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The National Bureau of Economic Research said Monday that the US has been in a recession since December 2007. The NBER is a private, nonprofit research organization of academic economists who determine business cycles. The stock market took a dip on the news that reached double-digit percentages for some tech stocks.
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Ever thought of making the move to digital audio on a PC for all your listening needs? Prices may not be for the faint of heart, but the end results are a different matter….
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 Macworld |
Apple's In-Ear Headphones finally out—well, almost
Macworld - You might be forgiven for not remembering the In-Ear Headphones with Remote and Mic that Apple announced during its September "Let's Rock" event, alongside the fourth-generation iPod nano and second-generation iPod touch. Apple unleashes not-crap iPhone iPod earbuds Apple finally taking orders for new in-ear headphones |
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 Seattle Post Intelligencer |
Microsoft expands Vista SP2 testing
CNET News - Microsoft said on Tuesday that it is ready for broader testing of Windows Vista Service Pack 2, the second collection of fixes for the latest version of the operating system. Vista SP2: What’s inside? Rumor: Windows Vista SP2 RTMs in April '09 |
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 Times Online |
Swedish researchers create body-swap illusion
Reuters - WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Researchers using closed-circuit televisions to create an illusion have made volunteers virtually swap bodies, even making women believe they were in a man's body and vice-versa. Body-swap illusion tricks mind in new study Scientists Report Mental 'Body-Swapping' |
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Barence writes “After years of boasting about the Mac’s near invincibility, Apple is now advising its customers to install security software on their computers. Apple — which has continually played on Windows’ vulnerability to viruses in its advertising campaigns — issued the advice in a low-key message on its support forums. ‘Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.’ It goes on to recommend a handful of products.” Reader wild_berry points out the BBC’s story on the unexpected recommendation.
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ERIE, PA—”I think I want Wendy’s,” Don Turnbee told reporters. “There hasn’t been a Wendy’s in a while so there will probably be one in a couple of exits.”
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AFP – Yahoo shares gained more than seven percent on Wall Street on Tuesday amid reports former AOL chief executive Jonathan Miller was trying to raise money to purchase the Internet company.
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PC World – Thou shalt not offend law-abiding computer gamers with frivolous strictures, I think that’s a commandment somewhere. Whether CD/DVD copy protection tool SecuROM counts as frivolous, feckless, or downright frightening is debatable, but at least Rockstar’s being up front about its inclusion in the Windows version of Grand Theft Auto IV, which ships tomorrow. According to Rockstar by way of IGN:
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PC World – Microsoft has released a new wave of Windows Live services that adds more social-networking qualities to its set of online services.
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With the introduction of communication websites, people have come to realise the potential of these sites. They are not just unleashed with features for communication, but they can also be effectively used for entertainment purposes.
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stinkymountain writes “Writer John Brandon spent two days at Microsoft Research Labs in Redmond and got an inside look at some pretty interesting projects under development, including a robotic receptionist, a new type of touch screen for people with fat fingers, and an electronic table that allows multiple people to collaborate in real time. Brandon also talks about some of these research projects on this NPR podcast.”
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 CNET News |
Nokia Upgrades Maps, Messaging
InformationWeek - With beefed-up messaging and mapping services, Nokia continues its strategy to be more than just a cell phone manufacturer. By Marin Perez At Nokia World Tuesday, the cell phone manufacturing giant announced upgrades to its maps and messaging services. Nokia upgrades mapping and messaging services Nokia Takes Mobile Messaging to the Masses |
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Raistlin84 writes “I’m a PhD student in theoretical physics who’s recently gotten quite interested in AI design. During my high school days, I spent most of my spare time coding various stuff, so I have a good working knowledge of some application programming languages (C/C++, Pascal/Delphi, Assembler) and how a computer works internally. Recently, I was given the book On Intelligence, where Jeff Hawkins describes numerous interesting ideas on how one would actually design a brain. As I have no formal background in computer science, I would like to broaden my knowledge in the direction of neural networks, pattern recognition, etc., but don’t really know where to start reading. Due to my background, I figure that the ‘abstract’ theory would be mostly suited for me, so I would like to ask for a few book suggestions or other directions.”
