technology Articles


GM learns what not to do on the net

Somebody should have told General Motors that it would be a bad idea to put content control in the hands of the entire world. That only works if you have no enemies. However, as CNet notes in this article today, Chevrolet is now realizing that not everybody approves of the …

Google Romance

Google's rolled out another new service, Google Romance, their bid for the online dating game. It looks like competing with eBay, iTunes, and Yahoo! just isn't enough for the multi-billion-dollar baby. Perhaps this is why they filed for another $2B in stock sales earlier this week?

ExtremeTech talks about Conroe

Conroe, the CPU theorized to be at the heart of Apple's upcoming desktop line, is now being shown by Intel. The folks at ExtremeTech got a chance to take a look and were quite impressed according to their preview.


Wisconsin scientists build fastest digital camera

Admittedly, you're not going to be seeing this thing in use for the next SuperBowl, but the University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers are hoping that it will enable them to get pictures of the Higgs Boson particle (a key element in the Standard Model of particle physics). According to an article …

British Medical Journal reports mobiles don't raise risk

BBC News is reporting that the British Medical Journal has published a retrospective study to determine if cellular phones (mobiles in Britain) increase the risk of brain tumors. The study involved interviewing 966 people diagnosed with brain tumors and 1,716 people without spread over 5 regions of Great Britain …

MIT scientist uses algae to clean coal emissions

An article from the Christian Science Monitor details the exploits of an MIT scientist who is working to help greenhouse gas emissions by using algae. The idea is to use the algae in containers at the top of coal plant smokestacks as a filter. The tests so far indicate that …

TiVo to send video to PSP and iPod

According to a press release by TiVo, they will be supporting the Sony PSP and Apple iPod as delivery mediums for their TivoToGo product in the near future. The release date is first quarter of 2006 and it appears to be a feature that will be made available to all …

Apple's Airport wins PC Mag's Reader's Choice

Apple's Airport is the best home router out there, according to the PC Magazine Reader's Choice for Home Routers. Of particular note: the Airport's win marks the first time in the survey that a wireless router has won the prize. Also if interest, one amusing comment on why the Airport …

British car nut seeks iPod connector

Don't let the title fool you, this is actually quite amusing. If you've ever seen Top Gear (originally BBC, available in the US via ), you know Clarkson and his dry, sarcastic humor and fine analogies. Well, Mr. Luddite has found the iPod and it's taken over his life. Pretty good …

BBC launches open source site

The venerable BBC has launched an open source site for hosting their (soft)wares created under a variety of licenses. Lots of stuff here, including CPAN modules, Apache modules, and their new codec.

PowerPC still looking good for supercomputing

Although Apple is moving away from IBM's PowerPC CPUs for desktop and laptops in the future, IBM is still sitting pretty on the most recent Top 500 list (Just 2005) of the fastest supercomputers. An explosion in clustered computing leaves IBM in the 1,2,5,6,8, and 9th …

BBC building new video codec

As a part of rolling out access to the BBC Archives, the BBC is developing their own video CoDec (coder decoder) which uses wavelet compression and is said to be at least as efficient as the current front runners (although H.264 isn't addressed directly) and is expected to not …


New nuke plants to be safer, smaller, and cheaper

An article from the Christian Science Monitor discusses fourth-generation nuclear power plants (no, George, that's not pronounced "nuk-u-lar"). After a nearly 30-year drought in the US in bringing new nuclear power plants online, there's growing interest in replacing existing coal plants and providing new power using nuclear energy once again …

Initial reviews point at AMD over Intel in dual-core

According to an article from CNet that discusses reviews at Tom's Hardware and Anandtech that each show AMD's dual-core chips with an advantage over the Intel chips with dual-core technology.The Anandtech review is a bit more neutral, but the reviewer at Tom's gives early adopters a clear choice: AMD …


Google's "summer of code"

Google has announced the Summer of Code, whereby students who spend their summer working on certain open source projects can earn up to $4,500. The details are pretty cool. They're funding 200 developers, all students, to execute on plans to complete open source projects for a number of open …

Social engineering+trojan horse=LexisNexis

An article from Wired details the exploits of the three young hackers (16,19 and 20) who broke in to the LexisNexis databases and had access to the personal data of over 300,000 people. Of particular interest is the account of how they got access to the law enforcement …