2008 August 19
 Remember when that room was kept air-conditioned and food and drinks were not allowed inside? Well, that was before the personal computer changed the world. In 1977, Apple, Commodore and Radio Shaft all came out with versions of a home or office computer; they were usually called microcomputers. They held a maximum of 64K of memory and used floppy disks. On this date, 1981 August 12, IBM launched its first personal computer, the IBM 5150, operating under Microsoft's MS-DOS. It came with a one- or two-floppy-disk storage system. In today's terms, it would take 10 floppy disks to hold one MP3 song's worth of music. Quote: "Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window." — Steve Wozniak |
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Fifty-five years ago, 13 April, Ian Fleming's first 007 novel,
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 Google announced the launch on Monday night of its long-awaited, Web-based competitor to PowerPoint. Google Presentations, which is free, is part of the company's online office suite, Google Docs. |
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“w00t” was Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2007
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Last year, the phone and cable companies convinced the Federal Communications Commission and the Courts to change how the Internet is operated, making a few unelected officials responsible for a decision with billions of dollars of impact for millions of Internet consumers. These decisions reversed the safeguards that made the Internet so great – the freedom known as “Net Neutrality,” which allows you to go anywhere you want to go on the Internet. The Internet was designed by American universities, and made available to the general public over an open platform that required phone and cable companies to treat all traffic in a neutral manner. Now, however, the phone and cable companies boast that they will create premium lanes on the Internet for higher fees, and give preferential access to their own services and those VIPs who can afford to “pay to play.” They have already blocked certain services and have the power to block or degrade any service that competes with them:
If
you answered no to any of these questions, then |
The man behind the Commodore 64, Commodore founder Jack Tramiel gives a rare |
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“.Mac remote has firewall glitches” “See through menus make no sense” free Bootcamp is CRAP (compared to Parallels Desktop for Mac) “eye-candy”, “a prettier .... ”, blah, blah, blah “While Time Machine can perform backups over a network, the backup destination can only be a hard disk connected to a Mac running Leopard.” “The Dock's new Stacks feature is a mess” Peer Review: Leopard's secret flaws revealed! |
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“.Mac remote has firewall glitches” “See through menus make no sense” free Bootcamp is CRAP (compared to Parallels Desktop for Mac) “eye-candy”, “a prettier .... ”, blah, blah, blah “While Time Machine can perform backups over a network, the backup destination can only be a hard disk connected to a Mac running Leopard.” “The Dock's new Stacks feature is a mess” Peer Review: Leopard's secret flaws revealed! |
InformationWeek gPhone Slideshow Inside The GPhone: What To Expect From Google's Android Alliance ==> “ While the GPhone won't be revolutionary
Android - An Open Handset Alliance Project
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 SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 5 — Google took its long-awaited plunge into the wireless world today, announcing that it is leading a broad industry alliance to transform mobile phones into powerful mobile computers that could accelerate the convergence of computing and communications. |
The "Lunar Legacy" program comes from the X Prize Foundation, |
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PRoComputing webpage ==> GoogleDom |
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(both in text and audio) |
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 The Vanity Ring, a project by Markus Kison, is an update of the ring as a status symbol. Basically it keeps a running tab on the number of Google hits your name gets. You personalize the ring using some custom software, and every night you plug the little sucker into its docking station and it updates your hit count. Great idea, if you're famous and vain as hell. But if you're anything like me, the counter will never pass the number you do yourself unless you change your name to “nude pictures”, “free porn”, or “hot singles ready to have sex in my area” |
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insect-sized flying spies. A number of people reported what appeared to be flying mechanical insects, larger than dragonflies, over an antiwar rally in Washington DC last month. The reporter got mostly no-comments from the agencies he called trying to pin down what it was they saw. Only the FBI said through a spokesman: "We don't have anything like that." The article describes work on insect cyborgs as well as purely mechanical flying spies, but quotes vice admiral Joe Dyer, former commander of the Naval Air Systems Command now at iRobot in Burlington, Mass., as follows: |
Zamzar is a free online file conversion service. Supporting a huge number of file formats, you can make any file into just about any other type of file. Select your file, choose the type of file you would like it converted to, and pull the trigger. The source file is uploaded, and within several minutes, or an hour at most, you will get an email with a link to download the resulting file from Zamzar's server. |
 Windows XP SP2c Release to Add New Product KeysMore product keys are needed to support the continued availability of Windows XP Professional through the scheduled system builder channel end-of-life date of January 31, 2009. Service Pack 2c (SP2c) will be released to provide system builders with a new, extended range of product keys. System builders who use imaging must create new Windows XP Professional images with SP2c when shipping product keys; otherwise end users will not be able to complete installation. |
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Another iPhone feature -- it crashes!
