Dude News

Report: Gaither has movement in arms, legs

2009-10-04T14:34:00.001-07:00

(NECN: Foxborough, Mass.) - Baltimore Ravens left tackle Jared Gaither was taken off the field on a stretcher during Sunday's game against the New England Patriots.

Gaither, 6-foot-9 and 330 pounds, was injured after a freak collision in the backfield, in which quarterback Joe Flacco was driven into the helmet of Gaither by defensive end Ty Warren. Both Ravens went down to the ground, but Flacco quickly returned to his feet.

CBS Sports play-by-play man Jim Nantz said just before halftime of the broadcast that Gaither was being brought to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He also said that Gaither had movement in all of his extremities.

Material from The Associated Press used in this report.

letterman issue

2009-10-02T07:32:00.001-07:00

“Do you feel like a little story?” David Letterman asked the studio audience last night. He was sitting at his desk. He’d already done his monologue, which included a joking aside about “takin’ a ride on the Appalachian trail.”

And then for ten minutes, he told the story that had broken only a couple of hours before: that he’d been the object of an extortion attempt, and that “I have had sex with women who work on the show.” But before he said that he put it in the context of an odd, often humorously phrased anecdote, almost a folksy shaggy-dog story.

He told us about the “little package in the back of my car” that he found, which contained a threat from a man who wrote that he knew “some terrible, terrible things” about Letterman. The audience laughed heartily. He said “the guy said [he was] going to write a screenplay about me,” and that Dave’s first thought was, “that’s a little hinky” — “hinky” being a favorite bit of Letterman-language for odd things. The demand was for two million dollars.

He said it was a “terrifying moment,” “quite scary,” and that “I felt menaced.” He said he decided to take the threat to the authorities and “I had to tell them all the creepy things I had done.” Again, he got laughs from this.

“Now of course we get to, what was all the creepy stuff?… The creepy stuff was, I have had sex with women who work on the show.” There was silence mingled with gasps — for the first time, no laughs then. “My answer to that was, yes, I have.” He got applause and laughter from this, but it seemed a bit more nervous. “Would [this news] prove embarrassing?” he asked rhetorically. “Yes it would — especially for the women.” And the audience laughed quite loudly.

Here’s the thing about that reaction: If you’ve ever been in a studio audience before, you know you’re almost hypnotized into giddy good humor. You’ve been standing on a line for hours, you’ve had a warm-up guy come out and joke and tell you what to expect (Letterman usually comes out and does his own warm-up bit, to the best of my knowledge). And we no longer live in a culture where, upon hearing something disturbing, people feel comfortable saying (not shouting), “For shame!” or quietly walking out. In any case, I’m sure everyone was just pretty stunned, and that some of the laughter was of the nervous sort.

In a sense, Letterman had a captive audience with which to frame his admission. But that said, this was an extraordinary piece of television. He took what could be a damaging scandal, a tale of blackmail and workplace relationships, and turned it into a story that was at least in part about what he termed his “towering, Midwestern mass of guilt.”

Letterman even managed to get in a few more mild jokes about it. “I know what you’re sayin’: ‘Oh, Dave had sex!’” — a reference to his age (62). And though he said he would not have more to say about it, when he came back from a commercial, he said he’d taken questions from the audience during the break and “a guy said, ‘I’d like to see that movie.’” More laughs. On with the show.

This is going to play out in ways that you or I or Letterman cannot predict. There are going to be a lot of talks about consensual versus coerced sexual relationships, about Letterman’s history of making jokes about straying politicians. We’ll hear debates and conjectures about his long-term relationship and marriage since March to Regina Lasko, the mother of his son, Harry. Letterman will be mocked and he’ll be defended.

As it stands right now, though, what Letterman did last night was a striking, unique, and — for all the laughter it provoked — dramatic example of how a celebrity deals with both a threat and a scandal.

by Ken Tucker

What the Google Phone Needs to Beat the iPhone

2007-10-19T13:17:00.001-07:00

Although rumors of a possible Google Phone have been making the rounds really hard lately, any such phone will have to be amazing to grab enough end-user and media attention. Expectations are high, but since we're dreaming, here's our wishlist:Tight integration with Google Apps:• Picasa: A 2MP camera with decent color and low light performance should take a shot, and upload it directly to your Picasa web storage as a mirror. Likewise for YouTube uploads.• Google Talk: Both IM and VoIP makes this a fancy web communicator. The carriers may not like this, but we've got a feeling Google will sell this sans carrier. Oh, and other IM client support.• Google Video and YouTube: To at least match the iPhone, they have to have their video sites ready for mobile usage. Uploading• Google Earth: Google Earth for 3D maps, with GPS and app integration.• Google Docs support with full read like the ones for iPhones, Windows Mobiles and BlackBerries, but real with full editing right on the phone, and support for multiuser editing.• Google reader for RSS.• Product Search, including camera phone barcode reading for quick price comparisons.• Google Transit, Google Ride finder (taxis, limos and shuttles) integrated into maps.• Third-party Support: Allow an open platform for other people to develop for. Even a company as big as Goog can't do everything by itself, and with niche apps developed by end-users, you can service minor target segments that wouldn't otherwise be cost-effective for you to cover.• Those apps should be native, or at least widgetized for performance reasons. Native apps just run faster. We don't mean Java apps either, because those are even worse in terms of battery usage.• This thing is going to be a data transfer hog while it swaps info with all Google's online services. A 3G connection that toggles on for heavy downloads and uploads, but reverts to Wi-Fi or 2G for background email checking, etc. (To save battery.)• Push GMail and exchange server support.• A music player that doesn't suck: It's not going to be an iPod, but it's gotta have something in terms of media features that can top Windows Mobile phones. Try Rhapsody support. Stay away from WMPlayer as a load program, please.• Search from the home screen: Bring Google's search-centric features to your phone, letting you search contacts, the web, your emails, and every other bit of data right from your home screen, much like the Helio Ocean does.• Hardware Keyboard: The iPhone's virtual keyboard is passable, but we still love the solid feel of a key clicking. Our favorite is HTC's slide-out QWERTY keyboard, which is great because HTC is the rumored contractor for the Google Phone's hardware.• Touchscreen: Since it's probably going to be an HTC-made phone, a 3-inch touchscreen on par with Windows Mobile phones is the least they can do. While it would be nice to have multi-touch gestures, it's not completely necessary.• Long Battery life: We don't mind sacrificing some portability for a battery that can last an entire day, even with heavy screen and 3G usage. Nokia's are known for optimizing battery life without sacrificing too many features, but the Google apps may be too processor intensive—especially when combined with 3G.• Form-factor: We love the slide-out form factor that HTC usually uses, which gives us a spacious keyboard as well as a big screen on top. A Treo-like shape with keys on the front wouldn't be too bad either, but would sacrifice screen space.Funny thing is, Helio's Ocean and Nokia's N series phones do a lot of this. The UI needs to be slicker than what either of those companies have done so far, though. (Maybe they should hire some ex-Apple software people.) Anyhow, we don't even know if this phone is real, for certain, so I'm not sweating it.

