Free Republic

Technology - Reuters Roll Up for the Floppy TelevisionFri Jul 19, 6:10 AM ET By Pete Harrison LONDON (Reuters) - First they went wider, then flatter, and now televisions are set to go floppy. Roll-up, flexible televisions, akin to the melting watches of Salvador Dali's surreal landscapes, have become possible thanks to a glowing plastic compound perfected in the laboratories of Britain's Cambridge Display Technology (CDT). "You're effectively printing televisions," CDT Chief Executive David Fyfe told Reuters. "They can be printed onto thin plastic almost like paper." Roll-up televisions will allow viewers of the future to flip their sets out...

Copyright Linux Magazine ©2002 FEATURE The Importance of Being Debian Why you should care about Linux's great non-commercial distribution by Robert McMillan Eight years ago, as Purdue undergraduate Ian Murdock flipped through a Unix magazine, he came across an intriguing advertisement. It was for a Linux distribution that promised to let you run your Windows applications on the free operating system. Linux had sprung into existence a scant year before and now -- according to the ad -- it could support Windows applications. This seemed too good to be true. It was.The distribution in question -- Murdock no longer remembers...

It's got a get out of jail free card By Arron Rouse: Thursday 18 July 2002, 11:17 THE NEWS that Microsoft intends to ditch backwards compatibility (here), with its Windows XP replacement, Longhorn, has come as a surprise to many. Some industry pundits have expressed serious doubts about the idea. Doubts and surprise are the last thing you need -- this is a textbook Microsoft move. To get a better idea of why Microsoft would consider a course change as bold as this you need to consider the problems it is facing at the moment. There are several major issues...

Pairs of photons linked by the weird quantum effect of entanglement can pass through sheets of metal without the entanglement being destroyed. The finding means the quantum linking of particles is far more robust than scientists thought and could help them develop new ways of making quantum computers. Scientists think quantum computers could be hugely powerful because of their ability to perform many calculations at once, instead of doing one after another like regular computers. When photons are entangled, the physical properties of one are intimately linked to the other. Measuring the properties of one will instantly tell you the...

<p>Pittsburgh, the city that revolutionized convenient dining with H.J. Heinz's ketchup bottle cap that thwarts watery buildup, is about to -- as cable TV chef Emeril Lagasse perpetually promises -- kick it up another notch.</p> <p>This month, Alcoa will unveil Reynolds Wrap Release, a nonstick aluminum foil that will make for easier cleanups in the kitchen. The new foil will be available in 12-inch wide, 35-square foot rolls, at a suggested retail price of $2.49 -- a premium to the price of Reynolds' conventional foil.</p>

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (July 16, 2002 3:27 p.m. EDT) - The time is 10:13 p.m., the temperature is 93 degrees, and the humidity is somewhere between rain forest and gumbo. But step out of the sultry Texas night and into the Circle K, and suddenly it's not summer. The beer is cold, but so are the Twinkies. You can almost see your breath, though the young convenience-store clerk seems not to notice. "Is it just me," she asks, "or is it warm in here?" Of course, it's not just her. It's all of us who dart from our air-conditioned cars...

Technology is steadily eroding the concept of privacy in the United States. Surveillance cameras follow your moves through supermarkets and public parks, the National Security Agency can listen to your phone calls at will, financial institutions sell your bank records to anyone who wants them, insurance companies can share your medical history. And now the final insult, one so fantastic it always seemed reserved for the mythic Superman: Engineers are now developing tools that can peer through walls and spot you, no matter where you are. Technology is steadily eroding the concept of privacy in the United States. Surveillance cameras...

Microsoft on Monday launched the first of several pre-emptive strikes against Apple Computer's Macworld trade show by making announcements about new technologies far ahead of their delivery to market. The strategic attack comes as tensions mount between Apple and Microsoft. During Macworld five years ago, the two companies announced a five-year technology agreement, whereby Microsoft committed to continued development of Office and Internet Explorer for the Mac. The two companies have said that they have no intention of extending the agreement, choosing instead to work together without a written contract. In Microsoft's first salvo, the company revealed details about the...

