All Things News

Straight from Slashdot: “Though it’s not being widely reported, this week marks the end of the line for the F-14 Tomcat in US Navy service. First flown in 1970, the Grumman F-14 Tomcat was easily one of the world’s most powerful, advanced, and deadly aircraft for many years, capable of flying at Mach 2.3 and firing its half-dozen Mach 5 AIM-54 Phoenix air-to-air missiles at targets as much as 100 miles away. Having been gradually replaced during the last several years by the newer F/A-18E/F, the last of the aircraft in US service will be officially retired on Friday, September 22nd in a ceremony at Virginia’s Oceana Naval Air Station. However, at least a few F-14s will continue to fly for a few more years: Iran — which took delivery of 79 aircraft before the overthrow of the Shah — still flies the plane, though only a small number (perhaps ten or twenty) are believed to still be in service due to a lack of spare parts and attrition.”

Straight from Ars Technica: “Apparently feeling the heat from Microsoft, Sony announced a price reduction on the low-end 20GB PlayStation 3, settling on a sale price of 47,600 yen (roughly $410) in Japan. Sony trimmed about 12,200 yen (~$100) off the price of the console, bringing it face to face with Microsoft’s holiday offensive.The Xbox 360 Core System, which will be making a debut in Japan in early November, will sell for 29,800 Yen ($256). The premium system sells for 39,795 yen ($342), and Microsoft will also debut the HD DVD add-on drive in the region in time for the holidays. Yen for yen, the new low-end PS3 price matches up squarely against the Xbox 360 Core System and add-on HD DVD drive, which together will cost 49,600 yen ($427). Is Sony afraid of the Xbox 360/HD DVD combo? It is quite surprising to see the company slash prices when it is well known that Sony will not be able to meet demand for the first month of the consoles life. In fact, Sony has only 100,000 units for the Japanese launch. If previous reports are correct, only 20 percent of those units will be the low-end model.”

Straight from Yahoo News: “BAGHDAD, Iraq – Insurgents are now using unwitting kidnap victims as suicide bombers — seizing them, booby-trapping their cars without their knowledge, then releasing them only to blow up the vehicles by remote control, the Defense Ministry warned Thursday.”

Straight from DigitalBattle: “According to Famitsu, Gran Turismo HD will be released in two versions, one with no cars or tracks (at all) and the other, called “premium” with 30 cars and two tracks. Then the point is to go online and buy additional cars through Sony’s online system. The price of cars will range from $0.43 to $0,80, while the price of tracks ranges from $1.71 to $4.26. There are approximately 750 cars and 50 tracks in the game. You do the math.Now, any sane person will immediately acknowledge this as probably the biggest next-gen rip-off in 2006. Never mind the $600 console, or the $60 games, selling games “empty” and charging for the content is unheard of in today’s videogame culture. Apparently, milking every penny out of loyal gamers is the true “next-gen” spirit.”

Straight from Joystiq: “In a rare move, Sony directly responded to Microsoft’s 1080p upgrade announcement today. The response basically attempts to earn back any thunder taken from Sony yesterday by reminding consumers of the PS3’s much larger storage capacity and “full” HD 1080p support. Keep in mind Microsoft has no plans to produce 1080p gaming content in-house, rather just a resolution upgrade for existing content and compatibility with legitimate HD-DVD media.”

Straight from Slashdot: “Newsday is reporting that Hezbollah was able to monitor secure Israeli military communications, perhaps using technology supplied by Iran, during the recent Lebanon war. A former Israeli general, speaking anonymously, called the results ‘disastrous’ for Israel. The story reports that an anonymous Lebanese source said that Hezbollah might have taken advantage of Israeli soldiers’ mistakes in following secure radio procedures. The radio gear uses frequency hopping and encryption.”

Straight from Ars Technica: “Microsoft used a press briefing before the launch of the Tokyo Game Show to announce a number of Xbox 360 developments, including launch information for an external HD DVD drive and news of a forthcoming HD resolution upgrade to the console. The company also announced the launch of the Xbox 360 in Africa and India.The big news is the external HD DVD drive, which we’ve been expecting to hear about for months. The drive can be seen as a counter to the forthcoming PlayStation 3’s Blu-ray drive, and Microsoft is certainly pricing it as such. The new drive will launch in Japan on November 17, and will retail for ¥19,800 ($170). The drive will come with a remote control.”

Straight from Slashdot: “Mac OS market share actually slipped since last September. This reverses a trend in the winter and spring months that showed some slight growth. The actual percentage loss is small: 0.02%. But it may be significant since it follows a solid growth trend. It must be disappointing to Apple and Mac fans to see what is basically a flat line in desktop market share.”

