Texas Community College Bans MySpace.com
April 25, 2006
Apr 23, 10:56 AM (ET)
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (AP) - Del Mar College students now have to use computers outside the school’s system if they want to visit the popular Web site MySpace.com.
The community college has blocked the site in response to complaints about sluggish Internet speed on campus computers.
An investigation found that heavy traffic at MySpace.com was eating up too much bandwidth, said August Alfonso, the school’s chief of information and technology. Forty percent of daily Internet traffic at the college involved the site, he said.
“This was more about us being able to offer Web-based instruction, and MySpace.com was slowing everything down,” President Carlos Garcia said.
MySpace.com - a social networking hub with more 72 million members - allow users to post searchable profiles that can include photos of themselves and such details as where they live and what music they like.
Paul Martinez, 20, is a frequent visitor to MySpace.com and finds the site to be addictive. Restricting access to the site could be a good idea, he said.
“The library is pretty much full with people on MySpace, and with them banning it you won’t have anything to distract you,” he said.
Some though, disagree with Del Mar College’s decision.
“We pay for school and the resources that are used,” said Zeke Santos, 20. “It’s our choice, we’re the ones paying for our classes. If we pass or fail, it’s up to us.”
Thats nothing a simple packet shaper wouldn’t fix.
I am curious though where they got the stat that 40% of the bandwidth was myspace related, how they are actually blocking it and what their internet connection speed is. Our packet shaper gives us those stats and we could easily give myspace lowest priority so it wouldn’t interfere with college related traffic.
NASA plans to crash into moon
April 20, 2006
NASA plans to send a two-tonne probe crashing into a crater on the moon in hopes of discovering if it harbours water that could be used for manned missions, the US space agency said on Monday.
The $US73 million ($NZ120 million) probe, to be built by Northrop Grumman Corporation, is set to be launched in 2008 aboard a rocket also carrying a sophisticated lunar mapper.
“We’re going to learn a lot from this,” said program manager Dan Andrews of NASA’s Ames Research Centre in Moffett Field, California. “It’s going to give us a real definitive understanding of what we have up there.”
NASA astronauts visited the moon during the late 1960s and early 1970s under the Apollo program but have not returned.
In the aftermath of the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster, US President George W Bush instructed NASA to retire the shuttle fleet in 2010 and return humans to the moon by 2020 and then aim for Mars.
First, though, NASA plans a series of robotic precursor missions including the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, which will plough into the crater, and the mapper, called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
When LCROSS strikes the crater, it is expected to create a hole 5 metres (16 feet) deep and send up a 998,000 kilogram (2.2 million-pound) plume of debris for sensors and cameras stationed on a second spacecraft to monitor.
Dozens of ground-based telescopes, as well as possibly space observatories, such as the Hubble telescope, will be trained on the plume as well.
A monitoring satellite that is part of LCROSS, but separate from the reconnaissance orbiter, will then fly through the plume to collect and relay data back to Earth. It will have just 15 minutes before it too crashes into the moon, sending up a second, smaller plume for additional studies.
Two previous missions, the military’s Clementine spacecraft and NASA’s Lunar Prospector, determined the moon’s south pole is particularly rich in hydrogen, which scientists suspect is bound with oxygen to form water.
But there are other theories to explain the hydrogen readings as well.
“What this mission buys us is an early attempt to get to know what the resources are,” said Scott Horowitz, head of NASA’s lunar exploration program. “We know for sure that for human exploration to succeed we’re going to have to eventually live off the land.”
Water ice could be used to make oxygen for astronauts to breathe, as well as an oxidiser for rocket fuel.
The new guy made me post this.
Russian Lawmaker Blames Surge in Racism on Computer Games
April 19, 2006
A member of the Russian State Duma has blamed computer games and the Internet for the rise in violent crime in Russia, especially for the sharp surge in racist attacks and killings.
The Rosbalt news agency quoted Alexander Gurov, a member of the parliamentary security commission as saying that the Russian crime rate has risen to become the highest in the world, with 21 murders per 100 thousand population committed in 2005.
