Kinetically powered cell phones have been relegated to futuristic concepts..or have they? Nokia files a patent that could lead to the first real piezoelectric mobile phone.

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Starting next month, the more than 400 million Facebook users could begin seeing a new kind of status update flow through their news feed: the current locations of their friends.  —  Facebook plans to take the wraps off a new location-based feature …

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Neil McAllister takes a deeper look at HTML5, outlining what developers should expect from this overhaul of HTML — one that some believe could put an end to proprietary Web technologies such as Flash and Silverlight. Among the most eagerly anticipated additions to HTML5 are new elements and APIs that allow content authors to create rich media using nothing more than standards-based HTML. The standard also introduces browser-based application caches, which enable Web apps to store information on the client device. 'But for all of HTML5's new features, users shouldn't expect plug-ins to disappear overnight. The Web has a long history of many competing technologies and media formats, and the inertia of that legacy will be difficult to overcome. It may yet be many years before a pure-HTML5 browser will be able to match the capabilities of today's patchwork clients,' McAllister writes. 'In the end, browser market share may be the most significant hurdle for developers interested in making the most of HTML5. Until these legacy browsers are replaced with modern updates, Web developers may be stuck maintaining two versions of their sites: a rich version for HTML5-enabled users, and a version for legacy browsers that falls back on outdated rendering tricks.'"

On Monday evening I received a phone call from someone I trust who told me that one of our interns had asked for compensation in exchange for a blog post. Specifically, this intern had allegedly asked for a Macbook Air in exchange for a post about a startup. After an investigation we determined that the allegation was true. In fact, on at least one other occasion this intern was almost certainly given a computer in ...

Cisco Systems, has announced the launch of a super-fast and effeciency-focused router technology which will be at the heart of "the next generation of the Internet".

2009 saw dramatic growth in the popularity of netbooks. This trend is expected to continue in 2010 as they become increasingly affordable.

Before the Internet provided instant access to vast stores of reference information, news, entertainment, and the like, there were CD-ROMs.

Sometimes companies spar out their differences behind closed doors, and sometimes they have guys like Jen-Hsun Huang at their helms and the whole world gets to know how they feel and what they intend to do about it. He has taken a recent interview with Fortune magazine as an opportunity to eloquently lay out his side's case.

Sequoia-backed Bump Technologies Inc. is closing in on 10 million downloads for its nifty contact and data-sharing app.

If you could design a perfect laptop, what features would you include or leave out? Best Buy asked its customers, then channeled the info back to laptop manufacturers. The Satellite E205 is Toshiba's offering and it weighs in at a decent price, with solid performance and Intel WiDi wireless display to TV technology on board.

The world's first commercial effort at a patient-ready brain computer interface is on display over at CeBIT 2010, but don't go throwing out your keyboard and mouse just yet.

Looking to facilitate what it calls free speech rights in countries that don't look favorably at such liberties, the US government Monday said it would ease the regulations around exporting Internet-based applications such as e-mail, blogging and social networking software to Iran, Sudan and Cuba

Following in the footsteps of the Swedes and Germans, the Dutch Pirate Party has decided to join the national elections being held this spring. The Pirate Party booked a surprising victory by scooping two seats in the European Parliament last year, but has yet to score its first elected seat in a national Parliament.

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The HTC lawsuit capped blunt talks that have reportedly shaken their faith in Google  —  Oppenheimer's Yair Reiner issued a behind-the-scenes report Tuesday that sheds a lot of light on the patent suits Apple (AAPL) filed last week against HTC, the Taiwanese smartphone maker.

Cisco's major news is finally out: a new large-scale core router, the CRS-3, capable of handling 322 Tbps.  —  That number — three times what Cisco's current best product, the CRS-1, can handle — is just a theoretical upper limit.

The entire family of devices built on the iPhone OS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) have been designed to run only software that is approved by Apple—a major shift from the norms of the personal computer market.

