Immer mehr Leser greifen zu E-Books: Zwar liegt der Marktanteil etwa in Deutschland in diesem Jahr erst bei rund zwei Prozent, wie Gottfried Honnefelder, Vorsteher des Börsenvereins des Deutschen Buchhandels, in Frankfurt im Main sagte. In den USA, wo sich Trends erfahrungsgemäss immer einige Jahre früher zeigen, hat er aber bereits 15 bis 20 Prozent erreicht.
Vor gut zehn Jahren war der Digitalradiostandard DAB in der Schweiz eingeführt worden. Ab kommender Woche sind DAB-fähige Radiogeräte aber bereits wieder veraltet: Dann wird der Standard endgültig durch das neuere DAB+ abgelöst.
EMC reorganisiert ihr Emea-Geschäft (Europa, Mittlerer Osten, Afrika) und fasst die Länder Italien, Schweiz, Spanien, Israel, Portugal und Griechenland in einer neuen Division zusammen. Die Führung der damit neu entstandenen Division EMC Europe South übernimmt der Schweizer Jacques Boschung.
Der US-Mobile-Chiphersteller Texas Instruments (TI) sorgte zuletzt gleich zwei Mal für Schlagzeilen. Zum einen warnte das Unternehmen im Vormonat vor schwächeren Zahlen für das Septemberquartal, zum anderen deutete der Chipgigant einen möglichen Rückzug aus dem Geschäft mit Smartphone- und Tablet PC Chips an.
Der Handelskonzern Douglas hat trotz der Krise bei der Buchhandelskette Thalia sein Umsatzziel im abgelaufenen Bilanzjahr 2011/12 erreicht. Ein deutlicher Anstieg der Erlöse im Online-Geschäft sowie eine rege Nachfrage in den Juweliergeschäften und Parfümerien in Deutschland hätten Rückenwind gegeben, wie Douglas am Dienstag mitteilte.
Der diesjährige Nobelpreis für Physik geht an die beiden Quantenphysiker Serge Haroche vom College de France in Paris und David Wineland vom National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder (US-Bundesstaat Colorado). Das gab die Königlich-Schwedische Akademie der Wissenschaften heute, Dienstag, in Stockholm bekannt.
Mit dem Nexus 7 hat Google bereits einen Fuß in die Welt der Tablets gesetzt. Nun soll ein etwas größeres High-End-Gerät folgen. Wenn man dem Bericht von CNET glaubt, soll das zehn Zoll große Nexus-Tablet eine größere Pixeldichte als Apples iPad in dritter Generation haben.
Der IT-Riese IBM und der Telekommunikationsnetzbetreiber AT&T haben heute ein Kooperationsprojekt bestätigt. Ziel der Zusammenarbeit sei die Entwicklung eines Cloud-Services für private Netzwerke, heisst es in einer gemeinsamen Aussendung.
Kurz vor dem Besuch von Deutschlands Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel in Athen haben Hacker mehrere Internet-Seiten der griechischen Regierung ins Visier genommen. Die Gruppe Anonymous brüstete sich am Montagabend auf Twitter mit den Angriffen und begründete die Cyber-Attacken mit dem angekündigten Grossaufgebot der Polizei zur Absicherung des Besuchs von Merkel.
Der japanische Display-Hersteller Futaba hat auf der Elektronikmesse Ceatec in Chiba City den Prototypen einer Armbanduhr mit flexiblem OLED-Display vorgestellt. Der Armband-Bildschirm ist lediglich 0,22 Millimeter dick und lässt sich problemlos um ein Handgelenk wickeln.
Nerval's Lobster writes "VMware has updated its cloud-management portfolio to support alternative tools, including Amazon's platform. That's a big step for the company, which for some time seemed to shy away from the idea of backing heterogeneous cloud environments. VMware's vFabric Application Director 5.0 is designed to, in the company's words, 'provision applications on any cloud.' That includes Amazon's EC2. The platform includes pre-approved operating system and middleware components for modeling and deploying those aforementioned applications, with the ability to use the platform's blueprints for deploying applications across 'multiple virtual and hybrid cloud infrastructures.' The other platform, vCloud Automation Center 5.1, enables 'policy-based provisioning across VMware-based private and public clouds, physical infrastructure, multiple hypervisors and Amazon Web Services.'"
Zothecula writes "Astrobotic Technology Inc., a spin-off company of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), has debuted its full-size flight prototype of its Polaris lunar water-prospecting robot. Polaris is specially designed to work in the permanently shadowed craters at the Moon's poles. Scheduled to be sent to the Moon using a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle, the solar-powered rover is a contender in the US$20 million Google Lunar X Prize and is tasked with seeking ice deposits that could be used by future colonists."
Several readers sent word that KDE has published a manifesto. According to its official announcement, the KDE community's growth over the past 15 years has "created a need for clarity about what pulls us together as a community." It continues, "The KDE Manifesto is not intended to change the organization or the way it works. Its aim is only to describe how the KDE Community sees itself. What binds us together are certain values and their practical implications, without regard for who a person is or what background and skills they bring." The manifesto opens boldly, saying, "We are a community of technologists, designers, writers and advocates who work to ensure freedom for all people through our software." It comes along with more detailed descriptions of the benefits and principles of a KDE project.
Following on the success of the various Humble Bundles for DRM-free video games, the organization has just launched its first Humble eBook Bundle. It includes Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow, Pump Six by Paolo Bacigalupi, Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, Invasion by Mercedes Lackey, Stranger Things Happen, and Magic for Beginners, both by Kelly Link. If you choose to pay more than the average (about $11 at this writing), you also get Old Man's War by John Scalzi, and Signal to Noise, by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. The books are available in PDF, MOBI, and ePub formats, without DRM. As with all the Humble Bundles, you can choose how much you'd like to pay, and how the proceeds are split between any of the authors and/or among three charities.