“The spread of violence into all the pores of social life is evident,” Gurov said. “The Internet is awash with violence and computer games have gangsters and killers, Nazis and Japanese militarists as main characters,” he said.
The MP said that the spread of such information technologies was one of the causes of the rise of nationalist and extremist tendencies in Russian society.
“In Russia, only games where the Nazis always lose should be available, but so far the opposite is happening,” Gurov said.
Yes, if only the games had Nazis losing all the time then the murder rate would be lower. Could it possibly be that people playing these video games are well, too busy playing games to kill anyone? Especially if they are playing a game like Civilization 4. Russia’s social problems run much deeper than video games.
Duke Nukem Forever - again
April 13, 2006
Broussard Updates Duke Nukem Forever Status
The May 2006 issue of Computer Games Magazine, which includes a cover feature previewing 3D Realms and Human Head Studios’ long-awaited FPS Prey, has also included fresh information on 3D Realms’s epochally long in development Duke Nukem Forever.
The game has been worked on in various forms for almost 10 years, having been originally announced in April 1997, and the update describes the current state of the title, which was viewed at 3D Realms’ Texas studios: “mainly just pieces of the game in progress and tech demos”, including “an early level, a vehicle sequence, a few test rooms”, among others.
Technology-wise, Duke Nukem Forever originally started development on the Quake II engine, before switching to Unreal, and, according to a Wikipedia entry, is now working with a heavily modified custom engine that includes some small elements from earlier iterations of Unreal Engine.
3DR’s George Broussard also demonstrated world interactivity that includes Duke standing in front of a computer and emailing the player, if he provides his email address for the game. But, according to the piece, Broussard was bashful, overall, about showing off the game, commenting: “The problem is that when we show it, people are going to be like, ‘Yeah, whatever’. Honestly, at this point we just want to finish it.”
A recently reported-on Take-Two financial filing shows that the game’s long-time publisher has significant interest in the game’s completion date, noting: “One other notable payment was the renegotiation of a $6 million charge due [to former publisher GT Interactive, now owned by Atari] upon delivery of the final PC version of Duke Nukem Forever back in March 2005. The epic delay of 3D Realms’ shooter has meant that $4.25 million of the final milestone payment has already been paid, alongside the promise of a final $500,000 upon the commercial release of Duke Nukem Forever prior to December 31, 2006.”
Further information on the game, alongside the longform Prey preview, is available in the May issue of Computer Games Magazine, more information on which can be seen at the official Computer Games Online website.
According to Slashdot this was suppose to be an update for DNF. I see no such info. One would think by the length of time this is taking that DNF would be the last/best/ultimate version of Duke Nukem. Guys just take what you got and finish it. In a couple years release another one with graphics a little bit better and a different story line. DNF has gone way beyond being a joke to the point that the whole project is sadly very pathetic.
TiVo Shares Up on Partnership Extension
April 12, 2006
By MAY WONG
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Shares of TiVo Inc. (TIVO) rose more than 5 percent Wednesday morning after the digital video recording pioneer announced it had extended a partnership with satellite TV provider DirecTV Group Inc. for another three years.
Under the agreement, DirecTV will continue to provide TiVo service to its existing subscribers. Both companies also extended their advertising relationship and agreed not to assert patent rights against each other.
The companies didn’t disclose specific financial terms of the deal but said the economics were similar to their 2003 agreement.
TiVo’s revolutionary technology lets people record television without the hassles of video tapes. Users can pause live TV, do instant replays and begin watching programs even before the recording has finished.
TiVo had about 4.4 million subscribers as of January, but 2.8 million of them were DirecTV subscribers who bought the satellite company’s TiVo-based receivers.
Alviso, Calif.-based TiVo is facing stiffening competition from bigger companies making their own DVRs, including Motorola Inc. (MOT) and Scientific-Atlanta Inc., which has been bought by Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) DirecTV itself has plans to also use DVR technology from a sister company, News Corp. (NWSA)’s NDS, in its boxes next year.
