Nothing to Fear... ?
Monday, February 12, 2007
What are you afraid of? What causes you real
fear, the kind that causes your heart to beat faster involuntarily,
your stomach to sag like you've eaten lead, and your mind to lose its
reason and revert to the primitive reactions of fight and flight?
Spiders? Snakes? Serial killers? Speaking in public? Or the worst, the
thing that freaks out almost everyone: scary clowns?
Those are what I what I would call primal fears, those that
exist deep down in our subconscious. Other fears, however, are
manufactured by politicians and the media (heck, some so-called "news"
channels base their whole business on this practice) in order to
manipulate us. John Twelve Hawks, in his perceptive essay "How We Live Now," discusses this exact state of affairs:...
Technorati Tags: Security, Computers
Enable Hidden BootScreen in Windows Vista
The Windows Vista BootScreen is pointless, but Microsoft decided to
hide a more visually appealing boot screen that can easily be enabled
with very little trouble. I’m not sure why they didn’t make the boot
screen better.
If you really want a better boot screen, you can check out my article on creating a custom boot logo....
Technorati Tags: Technology, Microsoft, Windows, Vista, BootScreen
Intel shows off 80-core processor
Chief Technical Officer Justin Rattner demonstrated the processor in San Francisco last week for a group of reporters, and the company will present a paper on the project during the International Solid State Circuits Conference in the city this week.
The chip is capable of producing 1 trillion floating-point operations per second, known as a teraflop. That's a level of performance that required 2,500 square feet of large computers a decade ago.
Intel first disclosed it had built a prototype 80-core processor during last fall's Intel Developer Forum, when CEO Paul Otellini promised to deliver the chip within five years. The company's researchers have several hurdles to overcome before PCs and servers come with 80-core processors--such as how to connect the chip to memory and how to teach software developers to write programs for it--but the research chip is an important step, Rattner said....
Technorati Tags: Technology, Intel, PC, Processor, cpu, chip, core-2-duo, supercomputing, multi-core, 65-nm
MySpace to Launch Video Filtering System
will experiment with a video-filtering system designed to block clips
containing copyright materials.
MySpace is licensing technology
from Audible Magic Corp., which late last year obtained rights to a
system for scanning video clips and looking for signature vectors —
such as a unique digital fingerprint — to compare with vectors stored
in a database. Video can be blocked from appearing on MySpace when
there is a match.
The video system supplements audio filtering MySpace already has in place to block unauthorized music uploads....
Technorati Tags: MySpace, Video, Pirating
Internet users transformed into news reporters
In December Yahoo launched YouWitnessNews, a website that posts offerings from users after the submissions pass muster with professional editors.
Founded almost two years ago, news website NowPublic.com taps into legions of people that post pictures, videos, or commentary online.
NowPublic boasts more than 60,000 contributing "reporters" in more than 140 countries and promises to quickly locate potential witnesses or news gatherers close to breaking events from natural disasters to terrorist attacks...
Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Mobile, Digital Camera, News
RIM to Introduce Newest BlackBerry
Technorati Tags: RIM, BlackBerry, Wireless,
Yahoo to Unveil Mobile Marketing Platform
mobile phone customers outside the United States as part of the
Internet powerhouse's efforts to build other revenue sources beyond the
Web.
The new mobile marketing platform to be unveiled Monday will
deliver image-based ads to mobile phones in Mexico, Canada and 16 other
countries in Europe, Asia and parts of South America.
The Sunnyvale-based company launched a similar advertising push in the United States in November.
Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Internet, Mobile, Advertising