read more | digg story

Why Hard Drives are Here to Stay, and SDD is just a FLASH in the Pan

2007-10-18T02:48:00.001-07:00

Sure, they’re taking place on a subatomic level that just won the Nobel Prize for physics. But overlooked innovations in hard-drive capacity, as PM’s senior tech editor sermonizes in his trend column, aren’t just letting you record TV shows and save massive amounts of music. They’re pushing us into a new era of computing. Reports of the Nobel Prize in physics being awarded for Giant Magnetoresistance dumbed down the science to the foundations of the iPod. But the confusing mechanics of the hard drive belies its undeniable usefulness in the world of electronics.For the record, Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR) is not a band of 15-ft.-tall mutants who have joined together to save the world from a diabolical villain with the power to influence metal. But you could be forgiven for thinking so, since the term is about as arcane as any that the dual disciplines of physics and computer science have produced. Despite its gargantuan-sounding proportions, the GMR principle is all about the infinitesimally small bits of information squeezed onto hard drives—and how to read them.Most people in the geekosphere are familiar with Moore’s Law, which observes that the number of transistors on a CPU will double every two years, but not everyone has heard of the corresponding law in the field of data storage. Named Kryder’s Law, after Carnegie Mellon professor Mark Kryder, it predicts regular exponential growth in hard-drive capacity Since the introduction of the hard drive in 1956, when the 1-ton IBM RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) included 5MB of storage, drives have experienced a 50-million-fold increase in capacity. In the early 90s, desktop drives started surging into the 1GB range, and now drives max out at around 1TB (terabyte). On Monday, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) announced that it expects to be shipping 4TB desktop and 1TB laptop drives by 2011. Meeting that news was a chorus of yawns all around from the techno-bloggers, who instantly went back to obsessing about iPhone hacks and Japanese robots.Unfair, I say! Hard drives are the most underappreciated technology in the world of computing. It takes some pretty sophisticated tricks at the microscopic—and even the subatomic—level to pack all those bits onto the spinning platters that hold everything from our music collections to pictures to PowerPoint presentations. Every time it seems that those disks are carrying as much information as is allowed by the laws of physics, engineers find a fascinating new method to squeeze out more capacity. In 2005, when the horizontally aligned bits on high-capacity drives were becoming crowded, Toshiba (followed by pretty much every drive manufacturer) upended the bits to a perpendicular orientation to the surface of the platter, aligning them like standing dominoes to squeeze in more per square inch.Hitachi’s announcement about drive heads was a good deal more esoteric than that: Hard-drive engineers have essentially found a way to redesign and shrink the read/write head (the official name for the technology is "Current-Perpendicular-to-the-Plane Giant Magnetoresistive," or CPP-GMR, drive heads) to allow for smaller perpendicular bits. And the GMR effect is not new. In fact, this year’s Nobel Prize for physics went to France’s Albert Fert and Germany’s Peter Grunberg, whose research into GMR in the late 1980s brought about the first real-world application of nanotechnology.In short, GMR is a quantum-level effect that allows hard-drive manufacturers to use magnetic fields to exploit the subatomic spin of particles. The discovery of GMR launched an entirely new field of applied physics known as spin-based electronics, or "spintronics." Given the complexity and difficulty of the subject, I imagine the reason Hitachi GST is making announcements about technologies two to four years down the pipeline is to piggyback on the Nobel and take advantage of the only public attention that GMR is ever likely to get.But the confusing mechanics of the hard drive belies its undeniable usefulness in the world of electronics. Over the past few years, CPUs from Intel and AMD have rolled into the world of gigahertz calculations and split into multiple cores. Consequently, computer users are now buying PCs with awesome processing power that doesn’t always translate into improved real-world performance in tasks such as surfing the Internet, looking at pictures and playing music and movies. But the advent of 100-plus-gigabyte computers has had a huge effect on the way we use our machines, moving them into the realm of entertainment devices, swallowing huge quantities of music, movies and family videos and photos.Whenever people come to me looking for guidance on purchasing a new computer, my advice is this: Buy as much processor as you think you need, but be sure to buy more hard drive than you’d ever imagine. That’s because once you get into consuming and producing music and video, you’ll start to see those gigabytes fill up awfully quick. Plus, it doesn’t cost much to overestimate—going from a 320GB drive to a 500GB drive on a standard Dell desktop computer only adds about $80. And modern operating systems and software are veritable hard-drive hogs—a Microsoft Windows Vista install requires 15GB of free disk space.Still, despite their massive capacities and apparently unlimited room for improvement, there is reason to question the future relevance of our spinning platter workhorses in home PCs. On the bottom end, flash-based solid-state disks (SSDs) are chasing HDDs up the capacity ladder—current SSDs have capacities of up to 128GB. On the top end, online storage providers will start to seem like reasonable alternatives as offerings approach infinite capacity and super-high-bandwidth fiberoptic connections to the home become the norm. Meanwhile, if our Breakthrough Award-winning $99 Zonbu laptop is any indication, we may be on the verge of a new era of slim-client computing.Nevertheless, hard-disk drives have maintained their primacy in the PC thus far because they have routinely kept pace with computer users’ needs and they are relatively cheap solutions for storing tons of data. Current 1TB drives sell for less than $350 and can hold up to 200 DVD-quality movies (far more if you compress them). And as we step gingerly into the world of downloading hi-def, that sort of localized capacity will become even more important.So even though the rest of the world may not get too excited about the soldierly progress of the hard-disk drive, I’m willing to give it a column’s-worth of respect. Current-Perpendicular-to-the-Plane Giant Magnetoresistance may seem like a hopelessly impenetrable piece of computer science (except to the people who hand out Nobel Prizes), but it’s advances like this that are enabling our DVRs to record Heroes for us while we’re out with friends, and that allow a computer to act as the repository for a collection of music and movies. Because there’s no such thing as too much room for your stuff.

