Topic: COMPUTER - on May 11, 2010 at 10:46:00 AM CEST
13 Open Source Hardware Companies Making $1 Million or More (video)
Selling products whose design anyone can access, edit, or use on their own is pretty crazy. It’s also good business. At the annual hacker conference Foo Camp East this year, Phillip Torrone and Limor Fried from Adafruit Industries gave a rapid fire five minute presentation on thirteen companies with million dollar revenues from open source hardware (OSHW). Companies providing OSHW allow all designs of the products to be shared through an open license, meaning that everyone is free to download, modify, and share all the schematics and associated software. You’re encouraged to make, refine, or even sell your own versions of these products. While this business model is counter-intuitive for those used to our patent and copyright loving system, Torrone and Fried estimate that the industry will reach a billion dollars by 2015. Check out their talk in the video below.
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Topic: MUSIK - on May 11, 2010 at 10:43:00 AM CEST
The Bay City Rollers are back! But why?
In a 1973 interview, Leo Sayer told the NME that he was a blues singer. He may have imagined himself, three decades later, venerated as Sussex's own BB King. Instead, this summer he'll be sharing a stage with David Essex, the Osmonds and the Bay City Rollers in the Once in a Lifetime 2010 tour, kicking off in Manchester next month, and ending in Cardiff in July. This is an astonishing teen dream line-up – you only need add David Cassidy (and subtract little Leo) and you account for pretty much all the sales of Blu-Tack in the mid seventies.
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Topic: COMPUTER - on May 11, 2010 at 10:42:00 AM CEST
US prosecution of McKinnon 'spiteful', says ex-top cop
The senior former policeman in charge of the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit squad which first arrested Gary McKinnon has described the ongoing US prosecution of the Pentagon hacker as "spiteful".
Marc Kirby, retired former detective inspector at the NHTCU, was in charge of the team which first arrested McKinnon for cybercrime offences in 2002. US attempts to extradite McKinnon only started three years later in 2005, after the signature of a controversial extradition treaty between the US and UK.
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Topic: STRANGE - on May 11, 2010 at 10:40:00 AM CEST
Scroogle has been blocked
We regret to announce that our Google scraper may have to be permanently retired, thanks to a change at Google. It depends on whether Google is willing to restore the simple interface that we've been scraping since Scroogle started five years ago. Actually, we've been using that interface for scraping since Google-Watch.org began in 2002.
This interface (here's a sample from years ago) was remarkably stable all that time. During those eight years there were only about five changes that required some programming adjustments. Also, this interface was available at every Google data center in exactly the same form, which allowed us to use 700 IP addresses for Google.
That interface was at www.google.com/ie but on May 10, 2010 they took it down and inserted a redirect to /toolbar/ie8/sidebar.html. It used to have a search box, and the results it showed were generic during that entire time. It didn't show the snippets unless you moused-over the links it produced (they were there for our program, so that was okay), and it has never had any ads. Our impression was that these results were from Google's basic algorithms, and that extra features and ads were added on top of these generic results. Three years ago Google launched "Universal Search," which meant that they added results from other Google services on their pages. But this simple interface we were using was not affected at all.
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