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Submitted by actz
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Thursday, 21 December 2006 |
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The geek shall inherit the earth, and history has proven this true. From the magnificent lightning storms of the eccentric Nikola Tesla to the time Charles Babbage cooked himself in an oven to "see what would happen", history is littered with nerds who made it big. But who is the geekiest of them all? Is it Diogenes who lived in a barrel for most of his life, or is it John von Neumann, who was known to get arrested for reading scientific papers and driving at the same time? Will Steve Wozniak steal the top spot for inventing the Apple computer in a garage, or is Linus Torvalds the obvious winner? Crave's votes are in and counted: here's your definitive guide to the top ten nerds and geeks. Source: CNET
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Read more...
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Submitted by actz
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Wednesday, 20 December 2006 |
 Skype may be good for something other than Internet calls. According to the Financial Times, the company is working on a peer-to-peer television service that could legally deliver videos to millions of users. Code-named 'The Venice Project', the service will stream videos and encrypt videos directly from the content owners and Skype hopes this will bypass copyright issues that have dogged other video sharing sites. The service will have hubs in Leiden, London, New York and Toulouse. Unlike, other major video sharing services like YouTube, the videos will be served from companies and Skype merely acts as a middle-man in the transaction. In contrast, Youtube, hosts the videos on its servers. Source: Tom's Hardware
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Submitted by actz
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Tuesday, 19 December 2006 |
 NASA has announced that it is teaming up with Google for solutions to a variety of technical problems including large-scale data management and human-computer interfaces, and will make its space exploration work, much of which is currently scattered across the web, more accessible to the public. NASA's Ames Research Center and Google will jointly focus on making NASA's most useful information like high-resolution three-dimensional maps of the moon and Mars available on the internet. In the future, users would also be able to view and real-time tracking of the international space station and the space shuttle. The space act agreement signed between the two is the first in a series of collaborations between the search engine leader and the US space research agency. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Source: Domain-B
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Submitted by psYchotic
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Monday, 18 December 2006 |
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 When 11-year-old Gus Luna was able to play one of his favorite video games while recovering from exploratory brain cancer surgery in intensive care, his mother breathed a big sigh of relief.
"It was brain surgery...it was so scary. That made me feel like things seemed OK," said Marcela Luna, whose son has been undergoing chemotherapy since last year, when surgeons were unable to remove his tumor. Source: CNET News Full story
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Submitted by actz
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Saturday, 16 December 2006 |
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 Launched many months later than the main competitor, Advanced Micro Devices’ Live! platform for living rooms is slightly outselling Intel Viiv in the
USA, according to figures obtained by Current Analysis research firm and published by AMD.Both AMD Live! and Intel Viiv personal computers are designed to be the center of digital home and act as machines capable of performing multimedia-rich tasks flawlessly, thus, get a step closer to consumer electronics compared to typical personal computers (PCs). Usually, such Live! and Viiv systems are equipped with dual-core central processing units, TV-tuners and other multimedia devices. Source: XbitLabs
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Submitted by actz
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Saturday, 16 December 2006 |
 To have your say on the battle between Internet Explorer and Firefox, click here Mozilla, the non-profit software group that is taking market share from Microsoft, has unveiled plans to release a radically revamped version of its Firefox internet browser as early as next year. An early test version of the new version of the browser, Firefox 3.0, was unveiled this week to developers under the codename Gran Paradiso. Its release follows a report showing that Firefox accounts for 20 per cent of the browser market across Europe and as much as 40 per cent in some countries. Source: Times
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Submitted by jamie
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Saturday, 16 December 2006 |
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 Sony has admitted that a brilliantly terrible marketing blog masquerading as the personal website of two semi-literate youngsters is in fact a brilliantly terrible marketing blog masquerading as the personal website of two semi-literate youngsters.
The blog - alliwantforxmasisapsp.com - was designed as a sort of incubator for viral marketing, aimed at convincing people that a) the PSP is a desirable Christmas gift that all the cool kids want, and b) that it's cool and all your friends will like you if you plaster the town in printable adverts and iron PSP transfers onto your t-shirts. Understandably, it found very little success on either front. Instead, it became a magnet for the sort of Internet revolt typically directed at comments about Gears of War that don't include the words "pledge" and "soul". Crowds grew in the comment threads, where people uncovered the fact that it was made by a marketing company called Zipatoni, one of whose staff bore curious resemblance to a man seen on the website posing in a home-made PSP t-shirt. View: Full Story (Eurogamer)
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Submitted by psYchotic
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Thursday, 14 December 2006 |
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 BERLIN:: A European industry group Thursday approved a bid by Microsoft to have the newest version of its Office file formats declared as industry standards, bolstering the software maker's bid to compete in the emerging era of so-called open-source data.
ECMA International, a group of makers of both hardware and software based in Geneva that includes Microsoft, designated the Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats of Microsoft's Office Open XML as official industry standards. Source: International Herald Tribune Read more
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Submitted by jamie
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Thursday, 14 December 2006 |
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 Even as consumers buy more and more iPods, they are purchasing only a handful of songs from Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes online store, a Forrester Research report said.
In a study of the online store, technology research company Forrester estimated that its monthly revenue, after rising for the past two years, has fallen 65 percent since January, when sales spiked most likely because people who received iPods for the holidays began filling them up with music.
Forrester concluded that most households buy less than two CDs worth of iTunes music. And in adding up all the songs sold on iTunes -- about 1.5 billion -- and all the iPods sold -- about 60 million to 70 million to date -- it breaks down to about 20 iTunes tracks sold per iPod, Forrester said. In recent months, that has increased to 23 songs per iPod. View: Full Story (San Franciso Chronicle) Update..... 'A UK outfit called The Register and Bloomberg decided to dive in and highlight one finding of the report -- that iTunes sales had dropped in the first six months of this year. We got treated to wonderful headlines about iTunes sales "collapsing" and "dropping" and "plummeting" and so on. Now for the record, iTunes sales are not collapsing. Our credit card transaction data shows a real drop between the January post-holiday peak and the rest of the year, but with the number of transactions we counted it's simply not possible to draw this conclusion . . . as we pointed out in the report. But that point was just too subtle to get into these articles.'
'Now, you can't unring the bell. But I will try to focus you on the truth here, which is this: iTunes sales are leveling off, the Journal did an article about it last Friday with data from Soundscan. Apple is not in trouble -- it makes its money mostly from iPods, and iTunes is just a way to make that experience better. It's the music industry that has to worry, since the $1 billion a year or so from iTunes, globally, doesn't nearly make up for even the drop in CD sales in the US, which are now down $2.5 billion from where they were.' View: Forrester (Thanks to Tim for the Update)
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Submitted by actz
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Wednesday, 13 December 2006 |
 A message for gadget fans expecting the launch of Apple's hybrid iPhone at January's MacWorld Expo : brace yourself for disappointment. The device is being billed as an iPod-phone combination, and rumours of its features have flooded the web in recent months. Wall Street analysts say the speculation of a delayed launch is even affecting Apple's share price. "Based on our checks, we believe the timing of Apple's iPhone commercial launch is around late first quarter 2007 to early second quarter 2007," CIBC World Markets analyst Ittai Kidron wrote last week. Source: smh.com
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Home 
Harvey Bumpus doesn't like to eat alone. But his wife died more than a year ago and his family is scattered across the country. Most nights, he heats up a simple meal of oatmeal or hot dogs and eats alone. "I don't have much choice," said the 82-year-old retired correctional officer who looks forward to Christmas as one of the few days each year when he gathers with his family.
tom_3
jamie