Activation problems plague iPhone debut |
In 2007, the U.S. Postal Service will issue the Forever stamp, which will always be valid as First-Class postage on standard envelopes weighing one ounce or less, regardless of any subsequent increases in the First-Class rate. |
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Crave is a new CNet blog about “gorgeous gadgets and other crushworthy stuff.”
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 “Spotlight: Twinkies! Can junk food get any sweeter? Twinkies are comfort food; they're sweet and light and easy to eat. They have about 145 calories apiece. Everyone makes fun of them. Very few people will admit to it, but someone in the U.S. is eating an awful lot of them. Hostess (owned by Interstate Bakeries Corporation) sold about ½ billion Twinkies last year. First invented on this date in 1930, Twinkies became a lunch box favorite and were a snack food of choice to satisfy the need for a mid-afternoon sugar fix. In 1999, US President Bill Clinton chose a package of Twinkies as one of the "enduring American icons" to be preserved in the nation's millennium time capsule.” from ==> http://www.answers.com/topic/friday-april-6-2007 |
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Do you want to develop computer games without spending countless hours Using easy to learn drag-and-drop actions, you can create professional looking games within very little time. You can make games with backgrounds, animated graphics, music and sound effects, and even 3d games! And when you've become more experienced, there is a built-in programming language, which gives you the You can do anything you want with the games you produce, you can even sell them! Also, if you register your copy of Game Maker, you can unlock extra functions, which extend the capabilities of the program. Game Maker comes preloaded with a collection of freeware images and sounds to get you started.
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James Gray, founder and manager of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center in San Francisco, won the A.M. Turing Award — the "Nobel Prize of computer science" — in 1998, has been missing since Sunday (28 Jan), when he sailed from San Francisco Bay with his mother's ashes aboard the 40-foot vessel Tenacious, intending to scatter the ashes near the Farallon Islands.
A high-technology search of waters off Northern California for engineer Jim Gray, Computer scientists from Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc.,
Microsoft and the University of California at Berkeley and other universities created custom |
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10
Top Tech Towns (from WIRED Magazine)
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 Astronomy Picture of the Day “Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.” Archive |
"I can spend as much time as I can doing what I like to do, which is to work with computers and schools and kids." from ==>  rg |
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 After first
saying they'll charge $4.99 for the 802.11n update to Core 2
Duo MacBook & MacBook Pros and then changing that to $1.99
it is now FREE!The download patch is available today |
UFO HACKER TELLS WHAT HE FOUND.......... “The search for proof of the existence of UFOs landed Gary McKinnon in a world of trouble. After allegedly hacking into NASA websites -- he says he found images of what looked like extraterrestrial spaceships.” [free] (from Shell Extension City.net Daily Update) |
 NASA is asking people to choose the best photograph taken by the Cassini spacecraft as it approaches its second anniversary at the planet Saturn.  |
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“Al Shugart--the man who founded Seagate Technology, convinced his pet dog to run for public office, and favored Hawaiian shirts over business suits--has died at age 76. The California native passed away at a hospital from heart failure Tuesday, a Seagate representative said. Al Shugart Shugart played an integral role in the development of the hard-drive industry. He was part of the original team of engineers at IBM that developed the first hard-drive storage system, which came out 50 years ago this year.”
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Many
last-minute shoppers procrastinate because they aren't sure
what to get their loved ones. For the undecided, this site
is a godsend. It offers an eclectic array of gift ideas
compiled from hundreds of Web sites and broken down by personality
type (Dreamer, Likes to Talk Politics), style (Works Too Much,
Aspires to Savoir Faire), hobbies (Quilter, Spacenik), occasion,
and more. Each item's description comes with links to
online stores where you can make a purchase. Innovative
categories like Has Everything Already (wall-mounted aquarium)
or Lives in a Small Apartment (zero gravity spice rack) make
finding a gift for even the hard-to-buy-for a breeze. Categories
serve everyone from the single moms (babysitting service) to
gadgeteers (James Bond stealth camera). |
“Misdiagnosis is still a common occurrence in the medical profession despite all the tools available such as the blood tests and state of the art scanning equipment. Studies of autopsies have shown doctors seriously misdiagnose fatal illnesses about 20 per cent of the time. So millions of patients are being treated for the wrong disease. And the more astonishing fact may be that the rate has not really changed since the 1930s.” |
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Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by a total of 1,517,472 people from around the globe.  |
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thx
to [TAa]
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NASA will send a team of astronauts to repair the
orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, extending its life to 2013 and ensuring
more discoveries about distant galaxies. |
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Firefox
2.0 released 2006 October 24 |
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http://www.technewsworld.com/story/NyFHST90nnbQ4h/Wikipedia-and-the-Trust-Factor.xhtml |
On the morning of November
8, the planet Mercury will pass directly in http://astroday.net/MercTransit06.html |
