Got A Pirated Copy of XP? Expect to be Nagged

Microsoft is introducing a new "feature" to Windows XP Professional. If you try to update with a bootleg copy, you'll see a few changes... Such as, the desktop background will be reset every 60 minutes & changed to a plain black background. Not to mention the addition of what Microsoft calls the "persistent desktop notification."

read more | digg story

It's official: Comcast starts 250GB bandwidth caps October 1

Comcast has finally announced that it will introduce 250GB per month bandwidth caps for all residential customers this fall. It insists that this is the same policy it always had, but with clearer limits.

read more | digg story

Web Apps Faster With Firefox 3.1

Firefox 3.1 will run many Web-based applications such as Gmail faster through incorporation of a feature called TraceMonkey that dramatically speeds up programs written in JavaScript, Mozilla said Friday. JavaScript has been very broadly used to add pizzazz or flexibility to Web pages over the years, but in recent years, it's also become the

read more | digg story

Get “I Am Rich!” for $999.99 off the cover price

No Jailbreak required! That’s right, now you too can pretend you were $999.99 richer a few minutes ago! Sure, it may not have I Am Rich’s secret piece of advice that may or may not have made you even richer, but I am 99% sure that advice was “Do not waste your money on expensive crap like this”.

read more | digg story

101 Classic Computer Ads [PICS]

Boing Boing Gadgets has compiled a nice set of 101 classic computer ads.

read more | digg story

TWIT cartoons by Beltane

This is an homage to our favorite tech guy and all the other Twits.www.toondoo.com Leo has seen the first few of these and liked them and said I should share them.http://www.toondoo.com/ViewBook.toon?bookid=64215

read more | digg story

Youtube to hand over all user histories and IP addresses!

Due to a recent judge ruling, google will be forced to turn over every record of ever video watched by youtube users, including user's names, and IP addresses to viacom.

read more | digg story

Oh Yes... There Will Be Blood

The same could be said about the Movie Bambi Vs Godzilla I and II

read more | digg story

Trash those records, now we have tape!

Back in the day, audiophiles listened to music on tape, but they were hard to change. Here's an orphaned tape format RCA was eager to sell you: 4 tracks of bliss in one easy-to -load, huge cartridge

read more | digg story

MetroFi Plans Market Exit: Sale or Shutter

In what is proving to be yet another high-profile Metro Wi-Fi failure, MetroFi, a San Jose-based startup that raised over $15 million from Sevin Rosen and August Capital, is close to shutting down, according to WiFi NetNews and MuniWireless, two blogs that follow the MuniFi industry closely.

read more | digg story

Comcast Lied to FCC, Blocks BitTorrent Traffic 24/7

New data on Comcast’s interference with BitTorrent traffic shows that the company misinformed the FCC this February. Comcast has always argued that BitTorrent upstream traffic was only blocked during periods of heavy network traffic, this turns out to be a lie.

read more | digg story

The Fight to Own Yahoo: Five Possible Scenarios

Rumors are flying that Yahoo is teaming up with AOL, the long-suffering Internet division of Time Warner, as a way to stave off an unwanted merger.While many industry watchers still believe that Microsoft will gobble up Yahoo eventually, chances are it will have to pay a lot more for its meal. Here are five possible scenarios to consider.

read more | digg story

Mozilla: Final Version of Firefox 3 Will Ship in June

Mozilla officially announces when Firefox 3 will be out.The final release of Firefox 3 is due in June, the company said Wednesday during a roundtable discussion with a small group of tech bloggers.During the event, the key members of the Mozilla team, including CEO John Lilly, gave a quick overview of the product release schedule for the next version of the open source web browser.According to VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer, the first Release Candidate will ship in early May. The RC1 stage is the point at which most of the larger extension developers re-work their code to be fully compatible with Firefox 3. So if your favorite extension isn't yet working, you'll only have to wait another month or so.Right now, the latest Firefox 3 release is beta version 4. The Firefox 3 betas have about 700,000 users right now -- a small but dedicated chunk of Firefox's entire user base of 160 million people. The public release of Beta 5 will be out the first week of April (the nightly builds are available for testing now), and that will be the last beta release before Firefox enters the release candidate stage.Hopefully by June all of the FF Developers will update their Plug-ins to be compatible with FF 3.0 as of now left than have are.