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 MacBlogz |
iPhone grabs 30% of US smartphone market
CNNMoney.com - Apple’s iPhone is the star in a series of charts published Tuesday by Needham & Co. analyst Charles Wolf. The first is a quarter-by-quarter snapshot of the worldwide smartphone market that shows a sharp uptick in Apple’s (AAPL) share set against the … iPhone clouds true Smartphone snapshot iPhone Linux Hack: What It Means |
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24.5 Megapixel, 51-point AF, 14-bit RAW, GPS module, and continuous full-frame capture at 5 FPS…
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AP – Yahoo Inc.’s stock rallied Tuesday on a report that AOL’s former chief executive believes he can raise enough money in a worsening recession to buy the struggling Internet company for as much as $30 billion.
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Tom Farber, a calculus teacher at Rancho Bernardo high school in San Diego, has come up with a unique way of covering district cuts to his supplies budget. He sells ads on his tests. “Tough times call for tough actions,” Tom says. The price of an ad on a Mr. Farber Calc test is as follows: $10 for a quiz, $20 for a chapter test, and $30 for a semester final. Most of the ads are messages from parents but about a third of them come from local businesses. Principal Paul Robinson says reaction has been “mixed,” but adds, “It’s not like, ‘This test is brought to you by McDonald’s or Nike.’” I see his point. Being a local business whore is much better than being a multinational conglomerate whore.
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Linux distributor Good OS and BIOS vendor Phoenix Technologies are launching quick-start programs to speed the operation of netbooks.
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The last post generated some very interesting comments and questions, which I wanted to address. Unfortunately, some people misinterpreted the post as a “the best scores Nehalem and Shanghai can get in Linpack” review. So let me make this very clear: this and the previous blogpost are not meant to be a “buyer’s guide”. The Nehalem desktop…
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AP – Laptop, cell phone and iPod owners tired of having their devices run out of charge after a few hours have been patiently waiting for the next portable power source to arrive.
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ozmanjusri writes “Online market share of the dominant Windows operating system has taken its biggest monthly fall in years to drop below 90%, according to Net Applications Inc. Computerworld reports that Microsoft’s flagship product has been steadily losing ground to Mac OS X and Linux, and is at its lowest ebb in the market since 1995. ‘Mac OS X… [ended] the month at 8.9%. November was the third month running that Apple’s operating system remained above 8%.’ The stats show that while some customers are ‘upgrading’ from XP to Vista, many are jumping ship to Apple, while Linux is also steadily gaining ground. A Net Applications executive suggests the slide may be caused by many of the same factors that caused the fall in Internet Explorer use. ‘The more home users who are online, using Macs and Firefox and Safari, the more those shares go up,’ he said. November has more weekend days, as well Thanksgiving in the US, a result that emphasizes the importance of corporate sales to Microsoft.”
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Onion Radio News – with Doyle Redland
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Smivs points out a blandly-worded story from the BBC with scary implications, excerpting “Remote searches of suspect computers will form part of an EU plan to tackle hi-tech crime. The five-year action plan will take steps to combat the growth in cyber theft and the machines used to spread spam and other malicious programs. It will also encourage better sharing of data among European police forces to track down and prosecute criminals. Europol will co-ordinate the investigative work and also issue alerts about cyber crime sprees.”
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 Sydney Morning Herald |
Britney Spears Tops Yahoo Searches In 2008
CRN - Celebrities, US politics and TV shows were among the 10 most-searched terms on Yahoo for 2008, the search engine said this week. Pop star Britney Spears was No. Yahoo's Top Ten Searches of 2008 Britney, WWE beat Obama as superstars on Yahoo! |
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badger.foo writes “We have seen the future of botnets, and it is distributed and low-key. Are sites running free software finally becoming malware targets? It all started with a higher-than-usual number of failed ssh logins at a low-volume site. I think we are seeing the shape of botnets to come, with malware authors doing their early public beta testing during the last few weeks.”