read more | digg story

BitLet Bookmarklet: Directly Download Torrents in your Browser

2007-10-16T12:01:00.001-07:00

BitLet, the web-based BitTorrent client recently added a bookmarklet. This new feature makes it possible to download .torrent files in your browser, without navigating away from the torrent site. The bookmarklet works on The Pirate Bay, mininova, Demonoid and all other sites that use the .torrent extension.

read more | digg story

PS3 price cut in UK has led to a 178% sales increase!

2007-10-16T11:58:00.001-07:00

PlayStation 3 hardware sales jumped 178 per cent last week with the introduction of two new SKUs, helping the system record its third highest week since launch in the UK.Supplied data reveals that although Sony's console enjoyed a considerable sales boost, Nintendo's DS was still the best-selling hardware system in the UK, followed by the Wii and then the PS3, with the Xbox 360 behind its home console rival.Two new PS3 models were introduced to market last Wednesday. A 40GB model with less functions has gone on sale for GBP 299, and the 60GB model has been reduced to GBP 349, bundled with two free first-party games.PS3 software has also enjoyed a resurgence, with Resistance: Fall of Man climbing the all-formats charts from 22 to eight, Heavenly Sword re-entering the top 40 at number 14, MotorStorm moving from 22 to 18, and Formula 1: Championship Edition also back in the official charts at number 24.by gamesindustry.biz

read more | digg story

Fearless Digital Pirates Don’t Care About Lawsuits

2007-10-14T10:43:00.000-07:00

The year 2005 saw the first person sentenced to prison for sharing a movie. In 2007, the possibility of being fined huge amounts became a reality as a music sharer snared by the RIAA picks up a $222,000 bill. So presumably file-sharers are in hiding? Hardly. This fearless internet breed never stops sharing.

Once it became clear that the ‘Grokster Decision’ was actually a win for file-sharing and not the golden bullet against sharers that the industry had hoped for, it became increasingly clear - sharing was simply not going to go away. Today, if one visits the Grokster site, you’re greeted by this message:

Apart from the fact that I am anonymous (the IP is owned by the anonymous Relakks service), this message is typical of the type of useless scare tactics employed by the industry. Time and again the message is “Don’t think you can’t get caught” and “You are not anonymous” or “You can click but you can’t hide”

Millions upon millions of file sharers are responding to these slogans, not with words, but with actions. They ARE clicking and the vast majority simply don’t care about hiding. It’s true that when you use a standard connection on the internet you aren’t anonymous and of course, it’s certainly possible to ‘get caught’. However, as ever more serious headline-grabbing events come and go, file-sharers are getting wise and making their own risk assessments, probably based on: “I’m clicking every day, they never find me. Or any of my friends. Or their friends.”

When Scott McCausland and a handful of other people went to jail for uploading a pre-release movie in 2005, the industry put out the message: You will go to jail for sharing. Well, it’s 2007 now and surprise, surprise - no one else did. It was a special case, it doesn’t apply to 99.99% of file-sharers and it’s useless in the battle against them.

Today in 2007, we hear about Jammie Thomas, the most famous of the 26,000 recipients of legal action at the hands of the RIAA. Sure, she really got hammered with that huge fine and it will deter some from sharing, but the overwhelming majority either haven’t heard about the case or don’t think they’ll be caught - and they could be forgiven for thinking that.

Even if we super over-compensate and say that 100,000 people worldwide had legal action taken against them (it’s nowhere near), this number pales into insignificance when put alongside the conservative estimate of 100 million worldwide file-sharers. Furthermore, take away the legal actions in the United States and the chances of being ‘caught’ edge ever closer to zero. The odds of being ‘caught’ in the rest of the world aren’t quite zero but they’re substantially slimmer than in the States.

Whatever the reality, it’s the perception that really matters and the perception among file-sharers is that while they’re downloading the latest blockbuster movies or millions of TV shows every single week, the chances of being ‘caught’ are close to zero. Therefore the chances of paying a ‘fine’ are close to zero and the chance of going to jail, closer still.

So maybe digital pirates aren’t fearless, brave or even reckless. Maybe they just like to gamble when the odds are hugely - massively - tipped in their favor.

