Library of Congress posts 1891 film footage (and ancient LOLcats)
It's shorter even than most YouTube clips, and we don't see any Oscars in its future, but a 29-second snippet from the voluminous Library of Congress archive has the honor of being one of the oldest known videos still extant.
The silent clip, embedded below or downloadable from the LoC, shows a young man swinging a set of Indian clubs. The event was filmed sometime during the spring of 1891 on an Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera, using 3/4-inch wide film.
New Obama DOJ claims sovereign immunity in wiretap case
It is a principle that predates the founding of the United States: a kind of unwritten rule that, in an earlier era, boiled down to the common phrase, "The King can do no wrong." Since the early days of English common law, the doctrines of government have been presumed to exclude and immunize a government from liability, except when those doctrines provide the exceptions.
And while the US Constitution is often praised for empowering individuals to sue their own government, the truth is that the Constitution didn't really address that point very directly. So since 1789, it's been up to the courts to apply those certain exceptions to the unspoken rule of sovereign immunity -- a practice which, when viewed with a wide-angle lens toward all of US history, has worked out quite well in the end.
Intel and Asus pick 'crowdsourced' design PC finalists
In October, Intel and Asus began a project called "WePC," where users could submit their own notebook designs. The project allowed users to submit suggestions for their dream design in the Gamer, Notebook, and Netbook categories with the idea that Asus would eventually build the most popular design. It is a sort of experiment in crowdsourced design.
Today, roughly half a year after the project began, Intel and Asus have selected the top 100 designs in the four most popular form factors submitted: docking units, dual-screen units, touchscreen units, and PCs for kids.
Australia's future is in broadband, says PM
The Australian government has established a new company with the express purpose of building a national fiber-to-the-home broadband network. The project is expected to take eight years, and cost 43 billion Australian dollars, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said in his announcement today.
The ambitious project seeks to connect 90% of all Australian homes to a 100 Mbps pipeline. Under the Rudd Government's national broadband network, "every house, school and business in Australia will get access to affordable, fast broadband."
Red Hat CEO sees open source as a 'model for government'
"President Obama came to office with the promise of change. His administration has pledged to create an environment of openness and participation," according to Jim Whitehurst, the CEO of the leading seller of Linux software in the US, in a blog post this week on the Red Hat company site.
"Red Hat is excited that the Obama administration recognizes the value of open source beyond software."
Whitehurst also noted that some have dubbed Obama the "open source president." Obama, whose presidential campaign relied heavily on technologies such as e-mail and social networking, first received the designation "open source president" from CNN contributor Alex Castellanos, when Castallanos lauded Obama's "bottom up" management style on national TV last fall.
Social networks get more social as spring springs
One part momentum, two parts hype, one part fascination with Rainn Wilson's random thoughts and violent ailurophobia -- stir, and you've got a remarkable 76.8% unique-visitor growth rate for Twitter in March, as noted by a Social Times blogger who had a bit of fun with Compete.com this morning. And the warming trend extends past the trendy microblogging service and its 14 million users.
Facebook's up 23.4% to over 91 million users, and even shaky MySpace, which has seen declines of about 11% over the past year, got a 4% bump to 55.6 million users, and standoffish LinkedIn is up 13.1% to 12.7 million users. And the URL-shortening services crucial to microblogging are showing great gains too; tinyurl.com, is.gd and bit.ly are all up by double digits (21.6%, 21.8% and 48.8% respectively), with wee is.gd showing 3721% growth over the last twelve months. (Rainn Wilson photo courtesy of Stacy D of Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons.)
The micro-cell era finally has a standard: Is femtocell finally a go?
Today, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) announced that it has published the first femtocell standard. Covered in the standard is network architecture, radio and interference aspects, management and provisioning, and security.
This new standard is a part of 3GPP's Release 8, and is interdependent with extensions that the Broadband Forum made to Technical Report 069 (TR-069). That document was developed to simplify the connectedness of end user equipment. It defines how hardware can automatically configure the protocols it uses in the application layer (ACS).
The new Nehalem-based Apple Xserves promise a price advantage
This morning's announcement of the first Apple servers to use Intel's Nehalem-series Xeon processors may be a bit more tentative at the core than it seems on the surface. What could be the best performers in Apple's new rack-mount lineup are actually not available yet, although this morning's announcement made it appear -- and some sources are actually reporting -- that the high-end models are available now.
