Friday, December 29, 2006

A peek at faster Power6, Cell chips

IBM's Power6 processor will be able to exceed 5 gigahertz in a high-performance mode, and the second-generation Cell Broadband Engine processor from IBM, Sony and Toshiba will run at 6GHz, according to the program for the International Solid State Circuits Conference that begins February 11 in San Francisco.

For servers, IBM has said its Power6 processor, due to ship in servers in 2007, will run between 4GHz and 5GHz. But in the ISSCC program, Big Blue said the chip's clock will tick at a rate "over 5GHz in high-performance applications." In addition, the chip "consumes under 100 watts in power-sensitive applications," a power range comparable to mainstream 95-watt AMD Opteron chips and 80-watt Intel Xeon chips.

http://tinyurl.com/vxxt8

FCC approves AT&T-BellSouth merger

The Federal Communications Commission approved the roughly $86 billion megamerger between AT&T and BellSouth on Friday, ending a bipartisan standoff.

The commission, which had been split between Democrats and Republicans for months on what--if any--conditions should be imposed on the merger, accepted conditions that AT&T had proposed in a formal letter sent to the commission on Thursday. The merger was approved by 4 to 0 vote.

http://tinyurl.com/y76ls5

Woz Gets Questioned by the Secret Service for Using $2 Bills

While generously feeding these machines I tipped the waitress a couple of $2 bills. Waitresses in casinos and other places often exclaim at how much they like getting these and how their kids love them. I have tons of $2 bill stories that will make a whole chapter in my book someday. My $2 bills are real and legit but unusual.

read more | digg story

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Saturn's greatest hits

NASA is asking people to choose the best photograph taken by the Cassini spacecraft as it approaches its second anniversary at the planet Saturn.

NASA lets viewers vote for the best of the 15 photos listed.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

http://tinyurl.com/y6py7s

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Vaporware '06: Return of the King

Pull back the red curtain and dim the lights. It's the 9th annual presentation of the Wired News Vaporware Awards, our ode to the year's top technology products promised, hyped and scheduled, but not delivered.

read more | digg story

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Turn Off Unnecessary Windows XP Services

Turning off unnecessary services in Windows XP can greatly reduce your exploit risk, while improving system performance. It's a good time to inject that often there are all sorts of "download optimizers" and other cute programs that vendors like to push on users. The first rule is "If you don't know you need it, you probably don't."

read more | digg story

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Pandora Goes Social

Tonight Pandora is releasing a additional features aimed at increasing interaction among members. These social features include listener profiles with musical preferences, bio information, etc. (previously listeners had only a list of bookmarked songs), as well as listener search and lists of users who are fans of particular bands.

read more | digg story

See real-time weather on a Google map

Weather junkies, your site has come in. Weather Bonk gives you not only the local forecast, but also traffic webcams, monthly averages and live conditions overlaid on a Google map.

read more | digg story

New Mozilla issues security updates

The Mozilla Foundation has issued "critical" security updates to vulnerabilities discovered in the Firefox browser, Thunderbird e-mail client and SeaMonkey application suite.

Flaws were found in versions of the open-source software prior to both Firefox 2.0.0.1 and Firefox 1.5.0.9, as well as prior to Thunderbird 1.5.0.9 and SeaMonkey 1.0.7, Mozilla said Tuesday.

The vulnerabilities could potentially be exploited to conduct cross-site scripting attacks, to let malicious attackers launch a remote execution of code on users' computers, and to expose sensitive information, according to an advisory from security company Secunia.

http://tinyurl.com/y5akp7

Dish Network to Launch IPTV Service?

The Satellite Guys forum floats the rumor that Dish Network may be exploring the possibility of starting their own IPTV service for broadband users. The rumor proclaims that the service (dubbed DishONLINE) will go live on February 15th, 2007, offering SD and HD quality movies, music, news and adult films. It looks like this portion of the Dish website has been gearing up for the IPTV launch. Of course, we're still waiting on the rumor that there would be a DirecTV blade on the Xbox360 dashboard.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/80418

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Linking to Pirated Content Illegal Down under...

