ZeptoPad 2.0 for iPhones

I thought that this was a another cool gadget that I found for the iPhone. I watched the video of the short clip that they offered, and it seemed pretty cool! Very promising and I can't wait to try it! I just hope that it isn't too expensive! This ZeptoPad is some sort of a Whiteboard that copies on a screen from your iphone with whatever you are drawing! Pretty cool right?

It's just a demo right now, but Ryo Shimizu's ZeptoPad 2.0 whiteboard app looks pretty promising. We already love collaborative drawing apps like Netsketch, but Ryo's whiteboard adds a couple of interesting tweaks—the ability to watch the whiteboard live via a web interface or on what looks like a local client, and then save everything to PDF when you're finished. If collaborators are not limited to being on the same wi-fi network, which is how these apps often work, sign us up. Barring any Apple hold-ups (that's never happened, right?), ZeptoPad should hit the store next weekend.

There could be some downsides consumers were looking at like this comment here: This app definately looks really cool, but in all reality what would you use it for? I like the web interface idea, is it possible to share word and excel files to and not just pictures with multiple people. It seems like it is going in the right direction, but he had made a statement about using it for presentations and I'm still trying to figure out the how I could use it for presentations unless I'm a teacher with multiple students that are sitting in front of computers. Maybe...sorry to be the devils advocate I definately like the app though.


Original Article

NY public toilets feature TVs, tuxedoed attendants

What a relief! The free public restrooms operated by the Charmin toilet paper company in Times Square during the holidays have been rolled out for another year.

It's the third straight year for the 20 deluxe stalls.

The plush potties feature flat-screen televisions, attendants dressed in tuxedos and plenty of Charmin.

The loos are so luxurious that Charmin promises Times Square tourists will feel like kings sitting on their thrones before making their royal flushes.

The toilets were inaugurated Monday with a ceremonial first flush by pop singer and Broadway star Joey Fatone (fuh-TOHN').

They'll be open daily through the end of the year except Christmas Day. For the first time, they'll be open on New Year's Day until 2 a.m. for the crowd watching the 2009 ball drop

Original Article from Boston.com

What’s Going On In Head Of A Computer?

A research team led by Dr Alan Drew (University of Fribourg, Switzerland and Queen Mary, London) and Dr Elvezio Morenzoni (Paul Scherrer Institute – PSI, Switzerland) is the first one to have tracked the magnetic processes going on within a hard-drive read head – similar to the heads that read the data off computer hard discs.

In their experiment, the researchers implanted muons into their device. Muons are elementary particles that act like small magnets, and can thus show up the magnetic fields in their surroundings. The muons for this experiment were generated in the particle accelerator at PSI and subsequently subjected to heavy deceleration – PSI is the only location world-wide where this process is available. In the long term, this type of experiment will help us to understand the processes going on inside the read head in greater detail, so that engineers can see where they need to concentrate their efforts to optimise the heads.

The fact that computers can store more data and MP3 players have become so much smaller in the past decade is largely due to an effect that physicists call giant magnetoresistance. In 2007, the Nobel Prize for physics was awarded for the discovery of this effect, which makes it possible to produce electronic components with an electrical resistance extremely sensitive to external magnetic fields. By using the effect in hard drive read heads, magnetically coded information can be packed together very densely, and the hard disc can then be extremely small. Without this effect, it would be impossible for a device half the size of a cigarette packet to store all the information contained in 100 CDs and more.

Original Article from Science Daily

Let's Upgrade to Windows XP!

Many people will read the title and think it's a mistake. "Shouldn't it be Vista?" Nope, I found this article on FOX 11 website and it said a lot about downgrading to XP, just because it's so hard to use. I thought it would be a step up for Windows because everyone knows that Apple is beating them by a landslide. I think that Windows Vista is not user-friendly. I have actually seen a lot of their recent commericials and I'm still not convinced. They have that parent control thing, but it actually tells them what time their child has been online and for how long. Nearly six months after it launched, gripes over what doesn't work with Vista continue, eclipsing positive buzz over the program's improved desktop search, graphics and security.

With Vista now shipping on most new computers, it's all but guaranteed to become the world's dominant PC operating system — eventually. For now, some users are either learning to live with workarounds or sticking with Vista's predecessor, Windows XP.

Pirillo is geekier than the average user. He runs a network of technology blogs called Lockergnome, and was one of several "Windows enthusiasts" Microsoft asked for Vista feedback early on.
Still, Vista tested even Pirillo's savvy. He fixed the hobbled printer and other problems by installing VMware, a program that lets him run XP within Vista. But when his trial copy expired, he decided the solution was too clunky — and too expensive.

He "upgraded," as he called it, back to XP.

Users' early complaints aren't a threat to Microsoft's dominance in operating systems. The various flavors of Windows run 93 percent of PCs worldwide, according to the research group IDC. Last fiscal year, Windows accounted for about a third of Microsoft's total revenue of $44.3 billion.

