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Y2K Bug Strikes Australia 10 years Late
Saturday, January 2, 2010 © The Cairns Post As the rest of Australia welcomed 2010, Bank of Queensland computers skipped six years ahead to January 1, 2016. Yesterday, credit and debit card transactions were being rejected, with "card expired" messages printing on to Eftpos error receipts dated six years into the future. Cairns business owner Barry Jones said the glitch was costing sales at his Shields St T-shirt and souvenir shop, Sharky’s, with his main customers – tourists – reliant on the Eftpos service. "A lot of people from overseas don’t carry Australian currency, it’s just cards," Mr Jones said.mobiles
The mobile browser has been in development for the last year and a half The first mobile phone version of the popular web browser Firefox is "days away" from launch, the head of the project has told the BBC. The browser, codenamed Fennec, will initially be available for Nokia's N900 phone, followed by other handsets. It is currently going through final testing and could be released before the end of the year, said Jay Sullivan at Mozilla, the group behind Firefox.
Firefox for mobile 'days away' from launch
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A US student who was fined $675,000 (£421,000) for illegally downloading music has asked a judge to reduce the damages or offer him a retrial. Joel Tenenbaum said that the fine was "grossly excessive". The court case focused on 30 tracks that Mr Tenenbaum admitted downloading. He was fined $22,500 per song. The court admitted that initially the market for online music was "unfair" because there were not many legal alternatives to illegal downloads.
File-sharing student fights fine
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GoogleWave
Teens Banding Together to Cut Down on Facebook
There’s no doubt that for many of us, Facebook consumes a goodly proportion of our time; on average, we spend 5 percent of our time online . For some teenagers, time spent on the 350 million-strong social network has gone beyond time spent and into time sunk. It’s prompted a spate of young users to devise ways of cutting down, taking breaks or simply deactivating their accounts altogether, according to The New York Times . Some are even banding together to provide social support for curtailing the Facebook obsession. Two teens at San Francisco University High School, Hally Lamberson and Monica Reed, made a pact to only log in on the first Saturday of every month.gaming
In a new study conducted by Scott Owens out of the University of Mississippi, the Wii Fit was loaned to eight families and the usage and fitness impact was tracked over time -- three months before they got the Wii, and three months after. The verdict? "No significant changes" in family fitness from the Wii. Interestingly, over the period of three months the daily Wii Fit usage declined a staggering 82 percent, from 22 minutes a day for the first half of the time all the way down to an average of four minutes a day for the last six weeks.
Wii Fit found to have 'little effect' on family fitness level, b
Gordon Brown to promise free laptops and broadband for poor fami
Gordon Brown today promised free laptops and broadband access for 270,000 low income families so that they could better follow their children's progress at school. In what aides described as a sign of his commitment to "aspiration", the prime minister said he wanted every household to have broadband access to the internet. The aim is to get all families linked up to their children's schools via the internet and access progress reports on attainment, behaviour and other needs.youtube
Christopher Rawlings, head of strategy at Consumer Focus, said greater use of social media to solve problems was to be welcomed but warned firms not to neglect consumers who "cannot access, or are simply not interested in using, the likes of Twitter or Facebook". He said: "There is a risk that too much attention is paid to customers those who have online influence and it is important that the traditional ways of getting problems resolved remain open. "We are conducting researching into ways consumers can benefit from social media. Equally, we recognise that there are those who do not have online access or do not want to share their personal information over the internet." The Convergys research, published last month, found one in three of those affected by bad customer service share their problems on the internet.
Silent majority risk worse customer service as companies monitor
Wagner James Au sez, "Jonathan Lethem's latest novel Chronic City includes a virtual world inspired by Second Life, so fittingly, this Sunday Lethem is promoting his book *in* Second Life on the Copper Robot show, using an avatar named PerkusTooth Riddler, based on the character Perkus Tooth from the book. If you don't have an SL account you can watch on the web ." Jonathan Lethem Appears in Second Life This Sunday As Avatar Based on Character From His Novel, *Chronic City* Copper Robot: Novelist Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem's Perkus Tooth comes to Second Life for an inter