TiVo is in the midst of a jury trial against DirecTV’s rival, EchoStar Communications Corp. (DISH), the parent of Dish Network, alleging the satellite provider is infringing on its DVR patents. Closing arguments in that case in Marshall, Texas, were scheduled Thursday.
TiVo shares rose 38 cents, or 5.1 percent, to $7.89 in morning trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
Anyone that has DirecTV with Tivo and has been following the relationship between the two companies knows this really isn’t new news.
It is common knowledge that Tivo would still provide program scheduling content to the 2.8 million DirecTV customers with Tivo.
Just because DirecTV has started to lease its own DVR box doesn’t mean the millions of Tivo based DirecTV tuners would simply stop working. This is similar to how long DirecTV ’supported’ Ultimate TV, which might still be the case.
I am sure at some point down the road once Tivo based DirecTV receivers get below a certain number the ‘partenership’ might cease. At any rate I think the long term future for Tivo as a corporation is not a good one. Someone will buy them, but who?
How I Work: Bill Gates
April 6, 2006
How I Work: Bill Gates
Not much of a paper chase for Microsoft’s chairman, who uses a range of digital tools to do business.
FORTUNE Magazine
Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect, Microsoft, U.S.A.
April 4, 2006: 8:11 AM EDTNEW YORK (FORTUNE) - It’s pretty incredible to look back 30 years to when Microsoft was starting and realize how work has been transformed. We’re finally getting close to what I call the digital workstyle.
If you look at this office, there isn’t much paper in it. On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you’ll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.
The screen on the left has my list of e-mails. On the center screen is usually the specific e-mail I’m reading and responding to. And my browser is on the right-hand screen. This setup gives me the ability to glance and see what new has come in while I’m working on something, and to bring up a link that’s related to an e-mail and look at it while the e-mail is still in front of me.
At Microsoft, e-mail is the medium of choice, more than phone calls, documents, blogs, bulletin boards, or even meetings (voicemails and faxes are actually integrated into our e-mail in-boxes).
I get about 100 e-mails a day. We apply filtering to keep it to that level e-mail comes straight to me from anyone I’ve ever corresponded with, anyone from Microsoft, Intel, HP, and all the other partner companies, and anyone I know. And I always see a write-up from my assistant of any other e-mail, from companies that aren’t on my permission list or individuals I don’t know. That way I know what people are praising us for, what they are complaining about, and what they are asking.
We’re at the point now where the challenge isn’t how to communicate effectively with e-mail, it’s ensuring that you spend your time on the e-mail that matters most. I use tools like “in-box rules” and search folders to mark and group messages based on their content and importance.
I’m not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I’ve flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.
Outlook also has a little notification box that comes up in the lower right whenever a new e-mail comes in. We call it the toast. I’m very disciplined about ignoring that unless I see that it’s a high-priority topic.
Staying focused is one issue; that’s the problem of information overload. The other problem is information underload. Being flooded with information doesn’t mean we have the right information or that we’re in touch with the right people.
I deal with this by using SharePoint, a tool that creates websites for collaboration on specific projects. These sites contain plans, schedules, discussion boards, and other information, and they can be created by just about anyone in the company with a couple of clicks.
Right now, I’m getting ready for Think Week. In May, I’ll go off for a week and read 100 or more papers from Microsoft employees that examine issues related to the company and the future of technology. I’ve been doing this for over 12 years. It used to be an all-paper process in which I was the only one doing the reading and commenting. Today the whole process is digital and open to the entire company.
I’m now far more efficient in picking the right papers to read, and I can add electronic comments that everyone sees in real time.
Microsoft has more than 50,000 people, so when I’m thinking, “Hey, what’s the future of the online payment system?” or “What’s a great way to keep track of your memories of your kid?” or any neat new thing, I write it down. Then people can see it and say, “No, you’re wrong” or “Did you know about this work being done at such-and-such a place?”
