Charlie Demerjian the Inquirer, Sunday 6 July 2008. 11:55:00

Altera, Nvidia and ATI all affected

CHIP FAB TSMC IS to delay its 40nm process, a bit. It was originally scheduled to start shipping this year, just barely, but now it has been pushed out. People whispering in our ear have said the first parts, originally scheduled for the waning days of 2008, slipped to January...

Nick Farrell , Friday 4 July 2008. 09:25:00

All a bit of a laugh

THE CASE AGAINST the German family which stuck its kid up for sale on Ebay has been dropped. The new-born boy was taken into care while humourless German coppers investigated allegation of child trafficking against the parents....

INQUIRER staff , Friday 4 July 2008. 10:21:00

Q1 server revenue growth estimate cut back

INDUSTRY SHAMANS at Gartner Group have rejiggered industry numbers for the first quarter, cutting estimates of server revenue growth from 4.3 per cent to 2.5 per cent and handing first place in global server market share back to IBM from HP....

Stewart Meagher , Friday 4 July 2008. 10:22:00

You can't keep a good Yank down

GEORGE DUBYA BUSH recently tried to kick-start the American economy by sending each and every tax payer in the States a cheque for up to* twelve hundred bucks. The hope was that patriotic Americans would spend their windfall on made-in-the-USA products, heading off the inevitable recession at the pass....

Sylvie Barak , Friday 4 July 2008. 10:30:00

Terminal laptop loss

TWELVE THOUSAND LAPTOPS ARE carelessly lost on a weekly basis in US airports and most companies never even bother to disclose the losses according to a new report. The study, sponsored by Dell Computer and carried out by the Ponemon Institute surveyed 106 major U.S....

Fernando Cassia , Friday 4 July 2008. 10:54:00

Hands On Kiss the WinXP Language Bar goodbye

YOU DON'T have to struggle with the default key maps provided with Windows. Yet few people venture to redesign their own keyboard map with Microsoft's freeware utility. We prove here you have nothing to fear....

Sylvie Barak , Friday 4 July 2008. 11:20:00

Ringing in a new era of downloaded music

AS CD SALES PLUNGE, the mobile device music market soars according to a new report by research outfit Emarketer which claims that music on mobile devices will be a $7.3 billion industry by 2011. The company's report, "Recorded Music: Digital Falls Short," predicts more doom and gloom for non-digital music...

Nick Farrell , Friday 4 July 2008. 11:28:00

Millionaire musicians barely staying alive

POPULAR BEAT COMBO warbler Robin Gibb, claims that standardising music royalties across Europe would be a 'tragedy' for musicians and the songs they write. EC mandarins are close to finishing an antitrust investigation into how royalties are collected....

Stewart Meagher , Friday 4 July 2008. 12:02:00

Parents unaware of new threat

IN-GAME COMMS have brought a whole new layer of fun to many multi-player console games, but parents may be unaware that sexual predators, who have more commonly used traditional Internet chat sites to groom their victims, are moving onto games consoles....

Tony Dennis , Friday 4 July 2008. 12:16:00

Reliance unlikely to merge with MTN

HIGH HOPES of a deal between India's Reliance Communications and Africa's MTN have been dashed by recent events. It's quite feasible that MTN might pull the plug on the deal entirely. The first problem is a legal wrangle between the two brothers than inherited the Reliance empire....

Stewart Meagher , Friday 4 July 2008. 12:31:00

Just an arm and three quarters of a leg now, Airheads

THE KINDLY FOLK at Cupertino have lopped £300 ($500) off of the price of the top-spec Macbook Air. Still the thinnest notebook in the world, and guaranteed to make your average Apple fanboi's winky go a bit funny at thirty paces, the 64GB SSD version has dropped from £2028 to...

Egan Orion , Friday 4 July 2008. 13:08:00

Internet Explorer losing its stranglehold

MOZILLA FIREFOX now holds 19 per cent of the web browser market, according to web survey company Net Applications. Less than one per cent of Firefox's increase in popularity can be attributed to the release of Firefox 3.0, however....

Tony Dennis , Friday 4 July 2008. 13:12:00

We remain to be convinced

ARIESO's DR Konstantinos Stavropoulos claims a growing number of people are using their mobile phone instead of the fixed at home by signing up for 3G. The catch is that coverage is sometimes poor. Stavropoulos claims that a fellow London-based Greek found that one in three 3G calls was dropping...

