The advance of the cyclist stepped up a gear yesterday when Halfords, the bicycle and car accessories chain, said it hoped to open 50 stores devoted entirely to cycles.

With fewer people dying on the roads than at any time since records began in 1926#44; it may be difficult to understand why the Government is taking a harder line with those who speed or drive carelessly#46;

Controversial BBC plans to develop local news websites are expected to suffer a setback today, with ministers voicing concerns over the impact that the scheme will have on the viability of local newspapers.

Turkey is close to agreeing a deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that would allow it to draw up to $40 billion ($£27 billion) in funds if needed to help the country to combat the global credit crisis.

Shareholders in Royal Bank of Scotland voted almost unanimously to accept the Government's £20 billion bailout package yesterday. However, any anger that existed was directed more towards the Treasury than at the bank's board. Rage that small shareholders felt towards the board for presiding over a 90 per cent fall in the bank's stock market value and the disappearance of dividends appeared to have been assuaged by a deep apology by Sir Tom McKillop, the chairman.

Germany rebuffed Gordon Brown's push for a co-ordinated fiscal response to the economic crisis yesterday when it rejected EU-wide tax cuts in the growth package to be announced by European Commission next week.

An otter has astonished conservationists after completing a hazardous journey to reach a small island three miles out to sea.

IG Group, the spread-betting company, lost more than a quarter of its stock market value yesterday after it admitted that some of its high-rolling clients had been burnt by the meltdown in banking shares last month.

Woolworths’ biggest shareholder was locked in meetings with advisers last night over how best to fight Hilco’s £1 offer for the company’s retail arm.

There are at least five ways of saying, “with the benefit of hindsight”. We know because Sir Tom McKillop, the chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland, wheeled out all five in his apology to shareholders yesterday. A once mighty institution has been all but destroyed and is still breathing only because of the promise of £20 billion of public money.

pAs another follow-up to a href="http://www.coolfer.com/blog/archives/2008/11/the_lure_of_d2c.php"yesterday's post/a on a speech by Ian Rogers (Topspin Media, ex-Yahoo Music) about, for lack of a better summary, the future of music, here's a a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/19/ian-rogers-on-the-death-of-the-music-cd-business-i-dont-care/"link to coverage today at TechCrunch/a. Skip the post and go straight to the commentary. You get everything from (paraphrasing loosely here) "Technology will kill labels -- Kozmo.com should have been the next eBay" to "Less popular music is less popular because it sucks." And plenty of opinion in between. Rogers even left a comment./p pWhat is missing from the discussion is the competitive role technology will play for music's middle class. Forget any Utopian ideas of a growing, more self-sufficient middle class. I understand that may be difficult when we're frequently presented with success stories big (Nine Inch Nails) and small (Josh Rouse). But don't forget the stories of mediocrity and failure. There are plenty of them. Case studies and success stories sell a product and a vision. They do not accurately represent the entire marketplace./p pThe best assumption is -- short of the emergence of government endowments and grants for everyday musicians -- the middle class will stay about the same size, and consuming spending on music will stay about the same. Given those assumptions, middle class artists will use digital technologies in heightened competition with other artists. New tools aren't about growing the middle class, they're about enabling a portion of artists to divert money away from other artists. Today's ease and low cost of production and distribution have lowered the barriers to entry. Naturally, the market will see an influx of new entrants. The barriers to success, however, even modest success, are still there. /phr/a href="http://coolfer.jobamatic.com/a/jbb/job-details/34547" Sony BMG Music Entertainment is looking for a Mobile Account Executive/adiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/coolfer?a=eLrHn"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/coolfer?i=eLrHn" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/coolfer?a=qEWhN"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/coolfer?i=qEWhN" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/coolfer?a=soklN"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/coolfer?i=soklN" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/coolfer/~4/459006562" height="1" width="1"/

Corporate IT spending is falling like the stock market, but Apples share of the growing smartphone market is increasing among business customers, according to ChangeWave.

