Clipmarks | tabsey's 'computers' clips

Firefox download record official

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:29:00 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: Only Guinness record I'll be involved in I suppose.

So far there have been more than 28 million downloads of Firefox 3.0

Mozilla has officially made history with a new Guinness world record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period.

The final record breaking 8,002,530 downloads for web browser Firefox 3.0 took place in June.

"The enthusiasm and creativity of Firefox fans was key to making this happen" said Marketing head Paul Kim.

Gareth Deaves of Guinness World Records called it "an extremely impressive accomplishment".

The official figure was confirmed after logs from download servers were audited and checked to ensure duplicate and unfinished downloads were not counted.

Mr Kim told the BBC News: "The notion of going for a world record, as gooky and nutty as it may have sounded, was a really sticky idea.

"It was an idea that translated really well across national borders and to all different kinds of people around the world."

Tags: computers.

MySpace suicide: new law outlaws cyberbullying

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:19:50 GMT

clipped by: tabsey

Clip Source: www.theage.com.au

Missouri Governor Matt Blunt signed a bill today outlawing cyberbullying, just kilometres from where a 13-year-old girl committed suicide nearly two years ago after being harassed on the Internet.

The bill updates state laws against harassment by removing the requirement that the communication be written or over the telephone. Supporters say the bill now covers harassment from computers, text messages and other electronic devices.

"Social networking sites and technology have opened a new door for criminals and bullies to prey on their victims, especially children," Blunt said. "This new law will ensure that we have the protections and penalties needed to safeguard Missourians from internet harassment."

Megan Meier killed herself in October 2006, shortly after receiving mean-spirited messages over the Internet. Her suicide prompted the bill.

The teenager's mother, wearing a picture of her daughter in a pin on her dress, stood over the governor's shoulder as he signed the bill.

Tags: bullying, shows, weakness

Online Service Lets Blind Surf The Internet From Any Computer, Anywhere

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:09:59 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: Wonder if they are using it here. Hope something is available.

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

A blind person goes to a library computer and uses WebAnywhere to read e-mail and consult an online bus schedule.

ScienceDaily (June 27, 2008) — Visions of future technology don't involve being chained to a desktop machine. People move from home computers to work computers to mobile devices; public kiosks pop up in libraries, schools and hotels; and people increasingly store everything from e-mail to spreadsheets on the Web.

But for the roughly 10 million people in the United States who are blind or visually impaired, using a computer has, so far, required special screen-reading software typically installed only on their own machines.

New software, called WebAnywhere, launched today lets blind and visually impaired people surf the Web on the go. The tool developed at the University of Washington turns screen-reading into an Internet service that reads aloud Web text on any computer with speakers or headphone connections.

Tags: computers

Travel back in time...

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 13:41:08 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: Part of the blurb that goes with WayBack page search You can go to all the sites through web.archive.org.

Clip Source: web.archive.org

Yahoo!
www.yahoo.com

"Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" was started in 1994 by a couple of computer geeks in a trailer on the Stanford campus. Seven years and one name change later, we have the phenomenally successful Yahoo! Do you uh...
Go Wayback to Yahoo! on December 20, 1996 | See all dates

Trojan Room Coffee Machine
www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html

National Center for Supercomputer Applications

The Internet Movie Database
www.imdb.com

Created in 1989, and first arriving on the web in 1993, the Internet Movie Database has been dispensing movie trivia since the time when Brooke Shields starred in Brenda Starr.
Go Wayback to IMDb on November 19, 1996 | See all dates

Ultimate Band List
www.ubl.com

Started in the Summer of 1994 at Caltech U., UBL, originally known as the Web Wide World of Music, or WWWOM, quickly grew into a large and wildly popular directory of music links.
Go Wayback to UBL on December 27, 1996 | See all dates

Amazon.com

The White House

The Well

Tags: computers, now, have, a, history- short, though

Liter Of Fuel Would Last UK 1 Year If Cars Had Kept Pace With Computers

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:17:29 GMT

clipped by: tabsey

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

ScienceDaily (June 20, 2008) — One litre of fuel would serve the UK for a year and oil reserves would last the expected lifetime of the solar system - if efficiency in the car industry had improved at the same rate as in the computer world - a leading computer scientist will tell an audience in Manchester, UK on Friday 20 June 2008.

