In a heated bidding war, ToysRUs bought the domain name Toys.com at auction for $5.1 million. ToysRus really wanted the domain, for obvious reasons. Everyone except ToysRUs and domain holding company National A-1 (owner of domains such as free.com, boys.com, girls.com, and divorce.com) bowed out of the auction at $3 million. The last $2 million was just those two companies going back and forth for hours.

ToysRUs really didn’t have much choice. If it wants to be the first thing people associate with toys it really couldn’t afford to allow anyone else to own that domain, even in this economy. Who says real estate is dead?

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0, which is also known by the Toy Story -inspired name Lenny, sports the same excellent software management tools and broad processor architecture support that marked previous Debian releases. While more modest than the Etch release that preceded it, eWEEK Labs found in Lenny an apt standard bearer for the noncommercial Linux community.
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Alaska Airline launches a trial service employing a satellite-to-plane Wi-Fi system to provide in-flight broadband for laptops, PDAs and other mobile and wireless Wi-Fi-enabled devices. Along with providing Wi-Fi connections for passengers, Row 44’s satellite-based technology also provides the airlines with a broadband link for operational data.
- Alaska Airlines joined the industry race to add in-flight
Wi-Fi service Feb. 26, debuting the service on a handful of Boeing 737-700s.
The service is initially being offered for free on flights between Seattle and San Jose, Calif.

After the trial period, Alaska Airlines said it would determine …

In commemoration of Black History Month in February, eWEEK introduces some of the most prominent black executives and technologists in the IT industry. These men and women have made names for themselves in some of the world’s largest IT companies, including IBM, Microsoft, Xerox and Google. In addition to some of the African-Americans who have made serious contributions at big-name IT companies, eWEEK has also taken some time to consider black entrepreneurs who have started smaller businesses and who have paved the way to developing new types of technology.
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You play the Wii one night for a few delightful hours. Three days later you go to relive the experience and find that the batteries are dead. Is this normal Are those cool little Wii remotes making you bleed batteries Discover some battery-saving tips and save on video gaming costs….

In this day and age we are always connected. Networking devices are some of the most important items that allow us to communicate with others surf the Web send and receive streams of data and hold a videoconference with employees spread all over the world. Understanding networking devices is almost a survival requirement in our highly advanced hi-tech and modern world. This article covers them in layman s terms….

Web-based frameworks are very popular these days. They provide programmers with a set of reusable components usually packaged in the form of classes and functions which allow them to build complex web applications very quickly and with minor efforts. In these tutorials you ll find an approachable guide to how to build a simple CSS framework that will let you create some typical web page layouts in a very short time using only a few basic style sheets….

“Gather ’round children, it’s time for story time with RoboGrandma - just make sure my batteries are charged!” This kind of blatant intellectual property violation will no longer be committed by the Amazon Kindle. The company today announced that it has given in to demands by the Author’s Guild and will let publishers choose whether or not to enable the Kindle’s speech to text audio functions for individual texts. Remember, folks, when reading by robots is outlawed, only outlaw robots will read aloud.

The Author’s Guild argued that Kindle had only licensed display rights for content on the kindle, not audio or performance rights. The feature will now be neutered and put under the control of publishers on a title by title basis.

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The New York Times has published Amazon’s full statement on the deal but it can be summarized as “blah, blah, blah…we cry Uncle.”

Last week our own Frederic Lardinois wrote a post titled “Don’t Be Silly; the Kindle 2 is no Threat to Audiobooks.” He argued that the speech to text was more likely to persuade customers to purchase professionally (human) read audio books than it was to whisk them into a pirate world of cuddling up with annoying robot voices for extended listening sessions.

It is pretty interesting that the book publishing world remains able to flex its muscles and make the mighty Amazon budge though - is it not? I bet they are pretty pleased with themselves about that.

Image from CNet UK.

