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OCAU News |
Former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev has asked Bill Gates to lay off a teacher facing detention over software piracy. "Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on Monday asked Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to intercede on behalf of a Russian teacher accused of using pirated software in his classroom. In an open letter, Nobel Peace Prize winner Gorbachev said the teacher, Alexander Ponosov, from a remote village in the Urals, should be shown mercy because he did not know he was committing a crime. "A teacher, who has dedicated his life to the education of children and who receives a modest salary that does not bear comparison with the salaries of even regular staff in your company, is threatened with detention in Siberian prison camps," read the letter, posted on the Internet site of Gorbachev's charitable foundation www.gorby.ru."
Somebody has patented an upside down mobile phone who says that it is more ergonomic for texting people this way. Patent documentation can be found here. "The new design repositions the keypad above the screen and ensures that most of the handset rests in the palm of the hand for improved support and control."
CodingHorror has posted an interview with a guy who helps run SneakerNet which uses a very unusual method to transfer data. "In the old days, sneaker net was the notion that you would pull out floppy disks, run across the room in your sneakers, and plug the floppy into another machine. This is just TeraScale SneakerNet. You write your terabytes onto this thing and ship it out to your pals. Some of our pals are extremely well connected—they are part of Internet 2, Virtual Business Networks (VBNs), and the Next Generation Internet (NGI). Even so, it takes them a long time to copy a gigabyte. Copy a terabyte? It takes them a very, very long time across the networks they have."
It seems that Geforce 8800 users still have no Vista WHQL drivers. "Let’s also consider how NVIDIA has marketed their 8800 series GPU. Checking NVIDIA’s PR page, we find more than a few mentions of “DX10” or “Windows Vista.” One, two, three, four, five. In all fairness, these are not all in reference to the GeForce 8800 specifically, but a lot of the press releases make a big deal about Windows Vista and DX10 support."
NASA has posted a list of 181 things to do on the moon, for those going sometime it could be worthwhile to print off the list and take it with you. "If you woke up tomorrow morning and found yourself on the moon, what would you do? NASA has just released a list of 181 good ideas. Ever since the end of the Apollo program, "folks around the world have been thinking about returning to the moon, and what they would like to do there," says Jeff Volosin, strategy development lead for NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. Now, NASA is going back; the agency plans to send astronauts to the Moon no later than 2020. "So we consulted more than 1,000 people from businesses, academia and 13 international space agencies to come up with a master list of 181 potential lunar objectives.""
ExtremeTech have taken a look at Vista performance after an upgrade or clean installation. "In a recent article, we kicked around the idea of dropping a Vista upgrade over an existing Windows XP installation. Windows Vista's Setup program—the multitude of code that installs the operating system—doesn't copy files and wriggle the new operating system atop the old one, resulting in a mishmash of both, as was more or less the case with prior Microsoft OSes. Vista's compartmentalized installation routine actually copies an image of Vista onto the hard drive and then plows through things like hardware detection and configuration."
TechwareLabs has taken a look at the process of purchasing a PC and why things other than the price are important. "At some point in time most of us have had to purchase a computer. Regardless of whether it was a laptop or a desktop price was a factor in the purchase. Price plays the dominant role in brand selection, component selection, timing of the purchase, and much more. It is our advice ,however, that consumers start to look beyond price and into factors such as: 1. TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), 2. Value, 3. Performance..."
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All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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