @ Hexus.
Fake aquarium side panel @ 3DGM.
Vantec Aeroflow @ Extensiontech.
MSI DVD drive @ Viperlair.

I'm so damn lazy, I gotta start working on the site's code more.

In Asia, there are tons more gamers than people who use the internet for 'good use'. That makes me proud.

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The survey, obtained by Reuters on Tuesday and covering six Asian countries, estimates that half of South Korea's 27 million Internet users dial up for the latest Web games including the massive, multi-player role-playing (MMORPG) genre. In China, which has 48 million Web users, about 43 percent were gamers, compared with 16 percent who shopped over the Internet.

SBC claims that they are the ones that made frame. Frames are when you see two split windows on a site, that sort of thing. It is so common.

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In the letter sent to Museum Tour President Marilynne Eichinger, SBC Intellectual Property President Harlie Frost pointed out that the Museumtour.com Web site contains tabs pointing to different Web pages within the site, and those tabs are in a frame that does not disappear as a person navigates the site. SBC said those "features (as well as other valuable features) appear to infringe several issued claims" related to certain patents. The company urges Museum Tour to sign up for its licensing program.

Well, looks as though AOL and Yahoo have switched places. Yahoo is now very profitable while AOL is being hammered. The internet sector is very weird to be in.

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Still, the series of bets made under the leadership of Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, who replaced Tim Koogle in May 2001, have done much to please investors and to quiet naysayers. Yahoo reported Wednesday its third-consecutive quarter of profitability, booking $46.2 million in net profit and a 51 percent jump in revenue to $285.8 million.

The new workstation boards based on the Geforce FX will be out next month. Expect to pay a load of money for them($1300-$2000).

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Graphics cards based on the Quadro FX should be available in the first week of February, priced at around $2,000 for the FX 2000 and $1,300 for the FX 1000, Chen said. Nvidia will produce additional versions of the Quadro FX over the course of the year, he said.

Well, we're all screwed now. A 21st amino acid was produced. Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye!

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The world's first truly artificial organism has been engineered by researchers in California. The bacterium makes an amino acid that no other organism uses to build proteins. The work is being hailed as "a very great accomplishment" and the technique promises to open unique avenues for manufacturing drugs/

The first country to see the Windows source code is Russia. I still wonder if we will see any leaks.

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Signing on to Microsoft's Government Security Program will allow Russia, and any other signatory, to weave its own technology into Microsoft's Windows platform and adapt Windows to its needs and test its ability to fend off hackers.

Sounds awfully like Linux, so what is this? Open closed source.

Some interesting things in the space news today.

NASA wants to use nuclear propulsion. They also want to go to Mars within this decade!

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Researchers believe new nuclear propulsion systems could triple the current speed limit for space travel of 29,000 kilometres per hour. This would make it possible, for example, get to Mars in two months, rather than six. But NASA has dismissed media speculation that it is planning a nuclear-fuelled mission to take astronauts to Mars.

First Israeli in space symbolic.

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Colonel Ramon, a 48-year-old combat pilot in the Israeli Air Force and the son of a Holocaust survivor, is the first citizen of his country to venture into space. The accomplishment, he said, is not his alone.

A trick black hole.

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When working with big numbers and data from faraway places, small errors can have huge consequences. Black holes, for example, can seem to pop in and out of existence, only to possibly materialize yet again.

Top 10 mysteries for 2003.

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The funny thing about discoveries is that they often produce new mysteries, too. This year was no exception, as many remarkable space science findings generated puzzling problems for astronomers to look into.

Plenty of things in my inbox to get clean. By the way, Have you seen the Sim City 4 review yet? What a game. Let's see, ASEville's articles still need work, but I got the first few steps working, everything should be cake until the picture step. I'm calling the computer section just 'systems'. That's about it.

Hardware:
FIC AN19E Stealth @ Zephiretech.
Radeon 9500 mod. (Some info is wrong)
Athlon XP 2700+ @ OCA.

Other:
Steelpad S3 @ ExtensionTech.net.
Lian Li drive bezel @ Voidedwarrant.
iRock MP3 player @ 3DGM.
LIUtilities Winbackup @ Ascully.
Aluminum fan @ Viperlair.
Innotek GPU block @ Nexus.
Innotek HDD noise reduction @ PC-A.
Modded gameboy with backlight @ Ascully.
CoolerMaster ramsinks @ Viperlair.

The Sim City line was my favorite since the first Sim City back in the 80's. With super enhanced graphics and much more micromanagement, Sim City 4 will be sure to rock your world.



Check out the full review.

Now you know this is going to be bad, but easily broke once again. If you want to escape this, just use another OS for burning CDs.

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Microsoft believes it may have come up with a solution. The new software is called the Windows Media Data Session Toolkit. It enables music labels to lay songs onto a copy-controlled CD in multiple layers, one that would permit normal playback on a stereo and a PC. The PC layer, laid digitally on the same disc, can be modified by the content provider, so that they could prevent, for example, burning songs onto another CD, said David Fester, general manager, digital media entertainment for Microsoft.