By TorrentFreak

Your iPhone/iPod Touch is a remote control

2007-10-09T15:11:00.000-07:00

So it's not quite the way I was hoping to integrate AirTunes with my iPod Touch but for now it'll do.

If you've got an AirTunes network setup you'll know how nice it is to be able to to listen to your music anywhere in the house, but you'll also know that it's annoying when you have to climb 2 flights of stairs to change albums or skip that song that you know you really should delete!

Well using Signal you can use your iPod Touch as a media remote to control you music from where ever you are.

1. Once you've downloaded Signal drag it to your applications folder and launch it. When it launches you are given a very simple window telling you what to type in to your iPhone/iPod Touch browser.

2. Type the clicker address into your browser and you'll be given a page like the one shown. From here you can pick anything to listen to. A quick warning though, selecting to play a song from an album will only play that song. You need to create a queue to play more than one song, to make it easier though you are able to add an album to the queue.

3. Clicking the plus sign next to a song adds it to the song queue. If you click the plus sign next to a song it just adds it, but if you click it next to an album then you are given the choice as shown in the picture.

4. This song queue is kept as a temporary playlist in iTunes.

5. Album artwork is nicely displayed on your iPhone/iPod Touch and all the controls are the same as usual. So tapping the artwork gives you on screen controls for volume and song rating.This is an excellent way of remotely controlling iTunes and I'm sure that given more time more comprehensive remote control applications will become available. Salling Clicker is one that is also very good but isn't compatible with iPhone or iPod Touch as it requires software to be installed on the device.
This is an excellent way of remotely controlling iTunes and I'm sure that given more time more comprehensive remote control applications will become available.
Found at sipedia.co.uk

10 Most Brilliant Inventions of 2007

2007-10-08T10:10:00.000-07:00

R&D Magazine has sponsored the "Oscars of Inventions" for 45 years. These research and design awards are coveted by government as well as private industry inventors. The 100 winners selected by R&D Magazine for 2007 are stunning innovations - resourceful, effective, inspiring. A significant portion of the 2007 awards are homeland security/military innovations; others are environmental, health, and there's even innovations for kids, like a must-have-Holiday-toy robot!

Here are my picks for the top 10 inventions from R & D Magazine's list of the best of 2007:

1. Air Conditioner That Controls Superbugs

The Kunne air conditioning system is the first of its kind to control heat and humidity at the same time, thereby helping to prevent "sick buildings," those that make us sick just by visiting or working in them. This system does not have a filter or anything else that may hold germs and is self-cleaning. By Palm Beach R&D . Hopefully, this system will be implemented by hospitals, so those with weak immunities can avoid the dreaded superbug as well.

2. No More Blood Tests!

Some of the 2007 awards have gone to inventions that seem just short of miraculous and the Electro Needle Biomedical Sensor Array comes close. This is a small patch device with electro-chemically treated probes. When the patch is applied to the skin, it has the ability to ascertain chemical readings present in a patient's blood without having to withdraw any blood. Thus, readings such as "carbohydrates, electrolytes, lipids, enzymes, toxins, proteins, viruses, and bacteria can be detected in a patient's blood or interstitial cellular fluid." No more searching for "good" veins? You mean no more vials and vials and vials taken? One great step for medicine; 15 great steps for the sick folks in the emergency room. Developed by the Sandia National Laboratories.

3. Troops Can Detect Surrounding Chemicals

Chemical detection ability is extremely important t our troops, and this HAPSITE Viper Chemical Identification System uses infrared technology to improve the identification of toxic substances and chemical warfare agents (CWA's) in the environment in a matter of a few minutes. The Hapsite System that can be used inside a vehicle as well as in open space, is one thousand times more sensitive than NATO requirements for such a system, affording greater safety to troops and civilians in the area. Inficon won an R&D environmental award for the system, just one of several detection devices made by the company.

4. Homeland Chemical Detection

Another environmental innovation in CWA technology, the Passive Millimeter-Wave Spectrometer for Remote Chemical Detection was developed by four scientists at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois This somewhat larger device can detect harmful nuclear waste from several miles away. Focusing, let's say, on a plume of smoke from a processing plant, the spectrometer can detect the levels of environmentally dangerous particles in the smoke. For use in the U.S., this system is seen to be a boost to Homeland Security efforts and one that may have several other applications in the future.

5. A Future With Cleaner Water

Musically, you may be partial to heavy metal, but few of us care for it in our drinking water. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, has developed a Functionalized Nanoporous Thin Film (FNTF) that behaves like fly paper in attracting the metals in a sample of water. When the FNTF is removed from water, x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) can then be used to identify the metals on the film. The combination of these technologies makes identifying almost every heavy metal identifiable, even when present in minute quantities.

6. Let Pilots See Where They're Going!

It's a bit disconcerting to think that your airline pilot can't see where he's going. Now, it turns out that not being able to see what's ahead when taking off and landing may indeed be the cause of some airline accidents (ahem).

The Integrated Primary Flight Display, developed by Honeywell International, is anticipated to greatly improve a pilot's ability to avert other planes, as well as obstacles on the ground. Cool. "Honeywell's Enhanced Ground, Proximity Warning System database-a tool that uses a worldwide terrain and obstacle database along with GPS navigation or other input-which draws a computer-generated picture of the landscape outside the cockpit and alerts pilots if they are approaching an obstacle too closely. And in an effort to ensure the accuracy of the terrain data, Honeywell continuously updates the data using feedback from users who have flown more than 750 million flight hours on more than 35,000 commercial aircraft."

7. Signing Made Easy

Motorola Inc. has developed a technique to make advertising grab you whether you want it to or not. While not subliminal, this technique is subtle, employing special inks and paper thin printed circuits to make words and objects stand out more than others. The Motorola Printed Active Display can be used on posters and packaging, on the surface of most commonly used media. It's not that I don't get enough advertising, but think of the various safety uses of this technology... perhaps medical alerts, driving lanes, print for vision-impaired persons. Here's hoping that this quickly becomes a technology transferred!