read more | digg story

Google: No kids allowed

"Google's terms of service, while ignored by the vast majority of users, contain a pretty shocking clause: Under 18's are not permitted to use any of Google's web properties. Thats right kids - no search, YouTube, Gmail, news, or images."

read more | digg story

Give an Old Laptop New Life with Cheap (or Free) Projects

Like a famed race horse or a classic book, you don't just throw away a laptop because it's banged up a little. With some free software, a little know-how and some creative thinking about your home network, nearly any old laptop can find its second wind, and today I'll run through some of the best ways to get it there.

read more | digg story

Photos: Dinosaur sighting: Commodore 64 - CNET News.com

Follow along as TechRepublic gives a tour of a fine old relic it dug up.

read more | digg story

Official: 16GB iPhone available and 32GB iPod touch, $499

Out of the rumor mill comes the 16GB iPhone, now official. Ever since the 16GB iPod touch was announced in September, we all knew it was just a matter of time until Apple could bung the same NAND chip into their chubbier iPhone. The Surprise is a new 32GB iPod touch for the same $499. Both are available immediately. So why did apple waited today to make the announcement. Steve should have made the introduced for the 16GB iPhone and the new 32GB iPod touch at this years Macworld in January.

read more | digg story

Click if your computer screen is dirty.

Clean your computer screen through the internets!

read more | digg story

January 30th is International Delete Your MySpace Day

PLease no more myspace. . . . We were just recently alerted here at Mashable that January 30th, just a few scant days away, is International Delete Your MySpace Account Day. Cory Geller sent us to a blog post by Simon Owens describing his growing disgust with the constant friend requests from the fembots I have delete, myspace over a year ago. To take part in the excitement. I am going to create another one than Delete it Again to join in the fun!!

read more | digg story

January 30th is International Delete Your MySpace Day

PLease no more myspace. . . . We were just recently alerted here at Mashable that January 30th, just a few scant days away, is International Delete Your MySpace Account Day. Cory Geller sent us to a blog post by Simon Owens describing his growing disgust with the constant friend requests from the fembots I have delete, myspace over a year ago. To take part in the excitement. I am going to create another one than Delete it Again to join in the fun!!

read more | digg story

Talking About AT&T's Internet Filtering on AT&T's Own Show

Joel Johnson of Boing Boing Gadgets was invited to talk about gadgets onThe Hugh Thompson Show, a television-style talk show sponsored exclusively by AT&T for distribution on the online AT&T Tech Channel. I eventually did talk about gadgets, but in light of AT&T's shocking and baffling announcement of their plans to filter the internet, I thought.

read more | digg story

Apple Adds Five Apps To The iPod Touch -- For A Price

It's not all love for the iPhone today -- Apple just announced that Mail, Maps, Stocks, Notes and Weather are all coming to the iPod touch. New touch owners get 'em all for free, but all of you early adopters will have to cough up: the bundle is going to set you back a whopping $20.

read more | digg story

It Takes 7 Hrs and 51 Mins to Get From "Here" to "There"

Only Google would know that Its in France.

read more | digg story

HD-DVD - Runs and hides from CES

"....HD DVD group is canceling its CES press conference; tail severely between legs over today's explosive news that Warner -- the last "undecided" studio -- was going to the other side and doing Blu-ray discs exclusively."For now I am going to stick and Major other Geels out there with my Upconverting DVD Player. And let this Next Gen DVD Format War Just play out for another Year, Until there is a clear winner.

read more | digg story

Intel Quits One Laptop Per Child Program

That didn't last long! Citing disagreements with the organization, Intel Corp. said Thursday it has abandoned the One Laptop Per Child program, dealing a big blow to the ambitious project seeking to bring millions of low-cost laptops to children in developing countries.

read more | digg story

GeekLinks.net - Tech News From My World. to my Jaiku Page

GeekLinks.net - Tech News From My World. to my Jaiku Page found over here.

Apple: 6G iPod & Apple's Future?

"CNET rounds up what we're going to get from the next iPod and where Apple is heading as a company and as a business juggernaut. [They have the] 100GB widescreen video iPods, Wi-Fi-enabled iPods capable of on-the-fly movie downloads over the air, unlimited downloads from iTunes for a flat fee and the UK finally getting its content-hungry hands on movie downloads. Apple has dropped the 'Computer' from its company name, and is making significant advances into the media-distribution business. It's bringing video to everyone everywhere with iTunes movies and now Apple TV, and the rumours and speculation we've discussed promote the theory that Apple is setting itself up as a major player in the media-distribution industry."

