An anonymous reader writes "Seagate has agreed to settle a lawsuit that alleges that the company mislead customers by selling them hard disk drives with less capacity than the company advertised. The suit states that Seagate's use of the decimal definition of the storage capacity term "gigabyte" was misleading and inaccurate: whereby 1GB = 1 billion bytes. In actuality, 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes — a difference of approximately 7% from Seagate's figures. Seagate is saying it will offer a cash refund or free backup and recovery software."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dare Obasanjo, who works at Microsoft, says that Google has transformed itself into "Microsoft of Old."

It seems true, with a bit of Sun and Java thrown in as well.

It's the hurt of the software industry, moving away from serving users, and getting spun in its own drama.

It's not much longer before something totally new sprouts, quietly, out of sight, and re-energizes the people who care about the purpose of technology, which is to enable and empower, not limit and cripple.

We lifted Google on our shoulders as our vision of what was good about the web. They're so far from that ideal these days.

There's been a lot of talk over the last couple years about "enterprise 2.0" efforts to bring the types of applications in the "web 2.0" world into the enterprise. How successful those efforts have been is still an open question -- but companies keep on looking for such solutions to improve internal communications. Two stories today suggest exactly how that's happening. Business Week has a story about how Nissan is trying to build an internal "MySpace" to get employees more connected with each other and make the flow of information and the sharing of ideas more useful. Meanwhile, Sun, who has been trying to push more workers to telecommute for years, is now trying to build its own Second Life-type virtual world for employees from around the world to interact as if they were in an office together. While it's worth noting both of these experiments as clearly taking a consumer internet service and moving it into the enterprise, there's still a huge question of how useful either service will be. They both make nice stories for the press, but that doesn't mean either will get enough adoption to really be useful. Lots of companies have had internal intranet-type collaboration services in the past that don't get any use. Repainting the same thing with the broad 2.0 brush won't automatically make them useful.

Lord Byron II writes "K-mart has decided to stop selling Blu-Ray players in their stores, primarily because of the high cost of Blu-Ray compared to HD-DVD (now under $200). They will continue to sell the PS3 for the time being. Will lower prices speed the adoption of HD-DVD in the upcoming holiday shopping season?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few years ago, there was a big debate over whether or not companies should be forced to expense stock options. Most companies did not count stock option grants as an "expense" on the income statement, even though it could impact the company's financial situation. Some argued that this gave companies a way to hide compensation -- though, that was somewhat misleading. Most of the necessary information was still in the footnotes -- it just didn't play directly into the numbers. There was some speculation that if forced to expense stock options, companies would stop using them as an incentive and it would hurt the stock of many companies as it would be harder to appear profitable (more expenses dragging down the net income number). Of course, this was silly also. Since the number of stock option grants didn't have any real immediate impact on cash, it wasn't impacting the actual cash position of the company. It seemed likely that the market had already calculated in the "expense" of options. Indeed, after FASB decided that companies should expense options, the impending doom many predicted failed to appear.

Of course, that doesn't mean there still aren't question about how you expense stock options as there's no really good way to know how much they're worth. The standard method for calculating the price of an option, the Black-Scholes method, isn't really accurate for high growth companies -- but it's what is most commonly used. However, there have been some experiments to more accurately price options. Cisco kicked off the debate on this topic a couple years ago by proposing derivatives based on the options that could be publicly traded. Then, Cisco could expense the actual options based on the market price of the derivatives. The SEC rejected this plan, but it appeared that the rejection was mainly on some finer technical points. When another company, Zions Bancorp, proposed a very similar model, the SEC seemed much more willing to along with it. The latest is that the SEC has now approved Zions' plan for options expensing based on publicly traded derivatives. The story at Gigaom provides some of the reasons why this might not actually be a very accurate way of expensing options -- but it seems a lot more accurate than something like Black-Scholes. Also, again, the market has most likely already priced in the real impact of these numbers games into the stock price, so it shouldn't have any real impact. Given the approval, though, expect many other high growth companies to jump on board with similar plans, as it's likely to reduce the "expense" associated with options.

In the meantime, we're still surprised that there hasn't been more discussion about Google's experiment with actually allowing employees with stock options to sell the options themselves to institutional traders. That seems like it could be an even more accurate way of pricing the options, since there will be a real market for them. However, it still seems like it's being used merely as an employee perk, rather than a method for expensing options.

openfrog writes "An inspired professor at University of Washington-Bothell, Martha Groom, made an interesting pedagogical experiment. Instead of vilifying Wikipedia as some academics are prone to do, she assigned the students enrolled in her environmental history course to contribute articles. The result has proven "transformative" to her students. They were no longer spending their time writing for one reader, says Groom, but were doing work of consequence in a "peer reviewed" environment, which enhanced the quality of their output."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crazy Rulers of the World is a documentary about secret paranormal experiments conducted inside military bases.

Three years in the making, Jon Ronson’s Crazy Rulers of the World explores the apparent madness at the heart of US military intelligence. With first-hand access to the leading players in the story, Jon Ronson examines the extraordinary -- and plain bizarre -- national secrets at the core of George W Bush's war on terror.

Interviewee: "We had a master sergeant that could stop the heart of a goat"

Jon Ronson: "What? Just by looking at it?"