SharePoint puts me in touch with lots of people deep in the organization. It’s like having a super-website that lets many people edit and discuss far more than the standard practice of sending e-mails with enclosures. And it notifies you if anything comes up in an area you’re interested in.
Another digital tool that has had a big effect on my productivity is desktop search. It has transformed the way I access information on my PC, on servers, and on the Internet. With larger hard drives and increasing bandwidth, I now have gigabytes of information on my PC and servers in the form of e-mails, documents, media files, contact databases, and so on.
Instead of having to navigate through folders to find that one document where I think a piece of information might be, I simply type search terms into a toolbar and all the e-mails and documents that contain that information are at my fingertips. The same goes for phone numbers and email addresses.
Paper is no longer a big part of my day. I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It’s fully synchronized with my office machine so I have all the files I need. It also has a note-taking piece of software called OneNote, so all my notes are in digital form.
The one low-tech piece of equipment still in my office is my whiteboard. I always have nice color pens, and it’s great for brainstorming when I’m with other people, and even sometimes by myself.
The whiteboards in some Microsoft offices have the ability to capture an image and send it up to the computer, almost like a huge Tablet PC. I don’t have that right now, but probably I’ll get a digital whiteboard in the next year. Today, if there’s something up there that’s brilliant, I just get out my pen and my Tablet PC and recreate it.
Days are often filled with meetings. It’s a nice luxury to get some time to go write up my thoughts or follow up on meetings during the day. But sometimes that doesn’t happen. So then it’s great after the kids go to bed to be able to just sit at home and go through whatever e-mail I didn’t get to. If the entire week is very busy, it’s the weekend when I’ll send the long, thoughtful pieces of e-mail. When people come in Monday morning, they’ll see that I’ve been quite busy they’ll have a lot of e-mail.
A very interesting look into what a typical workday is for the world’s richest man.
I wonder what reason he has for not already having a digital whiteboard?
Microsoft Makes Virtual Server R2 Free
April 4, 2006
Price drops from $199 or $99 to nothing for flagship virtualization software.
Eric Lai, Computerworld
Monday, April 03, 2006
BOSTON — Microsoft today announced that it will give away its Virtual Server R2 for free, a move seen as reflecting the furiously competitive virtualization software market. This is Microsoft’s second price cut for its flagship virtualization product, which can host multiple virtual machines running either Linux or Windows.Virtual Server 2005 originally cost $999 and $499 for the Enterprise and Standard editions, respectively, when released in September 2004. Microsoft then released Virtual Server R2 at $199 and $99 for the Enterprise and Standard editions, respectively, in December.
Longtime virtualization market leader VMware, which already had a free product called VMware Player, responded in February by making its GSX Server free. Meanwhile, Linux-based vendors such as XenSource and Virtual Iron Software are readying new or updated versions of their virtualization software.
VMware also announced that its similar but competing virtual machine disk-format specification will be available to all developers and vendors without charge, restriction, or license.
Tactical Move
With Monday’s change, announced at the LinuxWorld conference here this week, Microsoft is eliminating the Standard edition and making its Enterprise edition available for download at no charge.Zane Adam, director of product marketing for the Windows Server division, acknowledged that the move is partly a tactical reaction to other vendors’ moves. “But even before R2 arrived, we were already signaling this was the direction we were going in,” he said.
Microsoft entered the virtualization market in 2003 when it bought Virtual PC for the Macintosh and the then-unreleased Virtual Server from Connectix. It claims 5000 customers for all versions of Virtual Server, with a total of 700,000 downloads of the product. Adam declined to speculate on how many users Microsoft hopes to gain by making the software free.
Support Services
Microsoft has itself played a role in the rapid commoditization of the virtualization software market. A year ago, it said it would fold a hypervisor–software that manages virtual machines–into release 2 of the upcoming Longhorn Windows Server, which is expected around 2009.“We think that virtualization will eventually be just like having wheels on your car; it’s just going to be there,” Adam said.