Professor Steve Furber CBE, ICL Professor of Computer Engineering at The University of Manchester, will deliver the inaugural Kilburn Lecture to mark Digital 60 Day -- the 60th anniversary of The Baby computer, designed and built at The University of Manchester in 1948.

In his lecture entitled 'The Relentless March of the Microchip', Professor Furber will note that computers are now 50 BILLION times more energy-efficient than the 'Baby', which weighed roughly one tonne and took up a whole room.

Tags: greed, slows, or, speeds, progress

Supercomputer sets petaflop pace

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:00:34 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: Those mice must have to run awfully quickly.

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Currently, BlueGene/L is the most powerful computer in the world

A supercomputer built with components designed for the Sony PlayStation 3 has set a new computing milestone.

The IBM machine, codenamed Roadrunner, has been shown to run at "petaflop speeds", the equivalent of one thousand trillion calculations per second.

The benchmark means the computer is twice as nimble as the current world's fastest machine, also built by IBM.

It will be installed at a US government laboratory later this year where it will monitor the US nuclear stockpile.

It will also be used for research into astronomy, genomics and climate change.

"We are getting closer to simulating the real world," Bijan Davari, vice president of next generation computing systems at IBM, told BBC News.

It would be of particular use for calculating risk in financial markets, he said.

"The latency of the calculations is so small that for all practical purposes it is real time."

Tags: computers

A quarter of US PCs infected with malware: OECD

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 10:25:19 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: That's a lot of malware cleaners to sell. They are at freebie sites

Clip Source: www.theage.com.au

An OECD study into online crime says that increased activity by cyber criminals has left an estimated one-in-four US computers infected with malware.

The report, entitled Malicious Software (malware): a Security Threat to the Internet Economy, gives an impression of two worlds engaged in an uneven war of virus invasion and belated defence.

Cyber crime, to steal data, spy and attack government and business computer systems "is a potentially serious threat to the internet economy," the study, published on Friday, warns.

Organisations involved in "fighting malware offer essentially a fragmented local response to a global threat," the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development says.

"Over the last 20 years, malware has evolved from occasional 'exploits' to a global multi-million-dollar criminal industry ... Cyber criminals are becoming wealthier and therefore have more financial power to create larger engines of destruction."

Tags: computer

The photonic beetle

Tue, 20 May 2008 14:21:26 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: Computing assisted by beetles.

Clip Source: www.eurekalert.org

Nature builds diamond-like crystals for future optical computers

SALT LAKE CITY – Researchers have been unable to build an ideal “photonic crystal” to manipulate visible light, impeding the dream of ultrafast optical computers. But now, University of Utah chemists have discovered that nature already has designed photonic crystals with the ideal, diamond-like structure: They are found in the shimmering, iridescent green scales of a beetle from Brazil.

“It appears that a simple creature like a beetle provides us with one of the technologically most sought-after structures for the next generation of computing,” says study leader Michael Bartl, an assistant professor of chemistry and adjunct assistant professor of physics at the University of Utah. “Nature has simple ways of making structures and materials that are still unobtainable with our million-dollar instruments and engineering strategies.”

Tags: science, computers

Melting defects could lead to smaller, more powerful microchips

Mon, 05 May 2008 13:23:12 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: So you now have to have a gas flame thrower in case the chips needs melting so that the contacts meet.

Clip Source: www.eurekalert.org

These electron microscope images show before (left column) and after (right column) examples of a new technique, developed at Princeton University, for perfecting nanometer-scale structures.
Click here for more information.

As microchips shrink, even tiny defects in the lines, dots and other shapes etched on them become major barriers to performance. Princeton engineers have now found a way to literally melt away such defects, using a process that could dramatically improve chip quality without increasing fabrication cost.

The method, published in the May 4 issue of Nature Nanotechnology, enables more precise shaping of microchip components than what is possible with current technology. More precise component shapes could help manufacturers build smaller and better microchips, the key to more powerful computers and other devices.

Tags: computers, flame, throwers

Internet serves up 30 years of spam

Mon, 05 May 2008 08:42:04 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: 100 billion spam messages are sent everyday, Is that all, you say?

Clip Source: www.abc.net.au

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the computer phenomenon - spam email.

Now a nuisance for tens of millions of computer users worldwide, three decades ago someone sent what is considered to be the very first spam email.