What data centers can get now are Xserve models based on the new 2.26 GHz Intel Xeon E5520. But the performance and power-saving tests Apple cites this morning are focused on the 2.93 GHz X5570, and we don't yet have prices or availability data for those models. Betanews has contacted Apple in an effort to get further details.
Spybot Search & Destroy competitors are trying to force its removal
For years, Spybot Search & Destroy has been one of Fileforum's single most installed pieces of software, with nearly 67 million downloads since 2000 on our sister site alone. It's one of the Web's original anti-spyware packages, independently distributed by Safer Networking Ltd., based in Ireland and developed in Germany.
Despite a user base in the dozens of millions (if not more; Safer Networking doesn't track its users), Spybot S&D hasn't had an easy time establishing itself in the competitive anti-malware field. Because it is freeware (commercial users must purchase licenses), the application is seen as a thorn in the side of larger companies who sell security software with the same functionality.
Google extends search localization to the desktop
Users of Google's mobile services on handsets are familiar with how its search service can assume they're looking for something in its own general vicinity, even using GPS location. That level of detail hasn't always been available through desktop searches, though in recent months, I've noticed Google had been testing the concept off and on. I'd assumed the company was judging my approximate geography using my IP address.
This morning, the company confirmed that suspicion, making official that it will use IP addresses to approximate users' locations when it can, to make desktop searches more localized. In a blog post this morning, Google engineers Jenn Taylor and Jim Mueller wrote, "In most cases, we match your IP address to a broad geographical location. You can also specify your likely location using the 'Change location' link on the top right corner, above the map. We try to make our guesses as good as they can be so...you can just say what you want, and we'll try to find it right where you are."
Sun goes down: Was that IBM's plan?
With the takeover negotiations that neither IBM nor Sun would confirm nor deny having broken down (or not) over the weekend, over a final price that IBM may or may not have offered that could have been too low ($9.40 per share, but that's just everybody making the same guess simultaneously), Sun Microsystems is now being perceived -- and this much we do know -- as a company with less strategic direction than it appeared to have three weeks earlier.
One wonders whether that was the idea to begin with. Last year's captivating semi-negotiations between Microsoft and Yahoo used the press as liaison between the two parties, as a way of maintaining plausible deniability that either party was speaking to one another -- or at least, speaking seriously. The result of that escapade was a Yahoo that, for a time, resembled the residue of a late-night cooking knife informercial, which put Microsoft in a stronger position to build a comeback strategy for its online services.
The clock ticks down for Blockbuster: 35 days and counting
Blockbuster's recent filing with the US Securities and Exchange commission clearly portrays the gravity of the company's current situation.
For the company to maintain day-to-day operations, Blockbuster is in the process of refinancing its revolving and term loans, which will earn it $250 million that will come due in September 2010. However, before the refinancing can finish on May 11, certain conditions must be met before its lenders to fund the credit facility, and even if those are met, Blockbuster still may not make it.
Card skimmer found operating in the wild
It's like finding out there really are monsters under the bed: Over the weekend, a Seattle man visiting a WaMu ATM noticed there was something peculiar about the card-reader slot. There certainly was -- it was covered by a card skimmer with a battery, card scanner, and mini USB port.
The good news, as reported by Consumerist, is that this is pretty much the first time anyone involved has actually encountered a skimmer installed and operating (presumably; the investigation is ongoing) in the wild. The bad news is that the wee beastie was found not on some random gas-station cash machine, but on an actual bank-maintained ATM. Once upon a time we thought those might be safer from such tampering; so much for that security measure.
T-Mobile sharpening its Blade for May?
The generally reliable TmoNews is relaying information from "a trusted tipster" concerning the launch dates of various T-Mobile handsets. Eleven phones are mentioned with likely dates (not the G2, sorry). No one's safe trusting too heavily in launch dates much past midyear, but patient Sidekick 2009 (Blade) fans awaiting word on the smartphone release that's not the next iPhone and not the Pre have a date to obsess over: Wednesday, May 13. T-Mobile spokespeople had no comment on any portion of the launch-date list by press time.
Confirmed: Windows 7 users will have XP downgrade option
After a flurry of blog activity over the weekend, leading into today, concerning the extended availability of Windows XP, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Betanews early this evening that general Windows 7 users will be given the option of downgrading right over Vista to Windows XP.
"This is not the first time that Microsoft has offered downgrade rights to a version other than its immediate predecessor," the spokesperson told Betanews, "and our Software Assurance customers can always downgrade to any previous version of Windows."
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