According to an Australian court, linking to pirated mp3 content hosted elsewhere is illegal. Upholding a ruling from last summer, the ruling declared that Stephen Cooper, a retired policeman who ran the now-defunct site MP3s4free.net, and his ISP "[enabled] infringing copies of the downloaded sound recordings to be made." Cooper logged 7,081,899 unique visitors to his website in a little less than a year's time

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/80386

Monday, December 18, 2006

Digg Unveils New Features - Kevin's Blog Post Explains with Video

New Digg Features O
’ Plenty
by Kevin Rose at 6am, Dec 18th, 2006 in Digg Website
Big update today. Tons of new features to share with you – many inspired by feedback you’ve given us over the last few months (thanks!). Check out this video ...
(( http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/18/digg-break ))

read more | digg story

Cisco -- not apple -- announces iPhone branded VoIP phones

but Cisco, which has apparently had the trademark on the name since the 90s, is launching a line of Linksys "iPhone" VoIP devices (yes, that's right, lower case "i", uppercase "P"). Why wait until now to launch the iPhone name? We can't say for sure, but we imagine Cisco was probably trying to work behind the scenes to sell the rights to the name to Apple, but things didn't pan out -- but since "iPhone" is already a fairly ubiquitous brand without even being launched, hey, why not run with it?

http://tinyurl.com/ydje4h

Friday, December 15, 2006

The worst website ever made.

In early 2001, Dr. Kamran Afzal created the worst website in history. (Maximum appreciation can only be achieved by viewing & listening with IE.)
(Maximum appreciation can only be achieved by viewing & listening with IE.) Unfortunately Users of digg Do not does IE! Ugh! I have to switch to my old windows 98 machines to fireup the old IE 6 to get the Maximum appreciation Experience of this site.
The theme music is so 80's cheesy!I can't wait for someone to do a music montage of this site on Youtube!!
SING ALONG!
doctaire kamran afzel is the greatest in the world, his formula is natural herbolic made in wall, this herbal had been air wall been has no side effect, then the doctaire kamran afzal is the greatest in the world.



read more | digg story

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Who sent the first e-mail?

For those of you who had asked themselves this question at least once until now, and for those of you who are just curious in finding out the answer, I have searched around and found a few hints.

read more | digg story

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

The VCR Media Center PC

If you thought the Super NinTiVo was cool, reader Jeff has something even better. He frankensteined together a "ViVo", which is a Vista Media Center PC on a Celeron D 3.0 with a 250GB hard drive all running inside, you guessed it, a Panasonic VCR.

The only thing visibly different from the outside is the addition of a fan, and the fact that the VCR slot is actually a disc slot to pop out the DVD drive! Awesome, in a retro way—sort of like being able to go back in time and defile Marilyn Monroe's corpse while it was still warm.
http://tinyurl.com/y5yqmy

Skype 3.0 Released

The final version of Skype 3.0 was released today.

read more | digg story

A look inside Google's open-source kitchen

Search giant Google is a heavy user of open-source software and an active participant in many projects that develop it--even chipping in some funding, Chris DiBona says.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company has versions of software like Ubuntu running on its own machines, according to DiBona, the open-source programs manager at Google. For outsiders, it has recently released the Google Web Toolkit under an open-source license. The Java software development kit is designed to help programmers create Web 2.0 applications.
http://tinyurl.com/wh74s

Geek to Live: iTunes power tips

We've posted boatloads of iTunes hacks, workarounds, features, screenshots and tips over the past 2 years. But today I'd like to highlight some of the lesser-known but super-useful iTunes features available in the latest version.

read more | digg story

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Vinyl singles making a comeback in Britain

Physical singles may be losing the war against digital formats, but the U.K. market has found an unlikely hero to lead the fight: good old-fashioned 7-inch vinyl.

Fueled predominantly by independent labels and alternative groups like Arctic Monkeys and Kaiser Chiefs, the format--also known as a 45 in its pre-'90s heyday--is experiencing a mini-revival in the United Kingdom. In recent years, labels have increasingly added limited edition versions of 7-inch singles to their armory, which are targeted at indie rock consumers as trendy collectibles.

http://tinyurl.com/yzyv4y

Monday, December 11, 2006

Piratebay strikes back - blocks Swedish ISP!