Original Article

Let's Upgrade to Windows XP!

Video Gamers not Effected by Unstable Economy

The economy may not be going so great for everybody and we are probably in a recession or heading in one. But all that depressing news doesn't effect gamers! Video game sales were up 18% in October from the same month a year ago! That's pleasantly surprising.

Video machine makers said the results boded well for the holiday season. The Wii console secured its title once more as the country's best-selling videogame console after Nintendo sold 803,210 units of the Wii in October, up from 687,000 in the previous month. Wii sales have topped 13 million units since Nintendo released the console in November 2006.

Cammie Dunway, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Nintendo of America, told Reuters that sales showed consumers would continue to buy the Wii during the holidays. U.S. consumers bought 371,000 of Microsoft Corp's Xbox 360 console in October, up from 347,200 units in the prior month. Microsoft cut the U.S. price of its entry-level console in September to $50 below the Wii.

The price cut helped spike a 7 percent increase in Xbox 360 unit sales from September, according to NPD Analyst Anita Frazier. "We feel cautiously optimistic (going into the holidays), we don't see anything in this (NPD) data that leads us to believe there's a pullback," said Microsoft spokesman David Dennis.

Sales of Sony Corp's PlayStation 3 dropped 18.2 percent from the prior month, from 232,400 units sold in September to 190,000 units sold in October. Still, "PS3 sales realized the greatest year-over-year monthly unit sales increase at 57 percent," Frazier said. The videogames industry is set to top $22 billion in 2008, according to NPD. U.S. sales of videogames hardware, software and accessories totaled $1.35 billion in October, with accessories sales falling 8 percent.


Original Article from Yahoo! Tech

EA to Join Wii Fit, in the Healthy Games

Have any of you tried to the Wii Fit? It's awesome (in my opinion) it actually makes me want tot work out and get healthy. Who ever came up with the idea must be a genius (and probably filthy rich by now). Well now Electronic Arts ( EA Games) wants to help get people healthy too- biters (cough cough).

Electronic Arts Inc. on Thursday announced a new line, EA Sports Active, that runs on the Nintendo Wii console and aims to complement, not compete with, Nintendo's "Wii Fit" exercise title. Peter Moore, president of EA Sports, called the new brand, whose first title launches next March, a "somewhat radical departure from the normal game experiences we provide customers."

EA's sports audience has been mostly young men, who have flocked to football, soccer, basketball and hockey titles to make the company the world's dominant player in sports video games. But to stay competitive with rivals such as Activision Blizzard Inc., whose success with games like "World of Warcraft" and "Rock Band" seems to be weathering the recession, EA needs to continue to expand its audience.

The company's new brand seeks to take advantage of the popularity of the Nintendo console and of exercise games. While the "Wii Fit" is already enormously popular, Moore, a former physical-education teacher, said EA's sports software will run people through an exercise routine with a more Western approach than the Japanese company's product.

Original Article from Yahoo! Tech

LimeWire, a death trap to all PCs

I'm pretty sure a lot of people have been getting viruses, or wondering why their computer is slowing down. I thought it was because of my memory. Although that's not the real full reason, LimeWire is a dangerous maneuever to take hold of because in my eyes, it is on safe and I wouldn't know what to do though without it. I was a little curious when they LimeWire Pro came out, I figured that there would be no viruses whatsoever. But I'm not going to spend $18.88 to find out.

If the Gnutella Network is your playground, then LimeWire is probably your playmate; it’s been the most popular Gnutella client going for years. Although LimeWire is an open-source program, the LimeWire Group offers a Pro version for $18.88, which it claims has more features, more search results, and better speed via a Turbo-charged connection. (The GPL allows for this because the Pro version’s source code is freely available to anyone who wishes to compile it themselves. Good luck with that, though.) But is the $18.88 premium worth it, or is the free LimeWire even worth using at all?

For comparison’s sake I ran both LimeWire versions on two identical virtual machines on the same PC with the same Internet connection. I entered the same searches and downloads in both programs. For searches of popular songs (all legal, of course), both versions came up with almost identical results. The Pro version, however, came up with about 25% more results for more obscure tunes. On average, the Pro version downloaded files about 10 to 15% faster than the free LimeWire version. So, while the advantage goes to LimeWire Pro overall, users of the free version shouldn’t feel like they’re missing out on too much.

Both LimeWire versions offer an appealing feature set. They work through firewalls right out of the box and both optionally integrate with your iTunes music library for easy sharing. Both have an integrated player and can preview partially downloaded multimedia files. In addition, built-in spam filtering automatically removes obviously bogus files from lists, and a porn-blocker prevents adult content from appearing. An intuitive filter system also makes it simple to whittle down a huge list of barely relevant files to a smaller list of files that you may actually want.

