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Monthly Archives: January 2009

Blockbuster 2Wire MediaPoint

Saturday, January 31, 2009

With its $99 (direct) 2Wire MediaPoint digital media player, a set-top box that delivers movies to the home via Internet, Blockbuster once again shows us that anything Netflix can do, Blockbuster can do, too—if not better, then well enough. But while Netflix’s subscribers can stream movies to a computer or via a device like the [...]

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Here’s Looking at You Kid

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Watch an advertisement on a video screen in a mall, health club or grocery store and there’s a slim – but growing – chance the ad is watching you too. Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden around it, tracking who looks at the screen and for how long. The makers [...]

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How Many Angels Can Dance On the Head of a Pin

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Stanford researchers have reclaimed bragging rights for creating the world’s smallest writing, a distinction the university first gained in 1985 and lost in 1990. How small is the writing? The letters in the words are assembled from subatomic sized bits as small as 0.3 nanometers, or roughly one third of a billionth of a meter. [...]

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The NotBook

Saturday, January 31, 2009

This is true art, friend. The amazing “brotato” (rhymes with potato, in a perfect world) has hacked together netbook components, an ancient keyboard and a 14.2-inch LCD into this classy case, dubbing the project “The Poor Man’s Netbook.” More

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Meet The Beetles

Saturday, January 31, 2009

A giant flower beetle with implanted electrodes and a radio receiver on its back can be wirelessly controlled, according to research presented this week. Scientists at the University of California developed a tiny rig that receives control signals from a nearby computer. Electrical signals delivered via the electrodes command the insect to take off, turn [...]

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You Are Bad

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Google’s main search engine is currently identifying every site on the web as malware, according to reports in both the US and the UK. Following a query, the world’s largest search engine tags each result with the words: “This site may harm your computer.” More

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Hey, Hon? Could You Teleport Me a Beer?

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Physics and magic aren’t often mistaken, but increasingly, physicists themselves seem to be trying to change that. Last year, a team at the University of California, Berkeley, announced that it had developed materials that could lead to an invisibility cloak. Last month, a group of researchers at Harvard University and the National Institutes of Health [...]

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Scientists Love President Obama

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Environmentalists are encouraged by President Barack Obama’s focus this week on renewable energy and stricter emissions standards, although some economists are skeptical he can pull the country out of the recession while cleaning up the planet. Obama must strike a careful balance between stimulating the economy in the coming months and investing in the long-term [...]

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Windows 7 On a Mac

Friday, January 30, 2009

Microsoft’s public beta of Windows 7 is similar enough to Vista that it is fairly easy to install on a Mac, either using BootCamp to install it natively, or within a virtual environment. Here’s what’s involved with obtaining the beta and installing it using Sun’s free VirtualBox software. More

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Windows 7 Insecurities?

Friday, January 30, 2009

Microsoft’s efforts to make Windows 7 less annoying than Vista may also be making it less secure than its predecessor. With Windows Vista, the operating system popped up a warning any time a major change was being made to the system, whether by the OS or by a third-party application. With Windows 7, users can [...]

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No Windows 7 Beta 2

Friday, January 30, 2009

Microsoft officials on January 30 reiterated that there will be no public Beta 2 of Windows 7 and the next milestone will be the Release Candidate (RC) test build of the operating system. On the “Engineering Windows 7″ blog, Windows development chief Steven Sinofsky reiterated what officials stated less plainly at the Professional Developers Conference [...]

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One Wife, Two Degrees

Friday, January 30, 2009

Chip maker Microsemi has decided to keep its CEO and president James Peterson after a board investigation concluded he lied about receiving degrees from Brigham Young University. The California-based firm specializes in high-reliability parts the US government uses in military applications, satellites, and spacecraft. The board investigation determined Peterson didn’t obtain the Bachelor’s Degree or [...]

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Turn Off Automatic Updates!

Friday, January 30, 2009

Microsoft Corp. is warning customers that tools for blocking automatic upgrades to the newest service packs of Windows Vista and Windows XP will expire in the coming months. In a note on a company blog aimed at enterprise IT professionals, Microsoft said the Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) blocking tool expires on April 28, while [...]

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Three NAS Boxes

Friday, January 30, 2009

We are collecting and keeping more information today than ever before. Whether it’s video, pictures, music, or just plain old gobs of e-mail and text messages, all that information has to be stored and backed up. Even in a down economy, the obvious temptation is to rush out, grab a handful of hard drives (no [...]

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Quick! Take All of the Clothes Off Your Eye!

Friday, January 30, 2009

Late next month Earth will receive a new celestial visitor named Lulin – or Comet C/2007 N3 – which astronomers say may have never visited this corner of the solar system before and should be visible to the naked eye. Comets are icy clumps of dust and small rocks left over from the beginnings of [...]

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