wired_parrot writes “Responding to complaints from employees that email outside of working hours was disrupting their lives, Volkswagen has taken the step of shutting their email servers outside work-hours. Other companies have taken similar steps, with at least one taking the extraordinary step of banning internal e-mail altogether. Is this new awareness of the disruption work email brings on employee’s personal life a trend?”

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Volkswagen Turns Off E-mail After Work-Hours

New submitter Etrahkad writes “Trion Worlds, publisher of MMORPG Rift, has announced that somebody broke into one of their databases and gained access to user information. First Sony and now Rift… my identity has probably been stolen several times over, now. From the e-mail: ‘We recently discovered that unauthorized intruders gained access to a Trion Worlds account database. The database in question contained information including user names, encrypted passwords, dates of birth, email addresses, billing addresses, and the first and last four digits and expiration dates of customer credit cards. … there is no evidence, and we have no reason to believe, that full credit card information was accessed or compromised in any way.” Are game companies not concerned with preventing these attacks?”

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Trion Worlds’ Rift Account Database Compromised

1.2.2 is the first MediaPortal release which was developed using GIT. The learning curve is very steep, but the benefits are great!

We are very happy to present you this new release which focus is to increase the stability of MediaPortal 1.2.

Partial Changelog:

• 3772 Weather plugin unable to get data
  Sadly the Weather Channel disabled the free access to their API. This means that MediaPortal (among many other free applications) is no longer able to get data. Unfortunately there is no quick fix for this problem which we could add into an 1.2.x hotfix. A complete rework of the weather plugin is planned for 1.3.0.
  In the meantime, there are other weather plugins available in our Repository. World Weather and BBC Weather seem to be good choices.
• 3746 DaemonTools won’t unmount an iso file and crash MediaPortal
• 3760 Playback of Multi File Cue Sheets starts at wrong position
• 3740 #play.next.duration in wrong format
• 3775 WindowPluginBase incorrectly sets GuiProperties when it is not the ActiveWindow
• 3752 Cyberlink PDVD (DXVA/HAM/SW) codec version 10/11 are not available in codec configuration
• Continue Reading

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MediaPortal 1.2.2 RELEASED!

Continue reading FCC approves AT&T’s $1.9b purchase of Qualcomm’s 700MHz spectrum (update)

FCC approves AT&T’s $1.9b purchase of Qualcomm’s 700MHz spectrum (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 22 Dec 2011 21:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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FCC approves AT&T's $1.9b purchase of Qualcomm's 700MHz spectrum (update)

An anonymous reader writes “Researchers at Notre Dame have created a nanoparticle paste, which acts as the main ingredient in solar cells that are very easy to construct. In a short video clip, they can be seen assembling a functional solar cell with little more than a heat gun, tape, and some binder clips. The paste is made from a mix of t-butanol, water, and a mix of cadmium selenide with cadmium sulfide nanoparticles. So far, the experimental devices are not nearly as efficient as standard solar cells, but they were just developed. If the materials were slightly less toxic, it might even be a project that kids could do at home.”

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Solar Cells Made From a Spreadable Nanoparticle Paste

It’s true. According to Bill Colton, a VP at ExxonMobil, a single gallon of gas has enough energy to charge an iPhone once a day for 20 years. Of course, that’s never going to happen but it’s a point ExxonMobil uses to stress the fact that there is a lot of energy in gasoline. More »

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A Gallon of Gas Can Power an iPhone for 20 Years [Factoid]

Gremlin sez, “Sonos recently pushed an update to their once stellar music system which disabled windows DRM. They decided that it was unnecessary to continue to support this feature moving forward. Unfortunately they also pushed this update without warning to many customers, and they are offering no way for those customers to roll back to the previous version. Their answer to those customers effected is that they’ve made the decision for us. Many customers have been complaining, but it sets a dangerous precedent for them to be able to remove features at will. Today it’s a lightly used DRM system (mostly it effects people using Zune Pass at this point) tomorrow maybe it’ll be Sirius Satellite, spotify, or something else more people use. We’ve suggested that we’d be fine with them allowing us to roll back and making the decision ourselves to not take future update but they will not allow this to occur.”

It’s entirely possible that the decision wasn’t Sonos’s to make. After all, DRM license agreements routinely provide for “revocation” in which a DRM vendor or licensing body reserves the right to order its partners to discontinue the playback of its DRM for some reason or another. Which is one of the great dangers of DRM: you buy a device with six features today, and tomorrow it has five, or four, or three, or none. The negotiations resulting in these confiscations are confidential, conducted between giant corporations without any input from the people who’ve bought the equipment and the media to play on it.

I wrote a long, open letter to Wired editor Chris Anderson about this in 1994, when he told me that rejecting DRM was “idealistic” and defended taking a “pragmatic stance” when reviewing technology that had DRM in it. But worrying about what happens when your devices are designed to be remotely deactivated without your consent or knowledge is eminently pragmatic and has nothing to do with idealism, as we keep on learning.

Question 3.6 “Sonos will no longer support the Windows Media DRM format”

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Sonos removes Windows DRM playback, customers left high & dry

The biggest hindrance to consumer adoption of 3D technology thus far has been a lack of content, and price, of course. While I can’t vouch for their price tags quite yet, it would seem that Stream TV Networks has come up with some new 3D technology that could make that whole limited content thing much less of an issue.

How, you ask? Well, for one thing the new Ultra-D tech converts 2D content to 3D. But it gets better. Not only will that content be brought over to the third dimension, but you won’t have to wear any clunky glasses to enjoy it. Ultra-D technology also converts 3D content to autostereoscopic (sans glasses) 3D. It also works with just about any format, from Blu-rays and DVDs to PC games to cable and satellite content, and all the conversion is done in real time.

Stream TV Networks, under the Ultra-D brand, has 3D-capable products coming out for TVs, converter boxes, tabs, PCs of all shapes and sizes, smartphones, and even digital signage and picture frames. The technology also allows for the user to customize the 3D effect, letting users increase or decrease the real-time 3D rendering effect.

Products will be announced at CES, and we’ll be there to keep you in the loop. ‘Til then, pop on those glasses.

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Stream TV Networks Introduces Ultra-D: Glasses-Free 3D Conversion Tech

MojoKid writes “Rumors of AMD’s Southern Island family of graphics processors have circulated for some time, though today AMD is officially announcing their latest flagship single-GPU graphics card, the Radeon HD 7970. AMD’s new Tahiti GPU is outfitted with 2,048 stream processors with a 925MHz engine clock, featuring AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture, paired to 3GB of GDDR5 memory connected over a 384-bit wide memory bus. And yes, it’s crazy fast as you’d expect and supports DX11.1 rendering. In the benchmarks, the new Radeon HD 7970 bests NVIDIA’s fastest single GPU GeForce GTX 580 card by a comfortable margin of 15 — 20 percent and can even approach some dual GPU configurations in certain tests.” PC Perspective has a similarly positive writeup. There are people who will pay $549 for a video card, and others who are just glad that the technology drags along the low-end offerings, too.

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AMD Radeon HD 7970 Launched, Fastest GPU Tested

Researchers from Kyoto University have discovered a new technique that could dramatically improve the efficiency of some semiconductors. They took gallium arsenide, and blasted it with a terahertz range electric field pulse for just a picosecond, which lead to a 1,000-fold increase in exciton density. An exciton is a pair of an electron and a positively charged area it came from, which are attracted to each other and recombine to luminesce. They’re how we get light out of LEDs and other applications, and this new technique could make them dramatically more efficient. More »

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Hitting semiconductors with a superfast electric pulse massively increases their efficiency [Materials Science]