Brian X. Chen at Wired, on the default iPhone apps that aren't present on the iPad: … Actually, it's sort of the opposite problem.  It's not that Apple couldn't just create bigger versions of these apps and have them run on the iPad.  It wasn't a technical problem, it was a design problem.

It shouldn't be any surprise that the HP Slate supports Flash, since it runs Windows 7, but we've seen so little of the device since Steve Ballmer first waved it around at CES that we're still totally intrigued by this video from Adobe showing it in action.

Today we're launching our first new news vertical in almost four years: Mediagazer, which will focus on the content production and distribution business, organizing topics as wide as journalism, blogging, video production, e-books, and digital distribution technologies.

Apple just aired their first iPad commercial during the 82nd Annual Academy Awards.  A description of the ad by Doju:  —  The commercial was just on, depicted a person using the iPad on their lap …

OAKLAND, Calif. — Tim Westergren recently sat in a Las Vegas penthouse suite, a glass of red wine in one hand and a truffle-infused Kobe beef burger in the other, courtesy of the investment bankers who were throwing a party to court him.

Did you know that blocking ads truly hurts the websites you visit?  We recently learned that many of our readers did not know this, so I'm going to explain why.  —  There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads …

AP - Authorities have smashed one of the world's biggest networks of virus-infected computers, a data vacuum that stole credit cards and online banking credentials from as many as 12.7 million poisoned PCs.

LiveScience.com - Dim lights can make it seem as if no one is watching, triggering moral transgressions in many people, a new study suggests.

HavanaF writes "Online backup is practical, but can it offer any privacy? The Dutch security company Safeberg developed an Offline Private Key Protocol, with an asymmetric key scheme. The protocol demands that the private (decryption) key be stored away from the 'source' computer, which presumably is 'too vulnerable.' The catch is that the private key needs to be fairly large to be secure: a 4,096-bit RSA key should suffice for some years. But how to store an 800-character key offline? Safeberg introduces a machine readable paper key, with the 4k-bit key crammed in a giant 2D Datamatrix barcode. This video on key strength tells the story."

An anonymous reader writes "When beginning to use keyboards I did not pay much attention to touch typing technique. Instead, I eventually achieved decent rates by simply doing what felt natural to me. These days my qwerty typing speed is in the range of 90-110 WPM, probably more toward the lower end. While this isn't too shabby, I feel some awkwardness in my technique (such as not using my little and ring fingers when I really should). Has anyone been in a similar situation, wanted to fix it, and actually done so? What do you reckon is the best way to fix half-broken typing? Touch training sessions? Should I switch to Dvorak and pretty much learn typing from scratch, but properly this time?"

Mirk writes "In a recent interview, Don Knuth wrote: 'The way a lot of programming goes today isn't any fun because it's just plugging in magic incantations — combine somebody else's software and start it up.' The Reinvigorated Programmer laments how much of our 'programming' time is spent pasting not-quite-compatible libraries together and patching around the edges." This 3-day-old article has sparked lively discussions at Reddit and at Hacker News, and the author has responded with a followup and summation.

An anonymous reader writes "I own a small Web development studio that specializes in open source software, primarily Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla for small businesses. Our production servers, which host about 50 sites and generate ~20K hits/week, are managed by a 3rd party that I'm sure many on Slashdot would recognize. Earlier today I was researching some problems on one of our sites and found that there have been over 1 million SSH authentication failures from ~1200 IP addresses on one of our servers over the last year. I contacted the ISP, who had promised me that server security would be actively managed, and their recommendation was, 'change the SSH port!' Of course this makes sense and may help to an extent, but it still doesn't solve the problem I'm facing: how do you manage server security on a tight budget with literally no system admin (except for me and I know I'm a n00b)? User passwords are randomly generated, we use a non-standard SSH port, and do not use any unencrypted services such as FTP. Is there a server monitoring program you would recommend? Is there an ISP or Web-based service that specializes in this?"

