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failcomm writes 'I've been talking with my son's (middle-school) computer lab teacher about a 'time capsule' project. The school has a number of 'retirement age' PCs (5-6 years old — Dells, HPs, a couple of Compaqs), and we've been kicking around the idea of trying to preserve a working system and some media (CDs and/or DVDs), and locking them away to be preserved for some period of time (say 50 years); to be opened by students of the future. The goal would be to have instructions on how to unpack the system, plug it into the wall (we'll assume everyone is still using 110v US outlets), and get the system to boot. Also provide instructions on how to load the media and see it in action; whether it is photos or video or games or even student programs — whatever. So first, is this idea crazy? Second, how would we go about packing/preserving various components? Lastly, any suggestions on how to store it long term? (Remember, this is a school project, so we can't exactly just 'fr

An anonymous reader sends us to Telephony Online for a story about Comcast's second attempt at traffic management (free registration may be required). After the heavy criticism they received from customers and the FCC about their first system, they've adopted a more even-handed 'protocol agnostic' approach. Nevertheless, they're once again under scrutiny from the FCC, this time for the way their system interacts with VOIP traffic. By ignoring specific protocols, the occasional bandwidth limits on high-usage customers interferes with those customers' VOIP, yet Comcast's own Digital Voice is unaffected. Quoting: 'The shocking thing is just how big a Pandora's box the FCC has appeared to open — and it just keeps getting bigger. When the FCC first started addressing bandwidth usage and DPI issues, it quickly found itself up to its knees in network management minutia. Not long after that, it followed another logical path of the DPI question and asked service providers and Web companie

stefanparvu14 writes 'Physicists in Switzerland and California have developed a new type of camera capable of imaging quantum correlations between pairs of photons. The details are presented in the current issue of the open-access publication New Journal of Physics. Unlike a conventional camera with a CCD imager, this camera is composed of Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) pixels implemented on a high-performance CMOS chip. One of the authors has provided more background for the non-physicist. Apparently, it could be used to verify the existence of Bose-Einstein condensates that are now starting to be produced in new ways.' of this story at Slashdot.

The European Southern Observatory has chosen the Koha open source library management system to replace its existing Unicorn system.

House Democrats are signaling support for network neutrality as the Energy and Commerce Committee attaches network neutrality and open access mandates to almost $3 billion in grants and loans for network build-outs to unserved and underserved areas of the country. - Democrats sent a strong signal Jan. 22 thatnetwork neutrality would play a starring role in the $6 billion broadband pieceof the U.S. House's overall $825 billion economic stimulus package. Inapproving $2.9 billion for network build-outs in rural and underserved areas,the House Committee on ...

jcatcw writes 'Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that CAPTCHA cracking isn't that difficult these days. It has even become a business. For example, DeCaptcher.com will solve CAPTCHAs for your spamming needs at a rate of $2 per 1,000 successfully cracked CAPTCHAs. In response, newer systems are in development. Both Carnegie Mellon and Penn State (is there something about the water in PA?) are working on image-based systems. ESP-PIX and SQ-PIX both require the viewer to interpret pictures. Imagination CAPTCHA from Penn has the user find the center of an image. The idea is that humans are better at image recognition that computers, but humans can legitimately disagree on their interpretations and some humans are color blind. Problems remain. For now, sites would be well advised to look at reCAPTCHA — the system that works with Google Books and the Internet Archive to digitize printed texts — which comes with a wide variety of application and programming plug-ins and an open AP

Memory maker Qimonda filed for insolvency and Samsung posted its first quarter loss on the same day as the companies deal with the rapid decline of DRAM prices. Both Qimonda and Samsung are major players in the data storage and memory markets and the two companies have been hit hard by the recession, which has meant less spending on PCs and other hardware. - FRANKFURT/SEOUL (Reuters) - German memory chip maker Qimonda filedfor insolvency on Friday and South Korea's Samsung Electronics postedits first-ever quarterly loss, in the latest signs of recession hittingthe technology sector.Qimonda said it filed an application to open insolvency procee...

The Cloud Tools project, hosted on Google Code, is a prime example of the emerging trend of open source developers targeting the cloud and looking at services such as Amazon Web Services solutions and Google App Engine to host their applications. Cloud Tools is a set of tools for deploying, managing and testing Java Enterprise Edition applications on Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). And now its founder has launched a commercial service based on Cloud Tools known as Cloud Foundry. - The open source Cloud Tools project, hosted on Google Code, is a prime example of the emerging trend of open source developers targeting the cloud and looking at services such as Amazon Web Services solutions and Google App Engine to host their applications.Indeed, an Evans Data Corp. survey recen...

Communication on China's new 3G network can now make it to the roof of the world, as China Mobile Tibet branch has announced that its first TD-SCDMA trial base station in Tibet has been opened in Lhasa and the first TD-SCDMA mobile phone call in the history of Tibet was made this week.According to the [...]

Harvesting, querying, delivering, enriching and analyzing data is at the heart of every business. However, most organizations are saddled with high-priced commercial databases as a result of continual departmental investments in new database projects, business intelligence projects, and the addition of new database projects through the merger and acquisition process.