The Swedish ISP that decided to block allofmp3.com a couple of days ago didn't know what they had coming. Now they're being blocked by Piratebay and The Pirate Party are calling for other sites to do the same.

read more | digg story

Map of the Internet

"Author of the popular webcomic xkcd has put up a hand made map of the internet as today's comic. He also has an interesting blog entry detailing some of the work that went into it, such a pinging servers and creating a method of fractal mapping to display related regions as contiguous sections on the grid
http://xkcd.com/c195.html

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Mozilla Ships Alpha Release of Firefox 3.0

Mozilla today hit an early milestone on the road to the next version of its open-source browser, but the final product is still a year away, developers say.

read more | digg story

Friday, December 08, 2006

Pirates crack Vista Activation Server

Pirates have released another ingenious workaround to Vista's copy protection: a hacked copy of Microsoft's yet-to-be-released volume licencing activation server, running in VMware.

read more | digg story

Thursday, December 07, 2006

The Seminole Tribe of Florida has agreed to buy Orlando-based Hard Rock International for $965 million

The portfolio includes 68 company-owned Hard Rock Cafe restaurants and retail stores, including 44 in the United States, three in Canada, 17 in Europe, three in Australia and one in Puerto Rico. Hard Rock Cafe Louisville, located at Fourth Street Live downtown, is included in the deal.

The business is being sold by the U.K.-based Rank Group PLC, which wants to focus on its European gaming businesses. The closing is expected in early March.

In getting the business, the tribe will gain an estimated 70,000-item collection of rock memorabilia -- the world's largest collection of authentic music memorabilia -- ranging from a Chuck Berry guitar to one of Madonna's bustiers.
http://tinyurl.com/ya3bp6

Toshiba serves up 200GB on two platters

THIS REVIEW FEATURES a device I would not have thought even remotely possible a few years ago, a 200GB notebook drive. Of course there was a time when this hack thought a 20MB hard drive was a marvel to behold, so I guess that's not saying much

http://tinyurl.com/y9xyev

BitTorrent merges with uTorrent

BitTorrent Inc. has just bought (merged with) the popular BitTorrent client, uTorrent for an undisclosed sum. Both CEOs are available for discussion on IRC.

read more | digg story

Two Years of Digging!

"Hard to believe, but two years ago today, Kevin decided my code was bug- free enough to take down the beta sign and unleash Digg upon the world. It's been a crazy and exciting time since then, and we owe it all to you - the loyal and passionate members of the Digg community." Thanks everyone and Happy Birthday to all! : )

read more | digg story

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Remembering James Kim

For the sake of his family, he wanted to know whether I knew of any openings at CNET. Less than one minute later, I walked into my boss's office and told her that I had found my replacement, for sure. "This is your guy!" I exclaimed. Out of everyone I knew, he was the most competent, knowledgeable, friendly and responsible man for the job.

read more | digg story

PayPal Closes Man's Account After 7 Years For Selling Playstation 3

"After sending all of the information that they requested to get full access to my PayPal account, I received this email:"- "After reviewing your PayPal account, we have determined there to be excessive risk involved and would like to begin parting ways in a manner that is least disruptive to your business."

read more | digg story

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

100GB iPod?? I Say No Deal. I am still waiting for 2TB Wide Touch HDTV screen to come out

A Toshiba representative wouldn't discuss customer plans for the 1.8-inch drive, and Apple Computer declined to comment on the possibility of a boost to the music device, describing it as speculation.

However, Apple uses Toshiba drives in its higher-end iPods and has historically snapped up the latest models. Most recently, it added an 80GB version of its video iPod in September.

http://tinyurl.com/yafkuc

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Windows Vista Piracy Started

The business launch of Windows Vista is only a few days behind us and already the attempts to pirate Windows Vista are underway.

read more | digg story

Friday, December 01, 2006

Seagate CEO: We help people "Buy more Crap"

At a San Francisco dinner on Tuesday evening, he was candid about his company's ultimate mission: "Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn."

read more | digg story

Redesigned - Yahoo! TV Gets A New Do

Yahoo! redesigned their TV listing
site this week. Certain bloggers have expressed their displeasure with the makeover. I think it looks good but certainly could be more functional.

Most Yahoo! pages are getting Flash-ier so it was time for the TV listing page to go under the knife. Some complaints have been that the Ajax interface slows it do

Over the last two years I have been using tv.yahoo.com for my online TV listings needs. Now that yahoo has rolled out their new Bloatware 2.0 TV listings. I can no longer use this service. in its current form I can not get it work or in either Firefox or Opera. There is no way I am going to fire up IE 7.0 just to access this one site.

read more | digg story