8. Safe Clothing Limits Sports Injuries

Bikers are safer if they wear protective headgear, but Dow Corning has developed a "suit of armor" for bikers and other daredevils. The fabric used in the Dow Corning Active Protection System is soft and flexible until impacted, when it becomes rigid, not only at the site of impact, but throughout the material, thus protecting the entire area of the body covered. When it bounces back to its soft consistency, it can be laundered and worn again and again. Not just bikers, but other sportsmen and women can be protected from injuries by these fabrics.

9. Rear Bumper Radar/Smart Head Rest Limit Whiplash Injuries

Toyota, no innovation wallflower, has come up with a safety feature that's sure to reduce whiplash injuries and maybe even save a few lives. It's called the Rear Pre-Crash Safety System. A radar system, installed in the rear bumper, comes into play within a millimeter of the car behind when it's within two seconds of rear-ending you. It sets off your warning lights, tightens your seatbelts, and activates the pictured headrest, moving it forward to prevent your head from snapping back after collision. Toyota received an R&D safety award for this device, which is installed in the 2008 Lexus LS. Let's spread the wealth of safety.

10. Lego® Robots Promote Science & Engineering Skills

The toy to buy this holiday season, the Mindstorms NXT, brings you and your kids the next generation of LEGO's. Designed by LEGO and National Instruments, the programmable robot is designed to encourage and enhance engineering and science skills in kids. It looks like quite a challenge for adults as well. Available right now for PC's and Macs at Amazon.com.

I picked my top 10 list from 100 of the top inventions in R&D community. Don't imagine what the others are... check them out. They are all truly awesome.

by Myra Per-Lee from inventorspot.com

How to keep your old PC alive

2007-10-07T12:34:00.001-07:00

Windows and most of the proprietary software requires more and more computer power as it's version increases. This results to new hardware all the time for us. But what about our old abandoned PCs? Should we throw them away?
Of course not! Linux gives us many opportunities to use our old hardware and keep it alive while saving money.

Firewall – Proxy server

One of the best uses for an old PC is to turn it to a dedicated hardware firewall machine. There are some Linux distributions like Devil Linux and SmoothWall that do just that, but you can do it with any distro anyway, as Linux has it's own firewall, IPTables.
If you combine it with a small proxy server like Squid, you will also gain lots of bandwidth and speed to your home network, and of course this can save you some money.
To do all that you don't need a fancy Linux distribution with all the latest technology stuff. You need just a simple and very light distribution. And for optimal performance, you don't even need a graphical interface. After all, you won't use it all the time, you just set it and forget it. You can just install Webmin to configure it using your web browser from another PC, just like you do it for your router.
If your PC is strong enough, you might try to use Spamassasin too. It's a program used to clean your email from SPAM. Very useful.

Development server

Personally, I am a web developer. I code in PHP. That means that I have to install to my PCs some basic elements: Apache web server, PHP, MySQL and a CVS server for version control.
In my office I have a main PC and two laptops that I use regular.
One day I noticed how many resources in those computers I was spending to run all that stuff. I was actually running Apache three times, I was having three copies of all my databases, etc. So what I did was to setup an older PC just to keep all that stuff in one place.
I got an Pentium 3 PC from my old work, that was resting in a closet. I installed fedora. It's not the lightest, but it's my favorite distro. Of course I didn't install a graphical interface.
I installed on it Apache, MySQL, PHP, CVS, FTP (to access my files easily) and phpMyAdmin. I also forwarded some ports from my router to this PC, so I can access all my data when I am not in home. And them stopped all the services running in the other PCs. I didn't uninstall them because sometimes can be useful (mostly in the laptops), but not running them made my machines faster.

Storage Server

Similar to the last solution, if you have 1-2 big hard disks and many computers, you can connect them to an old PC and use it as a storage server in your home network. For example you can save all your mp3s (or oggs) in this PC and access them from all the other computers through the network.
There are operating systems designed for storage servers. Try FreeNAS.

Media Station

If your PC is strong enough to play videos, you could install it in your living room running a distro for multimedia. You can connect it to your home network (or to Internet) and play streams. Maybe a small case mod will be good for that case.
Check distros like Mythbuntu.

P2P Download Machine

Run any small distribution you wish, and load it with P2P software to download torrents and files from other networks. Also install some software for remote control of the computer, like VNC... And you have a download server!

Small Workstation

If your work isn't really advanced and you need a PC just to surf or for word processing, you don't have to use an expensive PC. You can also use your old machine. What you need is just the proper software.
There is a number of Linux distributions for this reason. Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux are two of them. You can also run some of the bigger distros like Fedora or Ubuntu, but you will have to do some customization, like changing the window manager to something lighter, like XFCE.
It will also be safer than using your Windows machine to surf... because there isn't a real risk from viruses if you use Linux.

Thin Client

One solution that I see in schools and small environments is using all the old PCs as thin clients. What you do is to have one strong PC with all the storage, and a number of old PCs connected together in a local network. You set all the old PCs to boot from Network and you install a distro with that ability to the big PC. For example you can try Skolelinux or ThinStation. What you gain is a number of really low cost workstations that can be used for education or surfing or even simple office work. Pretty good, huh?

Cluster

A little complicated thing you can do is to run a cluster. In simple words, you connect all your PCs and share their power to run applications. That's advanced stuff and you cannot use it in any application, but it's an option anyway. Try ClusterKnoppix.