8 CORE Mac Pro OFFICIALLY announced by Apple!!

8-core or quad-core Mac Pro workstation Meet the latest addition to the Mac Pro family: The world ’s first 3.0GHz, 8-core Intel Xeon-based Mac Pro. Consider the bar officially raised.

8 CORE Mac Pro OFFICIALLY announced by Apple!!

AMD Athlon 64 6000+ Launched And Tested

AMD officially launched their next speed bump in the Athlon 64 product line, in the form of a new 3GHz part branded the Athlon 64 6000+. This new dual-core Athlon 64 sports 1MB of on-chip cache per core and is designed for AMD's Socket AM2 platform. This chip is still built on AMD's 90nm fab node and is comprised of some 227 million transistors. It also carries a thermal power profile of about 125Watts. Unfortunately, in all the benchmarks seen here, it was still unable to catch Intel's Core 2 Duo E6700 chip at 2.66GHz."

http://tinyurl.com/2semeo

In-car record players from the 1950's

Record players were installed on a slide-out turntable beneath the dash and hidden behind a drop-down door that could be opened at the push of a button. I remember a old friend of mind who had one those In-Car Record players. Every time his car would go over a bump the tone air would skip all over place and it would ruin the player needle stylist!

Seagate to Release First 15k RPM 2.5-inch HDDs

This afternoon, Seagate Technology made an unexpected announcement coming so soon after the Storage Visions conference in Las Vegas – a tag-along with CES. The company’s second wave of Savvio hard drives in the 2.5" form factor will be revved up from 10,000 to 15,000 revolutions per minute.

But as an indication that such revolutionary speed, literally speaking, may not yet be cool enough for notebooks where the company’s Momentus product line revs up to 7200 rpm, the 15K series is being billed for use in RAID storage batteries for the enterprise. There, Seagate says the new Savvios will run cooler than a typical datacenter installation, drawing 40% less power per drive while consuming about a third of the rack space.

http://tinyurl.com/24luf8

Netflix Starts Offering Flicks On The Net

Beginning this week, some subscribers to DVD-by-mail service Netflix will be able to watch movies and TV shows on the Web. Netflix Inc. will start showing movies and TV episodes over the Internet this week, providing its subscribers with more instant gratification as the DVD-by-mail service prepares for a looming technology shift threatening its survival.

The Los Gatos-based company plans to unveil the new "Watch Now" feature Tuesday, but only a small number of its more than 6 million subscribers will get immediate access to the service, which is being offered at no additional charge.

Netflix expects to introduce the instant viewing system to about 250,000 more subscribers each week through June to ensure its computers can cope with the increased demand.

S.F. Finalizes Wi-Fi Deal With EarthLink, Google

EarthLink Inc. and Google Inc. have finalized a four-year deal to provide free wireless Internet service throughout San Francisco after seven months of sometimes-tense negotiations that stalled the city's effort to ensure all its residents, visitors and businesses have easy access to the Web.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom signed off on the contract Friday, but the details still require the approval of the city's Board of Supervisors and Public Utilities Commission.

Google launched a free Wi-Fi service in August in its home town of Mountain View, making the 11.5-square-mile city of 72,000 people the largest U.S. community with free Wi-Fi throughout its borders.

http://tinyurl.com/tncf5

Warner Bros. new "Total HD" disc tries to settle Blu-ray/HD DVD war

Warner Bros plans to announce a new single videodisc, called a Total HD disc, that can play films and television programs in both Blu-ray and HD DVD. They hope to make the new generation of DVD entertainment easier on the consumer by making movies and television libraries available in BOTH formats on a SINGLE disc.

http://tinyurl.com/y36snn

Get Ready for DRM-FREE 2007: Amazon, LimeWire, MySpace, eMusic, Yahoo Music

More rumors are surfacing around Amazon offering DRM-free MP3s to compete with Apple's iTunes. Only this time the rumors include other MP3 download services and are coming from the mainstream press (does that make it more or less credible?). Looks like certain key executives have converted to the idea that digital downloads should be sold as unprotected MP3s.

http://tinyurl.com/y7ky4j

Hitachi to unveil ultra high-end storage array

Code-named “Broadway,” the forthcoming storage array can be deployed with one Integrated Control/Array Frame and one to four Array Frames, which hold a maximum of 1,152 drives for a maximum internal capacity of 576TB and the ability to address as much as 256 petabytes of external storage. Now Everyone geek will have No accuse because now they will have access to an Virtual Bottomless Pit of Storage. So they can go out to purchase and download more crap 'until the cows come home' of digital media contains, for their Shinny brand new Raid 6 256 petabytes MAS!!