This is the 4th game in the Sim City series. Sim City 4 is no kids game, but it will leave you with endless hours of gameplay.Next Page »

Yeah, there was downtime. No idea what caused it. If you find any problems, let me know. I was making my Sim City 4 review, but I'll put that up tomorrow. There is soooo much stuff in it!

Interesting, they list OLED display technology coming out in 2003 as well. I'd love to see one of those.

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Shipments of panels made with TFT LCD technology, especially LTPS (low-temperature poly-silicon) panels, will grow faster than those made by other display technologies and will hold a 40.7% market share by 2005

Wow, when did you think that game servers can be used to make a large DDoS attack? There are many games affected, you're probably playing at least one of them.

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The flaw occurs because servers that include the GameSpy networking code automatically send responses to queries for status information and don't verify the sender's address. An attacker can just ask the server for the information, but forge the data so that the packets appear to come from a fake address. When the game server responds, the large amount of information sent in reply goes to the target of the attack instead.

The stupidphone OS used by some big and bulky cell phones/monster PDAs have a security flaw that allows people to do stuff to it. I'm talking about wirelessly also.

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"The Orange SPV has not been 'hacked'," Hack wrote. "The (security measure) has, rather, been legally circumvented by exploiting existing bugs in the bundled software and operating system. This circumvention allows developers to test their applications on their own SPV prior to going through the Orange certification process. This is surely a necessity in any robust and quality-assured development scheme."

A bit late. Anyway, I was just informed by my nephew that he'll be having a lan party in NJ in late June of this year. More details later in the year. Speaking of lan parties, I am planning on having one also in the summer. Who'd be interesting in coming to NJ/NY?

The story about Israel's role in Columbia's mission.

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In the final 30 minutes before blast off, all the channels chewed over Ramon's role in the destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor. Even the Holocaust was dragged into the debate, in the automatic context: an Israeli in space is a show of Israeli and Jewish potency, something of which to be proud, a national holiday. Another context: the attempt to build a public perception of the Israeli Air Force as the Space Force, fighting the nation's enemies outside of the earth's atmosphere, to rouse the cream of the nation's youth, to demonstrate just how tight Israeli-U.S. cooperation really is, to inculcate in the viewers a belief that Ramon's flight improves Israel's strategic position in the world.

Watch out for Jupiter tonight.

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Right now, Jupiter rises well above the horizon, to an altitude of nearly 30 degrees in astronomers' parlance, by around 8:45 p.m. local time. (Your fist held at arm’s length measures roughly 10 degrees. So when we say Jupiter rises to an altitude of 30 degrees, it would appear to be roughly "three fists" above the horizon.) Altitude is good for telescopic viewing because the planet's reflected sunlight passes through less atmosphere above Earth en route to an eyepiece, which means less distortion. Jupiter reaches the 30-degree height as early as 7:45 p.m. by month’s end.

Speed of Gravity WRONG.

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One physicist called the interpretation of the finding "nonsense". Others were more diplomatic, suggesting that the experiment, involving observations of the bending of light from a distant galaxy as the light sped by the planet Jupiter, had instead measured other phenomena.

Computer code for talking to aliens.
[QUOTE]For example, to generate the Fibonnacci series—a mathematical sequence related to many natural phenomena and also to human aesthetic judgments—we start by adding "1 + 1." We then take the result of this addition, "2," and add it to the last number that was used to get this sum (that is, the second "1"). We then repeat this process over and over: "1 + 1 = 2," "1 + 2 = 3," "2 + 3 = 5," "3 + 5 = 8," "5 + 8 = 13," and so on. We can specify these simple rules of addition very clearly in a computer program, and we will always get the same series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, and so on. In an interstellar message that attempts to communicate the Fibonnacci series, we could provide the recipients with a run of the program that they could use to check their understanding of the program.[/QUOTE:1042858

So they lost a few dollars... or two hundred million...

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Fourth quarter sales declined by 28 percent from the fourth quarter of 2001 and increased by 35 percent from the third quarter of 2002. In the fourth quarter of 2001, AMD reported sales of $951,873,000 and a net loss of $15,842,000, or $0.05 per share.

AMDZone has a full article including AMD's outlook for the future.

It seems as though HPQ is doing very well, selling 120K more computers than Dell. When they sucked up Compaq, it was for the better.

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Hewlett-Packard, meanwhile, took back the unit shipment lead from Dell Computer by shipping 120,000 more computers than Dell in the fourth quarter. HP's surge largely came as the result of strong consumer sales and aggressive price cutting, said Jim McDonnell, vice president of marketing in the personal systems group at HP. The fourth quarter is traditionally a more consumer-oriented quarter.

One thing I have noticed, if your buying a second or third (etc) PC, you may want to look for some great deals by these companies. IMO of course.