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The introduction of PC2Phone calls has paved the way for people to ‘terminate’ calls from their PC to others gadgets. It has eased the way we used to make calls. Now calling is no longer confined to forwarding calls from one mobile to another. User can easily make use of PC to terminate calls to mobile handsets as well as to other PCs.
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CNET – Nokia spent most of Tuesday buzzing about its N97 phone, but it also quietly completed an important step in its plan to evolve as a mobile computing company.
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Microsoft’s Windows OS last month took its biggest market share dive in the last two years, an Internet measurement company reported Monday, erasing gains made in two of the last three months and sending the operating system’s share under 90% for the first time.
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Onion Radio News – with Doyle Redland
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 CNET News |
Hitachi, Intel To Jointly Develop Enterprise SSDs
CRN - By Joseph F. Kovar, ChannelWeb Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and Intel said Tuesday they have agreed to jointly develop enterprise-class, solid-state hard drives. Hitachi, Intel Partner On SSDs For Data Centers In Deal With Hitachi, Intel Will Expand Its Flash Memory Business |
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Sears, Saks Fifth Avenue, Costco, Dell, Victoria’s Secret, Bloomingdale’s and Williams-Sonoma all saw their sites malfunction at some point between Friday and Monday, according to companies that monitor Web performance.
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 guardian.co.uk |
Classical musicians get shot at fame on YouTube
Reuters - NEW YORK (Reuters) – The video-sharing website YouTube will take classical music out of pricey concert halls and bring it to the masses by holding an online competition where the public chooses musicians to play at Carnegie Hall. How YouTube can get you to Carnegie Hall YouTube spotlights classical musicians with ‘Internet symphony’ |
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PC World – Oracle has contributed data-integrity protection code, partly developed with the hardware vendor Emulex, to the Linux kernel, the vendors announced Tuesday.
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PC World – What if a game had to be activated at the store before you could use it?
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 Canada.com |
Car Cell Phone Use More Hazardous Than Chat With Passengers
Washington Post - By Amanda Gardner TUESDAY, Dec. 2 (HealthDay News) — Drivers talking on a cell phone are more distracted and more prone to error than if they were speaking with a friend sitting next to them in the car, a new report finds. Study: Cell Phones More Distracting Than Passengers in Car Hands-free kits make drivers even more dangerous |
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KentuckyFC writes “Philosophers have long wondered at the profound link between mathematics and physics, but how deep does this connection go? Pretty deep according to the results of a quantum experiment exploring the nature of mathematical undecidability. Here’s how: any logical system must be based on axioms, which are propositions that are defined to be true. A proposition is logically independent from these axioms if it can neither be proved nor disproved from them; mathematicians say it is undecidable. In the experiment, researchers encoded a set of axioms as quantum states. A particular measurement on this system can then be thought of as a proposition which, if undecidable, yields a random result — which is what they found. ‘This sheds new light on the (mathematical) origin of quantum randomness in these measurements,’ say the researchers (abstract).”
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 Canada.com |
UPDATE 1-US FCC to mull free Internet plan at Dec. meeting
Reuters - By Kim Dixon WASHINGTON, Dec 2 (Reuters) – The US Federal Communications Commission is likely to consider a plan this month to auction public airwaves with a mandate that the winning bidder set aside some for free Internet nationwide, … 'Help Wanted' naming next FCC chair's priorities 2:30 pm – Free Internet Access Proposed for US |
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AP – Retailers who saw Thanksgiving holiday sales drop off as the weekend progressed stepped up online promotions on the day known as “Cyber Monday” to try to get consumers tired of the crowds at stores to keep shopping.
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A federal appeals court agreed that Qualcomm violated a standards body’s rules but said its punishment should be reduced.
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