MrSeb writes "A few hundred million miles away on the surface of the Red Planet, Mars rover Curiosity has photographed an unidentified, shiny, metallic object. Now, before you get too excited, the most likely explanation is that bright object is part of the rover that has fallen off — or perhaps some debris from MSL Curiosity's landing on Mars, nine weeks ago. There is the distinct possibility, however, that this object is actually native to Mars, which would be far more exciting. It could be the tip of a larger object, or perhaps some kind of exotic, metallic Martian pebble (a piece of metal ore, perhaps). Close-up imagery will now be captured and analyzed, and within the next few days we should know if it's simply a piece of Curiosity — or something a whole lot more exciting."
Today Mozilla released the final version of Firefox 16, which includes a number of new tools for developers. "A number of HTML5 code has been 'unprefixed,' which means that Mozilla has decided it has matured enough to run in the browser without causing instability. The newly unshackled HTML5 includes CSS3 Animations, Transforms, Transitions, Image Values, Values and Units, and IndexedDB. Two Web APIs that Mozilla helped to create, Battery API and Vibration API, are also now unprefixed. These changes help keep Firefox competitive, but it also sends a signal to developers that Mozilla thinks these are good enough to begin baking into their sites. It's a strong endorsement of the 'future-Web' tech." Here's the complete change list and the download page.
dsinc writes that Russia's "Communications and Press Ministry has proposed banning children from using Wi-Fi networks in public, potentially making cafes, restaurants and other locations providing the service responsible for enforcing the law. An official with the ministry's Federal Mass Media Inspection Service, known as Roskomnadzor, said the ban should apply to people under 18 years old. Locations providing Wi-Fi access would be held legally responsible for implementing the rule, and failing to meet the proposed measure would result in a fine ranging from 20,000 rubles to 50,000 rubles ($640 to $1,600), Vedomosti reported Thursday." The law, ostensibly to "shield" children, would apply to a fairly broad definition of child — anyone under 18.
JamieKitson writes "The latest Webconverger 15 release is the first Linux distribution to be automagically updatable from a Github repository. The chroot of the OS is kept natively in git's format and fuse mounted with git-fs. Webconverger fulfills the Web kiosk use case, using Firefox and competes indirectly with Google Chrome OS. Chrome OS also has an autoupdate feature, however not as powerful, unified & transparent as when simply using git."
tsu doh nimh writes "Brian Krebs follows up on a recent Slashdot discussion about a cybercrime gang that is recruiting botmasters to help with concerted heists against U.S. financial institutions. The story looks at the underground's skeptical response to this campaign, which is being led by a criminal hacker named vorVzakone ('thief in law'), who has released a series of videos about himself. vorVzakone also is offering a service called 'insurance from criminal prosecution,' in which miscreants can purchase protection from goons who specialize in bribing or intimidating Russian/Eastern European police into scuttling cybercrime investigations. For $100,000, the service also claims to have people willing to go to jail in place of the insured. Many in the criminal underground view the entire scheme as an elaborate police sting operation."
An anonymous reader writes "I have a cottage at the end of a long dirt road, no electricity nor internet, and recently some (insert expletive here) wads are using the area as a trash dump: countertops, sofas, metal scraps, tvs — all the stuff they don't want to pay to dump at the landfill. I can't block the road because it's a fire access. But I would really like to have a way to catch who is doing this. Are there any a) waterproof, b) self-contained, c) self-powered, and (ideally) d) inexpensive video-recording units out there? Are there any other creative ways to get the guys? I was thinking of something like a device that will cycle, so that the last week of video is recorded. It could take photos or video, and as long as it's small enough that I could camouflage it well, I suspect I'd be able to figure this out soon. And any idea of what my legal rights are to videotape or record?" Hunters have been doing this for years (with film, and now digital) to figure out prey patterns with cameras that are built for concealment; what else would you recommend?
concealment writes with this extract from GigaOm: "'We buy lots and lots of hard drives . . . . [They] are the single biggest cost in the entire company.' Those are the words of Backblaze Founder and CEO Gleb Budman, whose company offers unlimited cloud backup for just $5 a month, and fills 50TB worth of new storage a day in its custom-built, open source pod architecture. So one might imagine the cloud storage startup was pretty upset when flooding in Thailand caused a global shortage on internal hard drives last year. Backblaze details much the process in a Tuesday-morning blog post, including the hijinks that followed as the company got creative trying to figure out ways around the new hard drive limits. Maps were drawn, employees were cut off from purchasing hard drives at Costco — both in-person throughout Silicon Valley and online (despite some great efforts to avoid detection, such as paying for hard drives online using gift cards) — and friends and family across the country were conscripted into a hard-drive-buying army."
concealment writes "A new lawsuit targets Google for reading e-mails to target ads, according to TechCrunch. But the issue isn't that Google is reading e-mails from registered users; rather, the company is using e-mails sent from other services to Google users to target ads as well. Google has gotten the side-eye a few times in the past for using e-mail content to serve context-based ads to its Gmail users. And for those Gmail users, Google's hide is covered: the terms of service explicitly state that users' e-mail content determines what ads they see."
First time accepted submitter Tator Tot writes "A small radioactive cylinder that went missing from a Halliburton Co. truck last month was found on a Texas road late Thursday, the company said, ending a weeks-long hunt that involved local, state and federal authorities."