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Monthly Archives: December 2006

How Far the Monarch Has Fallen

Sunday, December 31, 2006

From [H]ard|OCP: Monarch Computer seems to have fallen on some hard times in 2006. They were not too happy with us when we evaluated a system of theirs back in May. They pledged then to fix all their support issues repeatedly, but we never saw that happen. We then saw constant complaints about Monarch’s customer [...]

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How to tell white lies

Sunday, December 31, 2006

More than four out of five people admit to telling little white lies at least once a day and the preferred way of being “economical with the truth” is to use technology such as cell phones, texts and e-mails, a survey on Thursday said. The research by UK pollsters 72 Point found that “techno-treachery” was [...]

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Would You Expect Anything Else?

Sunday, December 31, 2006

“Happy New Year!” That’s the subject line on a new malicious e-mail making the rounds. The sender wants you to click on the attached postcard. The file name is postcard.exe or postcard.zip. Don’t do it! Don’t open that attachment, even if you recognize the e-mail address. It contains harmful software that will worm its way [...]

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Good Thing There’s No Alcohol on the ISS

Sunday, December 31, 2006

The crew on board the International Space Station (ISS) may have decided to ring in the new year without any alcohol, but they’ll still be having their bit of fun as Russian Jack Frosts. Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin said in a video link-up Sunday that he and US astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria would be dressing up [...]

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Outsourcing in Taiwan

Sunday, December 31, 2006

Four Taiwanese manufacturers control over 70% of notebook manufacturing currently. The other Taiwanese notebook brands control another 10% of the manufacturing development. As early as 2001 the capacity in Taiwan to build notebooks all but vanished. The “Big 4″ in notebook assembly builds exclusively in China. More

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Gone in a Gmail Minute

Sunday, December 31, 2006

A number of Gmail users are complaining that their e-mail has mysteriously vanished. After TechCrunch picked up the story, Google issued a public apology, stating that the problem affected only 60 users. There don’t seem to be any noticeable patterns in the group of affected users. Google seems confident that it is the result of [...]

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“Can You Hear Me Now?” Gets A Cab Ride

Sunday, December 31, 2006

Ever wanted to stuff that “Can you hear me now?” guy into the trunk of your car and take him on a tour of those maddening spots where your cell phone won’t work? One telecommunications company has a plan to do the mechanical equivalent. The Stockholm-based firm Ericsson recently got approval from New York’s taxi [...]

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Reading A DVD With VLC Or Mplayer Is Now Illegal In France

Sunday, December 31, 2006

Starting tomorrow, December 31st 2006, reading a DVD protected with CSS (as most DVD are) is illegal in France when it is done with…software [that] circumvents the protection, such as VLC or mplayer which can both use the libdvdcss library. More -oldster-

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Innovative Weather Satellite System

Sunday, December 31, 2006

Preliminary findings from a revolutionary satellite system launched earlier this year show that the system can boost the accuracy of forecasts of hurricane behavior, significantly improve long-range weather forecasts, and monitor climate change with unprecedented accuracy. Six microsatellites are entering low-Earth orbit to form COSMIC, the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate. The [...]

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Looking For A New Car For The New Year?

Sunday, December 31, 2006

Detailed pictures of the long-awaited Phantom Drophead Coupé have at last been released. And on Sunday 7th January, the new convertible itself – Rolls-Royce’s first such car since the Corniche of 2002 – will be formally unveiled at the Detroit Motor Show. It’s no surprise that the Drophead Coupé is a spectacular feat of engineering [...]

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Cooler Master X Craft 250 IDE to USB Enclosure

Sunday, December 31, 2006

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Merry XXXMas

Sunday, December 31, 2006

Presumably turning a joyous, thrilling Christmas morning into one giant moment of awkwardness, a South Carolina mum was aghast when her son’s toy phone, which was purchased from K-Mart as an innocent symbol of motherly love, vocalized a profanity instead of “the number six” when that key was pressed. The phone reportedly shouts out numbers [...]

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IWILL ZMAXdp Dual Opteron SFF Barebones

Sunday, December 31, 2006

Features and Specifications: » Hotrod candy apple red design » Motherboard features: Support for dual AMD 64 Opteron CPUs with Hypertransport Two (2) extra large solid copper based heatsink and fans NVIDIA nForce3 Professional MCP chipset Two (2) 184-DIMM slots DDR400/333 SDRAM support Maximum 2 GB (PC3200 / PC2700 / PC2100 / PC1600) Registered ECC [...]

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Come into My Parlor…

Sunday, December 31, 2006

Spam is hardly news to anyone with a mail box. What is new is that some spammers are spinning a large spiders’ web of different domain names leading to a site peddling dubious “OEM software” downloads.The messages usually begin with the text “Office 2007 is available for enterprise users from November 30, 2006. The end [...]

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This Is Wrong in So Many Ways

Sunday, December 31, 2006

From The Inquirer: YOU NEVER QUITE wrap your head around how anti-consumer Microsoft’s policies are until they bite you in the bum. Add in the customer antagonistic policies of its patsies, HP in this case, and vendors like Promise, and you have quite a recipe for pain. Guess what I did today? More

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