....breaks; Another problem with deep sea cables

Reports abound that yet another cable linking the Middle East with the West has either been cut or has suffered a power outage. Conspiracy theories are starting to flow across what's left of the Internet (Perhaps Osama got a mini-sub for Christmas?). I guess it may just be possible that any extra traffic carried on this cable has caused a problem after the 3 failiures last week?

It does however highlight that our reliance on the Internet and it's apparent design weaknesses can be easily jepordised. Imagine what will happen if India becomes completely cut off from the west? All that 'out sourcing' of our call centers isn't going to seem like such a good money saving scheme to banks and the like when we can't access our details via the telephone.

God help us if a solar storm knocks out a few satallites this week; still it'll be a chance to catch up on some real 'book' reading.

Have your computer screen professionally cleaned.

This really is just for fun, and it made me laugh.

http://www.linein.org/media/screenclean.swf

OK, it seems that was taken down, but here a link to the same thing as a Windows Screensaver: http://shell.jssjr.com/files/screenclean.exe

...

Or when technology is great.

Technology put to good use against undesirables?

The Internet-based group "Anonymous" has released statements on YouTube and via a press release, outlining what they call a "War on Scientology". Church of Scientology related websites, such as religiousfreedomwatch.org have been removed due to a suspected distributed denial-of-service-attack (DDoS) by a group calling themselves "Anonymous". On Friday, the same group allegedly brought down Scientology's main website, scientology.org, which was available sporadically throughout the weekend.

Read more

Early adopters of Blu-Ray - paying the price?

It seems that people who went out and invested in Blu-Ray early-on are unlikely to be able to take advantage of new features being added to newly released movies. Blu-Ray players are divided in to categories (or profiles) with all players released before Nov 2007 being Profile 1.0. The latest profile, 1.1 allows new features to be accessed, one example of which is Picture-in-Picture. Anybody who owns a Sony PlayStation 3 will be aware that the recent update from Sony upgraded the Blu-Ray firmware to Profile 1.1. And that's the problem; there was no requirement for the hardware of early players to be upgradable and so they're pretty much stuck with an out-of-date Profile.


Whilst I'm sure there will soon be a great eBay market for 'chipping' or modding older players to upgrade the Profile of a player you've got to ask yourself how hard would it have been for the manufacturers to implement an upgrade process from day one. It would seem that in the rush to get their systems out to market, and thus not allow HD-DVD too great a lead, the players released weren't quite as good as they should have been and now the most dedicated base of users is to pay the price.

Now whilst I'm sure many of the early-adopters were aware that this may have become an issue when they purchased their players, it just doesn't seem right. In this day and age firmware updates are common for the gadgets we use (iPods, routers & games consoles etc...), and considering the complexity of the Blu-Ray technology, how hard would it have been to include an Ethernet port and update functionality?

The problem is only going to become more apparent when Profile 2.0 is released later in 2008. At present the only upgradable player on the market is the PlayStation 3 which seems to top may peoples lists as the best quality/value around.

You can read more in this BBC article

And talking of laptops; is this the most expensive ever?

This piece of cheap looking tat (i can only assume you have to be there) is the Tulip E-Go.

The Tulip E-Go Diamond notebook is inlaid with solid palladium white gold plates in which thousands (80 carats) of top-quality, brilliant cut diamonds have been pave set with surgical precision. The magnificent end result also incorporates a unique square cut ruby set in both Tulip logos and costs 283,000 Euros (US$355,000).

Apparently, E-Go stands for 'easy going' - I don't think my bank manager would see it that way.

Man this is one ugly laptop

I can accept that some people have no concept of taste, each to their own, but why the hell he chose pink? He's missed out on the fluff though....

Microsoft tries to get gaming writer fired

Right, so... a games reviewer in the UK has asked Microsoft to allow him to pay for his Live account in US$ rather than UK£ (Probably because we all know that we in the UK/Europe/Canada are getting done-over by Microsoft...And Apple...And the record companies...And the movie studios...). After Microsoft declined the offer Ben Paddon complained. This had lead to a rather pathetic attempt by Microsoft to get him fired from his writing job. Wow!

You can read more from the horses mouth here.