Thanks to Yannis – Pastis 'mrpc' Glaros from www.pramnos.com

Microsoft wants your health care records and trust

2007-10-07T12:20:00.001-07:00

Microsoft has launched a public beta of HealthVault, which the company bills as a secure service that allows users to centrally store health documents and information. HealthVault aims to make dealing with complex healthcare easier by putting users in control of entering information from various doctors and making select parts of it available to whoever they choose—including the doctors themselves. This, in turn, is supposed to help guide doctors through a more complete diagnosis with the additional information, as well as prevent conflicting prescriptions. We took a look at HealthVault to see what it was all about and whether it might actually take off among the general population.

Access to HealthVault requires a Windows Live ID as well as a HealthVault account that is apparently based on the Live ID. As someone who has never had a need to use a Live ID before, I had to create one. After that, things were relatively straightforward. HealthVault allows you to enter your personal contact information as well as associate other people with your account. For example, I added myself (as "Self") and an imaginary friend as my "Domestic Partner." There are also options for spouses, patients, guardians, children, relatives, and even pets—this allows one person to manage all of the health records for the family without requiring multiple individuals to do so.

You can then upload documents from your computer, enter information yourself, or even transfer data from a device like a glucose monitor. Once data is in the system, you can choose how much of it to share with family members and doctors.

The obvious goal with HealthVault is to streamline the healthcare system by making connections where it is currently failing to do so. However, the major concerns with putting all of this information online are privacy and security. Aside from basic security measures such as automatically logging you out after a certain period of inactivity, Microsoft makes it clear that it will not transfer your data to any other party without your informed and explicit consent. Even when Microsoft rolls out advertising on HealthVault, the ads will not be contextually based on any of your personal information.

"All data that moves among our systems are encrypted, including all traffic to and from HealthVault, its users and its partners," Microsoft said in a statement. "Access to HealthVault data by Microsoft employees is tightly controlled and extremely limited to a small group of personnel necessary to perform essential operations. All of our backup data is encrypted, and every stage of its transportation is logged. We also log every time records are created, changed, or read, leaving a clear audit trail."

HealthVault also will not accept anything less than a pretty complex password—your Live ID password had better contain numbers, letters, and special characters (in addition to being sufficiently long), or else HealthVault will not let you into the service. This is certainly secure, although I worry that it may throw some members of the general public for a loop. Then again, if they can't create complex passwords that they can remember, perhaps it is indeed better that they not upload their health records to the Internet.

Microsoft has beaten Google to the punch when it comes to offering an online storage system for health documentation. Google had planned to launch its own, similar service called Google Health (codenamed "Weaver"). The company has since fallen behind in its plans, perhaps due to the loss of Google VP and leader of the program, Adam Bosworth, last month. The only thing Google currently offers in the way of health information is Google Co-op, which allows users to tag sites with specific health information to make it easier for other to search.

The next major step for HealthVault (and Google Health, if and when it ever gets off the ground) will be to gain a user base. Centralized digital storage of health information is almost universally desired by doctors and patients alike, but the general public won't know about services like HealthVault unless Microsoft launches a major awareness campaign and makes a few critical changes to how the service is run.

Some are very skeptical of services like HealthVault and Google Health because they put health records directly in the hands of not-very-trustworthy patients. Patients are historically poor at remembering everything said to them by doctors, while others may not be in the mood to enter everything that exists on their records. Doctors who use the data provided to them by the patient through HealthVault will have to be aware that the information is only as good as the patient's memory and willingness to disclose his or her medical history—it may not contain all necessary info. It could even be flat-out wrong. And as long as patients have such direct write access to their records, something like HealthVault cannot be universally adopted by the healthcare system if it wants to provide complete and accurate services.

A more reliable approach would be to provide tiered access to HealthVault, with patients only having read access to the documents that are provided directly by their doctors. If they see an error, they can call the doctor's office to have it corrected. This would prevent patients from misinterpreting or incorrectly entering information provided to them by their doctors, and ensure that the records on HealthVault are much more accurate. Should that happen, doctors may actually be able to rely on the information from HealthVault to make informed diagnosis decisions.

The service is still in beta form, so changes like this could still take place before it officially launches. Until then, though, the technology will remain a novelty for many healthcare professionals.

By Jacqui Cheng from ars technica

Microsoft wants your health care records and trust

2007-10-07T11:36:00.001-07:00

"Microsoft has opened up HealthVault, its service that it hopes will become a centralized place to store health records online, as a beta to the public. We took a brief walkthrough to see what it was about." Hell I don't even trust Microsoft with a windows update.

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Demonoid Aftermath: An Open Letter to the CRIA

2007-10-05T06:46:00.001-07:00

After Demonoid torrent tracker was closed “A former music buyer” posted an open letter to the CRIA - an impressive summary of what’s wrong with the music industry and how they alienate their customers. The RIAA and the CRIA have to rethink their business models, closing down p2p sites does not solve the problem.