http://tinyurl.com/yzlstj

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FireFox Gone Wild

Screenshot of the venerable Firefox browser when inundated with all possible extensions and add-ons.
Since some of my favorite FF extensions are not updated by the author when I had upgraded to FF 1.0.x to FF 1.5.x to FF 2.0.x Along the way for me, FF will lose some extra baggage from incompatible exts. So this keep FF of becoming bloatware on my systems.

read more | digg story

Allofmp3 to be closed

The US and Russia have agreed on actions that Russia will take to address piracy, i.e. shutting down AllofMP3.com (on page 2 on top).

read more | digg story

Radio Shack Catalog featuring 16MHz PC for only $2599

Good stuff here, including "OS/2 Ready" and "3 1/4 inch disk drive stores 1.4 million characters per disk"
What really sad I Still have this Radio Shack Catalog from 1987 somewhere in the back of my closet. I have a full create of old Radio Shack Flyers and Catalogs since 1984 from the Technology Store!!

But then again, everything at Radio Shack is overpriced..And cheap (quality).

read more | digg story

A Hack To Prevent Traffic Jams!

This amateur scientist has devised a way to singlehandely reduce traffic jams during your commute. It is golden advice for dealing with holiday traffic. Still This hack will never work on the 405 Freeway in LA Regardless time of day.

read more | digg story

1987 computer serving a site from floppy!

This old 286 computer running at 8 MHz, with 1 MiB ram and no hard drive (the OS, all software and the site is on a single floppy!) still serves a purpose by acting as a fully functional web server running DR-DOS. Also includes a description of how to build your own server on an 8088 or newer, and links to all software required!

Next I want to see this preformed on Atari an 2600!!

read more | digg story

1987 computer serving a site from floppy!

This old 286 computer running at 8 MHz, with 1 MiB ram and no hard drive (the OS, all software and the site is on a single floppy!) still serves a purpose by acting as a fully functional web server running DR-DOS. Also includes a description of how to build your own server on an 8088 or newer, and links to all software required!

Next I want to see this preformed on Atari 2600!!

read more | digg story

The Wii Disassembled

"There are two ways to take apart the Wii. The first, as demonstrated by Popular Science, involves breaking the Wii open due to a lack of tools. The second method is a more formal Wii disassembly guide, which is provided by InformIT.com. Either way, you can see some detailed pictures of the internals of the Wii and how the parts are laid out. The InformIT.com version also includes an eight minute teardown video."

From /.
http://tinyurl.com/se58h

Fox Cancels O.J. 'If I Did It' Book, TV Special

News Corp., the parent company of book publisher HarperCollins and the FOX network, has canceled publication of the O.J. Simpson book and television special "If I Did It."
Common decency: 1
Asshole: 1

(he's still got the book)

read more | digg story

Linux Mint 2.0 Screenshot Walkthrough

Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution whose goal is to provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including browser plugins, media codecs, support for DVD playback, Java, and other components. Linux Mint 2.0, code name "Barbara", was released yesterday: This release is based on Ubuntu 6.10 and uses the Ubuntu installer...

read more | digg story

"Will Web 3.0 Be In The Green?".

Web 3.0. The recently coined term that has many in the blogosphere screaming "Stop the keyword hype!" and others waxing hopeful that the next wave of Internet progress is finally starting to percolate. Before the seed has even sprouted roots, already bloggers are asking "but will it make any money?". Donna Bogatin asks this very question in her blog post "Will Web 3.0 Be In The Green?".

Crowds gather to buy Nintendo's Wii

Nintendo's new Wii video game console debuted on Sunday as thousands of die-hard fans, some of whom camped out for several days, welcomed the final entrant in the three-way scramble for dominance in the $30 billion global game market.

At the Times Square Toys "R" Us store in New York, a line snaked around the block, with more than 1,000 gamers vying for first rights to take the new machine home, while more than 900 enthusiasts gathered for the West Coast release at the GameStop store at Hollywood's Universal City Walk.

At midnight, Isaiah "Triforce" Johnson, 29, purchased the first Wii as Toys "R" Us employees cheered and Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime helped ring up the sale.

