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Comment Synology (Score 5, Informative) 227

I recently installed a small DS212+ for a small office of 5 using around 1tb of data. The NAS was chosen as a low cost option but after running it for a few weeks it's actually better than a windows box for this use case, mostly because of its excellent software and ease of use. It has a built in VPN server and access to a host of 3rd party apps. Highly recommended.
Android

Submission + - Final Android 3.0 SDK released (blogspot.com)

Submitted by teh31337one
teh31337one writes: Google have released the SDK for their tablet OS, Android 3.0 "Honeycomb".

Google state on their developers blog that the APIs are final, and you can now develop apps targeting this new platform and publish them to Android Market. The new API level is 11.

An overview of the new user and developer features, is available here: Android 3.0 Platform Highlights.
Education

Submission + - The Internet Generation: Old Fogies in their 20s?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times has an interesting report on the iGeneration, born in the ’90s and this decade comparing them to the Net Generation, born in the 1980s. The Net Generation spend two hours a day talking on the phone and still use e-mail frequently while the iGeneration — conceivably their younger siblings — spends considerably more time texting than talking on the phone, pays less attention to television than the older group and tends to communicate more over instant-messenger networks. “People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,” says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.” Dr. Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, says that the iGeneration, unlike their older peers, expect an instant response from everyone they communicate with, and don't have the patience for anything less. “They’ll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up,” says Rosen. Another intra-generational gap is the iGeneration comfort in multi-tasking with studies showing that 16- to 18-year-olds perform seven tasks, on average, in their free time — like texting on the phone, sending instant messages and checking Facebook while sitting in front of the television while people in their early 20s can handle only six, and those in their 30s perform about five and a half. "That versatility is great when they’re killing time, but will a younger generation be as focused at school and work as their forebears?" writes Brad Smith. “I worry that young people won’t be able to summon the capacity to focus and concentrate when they need to,” says Vicky Rideout, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation."
Linux

Submission + - $199 Freescale Tablet runs Chrome OS (armdevices.net) 3

Submitted by Charbax
Charbax writes: This is an extensive video interview with Freescale's Manager of Software development about their integration of the Chromium OS onto their ARM Cortex A8 i.MX51 based $199 Tablet reference design.

It seems to run smoothly and fast with multiple tabs. No touch screen support yet so input is using a USB keyboard and mouse for now, but the WiFi drivers are fine. Freescale is also demonstrating Android and Ubuntu versions. Those have 3G sim card reader built-in, even an HDMI output and 720p video playback. The question is, will they be able to support full Chrome browser web browsing at full speed on the most Javascript and Flash intensive websites and support an unlimited amount of opened tabs?
The Internet

Submission + - 30000 UK ISP Users Face Illegal P2P Threat Letters (ispreview.co.uk)

Submitted by Mark.JUK
Mark.JUK writes: Solicitors at ACS:Law have been granted approval by the Royal Courts of Justice in London to demand the private personal details of some 30,000 customers suspected of involvement with illegal file sharing from UK broadband ISPs. The customers concerned are "suspected" of illegally file sharing (P2P) approximately 291 movie titles, they now face threatening demands for money (settlement) or risk the prospect of court action. It's noted that 25,000 of the IP addresses that have been collected belong to BT users.
Biotech

Submission + - 100K Californians to be Gene Sequenced (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "A hundred thousand elderly Californians (average age 65) will be gene sequenced by the state by using their saliva samples. This would be the first time such a large group has had their genes sequenced and is hoped to be a goldmine for genetic diseases--from cardiovascular diseases to diabetes and even the diseases associated with aging. Kaiser Permanente patients will be involved and they are aiming to have half a million samples ready by 2013. Let's hope that they got permission from the patients' doctors first."
Windows

Windows 7 On Multicore — How Much Faster? 349

Posted by Soulskill from the where-do-i-buy-a-256-core-netbook dept.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Andrew Binstock tests whether Windows 7's threading advances fulfill the promise of improved performance and energy reduction. He runs Windows XP Professional, Vista Ultimate, and Windows 7 Ultimate against Viewperf and Cinebench benchmarks using a Dell Precision T3500 workstation, the price-performance winner of an earlier roundup of Nehalem-based workstations. 'What might be surprising is that Windows 7's multithreading changes did not deliver more of a performance punch,' Binstock writes of the benchmarks, adding that the principal changes to Windows 7 multithreading consist of increased processor affinity, 'a wholly new mechanism that gets rid of the global locking concept and pushes the management of lock access down to the locked resources,' permitting Windows 7 to scale up to 256 processors without performance penalty, but delivering little performance gains for systems with only a few processors. 'Windows 7 performs several tricks to keep threads running on the same execution pipelines so that the underlying Nehalem processor can turn off transistors on lesser-used or inactive pipelines,' Binstock writes. 'The primary benefit of this feature is reduced energy consumption,' with Windows 7 requiring 17 percent less power to run than Windows XP or Vista."
Moon

Submission + - SPAM: NASA spacecraft crash into the moon 3

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: NASA' Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellites (LCROSS) took dead aim and crashed into the moon at about 5,600mph at around 7:31 am ESD. Watching the results on NASA TV, scientists were pleased with the impact of the two satellites.

The impact of the $80 million LCROSS satellites into the moon was to create what the space agency hopes is an ice-filled a debris plume that can be analyzed for water content.
[spam URL stripped]
Link to Original Source
The Internet

Submission + - First European provider to break Net Neutrality (astute.nl)

Submitted by
Rik van der Kroon
Rik van der Kroon writes: "Major Dutch cable provider UPC has introduced a new network management system which caps users their bandwidth for certain services and providers at 1/3rd of the bandwidth during a 12 hour daily time span between 12am and 12pm.

After that COAX, the consumers front for cable providers in The Netherlands, received many complaints about network problems and slow speeds UPC decided to take this as an excuse to introduce their new "network management" protocol which slows down a large amount of traffic. All protocols but HTTP are capped to 1/3rd and within the HTTP realm some websites and services which take up bandwidth are capped as well.

So far UPC hides themselves behind the common excuse: "We are protecting all the users against 1% of the user base which abuses our network"

The original statement in Dutch can be found here: http://www.coax.nl/news/reageer/index.php?NewsID=2218"
Government

Submission + - New York MTA asserts copyright over schedule (greatergreaterwashington.org)

Submitted by
Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: "Greater Greater Washington reports that

The New York Metropolitan Transit Authority's lawyers are going after a local blogger, and attempting to block an iPhone application showing Metro-North railroad schedules. The blog StationStops writes about Metro-North Commuter Railroad service north of New York City, and often criticizes its operations. Its creator, Chris Schoenfeld, also created an iPhone application to give Metro-North riders schedule information. Now the MTA is insisting he pay them to license the data, and at one point even accused the site of pretending to be an official MTA site.

I can't believe that this the MTA's actions are going to go over well with the public."
Cellphones

Submission + - "Terminator Vision" is here for the iPhone (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by musefrog
musefrog writes: The BBC is reporting that so-called Augmented Reality has arrived — in the UK at least.

From the article:
"Via the video function of a mobile phone's camera it is now possible to combine a regular pictorial view with added data from the internet just as the fictional Terminator was able to overlay its view of the world with vital information about its surroundings. For example, UK-firm Acrossair has launched an application for the iPhone which allows Londoners to find their nearest tube station using their iPhone."

The page features an impressive video demonstrating AR in action.

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