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A Great Robot Companion - WowWee Mr. Personality

Given the specific direction taken by the robotics industry over the past few years, it's very likely that, in the very near future, robots will become the companions of choice for a very large number of people, whether we're talking about children or adults. Some companies have started early on this path, one of them being WowWee, which has just introduced Mr. Personality, a very likable character that might prove to be a very good friend for children of all ages.

Microsoft starts to talk: Engineering Windows 7 blog is live (Updated)

Microsoft has thus far been very tight-lipped on Windows 7; everything that we know about Vista's successor—which is very, very little—has been carefully disclosed to us by Microsoft. The software giant has already been heavily criticized for not having any public channels of communication open. Even Microsoft's own partners have complained that the company isn't telling them much, and they're the ones that really have to know the details so they can align their products accordingly. Anyway, it seems that the stance over at Microsoft is changing, but very slowly: the Engineering Windows 7 blog (E7 for short) is now live.

Mint 220 Wireless Digital Music Station

Today we are looking at a really nice wireless digital music system that features an iPod dock called the Mint 220. The system is very easy to set up and offers great sound quality. Overall, the Mint 220 is very impressive. The sound quality from the small system is great, the price is very good at $179, and the system is very easy to set up for wireless streaming. It's hard to go wrong with the Mint 220. The only way I could see the Mint 220 being better would be if you had the option to run it from batteries for truly portable use.

TuneWiki Audio For Google Android Looks Very Impressive

This is TuneWiki, the music playback app that shows Karaoke-like lyrics and album art on almost all the music on your phone. It's been officially ported to Android and looks very very impressive. They've added features like searching YouTube for videos of your tracks, plus searching their database for certain song lyrics if you only remember caught a part of a song. There's also the built-in Google Maps API for looking at other people using TuneWiki and being able to see what people are listening to around a certain area. Yeah, we're pretty excited. [TuneWiki]

The Pirate Bay – "Just a Very Large Hobby"

praps writes "In a fascinating interview with two of the founders of The Pirate Bay entitled 'Are they baby-eating monsters or what?,' Swedish news site The Local discovers that far from being the radical Robin Hoods of the digital age, Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij are actually 'polite, humorous and down-to-earth.' They may run one of the biggest sites in the world but 'it's just a hobby that's grown to be very, very large.' Financially, they are 'happy as long as it doesn't make a loss,' and both hold down regular IT day jobs. And apparently they spend a lot of time with a Bedouin in the Sinai desert."

The Pirate Bay &ndash "Just a Very Large Hobby"

praps writes "In a fascinating interview with two of the founders of The Pirate Bay entitled 'Are they baby-eating monsters or what?,' Swedish news site The Local discovers that far from being the radical Robin Hoods of the digital age, Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij are actually 'polite, humorous and down-to-earth.' They may run one of the biggest sites in the world but 'it's just a hobby that's grown to be very, very large.' Financially, they are 'happy as long as it doesn't make a loss,' and both hold down regular IT day jobs. And apparently they spend a lot of time with a Bedouin in the Sinai desert."

Chip-less Mod Tool Leaked for Nintendo Wii.

It’s very small, very cold and very hard to program; D-Wave says it’s the first working quantum computer and it recognizes images. Read More

Bitch-Back! DeeCee and the C-Word

He's a very scary and not very nice man. Very informative. I wish all of America would read it—especially page eight where he calls his wife the C-word. I hate the C-word!

Google Chrome Review

Company Google surprised us this summer with novelty that is on verge of sensation - beta version of their Internet browser called Google Chrome. Since all their products are very functional and user-friendly nothing less can be expected from this project. New browser is very elegant, packed with innovative solutions and very usable despite the fact that it is in beta phase of development.

Tech's high rollers scoff at Wall Street

The rest of the world might be on the verge of economic meltdown, but that's not enough to swipe the grin off the faces of Silicon Valley's rich and powerful. Google boss Eric Schmidt says that it's well protected from the madness on Wall Street. "The company has a very large amount of cash in very, very boring and secure investments," he said at the Zeitgeist press event yesterday. "As a company, we're fine." Even Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's enfant terrible, seems to be riding out the financial storm - he's just appeared on the Forbes 400. The rich list values him at $1.5bn - even if it's largely theoretical cash.

Microsoft Expands Program To Bribe Users Into Using Its Search

A few years ago, Bill Gates had indicated that if all else failed in winning over users from Google, Microsoft was prepared to resort to bribing users to use its search engine, rather than the competitors'. Back in May, this plan kicked off for certain product searches, where actual buyers would end up getting cash back. But, that's rather limited to a very specific type of search and very limited results. So, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that Microsoft has now opened up a new program, called SearchPerks, which is an attempt to bribe users to use Microsoft's regular search. Of course, the incentive isn't very strong. It only works in Internet Explorer, and you get a tiny number of "points" each time you search, and you need a lot of points to redeem prizes.

World's Oldest Rocks Found

Smivs writes "The BBC reports that Earth's most ancient rocks, with an age of 4.28 billion years, have been found on the shore of Hudson Bay, Canada. Writing in Science journal, a team reports finding that a sample of Nuvvuagittuq greenstone is 250 million years older than any rocks known. It may even hold evidence of activity by ancient life forms. If so, it would be the earliest evidence of life on Earth — but co-author Don Francis cautioned that this had not been established. 'The rocks contain a very special chemical signature — one that can only be found in rocks which are very, very old,' he said."

