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OCAU News |
Saturday Afternoon Party Hangover News
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Saturday, 27-January-2007 14:11:31 (GMT +10) - by Rational
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Casinos are continuing to blame large winnings on computer errors after a slot machine in America displayed a win of $102,000. "A new casino in Pennsylvania had a slot machine tell a player that he had won $102,000, supposedly "the big jackpot" of the day. Various casino staff came up and congratulated him, until someone else came over and offered him two free meal coupons, saying that the jackpot message (which even stated his name) was a software glitch on their internal computer system, and was due to some internal testing that never should have reached the actual machine."
The Consumer Ombudsman of Norway has declared that Apple DRM is illegal mainly due to the restrictive nature of locking music and software to particular devices. "It doesn't get any clearer than this. Fairplay is an illegal lock-in technology whose main purpose is to lock the consumers to the total package provided by Apple by blocking interoperability," Waterhouse told OUT-LAW.COM. "For all practical purposes this means that iTunes Music Store is trying to kill off one the most important building blocks in a well functioning digital society, interoperability, in order to boost its own profits."
CNN has posted a list of technologies to save the world including things like Hydrogen cars and Nuclear waste neutralizer. "What could be greener than a hydrogen car in your driveway? Try a solar-powered hydrogen fueling station in your garage. Australian scientists have developed a prototype of such a device. It's about the size of a filing cabinet and runs on electricity generated by rooftop solar panels."
Ars Technica has taken a look at the demographics of American movie piracy. "Approximately 80 percent of movie downloaders only do so illegally according to Digital Life America. The profile of an average P2P downloader is a 29-year-old male (63 percent are male, 37 percent female) with 16 movie titles stored on his computer. Only 40 percent of those surveyed believed that downloading copyrighted movies was a "very serious offense." Study director Kaan Yigit said that this attitude is a likely result of the Robin Hood effect. "Most people perceive celebrities and studios to be rich already and as a result don't think of movie downloading as a big deal," he said."
BigBruin has posted an article about improving Skype audio in Windows. "Skype is arguably the most popular Web telephony service out there... One common complaint is that the quality of the calls varies widely. There are a number of simple changes that you can make to both your system settings and the settings of your Skype client software to improve the audio quality of your Skype calls."
Lyle has sent in this unusual mousepad (NSFW) which aims to keep your wrists comfortable. Even if they aren't for you it should still give you a laugh.
DVHardware has taken a look at the possibility of wireless charging using a technology called eCoupled. "The eCoupled technology uses the inductive coupling principle, it works by transferring power through a magnetic field. To receive power from this magnetic field a device needs to have a built-in eCoupled receiver, but at this moment there are still no devices on the market that support it. A more technical explanation can be found at eCoupled. Many of you probably already have a device that uses inductive coupling, like an electric toothbrush"
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All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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