Sylvie Barak , Friday 4 July 2008. 13:16:00

Boomerangs on its plans

AUSTRALIAN EBAY SELLERS were celebrating victory last night after the online auction site waved the white flag and backed down from plans to ram Paypal down users' throats. The move came just as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) was in the final stages of deciding to halt the...

Nick Booth , Friday 4 July 2008. 13:31:00

Oi lardy, hands off that pie!

IF THERE'S ONE THING WORSE than intrusive Orwellian technology, it's rude intrusive technology. Now Samsung has invented a machine which passes judgement on you as you walk down the street. It's a machine that could quite easily label you a fat minger....

Sylvie Barak , Friday 4 July 2008. 14:30:00

Wins the lottery 44,000 times a day

A BRITISH ANTI SPAM company has released a list of the five most spammed people in Britain, with the number one spot going to a guy who gets over 44,000 unwanted mails a day. Interestingly, three of the top five on the list use Orange as their ISP....

Sylvie Barak , Friday 4 July 2008. 16:32:00

Racing to map Europe's streets

AS IF WATCHING the Tour De France on TV wasn't boring enough, the organisers of the three week long bike race have now teamed up with Google to let fans see the route and track the cyclists' progress on Google Maps....

Egan Orion , Friday 4 July 2008. 16:37:00

Clothes maketh the man... for the FBI

COURT FILINGS have disclosed that a thief who stole from bank ATMs for about six months was nabbed by the FBI because he habitually wore a distinctive sweatshirt. Yuriy Ryabinin was always wearing the same unique sweatshirt in surveillance photos taken when he made withdrawals from ATMs in Missouri and...

Sylvie Barak , Friday 4 July 2008. 17:02:00

Taiwanese sources chip in with their thoughts

THE TAIWANESE RUMOUR MILL is rife with speculation about Nvidia's recent admission as to why exactly it's taking a $150-200 million charge this quarter for a supposed product failure. The chipmaker was slightly ambiguous as to what the problems were, saying only that they stemmed from die/packaging materials used in...

Sylvie Barak , Friday 4 July 2008. 18:02:00

Street fight

GOOGLE IS SET to start photographing areas in the UK for its Street View tool this week, but British rights groups are already up in arms about it and are threatening to call on the Information Commissioner to take action against it....

Paul Taylor , Friday 4 July 2008. 21:40:00

Daily Wibblery Asrock does it again

OUR AMERICAN FRIENDS are likely to be busy today - being the Independence Day'n'all - but there's time for a lot of reading today… While world+dog looks on at the P45, X48 and G45 chipsets, the "mainstream" mobo market is receiving its first tastes of the P43 variety....

Paul Taylor the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 21:40:00

Daily Wibblery Asrock does it again

OUR AMERICAN FRIENDS are likely to be busy today - being the Independence Day'n'all - but there's time for a lot of reading today… While world+dog looks on at the P45, X48 and G45 chipsets, the "mainstream" mobo market is receiving its first tastes of the P43 variety....

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 18:02:00

Street fight

GOOGLE IS SET to start photographing areas in the UK for its Street View tool this week, but British rights groups are already up in arms about it and are threatening to call on the Information Commissioner to take action against it....

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 17:02:00

Taiwanese sources chip in with their thoughts

THE TAIWANESE RUMOUR MILL is rife with speculation about Nvidia's recent admission as to why exactly it's taking a $150-200 million charge this quarter for a supposed product failure. The chipmaker was slightly ambiguous as to what the problems were, saying only that they stemmed from die/packaging materials used in...

Sylvie Barak the Inquirer, Friday 4 July 2008. 16:32:00

Racing to map Europe's streets

AS IF WATCHING the Tour De France on TV wasn't boring enough, the organisers of the three week long bike race have now teamed up with Google to let fans see the route and track the cyclists' progress on Google Maps....

Convicted murderer Hans Reiser, the Linux guru who killed his wife, has substituted his defense lawyer for his divorce attorney ahead of a July 9 sentencing hearing, where a motion for a new trial will be ...