Now 100 billion spam messages are sent everyday - three quarters of all the messages sent.

They are expensive to block and can slow down or crash computers across continents.

Spam reputedly got its name from a skit by the British television comedy show Monty Python's Flying Circus, in which a group of Vikings in a restaurant that serves all of its food with spam tinned meat, sing a song repeating the word ad nauseam.

Tags: computer

Laptops of the Future

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 14:33:34 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: Some interesting concepts.

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

A lot has changed in the 20 years since the first laptop computers appeared, including gigahertz processors, color screens and wireless data, but none are as profound as the change on the drawing boards at the world's leading technology designers.

"Between now and 2015, we expect to see a series of big changes that will redefine what a notebook is and what it looks like," said Mike Trainor, Intel Corp.'s evangelist for mobile products in an interview with IDGs Computerworld.

Here are some of the more seminal changes coming our way of laptops of the future:

Tags: computer

Exa! The World's 1st Cosmic Supercomputeris

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 04:15:46 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: I think this is bigger than my computer.

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

"Hello, Dave." Like a casting call for "2001 A Sapce Odyssey," the American Institute for Advanced Architectures (IAA) has designed the worlds first exaflop computer -a machine that would give HAL extreme paranoia. Unless you work for NASA or Dr Scorpio, exa- isn't a prefix you'll have seen much: it means a billion billion. A quintillion. Eighteen zeroes. Frickin' loads.

An exaflop computer could perform a thousand million billion FLoatin point Operations Per Second (FLOPS), made even more impressive by the fact our most advanced computers currently can't do one percent of that.

Tags: computer

Who owns the Internet?

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:16:01 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: If you need to check on "basics overlooked at the time". this may help.

Clip Source: computer.howstuffworks.com

Imagine you're in a room full of people from different countries, and everyone only speaks his or her native language. In order to communicate, you'd have to come up with a standard set of rules and vocabulary. That's what makes the Internet so remarkable: It's a system that lets different computer networks communicate with each other using a standardized set of rules. Without rules, these computer networks wouldn't be able to communicate with each other.

Think for a minute about the scope of the Internet. It's a collection of inter-networked computer systems that spans the entire globe. It depends on several sets of rules called protocols. These protocols make it possible for computer communication across networks. It also relies on a huge infrastructure of routers, Network Access Points (NAPs) and computer systems. Then there are the satellites, miles of cable and hundreds of wireless routers that transmit signals between computers and networks.

Tags: computer

Some viruses come re-installed in everyday gadgets

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 13:04:37 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: Not fair play.

Clip Source: www.theage.com.au

From iPods to navigation systems, some of today's hottest gadgets are landing on store shelves with some unwanted extras from the factory - pre-installed viruses that steal passwords, open doors for hackers and make computers spew spam.

Computer users have been warned for years about virus threats from downloading Internet porn and opening suspicious e-mail attachments. Now they run the risk of picking up a digital infection just by plugging a new gizmo into their PCs.

Recent cases reviewed by The Associated Press include some of the most widely used tech devices: Apple iPods, digital picture frames sold by Target and Best Buy stores in the US and TomTom navigation gear.

In most cases, Chinese factories - where many companies have turned to keep prices low - are the source.

Tags: who, can, i, trust

Will New Blu-ray Drives Suck Your Laptop Battery Dry?

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 13:00:17 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: There has to be a fortune on offer to those involved in battery research.

Clip Source: www.wired.com

Watching a Blu-ray movie in all its high-definition glory on your laptop may finally become an affordable prospect this year. Just don't wander too far from a power outlet.

With the Sony-backed HD format emerging victorious from a two-year showdown with Toshiba's HD DVD, many laptop manufacturers are now scrambling to add Blu-ray drives in their desktop and notebook lineups. Next month, Dell will even introduce a sub-$1,000 Blu-ray notebook, according to Brian Zucker, a technology strategist for the company.

But the promise of viewing an increasing variety of HD movies on your laptop may be overshadowed by ongoing concerns over the technology's vampiric effect on battery life. Indeed, if the first generation of Blu-ray equipped laptops are any indication, you might not get more than halfway through that movie before running out of juice completely, analysts say.

"Blu-ray battery life is obviously a huge concern," says Yankee Group analyst Josh Martin.

Tags: computers