Anyone else think that AOL is shooting itself in the foot? Steve Case really moved the company right along.

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AOL Time Warner on Thursday said CEO Richard Parsons will assume a newly created position of chairman and CEO following a unanimous vote by the company's board of directors, replacing outgoing Chairman Steve Case.
The move cements Parsons' authority over the troubled media giant, giving him a dual executive role at a time when a wave of business scandals has heightened concerns that U.S. corporations have not done enough to ensure adequate boardroom checks and balances.

Past few days, I wasn't home and I left some news at home. I waited so I can lump it together.

Koolance EXos @ OCA.
Basic Case Mod @ Monster-hardware.
Koolance case @ Buddhacon.
Antec True blue PSU @ PCA.
Samsung combo drive @ Tweaknews.
Vantec stealth PSU @ 3dGM.
Alum fan @ Casetest.
Dual Radiator @ NExus.
iRock MP3 Player @ Viperlair.
Abit AT7-Max2 @ OCA.

There will be new version of Itanium CPUs coming out next year and the year after. The latter will feature dual cores.

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Under the new schedule, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker this summer will release Madison, a souped-up version of the current Itanium 2 with 6MB of level 3 cache, according to Jason Waxman, marketing manager for enterprise processors at Intel. Increasing the cache, a reservoir of memory located on the processor, generally enhances performance.

You know, interdevice connections. I wasn't there, this is the NYT.

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What excited the manufacturers here most was the prospect that all these digital devices will create even more needs to fill. Now, the companies say, people need so-called media hubs and computer servers to store and organize photos, music and video. They need wired and wireless networks to move them around their houses. And they need portable gizmos to keep all the content in their pockets wherever they go.

Okay, this is a bit disturbing. Bananas are awesome. They better fix this problem soon.

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Two fungal diseases, Panama disease and black Sigatoka, are cutting a swath through banana plantations, just as blight once devastated potato crops. But unlike the potato, and other crops where disease-resistant strains can be bred by conventional means, making a fungus-free variety of the banana is extraordinarily difficult.

Motz has ordered Microsoft to include Java in Windows within 120 Days. We'll see if they do it or not.

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Motz ruled on Dec. 23, 2002, that Sun had a good chance of winning its antitrust case against Microsoft, and said he would grant a preliminary injunction forcing Microsoft to include Java in its Windows computer operating system. He had ordered each side to draft a proposal detailing how to carry out the Java "must-carry" directive and then negotiate a compromise with each other.

Well, this really doesn't have much/any science news, mostly just space. Space is awesome.

Columbia to lift off tomorrow, hopefully.

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NASA said Tuesday it needed 24 more hours of engineering analysis before clearing the shuttle for liftoff on a science mission with Ilan Ramon, a colonel in the Israeli air force. A crack in another shuttle has had engineers working practically nonstop for the past month to make sure Columbia is ready for its scheduled launch.

Watch out for geneticly engineered fish.

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The Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology questioned in a report the adequacy of FDA regulations in reviewing the risks that such transgenic fish might escape pens and taking over the habitat of nongenetically engineered varieties. Transgenic fish have genes that were added to make them grow large at a faster rate than normal fish.

More on the downed comet satillite.

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The world's largest and most ambitious comet mission, Rosetta, will miss its January take-off window and could be postponed for up to two-and-a-half years. The European Space Agency (ESA) hoped that the 1-billion-euro (US$1-billion) mission would land a probe on the comet Wirtanen in 2010.

ISS building and cleaning.

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With the completion of this 50th spacewalk at the orbiting outpost, station construction workers have logged 312 hours and 11 minutes performing assembly and maintenance operations. The next set of spacewalks at the ISS is planned for a targeted March shuttle mission in which the Expedition Six crew will be returned home and replaced by the Expedition Seven crew.

Can someone explain to me how they charge for Linux? Doesn't that go against the GPL? They want schools to pay $500 per year for unlimited installs.

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Unlike Linux itself, which requires a certain level of technical mastery, the Lindows software is intended to let the average PC user easily install and run a variety of open-source applications. The education package comes with the operating system, Web browsing, e-mail and other basic applications, Lindows said.

While some of the people have worked out a deal, others have not and will not. They want no deals (the MPAA). Screw them, we should be allowed to make backups of movies and the like.

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In other words, the RIAA and its allies at the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and the Computer Systems Policy Project (CSPP) are happy enough with the legal status quo, or at least don't wish to risk a clash on Capitol Hill with an uncertain outcome. The movie industry, CEA and consumer groups, on the other hand, are willing to risk that confrontation.

Now that more than the company has it, I wonder when an employee will leak it. Anyway, this is pretty big news. They are trying to take away from open source.

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Under a different program called the Shared Source Initiative, Microsoft already shares Windows source code with governments and companies. Partners in that program include several branches of the U.S. government, including the State Department; Austria; Sweden; and Switzerland, said Jason Matusow, the program's manager, in an earlier interview.