Examples of Microsoft stealing source code

With all of the FUD around Microsoft and SCO making wild and unsubstantiated claims regarding Linux, I thought I'd look up how much code Microsoft has stolen themselves. With a simple Google search, I was able to turn up eight different instances in just a few minutes where Microsoft has lost court battles from their code theft.

read more | digg story

Try out 10 free operating systems - in your browser!

If you've got Java-support in your browser, you can try out several free operating systems at Free OS Zoo. This is an experimental feature, using a system called FLOZ. The response-times are not too hot, but it's cool, none the less.

read more | digg story

Its Not Suse Linux Its Microsoft owns intellectual property that is in Linux!!!

A lot of people were initially surprised by Microsoft's deal with Novell that effectively admitted that some companies might actually want to use Linux. However, in the days following the deal, as more people dissected it, they began to realize that perhaps it was a trojan horse. While it "protected" users of Suse Linux, many people pointed out that suggested that Microsoft might believe that users of any other Linux were open to a lawsuit. Of course, it didn't take long for Steve Ballmer to confirm this for everyone. In a recent talk, he clearly stated that he believes Microsoft owns intellectual property that is in Linux. Microsoft has hinted at this in the past, so it's really not a huge surprise -- but if he's going to say such things, he ought to back it up by actually showing what's infringing or filing a lawsuit. Otherwise it's idle talk. And, paying someone else to make the same claims doesn't really count. Either way, for a news story that originally came out as Microsoft becoming more friendly with Linux, it's certainly turned 180 degrees pretty fast.

Member Folks Its Blog, But when they start making Money. Its still a Blog!!

"It's been a bad week for transparency and disclosure in the blogosphere, demonstrating that once blogging starts making money, the rules change. Nick Douglas was dismissed from ValleyWag, Jason Calacanis bolts from AOL, and co-founder Duncan Riley abruptly departs from b5media. Where do we get the real story? From The New York Times, or not at all. If we've come to expect honesty and straight talk from blogging icons, it's because so many blogospheric leaders have told us we should. And now suddenly we're getting the snarky insider accounts of blogospheric dirt from The New York Times?"

PCWorld: The 13 Most Embarrassing Web Moments

The Internet is the most efficient information distribution system ever known. But if you're not careful, it's also the perfect way to embarrass yourself in front of the entire world.

read more | digg story

The $99,999,999.00 PS3

Last night's eBay auctions were filled with arrogant twerps like this trying to sell their PS3's for Dr. Evil-like sums. Look at the screenshot, there were 135 bids on it. It's not the seller who pushed the price this high, it's the buyers being silly. As others have said, buyers post fake bids all the time, Remember folks all if you are the winnings bids are legal binding.

read more | digg story

Microsoft’s Zune Suffering Awful First Day Sales

Two boxed Zune players sat ignored on the top shelf of a Plexiglas showcase packed with iPod accessories in a Virgin Megastore and by mid-afternoon, the store had sold one Zune player and one other person had inquired about them.

I am Glad to see General Public finally waking up to the fact DRM is Simply an bad Ideas for Both Consumer and Music Business .

read more | digg story

Internet Only 1% Pron?? What Pron I want some quality Pron!!

"In what surely comes as a complete and utter surprise to everyone here, a new calculation shows that only one percent of web pages contain pornography. While the calculations were performed using data forced from Google's and Microsoft's search indices by the government, they will help the American Civil Liberties Union to keep enforcement of the Children's Online Protection Act of 1998 banned. A loss for business privacy has become a victory for free speech, even though netizens lose a beloved old proverb."

But in Contrast Over 95 % of Todays College Kids acting like True 'Dumb Ass' can be easily found on Webshots, Myspace, Gootube and other Social networking sites.

Dvorak: If anything is doomed to failure, it is the Microsoft Zune.

I have no idea who is marketing this device within the company, but from what I can tell, this is going to become a major turkey in the product mix. As far as I can tell, Microsoft should simply turn over all its marketing to the Xbox 360 folks
—at least some of the people in that group have marketing skills

read more | digg story

TiVo to add peer-to-peer video sharing

TiVo has several announcements planned for tomorrow. First, you'll be able to use the TiVo Desktop software to convert and transfer Internet video to your TiVo. Second, TiVo will be setting up "channels" so you can broad cast TiVo-to-TiVo. Third, CBS is adding video downloads to 'TiVoCast.' Sweet!