Microsoft also released add-ins to allow current and past enterprise and standard versions of both Red Hat Linux and Novell’s SUSE Linux to run on top of Virtual Server as guest operating systems. The company will also offer 24-hour technical support for Linux applications and guest operating systems running on Virtual Server.
Microsoft said that it has signed up 45 vendors as licensees of its freely available Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format. Licensees, including Brocade Communications Systems. BMC Software, Network Appliance, and XenSource, are making their applications interoperable with VHD, and thus Virtual Server.
Much of the marketing by Linux-based virtualization vendors such as XenSource and Virtual Iron touts their products’ faster speed and greater efficiency over VMware. Microsoft’s Adam says that such speed claims won’t impress customers in the future.
“We saw it in the processor wars. A split-second-faster response time is not what’s important,” Adam said. “Everyone’s going to have a hypervisor that runs at similar speeds. But the customer is already moving away from speeds and feeds. It will be about the ecosystem and the partners you have.”
So I guess the virtual wars have begun.
We use VMware’s ESX server at work and it is pretty darn good.
I have been running Virtual Server beta (previously called GSX Server) which is free, for about a month and have been happy with it.
I personally don’t see a reason to switch either product to the now free one from Microsoft. Especially since Microsoft’s product is slower.
It will be interesting to see what legal action if any comes out of Microsoft bundling virtualization server software with Longhorn.
No Vista, but ‘Vista Capable’ Stickers Instead
April 3, 2006
Microsoft hopes marketing program may ease Vista delay fallout.
Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service
Friday, March 31, 2006SAN FRANCISCO — Even though Windows Vista won’t be available until next year, Microsoft will work with hardware partners to prepare customers for its release. Starting next month, PCs with stickers saying “Windows Vista Capable” will be in stores, letting customers know what hardware can be upgraded to that operating system once it is available, the company said today.
Microsoft and industry partners co-developed what the company calls the Windows Vista Capable PC program to identify machines that currently run Windows XP but have the requirements to upgrade to Vista. Microsoft announced earlier this month that consumer versions of Vista wouldn’t be ready until January.
To receive a sticker, the PCs must pass certification requirements for the Designed for Windows XP logo. They also must meet hardware criteria that make them capable of performing well if running Windows Vista, Microsoft said. Those requirements are a modern CPU, at least 512MB of memory, and a DirectX 9-class graphics processor.
Ready or Really Able?
At a minimum, the requirements met by Windows Vista Capable PCs will allow customers to run Windows Vista Home Basic, according to Microsoft. However, they do not represent the minimum hardware requirements for higher-end versions of Vista, requirements Microsoft says it will provide in the future as the program expands.
Joe Wilcox, analyst with Jupiter Research, stresses the importance for customers of the distinction between PCs “capable” of running Vista and those that are actually “ready” to do so.
“A system that will run Windows Vista may not be capable of using all of its features,” he points out. For example, a machine branded “Windows Vista Capable” that is a high-end Media Center PC with superior graphics capabilities will be ready for even the most feature-intensive versions of Vista, Wilcox explains. But if it’s a low-cost PC and it has a “Capable” sticker on it, “it will probably run the features of Home Basic but not anything else,” he warns.
Wilcox adds that the Windows Vista Capable program was developed before Microsoft announced Vista’s delay, and that the company may have wanted to put off the program once the delay was announced, but could not because the program already was in motion, with certified PCs ready to go to the stores.
Windows Vista Capable? I say who cares?
I got a look at the beta version of Vista on Friday and I wasn’t impressed.
I guess I shouldn’t be impressed by just an OS, but I did find it quite annoying.
Popup boxes asking for permission to run programs I just clicked on (this while logged in as admin), all the eye candy stuff, the fading menus and boxes.
For me the eye candy isn’t needed. The first thing I do when installing XP is turn off all the eye candy crap. Anything that slows down the PC just to make it look prettier is useless to me. I run the OS to use applications that are useful to me not to look at how pretty everything is. My task bar is grey and I am proud of it.