Original Article

No Viruses on OS X

When was the last time you heard someboy said ther MacBook crashed? NEVER! If you think about it, it's always a PC! Apple makes sure that your purchase in their store will be secured and that no viruses will get in. This article even says that it's hard to attack the Mac just because there's not a lot to attack about! Microsoft could never be equipped like Apple can. Some people (mostly Microsoft supporters) like to claim there are no Mac OS X viruses because there is not enough market share to encourage them to write viruses for it. But, Paul Venezia of InfoWorld cleverly makes the point that market share has nothing to do with it. Virus writers like to show off and the real reason why we haven’t seen any Mac attacks is simply due to the fact that Macs are just more secure.

It is so difficult to successfully attack the Mac, virus writers simply give up and go back to attacking windows because why put the time and resources into Macs when they can have full run of most windows machines without any effort at all. Even when there is a vulnerability discovered on the Mac there isn’t a rush to exploit it because the OS further prevents attackers from gaining full control and doing much harm. With Windows, once an attacker is “in” the entire machine and every layer is compromised in most cases. More and more viruses are deploying rootkits and other means to avoid detection and the only way Windows users can be sure they’re rid of the malware is to fully format the entire machine.

Original Article

MacBook Seizes to Amaze Us

If you really think about it, what's not to love about a MacBook? MacBooks are becoming more and more popular in today's world, and they are not stopping. Apple has once again amazed us with a beautiful MacBook that is supposedly better than the other previous MacBooks. I finally recently bought one and it has amazed me in so many different ways! It runs longer than my pervious laptop and it weigh's a whole lot lighter!

Since then, Apple has been content to issue minor periodic hardware upgrades, which, while not all that exciting, continue to add CPU horsepower while keeping prices steady.

The latest update, from November 2007, bumped up the top available CPU to a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, and added Intel's Santa Rosa platform and slightly better integrated graphics, resulting in a modest boost in performance.

But you'll probably be much more interested in Apple's new Leopard version of its OS X operating system, which comes preinstalled on new MacBooks. It adds a handful of useful new features, keeping the MacBook in our top tier of laptop recommendations, even if we're secretly itching for something new.

While the $1,099 entry-level MacBook is available only in white, we're much more used to seeing the black version (starting at $1,499) in the wild. The matte black look still isn't quite as sharp as the metallic MacBook Pro, but we still like it better than the plastic-looking white finish.

Inside, you'll find Apple's typically minimalist setup, including a power button, a full-size keyboard, a sizable touch pad with a single mouse button, and a built-in iSight camera that sits above the display. If you miss the scroll bar found on almost every Windows laptops, the two-finger scroll option works well (run two fingers down the touch pad, and it scrolls like a mouse wheel).

We remain fans of Apple's flat-key keyboard, although Windows users will have to get used to a Delete key that functions like a PC Backspace key, and no standalone equivalent key for what PCs call Delete. Compared with previous MacBooks, the main visual difference is that a few of the alternate functions on the F keys have been juggled around.

The look and feel are largely unchanged, but several useful new features have been added, including Time Machine, an easy-to-use backup utility; Spaces, which allows you to set up multiple desktops (one with all your media apps open or one for Web pages) and swap between them on the fly; and Quick Look, which lets you open a fast preview version of any document or file without waiting for their associated applications to open.

The MacBook still includes the Front Row remote control (sadly, only available in white), and the extremely handy MagSafe power adapter, which handily (and safely) detaches itself from a magnetic plug on the laptop's side when you invariably trip over the power cord.

The 13.3-inch wide-screen LCD display offers a clear and easy to read 1,280x800 native resolution, which is standard for a screen this size, as well as most 14- and 15-inch laptops (although Apple's 15-inch MacBook Pro offers a higher 1,440x900 resolution).

Apple's previous revision added support for 802.11n Wi-Fi technology, but the lack of an SD card reader remains one of the MacBook's few weak spots. Adding mobile broadband -- not offered by Apple -- will also be difficult without an Express card slot.

Not surprisingly, we saw a decent uptick in performance from the new 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, with the new system beating the earlier 2.16GHz MacBook in each of our benchmark tests.

If you have a previous generation MacBook, the difference isn't enough to make you want to go out and get a new one, but credit goes to both the fast CPU and Intel's Santa Rosa platform for the improvement. Note that our review unit came with 2GB of RAM, a $150 upgrade over the default 1GB offered in even the $1,499 MacBook.

The MacBook ran for 4 hours and 30 minutes on our DVD battery drain test, which is even longer than the 3 hours and 36 minutes we got on the older 2.16GHz MacBook. We again give credit to the efficient Santa Rosa platform, and because our DVD battery drain test is especially grueling, you can expect even longer life from casual Web surfing and office use.

We're still not fans of Apple's nearly obligatory extended warranty upsell. The default warranty for the MacBook is one year of coverage for parts and labor, but toll-free telephone support is limited to a mere 90 days - -well short of what you'd typically find on the PC side -- unless you purchase the $249 AppleCare Protection Plan, which extends phone support and repair coverage to three years.

Original Article