<p>RICHMOND, Va. (AP) --  A California software company must stop delivering ads that pop up unauthorized when surfers visit the Web sites of several prominent media companies, a federal judge has ruled.</p> <p>U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton in Alexandria, Va., issued the preliminary injunction Friday in a lawsuit that 10 media companies filed last month against Gator Corp. of Redwood City, Calif.</p>

<p>The hydrogen car has been a long time coming. GM is betting $1 billion that the end of internal combustion is near.</p> <p>VIEWED from the proper angle, Detroit's Renaissance Center — six medium-high office towers surrounding a cylindrical 73-story giant — is a mighty glass hand giving the finger. Hulking by the iron-gray waters of the Detroit River, this is the führerbunker of the tired old industrial economy: the headquarters of General Motors.</p>

'); //--> DISCOVER Vol. 22 No. 11 (November 2001) Table of Contents Lovin' Hydrogen Maverick energy guru Amory Lovins says a profitable, pollution-free hydrogen economy is just over the horizon. It's merely a matter of taming the most powerful gas on the planet By Brad Lemley Photography by David Barry The future is simple, says Amory Lovins. The future is nonpolluting, inexhaust-ible, nontoxic, and so basic that even a liberal arts major can understand its chemical structure. The future is hydrogen: H, one proton, one electron. The first, lightest, and most common element in the universe. The stuff that ...

<p>NEW YORK -- Peer-to-peer networks such as Morpheus and Audiogalaxy have enabled millions to trade music, movies and software freely. A group of veteran hackers is about to unveil a new peer-to-peer protocol that may eventually let millions more surf, chat and e-mail free from prying eyes.</p>

TCPA / Palladium Frequently Asked Questions Version 0.1 26 June 2002 Please revisit this page shortly - I'm working on version 1.0 which should be ready during the week of the 8th July. There is also a Spanish version. 1. What are TCPA and Palladium? TCPA stands for the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA), an initiative led by Intel. Their website is here. Their stated goal is `a new computing platform for the next century that will provide for improved trust in the PC platform.' Palladium appears to be a Microsoft version which will be rolled out in future versions...

Hacker to Apple: Watch those downloads A security mailing list has alerted Apple Computer OS X users to a program that could let a hacker piggyback malicious code on downloads from the company's SoftwareUpdate service. According to the BugTraq mailing list, a hacker named Russell Harding has posted full instructions online for how to fool Apple's SoftwareUpdate feature to allowing a hacker to install a backdoor on any Mac running OS X. The exploit takes advantage of SoftwareUpdate, Apple's software updating mechanism in OS X, which checks weekly for new updates from the company. According to Harding, who claims to...

Those who surf the Web using a Mac tend to be better educated and make more money than their PC-using counterparts, according to a report from Nielsen/NetRatings. The study also said Mac users tend to be more Web savvy, with more than half having been online for at least five years. And the Mac faithful are 58 percent more likely than the overall online population to build their own Web page and also slightly more likely to buy goods online, according to the report. "With above-average household income and education levels, the Mac population presents a very attractive target for...

Column Heigh-Ho Celeron! By Andrew Busigin: Thursday 11 July 2002, 19:14 INTEL'S LATEST developments around future Celeron performance make for an interest study in marketing. It appears that once again, Intel Marketing folks are steering the engineering team, and it shouldn't surprise anyone, since the Celeron has always been a marketing phenomenon more than an engineering product. See Intel to shift P4 Celerons to Northwood core History Lesson The origin of the Celeron, for those of you more recently come to the party, was a marketing coup for Intel, whereby they managed to create an artificial segmentation of their CPU...

And XP service pack one in the wild By INQUIRER staff: Friday 12 July 2002, 08:38 US MAGAZINE Infoworld said that Microsoft will announce the next step in its digital media plans codenamed Corona next Monday. The paper says that Microsoft will steer cleer of MPEG 4, a widely accepted industry standard for digital media and instead plump to continue on its own remorseless proprietary path. The "Corona" technology is slated to be at the heart of the next version of its Media Player technology. On Monday, Microsoft will officially name the product and its launch date, as well as...

<p>ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- Imagine someday calling a taxicab in the shape of a tiny jet that seats six and can pick you up at your local municipal airport and deliver you to where you want to go for about the cost of an airline coach seat.</p>

By Andrew Orlowski in London Posted: 07/11/2002 at 05:01 EST A refreshing wind of honesty seems to be blowing out of Microsoft's phone division these days. Yesterday Roberto Cazzaro gave an interview with IDG in which he admitted he had "no idea" if Microsoft new Smartphone software was good enough to be accepted by the carriers. Cazzaro is director of International Strategy at Microsoft's Mobilie Devices Division, the umbrella for the PDA and phone operations. This is quite a change to the "World Domination tomorrow...the Universe next week" theme that accompanies so many tech launches, and Microsoft's in particular. But...

By John Lettice Posted: 07/11/2002 at 10:17 EST Microsoft, as we've all been aware for some time, plans to enter the home wireless arena at the tail end of this year, and the company today announced that it, er, plans to enter the home wireless arena at the tail end of this year. And...? Er no, that's it folks, they're refusing to give details. But they're not refusing to publish content-light softball interviews with themselves on Microsoft Presspass, so at some personal psychological risk The Register has gone in there on your behalf to decrypt the spin. Microsoft hardware division...