Submitted by nand on June 30, 2008 - 11:03. Ubuntu Brainstorm First million votes Already one million votes have been cast on ideas by Ubuntu users! Whoah! Call for moderators for project-specific Brainstorm ...

Microsoft has released all of the source code used in its Sandcastle project, which is now published at the CodePlex open source developer's Web site, according to a blog .

Evolis, the French manufacturer of solutions for plastic card customisation, today announced the release of a Linux driver for its entire range of printers, thus making them available, affordable and suitable ...

VLX for Network Infrastructure 3.0 is VirtualLogix's Real-Time Virtualization software, designed to address the demanding environments of communications equipment.

Everything Has Changed See how Intel developed the cure for deskside help visits in this video directed by Christopher Guest of Spinal Tap fame.

I HAVE been playing around with two cool netbooks -a new category of notebooks that promises to be lighter and cheaper.

HP 2133 Mini-Note 8.9 inch Laptop Starting At $499, Jun. 30 12 PM HP has the HP 2133 Mini-Note 8.9" Widescreen Notebook PC, featuring a lightweight 2.8lb chassis, flash-based storage, built-in webcam, and Linux ...

Let me start with pointers to the two most valuable resources that I constantly referred to prior to deciding which PCI wireless card would be the best fit for my home system running Fedora Core 5. Buying a ...

The remote SuSE system is missing the security patch kernel-5336. Description: This kernel update fixes the following security problems: CVE-2008-1615: On x86_64 a denial of service attack could be used by ...

Nokia's plan to open source the Symbian mobile OS platform is no threat to mobile Linux, maintains the executive director of the Linux Foundation.

Source: PC Advisor We could all use some computer help from time to time, whether it be with email, instant messaging or internet security.

After the recent release KDE 4.1 beta 2 and openSUSE 11 with KDE 4.0.4, some critics have been especially vocal in expressing their displeasure with the KDE 4 user interface paradigms.

Why OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Should Leave PowerPC In The Cold Solid State Drives Eat Battery Life, Don't Save It For Later The SSD Power Consumption Hoax : Flash SSDs Don't Improve Your Notebook Battery Runtime - ...

I've been meaning to write a post about DTrace , and Tim Bray's tweet finally got me moving.

In what would seem at first glance a surprising move, Roku have opened up their Netflix Player box to tinkerers by releasing the GPL code for the Linux-based download device.

Jamie Strandboge =========================================================== Ubuntu Security Notice USN-619-1 July 02, 2008 firefox vulnerabilities CVE-2008-2798, CVE-2008-2799, CVE-2008-2800, CVE-2008-2801, ...

How do I listen online? To listen online just click the icon on the top right of the screen labelled "Listen Live". This will launch the Galaxy player as a new window and start the streaming.

Feature Testing tools from Microsoft, Cisco, and HP lead to less security failures.

Linux & Open Source by Computerworld [Daily] The important news and issues about open systems including UNIX and Linux coverage.

What do you get when you cross scholarly research and dick jokes? Nothing to laugh at, normally. But science writer Jim Holt defies the Heisenberg principle of humor — you can't study it without killing it — in his book Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes. We caught up with him walking into a bar.

Wired: One question you tackle is who invented the joke. Weren't we cracking wise back in the caves?

Holt: No, the classic joke form — setup with incongruity, punch line that resolves the incongruity —seems to have come out of Greece and Rome. There's this guy in Greek -mythology called Palamedes who invented practically everything — numbers, currency, lighthouses, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He also supposedly invented the joke. And, of course, he was stoned to death.

Wired: So where do new jokes come from?

Holt: It used to be that all the jokes I got came from Wall Street. Now, with the Internet, they're sort of everywhere and nowhere at once. But the ideas for jokes are cultural — concepts that keep reappearing in different guises over the centuries.

Wired: There are lots of theories about why we joke. Which do you find most plausible?

Holt: Well, there's the superiority theory, that jokes express scorn for your inferiors — cripples and cuckolds and foreigners and the like. Plato said we laugh at vice. Then there's the Freudian interpretation, that it's all about sexual repression. Finally, there's the seduction theory, based on the observation that men do most of the joking while women do most of the laughing. Christopher Hitchens wrote a piece in Vanity Fair arguing that the only way most guys can impress women is to make them laugh.