Barence writes "Why do people think they own code just because they've paid for it? PC Pro's Kevin Partner says many of his clients believe that by paying for the work to be done, they take ownership of it. But, put simply, code is owned by its developer even once the client has paid, unless that developer is legally employed by the client or a contract exists that transfers full ownership (and even then it's far from clear-cut). He discusses the thorny issue of making clients understand that distinction and gives advice on how developers can assert their rights."

An anonymous reader writes "A local community organization has asked me to help them set up WiFi access for an upcoming event, with some unusual (to me) requirements. All users (up to 500 people) will occupy a relatively small area and more-or-less have line-of-sight to the WAP, so issues like signal strength and wall penetration don't matter. Security also does not matter, as we plan to open this to anyone wanting to connect. Cost always matters, but we realize a $50 Linksys or three won't cut it here. In the past, I have used Cisco AP1200s for a few dozen users to great satisfaction, but they only handle 50 connections at a time, and practically count as antiques at this point anyway. My research on the matter tells me that 802.11n performs far better in this regard, but I want to support 802.11g as well. I have no objection to using two APs to split those apart (with n limited to 5.8GHz, as per the suggestion of several comments in a recent Ask Slashdot), but physical constraints make it preferable to minimize the total number of APs needed — Ten WRT54s might cost about the same as one Aironet, but I only have three good places to mount these. I welcome any suggestions and real-world experiences with similar situations, including the ever-popular Ask Slashdot refrain of 'What kind of idiot would do it like that, when you can just do this?' Ideally, I would like to know model numbers and how well they held up under real-world loads comparable to my situation."

snydeq writes "Peter Wayner provides a developer's comparison of Android and the iPhone and finds Android not only competitive but in fact a better choice than the iPhone for many developers, largely due to its Java foundation. 'While iPhone developers have found that one path to success is playing to our baser instincts (until Apple shuts them down), a number of Android applications are offering practical solutions that unlock the power of a phone that's really a Unix machine you can slip into your pocket,' Wayner writes, pointing out GScript and Remote DB as two powerful tools for developers to make rough but workable custom tools for Android. But the real gem is Java: 'The pure Java foundation of Android will be one of the biggest attractions for many businesses with Java programmers on the staff. Any Java developer familiar with Eclipse should be able to use Google's Android documentation to turn out a very basic application in just a few hours. Not only that, but all of the code from other Java programs will run on your Android phone — although it won't look pretty or run as fast as it does on multicore servers.'"

whisper_jeff writes "I work in a design studio where the production director is also the owner's son (translation = he can do no wrong). He is fond of accessing a designer's computer via filesharing and working directly on files off of the designer's computers rather than transferring the files to his computer to work on them there. In so doing, he causes the designer's computer to grind to a near-halt as the harddrive is now tasked with his open/save requests along with whatever the designer is doing. Given that there is no way he's going to change his ways (since he doesn't see anything wrong with it...), I was wondering if there was a way to throttle a user's shared access to a computer (Mac OSX 10.5.8) so that his remote working would have minimal impact on our work. Google searches have revealed nothing helpful (maybe I should Bing it... :) so I was hoping someone with more technical expertise on Slashdot could offer a suggestion."

An anonymous reader points out this article about "how a big site like MySpace uses thousands of cloud computing cores to do performance testing on its live site. There are some really great numbers in there from the performance tests, like generating 16GB/second of bandwidth and 77,000 hits/second during testing (not including the live traffic on the site at the time)."