Straight from Gizmodo: “Neuros updates their video recorder by leaps and bounds with the OSD. Like the last one, it records analog video sources to flash memory in formats easily read by PSPs and iPods. But this one has a USB port for drives, and ethernet port, so it can also store to network-attached storage. It catches video at 720×480 pixels, at 30 FPS through S-vid or composite inputs. And comes with a remote. But can be reprogrammed to act as a web server, playback youtube vids, or whatever else you can code into the C-based, open source OS.”

Straight from Slashdot: “When Microsoft announced the end of support for Windows 98 and Millennium Edition on June 30th, there was a lot of talk of these users migrating over to Linux desktops. In the weeks since this announcement, there is a very noticeable increase of activity on community boards and blogs from newbies asking questions about switching over to Linux, and how would they support their new systems.”

Straight from Slashdot: “18-year-old David Banh of Annandale, VA recently graduated from the University of Virginia with a double major in Physics and Mathematics, and an education paid for almost entirely by scholarships. What’s truly amazing is that he did it in one year, bringing in 72 Advanced Placement credits, then taking 23 credits his fall semester, 37 credits his spring semester and 3 credits in the summer. His brief undergraduate career didn’t leave him much time to explore college, so he’s now working on his master’s degree. He says he may eventually pursue law school as a part-time student in hopes of becoming a patent lawyer.”

Straight from Joystiq: “At their pre-TGS press briefing in Tokyo today, Microsoft announced that the Xbox 360 will support 1080p content through a software upgrade. The “p” stands for parity.

Microsoft’s announcement — which effectively parries Sony’s bold claims regarding the merits of 1080p high definition content or, as Sony calls it, True HD — is their latest move seeking to blunt the impact of the oncoming Sony PS3 hype-train. With the True HD cat de-clawed, Microsoft’s mantra of choice will appear even more appealing. It’s another bullet point taken out of the next-gen console war equation.”

Straight from Ars Technica: “The Sony Rootkit Pain Train keeps rolling, this time crossing the border to blow its lonesome whistle up in Quebec, where a judge is overseeing the final details of the Canadian settlement agreement. Though the US case wrapped up months ago, the Canadian agreement was only finalized a few weeks back and remains subject to court approval. It’s much like the US agreement—but because this is Sony, it contains the usual assortment of shenanigans, and the objections have been flying thick and fast as snowballs up in the Frozen North.”

Straight from Slashdot: “MIT researchers are putting a tiny gas-turbine engine inside a silicon chip about the size of a quarter. The resulting device could run 10 times longer than a battery of the same weight, powering laptops, cell phones, radios, and other electronic devices.”

From the article: “All the parts work. We’re now trying to get them all to work on the same day on the same lab bench.” The goal is to do that by the end of the year.”

Straight from Pocket PC Thoughts: “It’s thin, light, flexible – and plastic. Brown University engineers Hyun-Kon Song and Tayhas Palmore have created a prototype polymer-based battery that packs more power than a standard alkaline battery and more storage capacity than a double-layered capacitor. Their work, published in Advanced Materials, will be of interest to the energy, defense and aerospace industries, which are looking at more efficient ways to deliver electricity.”

Now this is what really sounded cool about this new technology: “You start thinking about this polymer and you start thinking that you can create batteries everywhere out of it,” Palmore said. “You could wrap cell phones in it or electronic devices. Conceivably, you could even make fabric out of this composite.”

Straight from Ars Technica: “The US government’s big spectrum auction wrapped up yesterday with bids totalling $13.9 billion. Touted as one of the largest spectrum auctions in Federal Communications Commission history, the sale was for 1,122 licenses covering 90MHz of spectrum in the 1710-1755MHz and 2110-2155MHz bands.Overall, the big winner was T-Mobile. The number four cellular provider snapped up 120 licenses with about $4.2 billion worth of bids. Snagging those licenses, which cover a handful of major metropolitan areas as well as larger regions, was seen as crucial for T-Mobile, which lacks the sheer volume of spectrum larger US providers like Verizon, Cingular, and Sprint Nextel own. The additional spectrum should enable the company to expand its next-generation wireless offerings.”

Straight from Slashdot: “ESA’s Mars Express has obtained images of the Cydonia region, site of the famous ‘Face on Mars.’ using the High Resolution Stereo Camera. After multiple attempts to image the Cydonia region from April 2004 until July 2006 were frustrated by altitude and atmospheric dust and haze, the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board Mars Express finally obtained, on 22 July, a series of images that show the famous ‘face’ on Mars in unprecedented detail, with a ground resolution of approximately 13.7 metres per pixel.”