Worth a six1/2: The big stage continues to bring the very best out of Pietersen. In his first innings against the country of his birth he scored a hundred, as he did in his debut as captain" width="66" height="84"/>

1/2: The big stage continues to bring the very best out of Pietersen. In his first innings against the country of his birth he scored a hundred, as he did in his debut as captain

"Gervais has this uncanny ability to take very sad and isolated characters, and gives them depth of humanity and a wry comic bent. "Ghost Town" is partly a romantic comedy, and partly a film about a sad character that discovers that life, ultimately,

The 2008 Toronto International Film Festival continues with its usually eclectic array of films. David Koepp's "Ghost Town" is a very mainstream offering for Toronto, yet it's quirky and wry enough to appeal to audiences outside of the commercial box.

Anti-Terrorist Data Mining Doesn't Work Very Well

Presto Vivace and others sent us this CNet report on a just-released NRC report coming to the conclusion, which will surprise no one here, that data mining doesn't work very well. It's all those darn false positives. The submitter adds, "Any chance we could go back to probable cause?" "A report scheduled to be released on Tuesday by the National Research Council, which has been years in the making, concludes that automated identification of terrorists through data mining or any other mechanism 'is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts.' Inevitable false positives will result in 'ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses' being incorrectly flagged as suspects. The whopping 352-page report, called 'Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists,' amounts to [be] at l

Refactoring HTML: Well-Formedness

The very first step in moving markup into modern form is to make it well-formed. Well-formedness is the basis of the huge and incredibly powerful XML tool chain. Well-formedness guarantees a single unique tree structure for the document that can be operated on by the DOM, thus making it the basis of reliable, cross-browser JavaScript. The very first thing you need to do is make your pages well-formed.

RMS: Cloud Computing Is Bad, Blogosphere Responds

IconA very interesting "Blogwatch" posting at Computerworld links out to an interview with Richard Stallman wherein he posits that Cloud Computing is a trap to entice users to give up control and privacy and become subject to closed, proprietary platforms. Since RMS is a professional provocateur, I wouldn't consider all of his pronouncements newsworthy. But the thoughtful responses linked in this blog roundup were interesting, and I believe the issue of convenience vs control vis a vis Cloud Computing is a very timely and important debate to be having at this point in IT history.

News: 72 Hour Metroid Charity Marathon LIVE NOW

Right below this very text, you should be able to see gamers playing through the Metroid series of titles, raising money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital which helps some very sick kids. The marathon is being streamed live via webcam and gives viewers a look at the games being played and a view of the action going on in the room. There's also prizes for viewers the world over, which are being given out regularly during the 72 hour period.

iPod classic, second-generation (2G) 120GB

Apple has done very little to improve the iPod classic with this iteration--that's not necessarily a bad thing. It remains the iPod to own if you want to carry a lot of media with you. The Genius feature is a nice addition as is the ability to quickly browse albums and artists based on the currently playing track, but those additions will convince very few people to trade in their old reliable (and perhaps, higher-capacity) iPod classic for this year's model.

Astronomers get best view yet of infant stars at feeding time

Astronomers have used ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer to conduct the first high resolution survey that combines spectroscopy and interferometry on intermediate-mass infant stars. They obtained a very precise view of the processes acting in the discs that feed stars as they form. These mechanisms include material infalling onto the star as well as gas being ejected, probably as a wind from the disc.

Astronomers Trace Gas Emissions Close To Young Stellar Objects

Astronomers have used ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer to conduct the first high resolution survey that combines spectroscopy and interferometry on intermediate-mass infant stars. They obtained a very precise view of the processes acting in the discs that feed stars as they form. These mechanisms include material infalling onto the star as well as gas being ejected, probably as a wind from the disc.

Astronomers Get Best View Yet Of Infant Stars At Feeding Time

Astronomers have used ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer to conduct the first high resolution survey that combines spectroscopy and interferometry on intermediate-mass infant stars. They obtained a very precise view of the processes acting in the discs that feed stars as they form. These mechanisms include material infalling onto the star as well as gas being ejected, probably as a wind from the disc.

Why B2C Database Marketing Firms Don't Understand B2B Companies

Traditional B2C database marketing firms are very good at addressing the first two points, but are usually not very good at the others because they lack the necessary operational expertise and methodology and the technical skills to perform complex integrations with front-office systems. This is not surprising. Firms with a B2C focus built their systems and processes for companies that do a large volume of marketing campaigns to large numbers of consumers. Their systems are designed for speed and volume, not for integration.

Why B2C Database Marketing Firms Don't Understand B2B Companies

Traditional B2C database marketing firms are very good at addressing the first two points, but are usually not very good at the others because they lack the necessary operational expertise and methodology and the technical skills to perform complex integrations with front-office systems. This is not surprising. Firms with a B2C focus built their systems and processes for companies that do a large volume of marketing campaigns to large numbers of consumers. Their systems are designed for speed and volume, not for integration.

A new push for desktop Linux

The GNU/Linux desktop can deliver a very mixed experience to the user: On one hand, you have very functional desktop environments, such as GNOME or KDE, with state-of-the-art features, capabilities, graphical effects, eye-candy and wizbang-ery (Compiz). On the other hand, you have apparent idiosyncrasies, such as different fonts and menu layouts, look and feel in your main desktop applications. Different maturity levels of your apps and different 'corners' of your desktop environment. Little niggles here and there, which don't quite seem to add up.

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