|
|
Advertisement:
|
|
OCAU News |
Thursday Night
(4 Comments)
(link)
Thursday, 5-January-2012 23:27:02 (GMT +10) - by Agg
|
MIT are setting up free online education for all. More info here on their site. Beyond the MIT campus, MITx will endeavor to break down barriers to education in two ways. First, it will offer the online teaching of MIT courses to people around the world and the opportunity for able learners to gain certification of mastery of MIT material. Second, it will make freely available to educational institutions everywhere the open-source software infrastructure on which MITx is based.
Once a giant of the photography world, Kodak seem to be going down the gurgler. Kodak warned in November that it might not survive 2012 if it was unable to secure $500 million in new debt or sell its patents. The company's cash had been shrinking as sales of its consumer products have failed to keep up with its heavy cost base, which includes employees and offices around the globe. Discussion here.
Meanwhile Google are gobbling up patents. The latest set of IBM patents, transferred to Google on Dec. 30, 2011, includes 222 patents and covers a variety of technologies, including email management, server backup, tuning and recovery, e-commerce, advertising, mobile Web page display, instant messaging, online calendaring and database tuning. Google acquired about 1,000 IBM patents in July of last year and about 1,000 other IBM patents in September.
The SOPA battle continues, with major online brands considering a nuclear option. According to Markham Erickson, head of the NetCoalition trade association, there’s been talk of a so-called “nuclear option,” in which the likes of Google, Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo! would go simultaneously dark to protest the legislation to highlight the fundamental danger the legislation poses to the function of the internet.
iXBTLabs have updated their i3DSpeed comparison. The i3DSpeed informs you about performance of popular graphics cards and the best price/performance deals in the market. This time we retested all graphics cards with NVIDIA Drivers 290.36 and AMD CATALYST 11.12; added test results of AMD Radeon HD 7970.
Some engineers have been arrested for selling Intel CPU samples on eBay. Four engineers have been arrested by Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) for allegedly selling off Intel Corp. CPU samples on eBay for personal financial gain. The CIB released a statement on Monday (Jan. 1) saying the four, confirmed to be engineers working for Intel's OEM manufacturers in Taiwan, had been apprehended in the city of Taoyuan.
Meanwhile notebook-OEM giant Quanta are suing AMD for allegedly providing faulty chips. AMD and its ATI Technologies Inc. unit sold chips that didn’t meet heat tolerances and were unfit for particular purposes, Taoyuan, Taiwan-based Quanta claimed yesterday in a federal court filing in San Jose, California. The chips were used in notebooks Quanta made for NEC Corp. (6701) and caused the computers to malfunction, according to the filing.
A physicist has made a Lego Hadron Collider, thanks Konman. As part of an outreach project at the Niels Bohr Institute I have recently designed a model of the ATLAS experiment in LEGO® bricks. It illustrates all details, from the muon and magnet system to the innermost pixel detector and will hopefully be a great eye-catcher for all generations.
A few people sent in this story of a Canadian man using his iPad as a passport. It remains a mystery as to whether a scanned copy of a passport would be accepted as an appropriate method of identification in Australia following a Canadian using such a copy on his iPad to gain access to the US from Canada.
File-sharing is now an official religion in Sweden. Riiiight. After their request was denied several times, the Church of Kopimism – which holds CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred symbols – is now approved by the authorities as an official religion. The Church hopes that its official status will remove the legal stigma that surrounds file-sharing.
Also on the oddball side of things, NASA now have a (warning, auto-plays audio) rock radio station. More info here. "Today's 4G audience craves new music and enjoys finding it," said Pat Fant, RFC Media co-founder and chief operating officer. "We've pulled out the best songs and the deepest tracks from a full spectrum of rock artists across many styles and decades. NASA features and news items are embedded throughout the programming alongside greetings by celebrity artists."
Mpot sent in this stunning underwater fishing video.
Return to OCAU's News Page
|
|
Advertisement:
All original content copyright James Rolfe.
All rights reserved. No reproduction allowed without written permission.
|
Advertisement:
|
|
|