To Whom It May Concern at the CRIA:
I have been an avid music collector for many years, and have approximately 1000 CD’s in my collection, not counting albums that I have purchased over the internet and own only digital copies of. I purchase approximately 30-40 new CDs per year. However, thanks to your recent decision to block Canadian users from accessing Demonoid, I have decided that I cannot continue to support this backwards, dysfunctional industry with my money any longer, and as such, I do not plan on purchasing music ever again if it means that one penny goes to your organization.I listen to heavy metal music, a form of music that “the industry” stopped supporting many years ago, so I have a hard time feeling any sympathy. Sites such as Demonoid have done far more to promote the music I love than your organization or the industry in general has ever done. I can find out about new artists and new releases from artists that are never promoted. I can listen to music from artists that have never been played on the radio, will never be shown on MuchMusic or MTV, and never have a review or even mention of their new album written about in the local newspaper. From listening to this music, I can make an informed decision if I wish to purchase the album or not, as I am not going to gamble $15-20 on something that I haven’t heard anything off of before.25 years ago, I primarily learned about music from friends who dubbed a copy onto a cassette tape, where I could listen to it and make a decision if I wanted to buy the tape for myself. Now, many years removed from school, my “gang” of friends to share music with has shifted from cassette tapes and the school cafeteria to sharing mp3’s online. I listen to some things that I don’t like, and consequently, I don’t buy those albums. What I do like, I buy, or at least I used to, before your decision intended to stop me from hearing new music.The industry cries that record sales are down, and blames this all on internet downloading. I won’t be so naïve as to say that internet downloading has no impact on the sales. Downloading has certainly stopped me from making the stupid purchases where I heard one single that I liked and bought an entire album only to find out that the rest of the songs are crap, and the CD sits collecting dust on my shelf. But for every CD that I didn’t buy based on those premises, there are 2 or 3 other CDs that I did buy because I heard of them for the first time on a site like Demonoid.In the meantime, the music industry itself needs to recognize that they are to blame for sagging record sales. For years, they have been marketing recycled crap, and people are getting tired of it. On the odd occasion that something fresh and new accidentally slips through and gets radio play, the music industry immediately signs a seemingly infinite number of clone bands that makes the “new, fresh” sound boring almost instantly. It seems the music industry doesn’t even care about making or promoting good music any more. Instead, they market a young, pretty face that can dance provocatively and lip-synch well, and push this on the radio stations to play while getting the tabloids to print large pictures of their breasts. If bands like AC/DC or Motorhead were to emerge today, they would never be successful; not because of poor record sales due to downloading, but due to the fact that they’re ugly so the record company wouldn’t promote them, if they picked them up at all. In the meantime, they’re falling all over themselves to promote Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, or any teenage tramp that can be airbrushed to look sexy.The record labels cry about downloading cutting into the profits of the sales of albums. They put out “greatest hits” albums by 20-year olds with 2 or 3 albums under their belts, released with one new track to try and sucker the fans that already have both albums into spending another $20 for one new song, or re-releasing a 3-month old album with a “previously unreleased bonus track”. Then they can’t understand why people aren’t buying them, and cry foul that people are downloading the one new song instead.I know not only the record companies are crying. Artists that have been around long enough to have enough clout to get a cut of the record sales are concerned about their cut, like Metallica that also clamor that “downloading is evil”, and then go on to sell over 9 million copies of their last album instead of 9.1 million. Boo hoo. Meanwhile, many younger, smaller artists favor downloading, because they know it’s the only way that people will get to hear the music and in turn come out to see their shows, because the record label sure as hell isn’t promoting them. But they can’t say that out loud, can they? If they do, guess which band is going to get dropped by the label?So tell me, what does the CRIA do to promote metal? Oh, right, you’ve got a link to the top 50 “metal” albums in Canada, which after a quick glance at the top ten this week includes punk acts like Dropkick Murphys, Finger Eleven, and Billy Talent, and rock acts like Nickelback and Queen, but very little that resembles heavy metal. (Perhaps you should ask the Celtic punk band, Dropkick Murphys, what they think of being labeled as “metal”.)And also tell me, without Demonoid, where would I have found out about bands like Evile or Dublin Death Patrol and made a decision to purchase their album online (because no record store that I have found in Canada carries either one). And god forbid the CRIA would care about the promotion of Canadian talent, such as longtime recording artist Annihilator, which released one of the better albums of 2007. However, I have yet to see their new album sold in any store in Canada, including HMV’s flagship store on Yonge Street in Toronto, and I ultimately had to buy a copy from a UK website. Considering the only place I had heard about this album was having downloaded it from Demonoid, do you really expect anyone to make this kind of effort to buy an album without ever having heard it?The record labels and CRIA have gone to great lengths to tell us that downloading and sharing music is killing the music industry. Open your eyes and you will see that the music industry dinosaur has already been killing itself for years, and by resisting technology rather than embracing it and using it to their advantage. “Oh, but they have,” you try to insist, pointing to the sites devoted to selling music in mp3 format online. I notice that most of the metal bands I am interested in are still not available through these services. I also notice that buying an entire album ends up costing as much, if not more, than if I went to buy it in the store, even though there are no longer costs of materials or shipping that have to be paid for, and once again, I fail to come up with any sympathy for the music industry. I hope the music industry does die, because I know that music itself will not die so with the corrupt aspects of the industry gone, only then might music once again flourish.

Sincerely,A former music buyer

New iMacs plagued by interface freezing issues

2007-10-04T07:21:00.001-07:00

A growing number of users have reported that Apple's computers suffer from a flaw that locks up the interface, rendering the system all but inert until a reboot.Customers participating in Apple's support discussions reported that the new iMac will technically continue to run when the freeze occurs, but that it becomes impossible to control or switch to programs without a hard reset.

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Another Zune 2 Details: Lossless, Glass Screens, Green is the New Brown

2007-10-04T06:31:00.001-07:00

• The Zune and Zune Software now supports lossless audio. Windows Media Lossless.• Microsoft claims that the Zune is now a much superior option compared to the iPod.• Launch date, according to Amazon, is November 13.• Zune Pass (the monthly subscription scheme) work with the 1 million DRM free songs, but all songs you download with the Zune Pass will still be wrapped in DRM to be recognized as a rental.• Wireless syncing will automatically sync one minute after activity is stopped as long as you're in Wi-Fi range and attached to a power source (dock, AC adapter). You can manually trigger the Wi-Fi sync as well even without being connected to power.• Syncing will interrupt any activity you're currently doing.• All the old accessories are compatible with the new devices (there may be some problems with a dock, but they'll get back to us)• Screens are now made of glass as opposed to plastic in the 30GB• The Flash Zunes, even though smaller, have the same resolution as the 80GB Zune.• Zune Social, the social networking site, will launch in beta.• You won't be able to send songs through Zune Social, just pointers to 30 second clips of what you're listening to• The brown isn't discontinued (it's still in the 30GB models), but they say green is the new fashionable color, so they're going with that in the Flash models• No battery life details yet• No sound quality comparisons vs. the iPod yet either