There is nothing I saw in Vista that would make me want to upgrade. I am very content with XP. They can work on Vista for another 5 years for all I care.
Comcast sees greater use of network DVRs
April 1, 2006
AP
NEW YORK — A top executive at Comcast Corp., the largest U.S. cable TV company, on Thursday predicted that the cable industry would move toward adopting a networking technology that could significantly increase the use of digital video recorders.Steve Burke, the chief operating officer at Comcast, told an investor conference that he thought that a trial of the new technology that was recently announced by rival cable operator Cablevision Systems Corp. looked promising, and seemed to be on a solid legal footing.
“It’s a very good idea, very well thought through,” Mr. Burke said at the conference in New York, which was hosted by Bank of America. “If it all works out, I’m sure the rest of the industry will follow.”
The new system that Cablevision is trying would allow cable users to retrieve recorded shows from the cable company’s system, rather than from a hard drive installed on a special set-top cable box.
Such a system could save costs for the cable company by having less expensive cable boxes installed in homes, while also making it possible to offer the premium service to more subscribers.
The idea remains controversial, however, with programming providers concerned about copyright violations. Also, programmers are already worried that the growing use of ad-skipping technologies could upset advertisers.
This would be very, very bad.
So they don’t license Tivo’s technology, instead they use their own DVR, wait for Tivo to go out of business and then get rid of their DVRs. Nice.
Yes I know Tivo is still around. But considering all the cable companies and now DirecTV is coming out with their own DVRs, unless Tivo radically changes their business it’s just a matter of time for the end.
Are they going to store all shows shown on all channels say for at least 5 years?
I don’t think so. This is just about removing control from customers and forcing them down the road to pay to watch shows that we now can just record and watch over and over for free.
It doesn’t look like it now, but this is all about screwing the customer down the road.
If DVR’s can stick around until solid state storage gets big and cheap then the cost with hard drives crapping out for cable companies will go away.
DirecTV
March 25, 2006
I have had DirecTV for a couple years now and it has been pretty decent. On several occasions I have had ‘rain fade’ when rather large intense storms go overhead. It isn’t a common occurrence but a pain when it happens. The Tivo integrated into the receiver has been great, especially with my work schedule. I don’t have to plan my activities around a show if I want to catch it. The Tivo
takes care of recording what I want so I can watch when I want.
Things are changing though at DirecTV and from a consumer aspect, not really for the better. First DirecTV is dropping Tivo and is implementing their own version of a DVR. While change isn’t usually fun this change at best will be a slight annoyance, at worse it will be a bad interface and a PITA to use. I haven’t seen the new DVR interface so I really can’t judge. This also makes previous hacks and mods available for Tivo based DVRs possibly obsolete since the underlying OS and file structure could be different.
Hacking the DVR won’t be possible anyway since DirecTV has now moved to leasing receivers. Starting this past March 1st DirecTV started doing what the cable companies have been doing for years, leasing the receivers. My first thought was great I don’t have to buy anymore, but this is where DirecTV burns the customer. You want to lease a HD DVR from DirecTV, fine you pay $499.00 up front with a $4.99 a month lease fee, and sign a 2 year comment contract. Cancel before the two years are up, send back the receiver and pay a $300 early cancellation fee. I am not making this shit up. What use to cost the same before March 1 now cost the same to lease.
When comparing what the cable companies charge for a HD DVR receiver this is just crazy.
At some point I will be going HD with a DVR. I have been holding off doing this with DirecTV until the MPEG4 HD starts rolling out. But now that probably won’t happen. Me getting HD thru DirecTv, not the MPEG4 rollout. After the hockey season I will revisit the two local cable companies and see if they will be offering NHL Center Ice for next year. I know they both carry HD DVRs and I know they both don’t charge an up front large sum of cash to lease their equipment, they also don’t require a 2 year commitment.
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