FED (or Field Emission Display) hasn't quite caught on as quickly as some other display technologies, but Sony's still out there doing its best to move things forward, and it certainly looks to have turned more than a few heads with its latest demo. Apparently not content with simply showing off a new 19-inch display from its spin-off, Field Emission Technologies, Sony went so far as to demo it with a customized version of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue that's playable at 240 fps. To do that, Sony used four PS3s to increase the frame rate, something it had previously done to run the game at quadruple the resolution of 1080p on a Sony SXHD projector. While that setup is out of the reach of most folks, Field Emission Technologies says that FED displays are now finally heading to market, and that some high-end professional FED video monitors up to 32-inches in size will be available sometime next year.

[Via OLED-Display.info]

Filed under: Displays

Sony demos 19-inch FED display running Gran Turismo 5 at 240 fps originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Photographs of a series of elaborate hand paintings. (via yokiddo)

(link)

h4Unified, horizontal system for communications...bitch!/h4 pA Ohio-based technology company is suing Facebook for copyright infringement, claiming it invented the platform the insanely popular social networking site uses to store and manage information..../p

h4Cost cutting saves the day/h4 pIf you were looking for some good news out of Dell today as it reported its fiscal 2009 third quarter financial results, you will probably be disappointed. But not as much as you might think. That's good news of a sort considering the miserable week the global economy is having..../p

In a speech in London, Microsofts top intellectual property strategy counsel argues for the need of a model in which content creators are better compensated.

img src="http://www.samurize.com/userfiles/41566/MegaCompact_U100.png" alt='' /br /br /This config shows within 40x262 pixels:br /Cpu activity and tempbr /Harddisk activity and tempbr /Membr /LANbr /WLAN (incl. strength meter)br /Tcp est.br /Batterybr /Uptimebr /Analag clockbr /br /Using MBM to get infos (change to your needs if you use Speedfan, GPU-z, HMonitor, ATI Tool and others).br /br /HAVE A LOOK AT THE SCREENSHOT.br /br /Also available as PC Version withoutbr /WLAN br /Battery timebr /

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2008/11/custom_1226340429317_ATVboxee5.jpg" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2" style="display:block;" /Apple TV updates generally always wipe away all third-party software you may have installed, but usually, most things can just be re-installed. Not so with a href="http://gizmodo.com/5094005/apple-tv-firmware-v23-update-gives-third+party-remote-support-airtunes-streaming"yesterday's 2.3 version update/a however, which has closed the door used to install software like a href="http://gizmodo.com/5082130/how-to-max-out-apple-tvs-potential-with-boxee"Boxee/a via a USB patchstick. So if you love your Boxee a href="http://gizmodo.com/5082130/how-to-max-out-apple-tvs-potential-with-boxee"like we do/a, hold off on installing version 2.3 (and don't forget to turn off auto-update). A thread on Boxee's forums is tracking the issue, where a fix will hopefully be announced. [a href="http://forums.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=2064"Boxee/a]/p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=77b511ff8612a1deca93c4362ed3df0cp=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=77b511ff8612a1deca93c4362ed3df0cp=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=77b511ff8612a1deca93c4362ed3df0c" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=JllSyE7D"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=oH2gjlLK"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=FEKAvovx"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=FEKAvovx" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=2YjZ09eW"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=2YjZ09eW" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/8SqB8KfTnGE" height="1" width="1"/

img src="http://www.samurize.com/userfiles/41566/MegaCompact.png" alt='' /br /br /This config shows within 40x238 pixels:br /Cpu activity and tempbr /Gpu activity and tempbr /Harddisk activity and tempbr /Membr /LANbr /Tcp est.br /uptimebr /Analag clockbr /br /Using MBM and Rivatuner to get infos (change to your needs if you use Speedfan, GPU-z, HMonitor, ATI Tool and others)br /br /HAVE A LOOK AT THE SCREENSHOT.br /br /Also available as Laptop Version with addedbr /WLAN (incl. strength meter)br /Battery timebr /

LinuxDevices: "Via announced a fanless panel PC that runs Linux, and resists both liquids and dust. The "VIPRO VP7710" includes Via's Eden or C7 processors, a 10.4-inch touchscreen display, gigabit Ethernet, three serial ports, and two USB 2.0 ports, the company says."

a href="http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/nation/611http3831.html"Change my ass.../a For months on the campaign trail, Barack Obama a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,455545,00.html"promised/a to bring change to Washington. But now that he's president-elect, his first potential Cabinet picks indicate that he may bring more years of Washington experience to his administration than Bill Clinton or George W. Bush did. br /