中国互联网是开放自由的，但Youtube上有太多伤害未成年人的视频了，于是我国依法将其屏蔽。 在写这篇文章时我很矛盾，到底要不要将方法从小圈子里公开到较大的圈子里，因为这样做可能会加速解决方案被相关部门取缔。但后来我想，即使只是在小圈子传播，相关部门也必须为了年终奖金做点什么，不然真的对不起5毛钱的工资。 所以，与其在小圈子里传播，倒不如让所有人都用上，起码能用上好一段时间。这篇文章分别介绍3个不翻墙上Youtube的方法，从简单到复杂。 一、山寨Youtube 山寨Youtube的网址是 www.youtubecn.com ，它利用Youtube的API，获取视频的地址后将其替换成一个还未被墙的地址，并使用第三方播放器播放。 事实上原理我们不需要知道，仅仅知道在这里能观看Youtube视频即可。 二、TubeWall脚本 TubeWall脚本是本文的重点推荐。 仅仅解决了主动观看Youtube视频是不足够的，很多网站、博客都嵌入了Youtube的视频，在不用代理的情况下，网页上就出现了一个又一个的“洞”。 于是很容易想到，能否用和山寨Youtube同样的原理，将网页上嵌入式Youtube视频的地址替换成还没被依法取缔的呢？ 答案是可以的。推友 @darasion 编写了TubeWall脚本，安装这个脚本后，网页上嵌入式Youtube播放器会被替换成第三方播放器，无需翻墙即可播放。同时，你还可以直接下载视频。 TubeWall脚本可以安装在Firefox（需要先安装Greasemonkey）、Chrome、Opera。点击这里直接安装。 安装TubeWall脚本后，如果网页上出现了Youtube的视频地址，点击后会弹出一个视频播放器直接播放。你可以在安装脚本后点击下面链接： http://www.youtub... 三、搭建一个TubeWall客户端 如果山寨Youtube也被依法取缔了，在不使用代理的情况下，我们如何主动观看Youtube的视频呢？ 这时我们或许会想，要是山寨Youtube开放源代码多好啊，我们自己就可以搭建一个。 实际上它没有开放源代码。但TubeWall的作者 @darasion 除了写了脚本外，还做了一个TubeWall网页版，并且将其开源。 只要你有一个PHP空间，就能在这里下载TubeWall网页版的源代码，上传到空间里你就能拥有另一个山寨版Youtube了。 相关文章： 【视频】胡紫薇大闹CCTV5改名发布会-家丑怎能如此外扬？ 小学生的成人行为 中文Twitter用户群抽样调查 因为在中国，所以有话题 一位Google员工及韩寒对Google退出中国的看法 宁为玉碎，不为瓦全-为Google喝彩 © 可能吧 | 查看原文 | 进行评论

Gmail is easily the most popular email application among power users, and with good reason: It's an excellent app. But if you haven't gotten to know its best shortcuts, tricks, Labs features, and add-ons, it's time you made Gmail sing.Photo remixed from Google's own Become a Gmail ninja page. Way back in 2006, I showed you my favorite tips, tricks, and tools for making the most of Gmail. A lot has changed in the Gmail ...

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When you’re on your way out of a job, there’s a lot of fun ways to exit. Some choose to take all the staplers in the office, some show up to the last day in shorts, some pull a Jerry Maguire. And some tweet out a haiku. That’s exactly what Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz did tonight. Here’s his tweet: Today’s my last day at Sun. I’ll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on ...

Because many of you use twitter.com to read and write tweets, we've been spending some time focusing on ways to improve your experience on the site. Today, we're introducing a feature called Hovercards that will be a handy way to interact with the folks behind each tweet.On any timeline, as its namesake suggests, Hovercards are cards which appear when you hover over a username or avatar. The cards display additional information about the person and ...

Something tells me Kwedit, which launches today, is going to be a hit. It’s a new payment service that absolutely doesn’t guarantee payments. In fact, its unreliability is what makes it so attractive to social game publishers and other people selling virtual goods. It’s also a great way to let the unbanked masses out there pay for stuff without getting sucked in to scamville-type scams. The product is called Kwedit Promise. Here’s how Kwedit works: ...

Steven Frank: shutup.css is a custom user stylesheet that can be applied to your browser to hide comments on many popular web sites without user intervention. ★

Further Reading Amazon.com Widgets

Lorem ipsum is a block of dummy text in Latin often used in design and publishing to fill space in a mockup. The brilliant Dummy Image Generator is like "lorem ipsum" for images.Like "lorem ipsum", the Dynamic Dummy Image Generator offers a glimpse at what content might look like in a layout, but instead of placeholder text, it creates a placeholder image. Using the service is dead simple: Sometimes you just need a placeholder image ...