No word of Comcast DVR powered by Tivo Software will have access to this feature.

read more | digg story

Google Earth In 4D

Google skipped right past the third dimension and landed directly in the fourth (time) by offering historical maps on Google Earth. Now you can travel back in time — for example, I am looking at the globe of 1790. Don't expect detailed high resolution photography from days gone by, but it's still interesting to see old maps overlaid on the satellite imagery of today."

Linus Torvalds Officially a Hero

"The European edition of the Time magazine has selected Linus Torvalds as one of the heroes of the past 60 years. From the main article: 'In the 60 years that Time has been publishing an Atlantic edition, extraordinary people have emerged from the churn and turmoil, creativity and chaos of a period that witnessed the aftermath of world war, the toppling of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, the vanquishing of apartheid in South Africa, the advance of women, the failure of old certainties and the rise of new fears. These people are our heroes, and in this special anniversary issue, we celebrate them and their many achievements.' The article on Linus is titled 'By giving away his software, the Finnish programmer earned a place in history.' Linus is cited in the 'Rebels & Leaders' category along with Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, and others."

TOP500 Supercomputer Sites For 2006

"The IBM BlueGene/L system, installed at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, retains the No. 1 spot with a Linpack performance of 280.6 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second, or Tflop/s). The new No. 2 systems is Sandia National Laboratories' Cray Red Storm supercomputer, only the second system ever to be recorded to exceed the 100 Tflops/s mark with 101.4 Tflops/s... Slipping to No. 3 is the IBM eServer Blue Gene Solution system, installed at IBM's Thomas Watson Research Center, with 91.20 Tflops/s Linpack performance." You need over 6.6 Tflop/s to make it into the top 100.

28th TOP500 List

Apple unveils upgraded MacBook line

pple Computer is upgrading its MacBook line of consumer laptop computers. Each of the three MacBook models will now have an Intel Core 2 Duo processor inside it, with the entry model having a 1.83 GHz version of the chip and the two other models having the 2.0 GHz version. Previously, the MacBook line contained Intel's original Core Duo processors.

On the top two models, Apple is also doubling the memory to 1 gigabyte of SDRAM and upping the hard drive space. The top model, which comes in black, will now have a 120 gigabyte hard drive, while the midline model will have an 80 gigabyte one. Apple is maintaining its prices on all three models: $1,499 for the high-end version, $1,299 for the mid-tier one and $1,099 for the entry-level model.

10 Coolest Lego Creations

From a LEGO vending machine to a LEGO USB drive

Test Ref Links
http://geeklink.net/ttvm
http://digg.com

read more | digg story

Utube Sues YouTube

From The Age article: Universal Tube, which sells used machines that make tubes, has said it has lost business because customers have had trouble accessing its site." So now Utube is suing YouTube seeking a cease and desist on the youtube domain. (I wonder if they think Google's pockets might be deeper that the previous owners'.) This again raises the problems of domain names colliding across different industries and countries, and reminds me of the etoys/etoy tussle a few years back. Should domain name simply be exempt from trademark legislation in all countries or is it a legit thing to fight for?"
Utube Sues YouTube

Microsoft backtracks on Vista transfer limits

However, the new restriction prompted an outcry among hardware enthusiasts and others. Microsoft is returning the licensing terms to basically what they were in Windows XP--users can transfer their license to a new PC an unlimited number of times, provided they uninstall and stop using it on the prior machine.

The software maker said it paid attention to the response both directly to the company and on blogs and decided to reverse course. Microsoft had hoped to use the change to aid its ongoing efforts to thwart piracy.
Microsoft backtracks on Vista transfer limits

ThePirateBay Grows

ThePirateBay Grows
It appears that ThePirateBay is continuing to iron out many of its remaining technical glitches. As of this writing, ThePirateBay is host to over 400,000 torrents and serves more than 5 million peers. Additionally, ThePirateBay crew reports their tracker has grown substantially over the last several months.

"...some updates. You might have noticed the increase in peers and number of new torrents everyday. This is very nice to see! We've grown like 30% the past two months

The Internet Now has Over 100 Million Web Sites

There are now more than 100 million web sites on the Internet, according to Netcraft, whose monthly web server survey has reached 101.4 million sites. From the article: 'The 100 million site milestone caps an extraordinary year in which the Internet has already added 27.4 million sites, easily topping the previous full-year growth record of 17 million from 2005. The Internet has doubled in size since May 2004, when the survey hit 50 million.'" This is a far cry from the August 1995 results that just cleared 18,000.