JetLib News

Voline writes “Digitimes reports that Asus and Acer will not be producing netbooks in 2013 , signaling the end of a product category that Asus began five years ago with it’s Eee PC. The Guardian looks at the rise and fall of the netbook and posits some reasons for it’s end. Reasons include: manufacturers shifting from Linux to Windows causing an increase in price that brought netbooks into competition with full-on laptops that offered better specs for not much more money, the global recession beginning in 2008, and the introduction of the iPad and Android tablets.”

Mark Westlake is the Chief Revenue Office for TechMediaNetwork. Slashdot has often taken a mediawatch role, especially when it comes to technology coverage — which is what TechMediaNetork does for a living. As Chief Revenue Office, Mark is in charge of making sure enough money comes in to pay writers and editors, pay for bandwidth and servers, and hopefully have enough revenue over and above expenses to show a profit. We’ve interviewed editors and writers, and plenty of writers’ work gets linked from Slashdot, but we pay little or no (mostly no) attention to the business side of the publishing business. Like it or not, if we are going to have online news someone has to sell the ads and make decisions about whether to set up a paywall or not. That’s Mark’s job. Like him or not, he does a job somebody has to do, and has been doing it for 30 years. He knows he’s talking to a potentially hostile audience here, but he accepts that. As he says, near the end of the video, “…you can’t please everybody, right?”

sfcrazy writes “Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, has shared his plans for 2013. It was clear from the Nexus 7 initiative that Ubuntu is eventually looking into the mobile space more seriously. Google created the cheap device Ubuntu was looking for wider testing and development. The initial builds of Ubuntu for Nexus 7 also showed that, despite popular perception, Unity is far from ready for the mobile devices. In fact quite a lot of ‘controversial’ technologies introduced in Unity don’t fit on a mobile devices such as Global Menus or HUD. So there are many challenges for Mark — redesign Unity for mobile, which may upset users again, get Ubuntu app developers to redesign apps for Ubuntu mobile, get top developers to write apps for Ubuntu… Is it all feasible when companies like RIM or Microsoft are struggling or is Ubuntu becoming a ‘me too’ company which is not brining anything new to the table and is simply trying to claim a pie?” Shuttleworth also wants to do something or other with the cloud: “It’s also why we’ll push deeper into the cloud, making it even easier, faster and cost effective to scale out modern infrastructure on the cloud of your choice, or create clouds for your own consumption and commerce.”

In addition to founding Canonical Ltd., the Ubuntu Foundation, and funding the Freedom Toaster, Mark Shuttleworth is a space enthusiast. In April 2002 Mark became the second self-funded space tourist and the first African in space. He spent eight days participating in experiments on the International Space Station as part of his $20 million trip. Now he’s ready to answer your questions. Ask him anything you like, but please limit yourself to one question per post.

Mark.JUK writes “Scientists working under an EU funded (3 Million Euros) project out of Bangor University in Wales (United Kingdom) have developed a commercially-exploitable way of boosting broadband speeds over end-user fibre optic lines by using Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OOFDM) technology, which splits a laser down to multiple different optical frequencies (each of which can be used to carry data), and low-cost off-the-shelf components. The scientists claim that their solution has the ability to ‘increase broadband transmission by up to two thousand times the current speed and capacity’ (most UK Fibre-to-the-Home or similar services currently offer less than 100 Megabits per second) and it can do this alongside a ‘significant reduction in electrical power consumption.’”

New submitter RocketAcademy writes “With the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex as a backdrop, XCOR Aerospace has announced its intentions to establish an operational base for the Lynx spacecraft in Florida. Plans call for XCOR to begin initial operations from a Florida location in 2014 with the Lynx Mark I prototype. As market demand dictates, XCOR may also establish a manufacturing and assembly center for the production vehicle, designated Lynx Mark II.”

Hugh Pickens writes writes “In 2008, as The Washington Post wrote at the time, ‘just hours before [Sen. John] McCain declared his veep choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, her Wiki page saw a flurry of activity, with editors adding details about Palin’s approval rating and husband’s employment. … Palin’s entry was updated at least 68 times, with at least an additional 54 changes made to her entry over the preceding five days.’ The obvious — in hindsight — implications of the Wiki activity: Aides were going into the entries to tune them up and clean out any material that was either embarrassing or erroneous. Now Mark Memmott writes on NPR that today’s Wikipedia activity may lend a clue to Mitt Romney’s vice presidential pick, expected to be announced within a few days. So what’s going on now with some of those said to be among the leading possibilities to be joining Mitt Romney on the Republican ticket? On August 7, Rob Portman’s Wikipedia page was revised 100 times, the Wikipedia page for Marco Rubio was revised 22 times, and the page for Tim Pawlenty was revised only 5 times. Of course, Memmott adds, somebody who knows about the 2008 Wiki tea leaves may just be messing with our minds.”

An anonymous reader writes “Sir Bernard Lovell, the founder of the Jodrell Bank Observatory and namesake of the Lovell telescope has died at the age of 98. The Mark 1 telescope, as it was known in the ’60s, was the only western telescope that could track the early Russian moon probes, which ensured its debts were paid off. However, the telescope is more famous for radio astronomy, including pulsar research, hydrogen line studies of the galaxy, and much more as other telescopes joined it in the Merlin network.”

An anonymous reader writes “If you’re a collector of video games, counting the complete back catalog of titles for one system as part of your collection is a commendable achievement, but what about having full gaming sets for 22 different systems? I doubt anyone has ever done that through game purchases alone, but one eBay seller is offering such a set. The price? A cool $1.2 million. That’s a crazy amount of cash to spend on games, but when you find out what’s included in this auction, and the condition the games are in, it might actually sound like a good deal. Here’s the list of systems the auction is offering full game sets for along with the number of games for each one:

Nintendo Famicon – 1,050 games
Nintendo Famicon Disk – 200 games
Nintendo Virtual Boy – 19 games
Nintendo Super Famicon – 1,500 games
Nintendo 64 – 200 games
Nintendo DD64 – 10 games
Nintendo Gamecube – 320 games
Sega Master System (Europe) – 300 games
Sega Mark 3 & Master System (Japan) – 80 games
Sega Game Gear – 200 games
Sega Megadrive – 450 games
Sega 32 X – 19 games
Sega Mega CD – 115 games
Sega Saturn – 1,150 games
Sega Dreamcast – 550 games
PC Engine Hucard – 300 games
PC Engine Supergrafx – 6 games
PC Engine CD – 120 games
PC Engine Super CD – 300 games
PC Engine Arcade CD – 12 games
PC-FX – total games not stated
Pioneer Laseractive – total games not listed.”

Mark.JUK writes “It’s enough to make grown IT workers cry. German cable operator Kabel Deutschland claims to have become the first provider to successfully achieve a real-world internet connection speed of 4700Mbps (Megabits per second) after they hooked up to a local school’s test account in the city of Schwerin. The ISP, which usually delivers more modest speeds of up to 100Mbps to home subscribers, used its upgraded 862MHz network, channel bonding, and the EuroDocsis 3.0 standard to achieve the stated performance. But don’t expect to get this kind of speed tomorrow; right now there’s no demand for it among home users, and you probably couldn’t afford the bandwidth anyway.” (“No demand at its current price,” at least.)