Archive for: October 2007

The Pirate Bay have been working on a brand new protocol which may replace BitTorrent in the future.

The reason for new and improved protocol is the massive number of spammers and anti-piracy organizations that abuse the BitTorrent protocol, either to make money or to bust people who download infringing material. The new protocol will be designed with these potential problems in mind.

The protocol will most likely use the .p2p file extension compared to the .torrent extension BitTorrent uses right now.

Read More

This new display has the same profile as 10-20 inch LCDs designed for desktop monitors. The panel, using an LED backlight, reproduces 92% of the NTSC standard for color saturation and features low power consumption of 90 watts or less.

Read more

The Sansa TakeTVTM video player (apparently leaked by buy.com) will let you play video from your PC to TV, it has a USB dock with TV outs and remote, it will read and decoding DivX, XviD, and MPEG-4 video files up to 720 x 576 and 7Mbps for playback on your TV.

Features

Connects to any PC
USB 2.0 compliant
Works with Windows Vista and Windows XP
Connects to any standard TV Supported AV Outputs
Integrated remote control
Supports a variety of video formats: DivX, xVid, MPEG-4
Supports NTSC and PAL color systems
Resolution of up to 720×576 (D1) at a bitrate of up to 7Mbps.
4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios and a range of viewing modes
DivX (Home Theater profile) certified
DivX DRM compliant

Read more here and here

Nokia just released images of the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet, specifications to come later.

More pics here

Update: here are some of the specifications from engadget

Same 4.13-nch WVGA (800 x 480), 65k color display as the N800, brightness increased by ~20%
GPS with particular focus on the “context sensitive web” via Ovi
2GB internal storage (not including memory cards), ships with maps for use with GPS
Has WiFi (802.11b/g), does not have WiMAX
Bluetooth (2.0+ EDR) DUNs to capable phones, totally Foleo-like
400MHz OMAP 2420 CPU, 128MB RAM, 256MB ROM
Integrated frontal camera, ambient light sensor, mini USB 2.0, hardware lock switch
Plays back video: 3GP, AVI, H.263, H.264, MP4, ASF, WMV, MPEG-1/4, Real video; audio: MP3, WMA, AAC, AMR, AWB, M4A, MP2, Real audio, WAV
Battery life aimed at 4 hours of “typical use” (movies, music, internet access, etc.), 10 hours music only, and up to 2 weeks totally idle time, and 5 days active standby (”improved compared to previous generation devices”)
Runs Nokia’s Linux Maemo interface (duh)
5 x 2.83 x 0.55-inches, 7.97 ounces
Ships in November, $479

You can read more about it here, and you can get the firmware here

Caution
“There have been many reports of this firmware putting ipods into an endless boot loop.
BUT DON’T WORRY
This problem is not permanent, and is EASILY fixable.”

On Thursday Novell released the latest free version of open-source operating system OpenSuse 10.3.

OpenSuse is the faster-moving but mostly unsupported version of Linux from Novell and various outside contributors. It competes most directly with Linux versions such as Canonical’s Ubuntu and Red Hat’s Fedora. Novell has tried for years to pit it against Windows as well, even as it cooperates with Microsoft in a legally thorny partnership. Novell’s supported product, Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise Server, is sold in the form of an annual support subscription.

Novell has been an eager adopter of fancy interface graphics, and 10.3 includes the Compiz and Compiz Fusion infrastructure for 3D effects such as desktop workspaces that map to the faces of a cube, or slightly blurred background windows, or windows that burst into flames upon closing. For those who want to head the other direction, version 4.4.1 of the minimalist graphics interface XFCE is an option.

You can either download OpenSuse for free or buy a $60 two-DVD set with a manual 90 days of installation help.

Read More

Oxygen, key to life on Earth today, began to appear on the planet millions of years earlier than scientists had thought, new research indicates.

An analysis of a deep rock core from Australia indicates the presence of at least some oxygen 50 million to 100 million years before the great change when the life-giving element began rising to today’s levels, according to two papers appearing in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

Previously, the earliest indications of oxygen had been from between 2.3 billion and 2.4 billion years ago when the “Great Oxidation Event” occurred.

The cause of the event is still not known, but before that the atmosphere was dominated by methane and ammonia. Today oxygen makes up about 21 percent of the atmosphere.

Read More