Kevin Fling

Channard writes "While there have been occasional reports of previous PS3 firmware upgrades causing system crashes and so forth, Sony's new firmware upgrade for the system, 3.41, is apparently stopping PS3 owners from upgrading their hard disks. This problem has been encountered by many users on Sony's forums and occurs when you try to put a new hard disk into a PS3 that already has the firmware upgrade installed. The general course of action for upgrading a PS3's drive is that you download the latest PS3 firmware onto a memory stick and, after swapping the hard drive in the PS3, plug the stick in, allowing the PS3 to properly prepare the disk for use. But as of upgrade 3.41, the PS3 fails to recognize the firmware on the stick, complaining that it can't proceed until you insert the correct firmware. Repeating the process and re-downloading the firmware does not fix the problem, as I can confirm, having encountered the problem myself. Users can put the old hard disk back in, provided they've not reformatted it for some other purpose, so all is not lost. Sony have apparently told gaming website CVG that 'The information available to our Consumer Services Department does not suggest that this is a problem PlayStation owners are likely to experience when upgrading the HDD with 3.41 update.' This seems to fly in the face of the currently available information — although whether or not this statement was issued by Kevin Butler is unclear. Either way, PS3 owners encountering this problem will likely have to wait a few days for a fix and use their old HDDs for now."

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CurtMonash writes "Nontechnical people — for example marketers or small business owners — increasingly get the feeling they should know more about technology. And they're right. If you can throw up a small website or do some real number-crunching, chances are those skills will help you feed your family. But how should they get started? I started a thread with the question on DBMS2, and some consistent themes emerged, including: Learn HTML + CSS early on; Learn a bit of SQL, but you needn't make that your focus; Have your first real programming language be one of the modern ones, such as PHP or Python; MySQL is a good vehicle to learn SQL; It's a great idea to start with a project you actually want to accomplish, and that can be done by modifying a starter set of sample code (e.g., a WordPress blog); Microsoft's technology stack is an interesting alternative to some of the other technology ideas. A variety of books and websites were suggested, most notably MIT's Scratch. But, frankly, it would really help to get more suggestions for sites and books that help one get started with HTML/CSS, or with MySQL, or with PHP. And so, techie studs and studdettes, I ask you — how should a non-techie go about learning some basic technological skills?"

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suraj.sun writes with news that the US Department of Justice has joined a lawsuit alleging Oracle of overcharging the federal government for its software products. Quoting: "In a nutshell, the lawsuit argues that Oracle's government customers — a wide array of agencies, including the State Department, the Energy Department, and the Justice Department itself — got deals 'far inferior' to those the enterprise software giant gave to its commercial clients. The allegations stem from a software deal between Oracle and the federal General Services Administration that the Justice Department says involved 'hundreds of millions of dollars in sales' and that ran from 1998 to 2006. Under the contract, Oracle was required to inform the GSA when commercial discounts improved and to offer those same discounts to government buyers. Oracle misrepresented its true commercial sales practices and thus defrauded the US, the lawsuit contends.

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eldavojohn writes "According to AfterDawn, Google has given app makers the option to use a license server as DRM to ensure the user has paid for an app before they can download it. Reportedly, the Market app will communicate with a Google license server using RSA encryption. It is important to note this is only available for non-free apps (built with SDK 1.5 and later), and it was instituted to provide a better solution to the old and widely criticized copy protection scheme that was susceptible to Android app piracy (like sideloading). For better or for worse, Android's Marketplace appears to now have an optional, phone-home form of DRM." Following news of the new licensing service, Hexage Ltd, makers of a popular Android game called Radiant, released the data they had collected on piracy of Radiant over a 10-month period beginning last October. A series of charts shows total users, paid users and the piracy rate, by region.

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climenole points out a post from Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth about internal strife in the free software community. He wrote, "Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are 'wrong by default.' It's the great-granddaddy of racism and sexism. And the most dangerous kind of tribalism is completely invisible: it has nothing to do with someone's 'birth tribe' and everything to do with their affiliations: where they work, which sports team they support, which Linux distribution they love. ... Right now, for a number of reasons, there is a fever pitch of tribalism in plain sight in the free software world. It's sad. It's not constructive. It's ultimately going to be embarrassing for the people involved, because the Internet doesn't forget. It's certainly not helping us lift free software to the forefront of public expectations of what software can be."

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wooferhound writes "Like proud parents savoring their baby's very first steps, mission team members gathered in a gallery above a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to watch the Mars Curiosity rover roll for the first time. Engineers and technicians wore bunny suits while guiding Curiosity through its first steps, or more precisely, its first roll on the clean room floor. The rover moved forward and backward about 1 meter (3.3 feet). Mars Science Laboratory (aka Curiosity) is scheduled to launch in fall 2011 and land on the Red Planet in August 2012. Curiosity is the largest rover ever sent to Mars. It will carry 10 instruments that will help search an intriguing region of the Red Planet for two things: environments where life might have existed, and the capacity of those environments to preserve evidence of past life."

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waderoush writes "Princeton's Ed Felten has criticized the iPhone and iPad as Disneyland-like 'walled gardens' and says there's no way the iTunes App Store can 'offer the scope and variety of apps that a less controlled environment can provide.' Now there's a central marketplace where developers can sell iPhone-optimized apps without going through Apple's gatekeepers. Launched today, it's called OpenAppMkt and it's a showcase for mobile Web apps — not just the type seen back in 2007-2008, before the advent of the App Store, but also for new games and other apps developed using HTML5/CSS/JavaScript (in some cases, the same apps compiled and sold as native iPhone apps). Xconomy has a behind-the-scenes interview with OpenAppMkt's creators, who say they're not out to compete with the native App Store, but that developers deserve new ways to reach users."

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angry tapir writes "Oracle has announced that rival hardware vendors Dell and Hewlett-Packard intend to certify and resell its Solaris and Enterprise Linux operating systems as well as Oracle VM on their x86 servers. The announcement 'demonstrates Oracle's commitment to openness,' company co-president Charles Phillips said in a statement."

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astroengine writes "Thirty years after the release of the cult classic comedy Caddyshack, Discovery News has geeked out and gone on the hunt for any trace amount of science they can find in the movie (video). From gopher territoriality to seismic deformation, from pool poop bacteria to the color of lightning, it turns out there's quite a lot of science to talk about..."

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sridharo sends in a report from the BBC that researchers have identified ancient rocks from Nili Fossae that could contain fossilized remains of life. These rocks are very similar to Pilbara rocks in northwest Australia. The rocks are estimated to be up to four billion years old, which means they have been around for three-quarters of the history of Mars. "[Many] scientists had hoped that they would soon have the opportunity to get much closer to these rocks. Nili Fossae was put forward as a potential landing site for NASA's ambitious new rover, the Mars Science Laboratory, which will be launched in 2011. ... But Nilae Fossae was eventually deemed too dangerous a landing site and it was finally removed from the list in June of this year." The research, led by a scientist from the SETI Institute, was published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

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