Discuss

We heard about a new to-do list service today: Tasck. Tasck is a web-based application that stands out because of the pure simplicity of the service. Another to-do list service, KonoLive, just released a major update to its service and now features integration with Google Docs. KonoLive is an Adobe Air-based application that focuses on sharing to-do lists with groups. There are, of course, already plenty of to-do list managers available on the net, but both Tasck and KonoLive put their own spin on this established genre.

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KonoLive

KonoLive’s focus is on sharing to-do lists with a small group of friends or colleagues. Adding tasks and sharing your lists with other users is very easy and KonoLive offers everything from basic functions like establishing due dates to a live chat feature to discuss a certain item. KonoLive also integrates nicely with Google Docs and Box.net. Your lists are cached on your own machine, but also stored on KonoLive’s servers. Sadly, though, you can’t access your lists directly from KonoLive’s web site.

One thing we don’t like about KonoLive is that it automatically creates a new Box.net account for you. While we are big fans of Box.net, KonoLive does not inform you about this until you suddenly get a welcome message from Box.net. Also, the KonoLive window can not be resized, and the application seems a bit sluggish at times and does take up an inordinate amount of memory.

Tasck

In many ways, Tasck is the complete opposite of KonoLive. It has a minimalist AJAX user interface that allows you to perform a total of three actions: add tasks, delete tasks, and mark them as done. To mark a task as important, you simply capitalize the first letter.

Besides that, there really isn’t much else to do - which might be a good thing, because the service lets you focus on your to-do list without getting in your way. However, it would be nice if you could re-order your tasks or edit them afterwards.

Discuss

In this third part of a five-part series focusing on Tomcat performance tuning you will learn benchmarking procedures and some of the qualities of the application that you can benchmark. This article is excerpted from chapter four of em Tomcat The Definitive Guide Second Edition em written by Jason Brittain and Ian F. Darwin O Reilly ISBN 5961 1 66 . Copyright 2 8 O Reilly Media Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission from the publisher. Available from booksellers or direct from O Reilly Media….

Somebody wanted to build a water filtration center on the spot of a Bronx, NY golf-course driving range. Bad idea? It was until the architects decided to build the plant and keep the range.

“Green roofs” are nothing new—one day soon all of us will have grass for a roof, especially if the economy continues to plunge into its fiery little hellpit. But at the Mosholu Golf Course in the Bronx, the roof of a new water filtration plant is “performative” according to landscape architect Ken Smith—who worked on it with a firm called Grimshaw—because it’s also a nine-acre driving range.

Even though it is full of drinking water, the $2.1 billion facility has to stay dry. The summer downpours and spring thaws that would otherwise buffet the green roof are naturally filtered and collected in innovative drains that route water around the entire 9-hole golf course. It apparently takes up to eight days for water to make its way around the circuit of irrigation.

In case you were wondering, this will be the “largest contiguous green roof in the country,” according to the Architect’s Newspaper, and it alone will cost $95 million. It’s also an impressive step forward for the City of New York in the arena of sustainable architecture. Mind you, this is not a concept, like a lot of the pretty sketches we publish.

George Carlin called golf an elitist sport and a waste of space. Though unspoken, I can only imagine there’s a bit of a hat-tip to Carlin, a New York native, in this move. (Incidentally, the Mosholu public golf course primarily serves underprivileged kids.) So there you go, Georgie—who said the human race was too dumb to listen to reason? Oh yeah, you did. [Architect's Newspaper via Treehugger]

Designed with greasy hands, soapy gloves, and cookie-dough-covered fingers in mind, the minimalistic DAB Digital Radio was created for a nitty, gritty kitchen environment.

With a splash-resistant design featuring large touch-sensitive buttons, users can power on ths battery-operated radio, turn up the volume and control this gadget using their elbows and knuckles. Users also don’t have to worry about knocking it over with their clumsy appendages because this device is fitted with a rubberized weighted base. Other specs include a click-back preset adjuster and a vertical-scrolling LCD. Sounds pretty neat, but as it is still a concept, there’s no word on when you’ll be able to get your slimy hands on one of these. [Yanko]