Wired: But your favorite explanation is a mashup of Kant and evolutionary biology, right?

Holt: V. S. Ramachandran, the brain researcher, has a theory about the origin of laughter — that when you're in the jungle and there's an apparent threat, the first member of the kinship group to notice that it's not a real threat emits this stereotyped vocalization. And it's contagious, so everyone starts laughing. That's also the basis of the relief theory of humor, that there's a release of the energy you had summoned up to solve some puzzle. Kant said that the essence of humor is a strained expectation dissolving into nothing.

Wired: Did you find any candidates for the perfect joke?

Holt: I did find what might be the shortest possible joke: "Pretentious? Moi?"

Ethoxydiglycol
Back in the '50s, home hair dyes were laced with toxic chemicals that turned a simple touch-up into a haz-mat operation. Luckily, dye makers found substitutes like EDG, a fume- free organic solvent that keeps the ingredients in a thin, pourable consistency.

Oleyl Alcohol, Vegetable Fatty Acid
That thin, pourable consistency would be problematic during application. Mixing the base with the separate bottle of "color developer" causes these two fatty organic thickeners to kick in, making the product cling to your hair like shampoo.

Ethanolamine
In last month's episode of What's Inside, this ingredient starred as a solvent in Easy-Off oven cleaner. Here it's an alkalizer that boosts the pH toward bleachlike levels and swells the hair's outer layer so the color can penetrate more fully.

Erythorbic Acid
If you take ascorbic acid — aka vitamin C — and rearrange the atoms just so (isomerization!), you get erythorbic acid. It's a cheaper antioxidant that protects the dye from sun and oxygen damage.

Trisodium EDTA
With its ability to bind heavy metals, EDTA is used to clean up after radioactive spills. That same talent is enlisted here to suck up copper in tap water, which might otherwise react with the product to create damaging radicals. Dyed hair is messed up enough already.

Polyquaterium-22
Sounds like a comic- book invention, but this common polymer coats each strand, smoothing the shaft's outer layer and improving lubricity — a fancy way of saying it's a hair conditioner.

p-Aminophenol, p-Phenylenediamine
These so-called intermediates react inside the hair fiber to produce the appropriate color when oxidized. This combination turns dark brown. Other chemicals (or different proportions of these) can make any shade — from Sandy Blond to Jet Black.

Resorcinol
Is there anything this stuff can't do? It's used as a chemical skin peel, a biological glue for aortic surgery, a sunscreen, a treatment for whooping cough, and — when mixed with the right acids — a TNT-like explosive. In Just for Men, it's a coupler, an additive that reacts with the oxidized intermediates to dial in the target color.

Hydrogen Peroxide
When combined with the other ingredients, this ubiquitous denizen of the medicine cabinet provides a superabundance of highly reactive oxygen, which turns those intermediates and couplers into luxurious dark coloring that will surely fool everyone into thinking that this is your natural look.

Many long-distance lovers have become experts in how tech can augment sexuality.

No commuter couple should go without Skype, Twitter and mobile phones, while sex toys can take the repetitive stress injury out of a long-distance affair.

But it's not much of a stretch to think that there's a bigger need (read: market) for "tele-amore" devices than there ever will be for teledildonics (online sex toys controlled by a lover from anywhere in the world). And yet we don't have a lot of options when we're looking for devices designed to arouse our emotions.

Not everyone is comfortable enough with both sex and computers to get internet-enabled vibrators working, but we all want to interact with our partners in special ways. Despite the frenzy around social media applications, we still don't have sensual devices that extend that functionality beyond virtual space.

All it would take is something like the Ambient Orb hooked up to a desktop dot to get my heart racing.

Joseph Kaye, a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University studying human-computer interaction, developed the Virtual Intimate Object, or VIO, to study the effect of low-bandwidth applications on long-distance intimacy.

The VIO is a dot that sits in your system tray (Windows) or desktop (Mac) and monitors an identical dot on your partner's computer. When your partner clicks his or her dot, yours fills with color; as time goes by without a click, the color slowly fades until the circle is just an outline.

In Kaye's 2004 study (.pdf), five long-distance couples kept journals of how often they clicked the VIO and how using it made them feel. He notes that while he originally thought of the VIO as the source of intimacy, he realized that the journals quickly became an integral part of the experience for the couples.