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Facts About the Paper Industry, Global Warming and the Environment

2007-10-04T04:25:00.001-07:00

Think of the hundreds of times a day we touch paper — newspapers, toilet paper, water bottle labels, parking tickets, money, tissues, books, shopping bags, napkins, printer and copier paper at home and work, magazines. This list could fill a paperback.The average American consumes more than 700 pounds of paper a year. That’s the world’s highest per capita figure. Here are 15 facts about the environmental impact of the paper industry, courtesy — as is the quote above — of The State of the Paper Industry, a report published today by the Environmental Paper Network. That is a coalition of environmental groups that aims to minimize paper consumption, maximize recycled content, source paper fiber responsibly and employ cleaner paper production practices. (And don’t miss more than a dozen tips for reducing your own paper waste at the bottom of this post.)

Forests store 50% of the world’s terrestrial carbon. (In other words, they are awfully important “carbon sinks” that hold onto pollution that would otherwise lead to global warming.)
Half the world’s forests have already been cleared or burned, and 80% of what’s left has been seriously degraded.
42% of the industrial wood harvest is used to make paper.
The paper industry is the 4th largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions among United States manufacturing industries, and contributes 9% of the manufacturing sector’s carbon emissions.
Paper accounts for 25% of landfill waste (and one third of municipal landfill waste).
Municipal landfills account for one third of human-related methane emissions (and methane is 23-times more potent a greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide).
If the United States cut office paper use by just 10% it would prevent the emission of 1.6 million tons of greenhouse gases — the equivalent of taking 280,000 cars off the road.
Compared to using virgin wood, paper made with 100% recycled content uses 44% less energy, produces 38% less greenhouse gas emissions, 41% less particulate emissions, 50% less wastewater, 49% less solid waste and — of course — 100% less wood.
In 2003, only 48.3% of office paper was recovered for recycling.
Recovered paper accounts for 37% of the U.S. pulp supply.
Printing and writing papers use the least amount of recycled content — just 6%. Tissues use the most, at 45%, and newsprint is not far behind, at 32%.
Demand for recycled paper will exceed supply by 1.5 million tons of recycled pulp per year within 10 years.
While the paper industry invests in new recycled newsprint and paper packaging plants in the developing world, almost none of the new printing and writing paper mills use recycled content.
China, India and the rest of Asia are the fastest growing per-capita users of paper, but they still rank far behind Eastern Europe and Latin America (about 100 pounds per person per year), Australia (about 300 pounds per person per year) and Western Europe (more than 400 pounds per person per year).
The Forest Stewardship Council’s certification of sustainable forestry practices is growing, with 50% of the paper product market share and 226 million acres accounted for. Advocates say the demand for recycled paper and sustainably harvested pulp from consumers, advertisers, magazine makers and other users of paper will yield the fastest reforms of the industry.

Here is a copy of the report. And, please, don’t print it out to read it.

Sony tells us that copying music that we own is "stealing"

2007-10-03T09:59:00.001-07:00

Countless studies have shown that the majority of music on portable music players like the iPod comes from sources other than download services. For most people, that music is comprised primarily of songs "ripped" from CD collections to MP3 or some other comparable format. Indeed, most portable music players comes with software (like iTunes) which is designed to facilitate the easy ripping of CDs. According to Sony view, this is stealing.

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Sorcer fans performance - Amazing!

2007-10-03T06:48:00.001-07:00

Boys from South Korea cheering for their soccer teams. They do this with their clothes! They have a jacket that is one color on the back, one on the front, and that they can open or close to show a third color shirt on the inside. I always was amazed buy fans performances on stadium!

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Weird looking..."car"...Concept car =)

2007-10-03T06:35:00.001-07:00

This is a weird car... You really cannot tell if you like it or not.

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Ubisoft Apologizes for Gay Slur Used in Scrabble DS

2007-10-03T06:07:00.001-07:00

Ubisoft has apologized to customers after the word "lesbo" was discovered as a proper word to use in Scrabble 2007 for the Nintendo DS. Ubisoft merely apologized if offense was caused, they are not pulling the game.

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Lamest Videogame Endings

2007-10-03T05:05:00.001-07:00

This is definitely the lamest video game endings your ever seen.

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Microsoft lauches next-generation iPod wannabe - Zune 2

2007-10-03T04:54:00.001-07:00

Zune 2 has just been announced, coming at you with a price of 249 US dollars for the 80GB hard drive model and 149/199 US dollars for the 4GB and 8GB models. The Zune's got a re-worked navigation button and no longer has brown as a color, additional video codec support - h.264 and MPEG4. You don't have to convert all your music or video to WMV.

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"Boing Boing" starting to broadcast daily online TV show

2007-10-03T04:38:00.001-07:00

"Boing Boing" starting to broadcast a daily online TV show at http://tv.boingboing.net This show will feature daily short reports by "Boing Boing"authors Xeni Jardin and Mark Frauenfelder, with regular segments by "Boing Boing"’s other three authors David Pescovitz, Cory Doctorow and Joel Johnson.

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Invisibility Cloak Has Been Created! Yay!

2007-10-03T04:04:00.001-07:00

The world's first real invisibility cloak that able to hide an object in the visible spectrum has been created in the US. So far it only works in two dimensions and on a tiny scale. I always wanted to create something like this from optic wire =) What a great opportunities =)

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