Interviewee: Just by wantin' the goat's heart to stop

All three parts are available on Google. Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Previously on Boing Boing:
• The Men Who Stare At Goats

Hugh Pickens writes "People possess a remarkable ability for recalling pictures and researchers at Newcastle University are exploiting this characteristic to create graphical passwords that they say are a thousand times more secure than ordinary textual passwords. With Draw a Secret (DAS) technology, users draw an image over a background, which is then encoded as an ordered sequence of cells. The software recalls the strokes, along with the number of times the pen is lifted. If a person chooses a flower background and then draws a butterfly as their secret password image onto it, they have to remember where they began on the grid and the order of their pen strokes. The "passpicture" is recognized as identical if the encoding is the same, not the drawing itself, which allows for some margin of error as the drawing does not have to be re-created exactly. The software has been initially designed for handheld devices such as iPhones, Blackberry and Smartphone, but could soon be expanded to other areas. "The most exciting feature is that a simple enhancement simultaneously provides significantly enhanced usability and security," says computer scientist Jeff Yan."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In May, the science journal The Psychologist published an article discussing the psychology of psychosis in the context of David Lynch's last film, Inland Empire (2006). The full text of the article is now online. From "David Lynch and Psychosis":

Watching a David Lynch film can give the viewer the impression that the director intuitively understands the underlying mechanisms of psychotic experience. Furthermore, in an age where experiential and subjective approaches to understanding mental illness have fallen out of favour, David Lynch may also offer some insight into the feeling of what it is like to suffer from psychosis...

The disorientation engendered by the experience of hallucinations is another tool in David Lynch’s armoury. In Inland Empire, sequences from dreams and earlier versions of the film being shot by Jeremy Irons’ director character are interspersed with footage of the ‘reality’ in which Laura Dern is an actress making ‘High on Blue Tomorrows’. This idea of showing multiple levels of reality is a characteristic of Lynch films. Unlike other directors he goes to great lengths to disorient the viewer by removing the conventional indictors that normally signpost the transition from one text world to another (Werth, 1999). This tendency to remove the tools that allow audiences to monitor the source of what they are witnessing may elicit an experience that resembles the psychotic patient being ‘taken in’ by their hallucinations.

Link to The Psychologist, Link to buy Inland Empire on DVD (via Mind Hacks)

The announcement of Google's new OpenSocial API has generated a blizzard of commentary around the blogosphere. Yesterday Mike argued that it was a smart move on Google's part because it creates a broader web platform that will be more attractive than any one social network could be by itself. However, the various news reports I've read suggest that OpenSocial is missing probably the most important element of a social networking site: the networking. Most people don't join Facebook because they want to use the latest Facebook widget. They join because that's where their friends are, and because it offers basic functionality like messages and photos. Widgets are just icing on the cake.

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

Paul Tibbets, the man who led the crew that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, died in Columbus, Ohio today. He was 92.

The five-ton "Little Boy" bomb was dropped on the morning of 6 August 1945, killing about 140,000 Japanese, with many of them dying later.

On the 60th anniversary of the bombing, the three surviving crew members of the Enola Gay - named after Tibbet's mother - said they had "no regrets."

Link

When AppTapp Installer for the iPhone came out a couple of months ago, I installed it on my iPhone and began running 3rd party applications. I especially liked the ebook reader, Frotz (a text adventure player), the voice recorder, and Summerboard (to scroll through application icons on the iPhone).

Then Apple announced the 1.1.1 update for the iPhone and issued stern warnings that they would not be responsible for any problems caused by updating a modified phone. I un-jailbreaked my phone before updating it.

Shortly after upgrading, I began to miss my jailbreaked iPhone. I read about ways to re-jailbreak it, but they involved downgrading the iPhone's firmware, and it seemed risky.

But a couple of days ago, the iPhone hacking community came up with a very easy way to jailbreak a 1.1.1 iPhone. All you have to do is visit jailbreakme.com on your iPhone and click the AppSnapp install button. I did it, and it worked without a hitch.

According to the site, AppSnapp will not brick your iPhone: "No, worst case you will have to restore in iTunes." Link (Via Ars Technica)

Ian Lamont writes "An Arizona State University researcher named Michael Kozicki claims that nanotechnology will replace disk drives in ten years. The article mentions three approaches: Nanowires (which replace electrons/capacitors), multiple memory layers on silicon (instead of a single layer), and a method that stores multiple pieces of information in the same space: 'Traditionally, each cell holds one bit of information. However, instead of storing simply a 0 or a 1, that cell could hold a 00 or a 01. Kozicki said the ability to double capacity that way — without increasing the number of cells — has already been proven. Now researchers are working to see how many pieces of data can be held by a single cell.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

No outdoor festival is complete without a giant naked man balloon, as seen in this terrific gallery of photos taken by Liberoliber and uploaded to Flickr. From an exhibition at the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan, May 7 – June 5, 2007. Link

A Berlin college student apparently had the ultimate thrift-score. Turns out that a beat-up old sofa bed she bought at a flea market for 150 euros (US$216) had a baroque painting tucked in the mattress. The painting sold at auction this week for 19,200 euros (US$27,660.) From Reuters:

"She used the sofa bed for a while before realizing the painting was in there," said Michaela Derra, spokeswoman for the auction house Ketterer Kunst, adding she did not know how the oil painting had wound up inside the sofa.

Link (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

Previously on BB:
• $1 million painting found in trash Link

Did you buy your Ape Lad T-shirt depicting a happy pirate hobo zombie chimp yet? It's only $10 including shipping. Link

The Guardian has an article about the "most bizarre tests ever conducted in name of scientific inquiry."

My favorite involved 10 soldiers who went on a supposedly routine airplane flight in California in the 1960s. After a while, the plane started falling and the pilot announced they were about to crash.

While the soldiers faced almost certain death, a steward handed out insurance forms and asked the men to complete them, explaining it was necessary for the army to be covered if they died.

Little did the soldiers know they were completely safe. It was merely an experiment to find out how extreme stress affects cognitive ability, the forms serving as the test. Once the final soldier had completed his form the pilot announced: "Just kidding about that emergency folks!"

A later attempt to repeat the experiment with a new group of unwitting volunteers was ruined by one of the previous soldiers, who had penned a warning on a sickbag.

Link (Thanks, Partha!)