Just as dancing leads to necking which leads to spanking and then to the oral sex, what was enough on day one was merely adequate by day five of the study.

By week's end, participants had several suggestions for additional functionality: a choice of colors, the option to play a sound, and the ability to replace the circle with their own set of graphics. They had become emotionally engaged not just with their partners, but with the application.

If you can get all that from a 2-D dot, think what you could do with an object you can touch.

Unfortunately, the closest thing I can find to that type of technology for consumers is the Nabaztag rabbit, a wireless device that connects with other Nabaztag rabbits over the internet. From a strictly romantic standpoint, they one-up the Chumby and the Tux Droid in that the rabbits can "marry" each other, so that when one partner moves their rabbit's ears, the paired rabbit's ears move the same way.

Chat acronyms, make way for the semaphore signs of love.

The Nabaztags are excruciatingly cute. I've wanted a set for years, but they weren't specifically designed for suitors. (Nor are they the seamless technical experience they claim to be, apparently: The Nabaztalk user forums provide a sobering counterpoint to the Nabaztags' slick product marketing.)

The human-computer interaction folks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology seem to understand the connection between technology and emotion, but their clever projects -- like the Lover's Cups that light up when a far-away partner takes a sip or the Mutsugoto interactive art bed -- have yet to break free of academia and museums.

Gadgets like teledildonics and sex machines that stimulate the body but shouldn't be used at work or in public only go so far. Sex tech doesn't have to be explicit to be effective: If you and your distant partner have been together long enough, you realize that tech that fosters intimacy, playfulness and common experiences has a much greater impact on the quality of your union than just having orgasms now and then.

I want to glance at the shelf and see an object glowing warmly because someone special sent me a message. I want to let someone know I'm thinking about him, simply by stroking my fingers over a smooth surface.

I know I'm not the only one who wants to interact through something sensual and swoopy and erotic that has no connection to business, chores or taxes.

I want my ambient intimacy object. Are you listening, developers? There's a mountain of money to be made keeping long-distance lovers connected in our increasingly complicated world.

See you in a fortnight,

Regina Lynn

- - -

Regina Lynn is the author of Sexier Sex: Lessons From the Brave New Sexual Frontier. She blogs at reginalynn.com.

1776: The Declaration of Independence is signed. It will take 117 years before someone gets around to saying, "Hey, maybe we should preserve this thing."

The Declaration of Independence can be fairly said to stand alongside the Magna Carta and Bill of Rights as the most important documents in the history of democracy. Its significance was understood from the moment it was signed, so one is left to wonder why its preservation was ignored for so long.

During the Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence was rolled up and toted around like a Thomas Bros. map, although, given the vicissitudes of war, that's perhaps understandable. Less understandable is what came later. Water was spilled on it while it was being copied in 1823. Then it was tacked up on the wall at the U.S. Patent Office for about 40 years, where it was subjected to a strong northern light.

Finally, the suggestion was made in 1903 that maybe it shouldn't be exposed to sunlight and, oh, by the way, maybe it should be kept dry, too. The latter turned out to be a bad idea because the Declaration, which was written on parchment, actually needs a bit of moisture to keep from cracking.

It wasn't until 1951 that the first modern preservation efforts began. The document was sealed inside a bronze, bullet-proof glass case at the National Archives building in Washington, D.C. Humidified helium replaced oxygen to prevent further erosion, and the glass was filtered to cut down on light exposure.

Beginning in 1987, using camera equipment developed for the Hubble Space Telescope, preservationists were able to monitor the Declaration for even the most minute signs of fading or flaking ink.

The measures proved effective, so much so that the Declaration outlived its original protective case. After undergoing careful inspection for further erosion in 2003, the document was resealed in a titanium casement filled with inert argon gas. Similar preservation techniques are used to protect the Bill of Rights and Constitution.

The Declaration of Independence remains on display in the rotunda of the National Archives, where it is seen by roughly 6,000 tourists every day. At night, when the crowds have all gone home, the case is lowered 22 feet into a vault.

That's almost as much protection as the French give to Napoleon.

Source: History.com

Former congressman Curt Weldon is helping broker deals between Russian and Ukranian weapons suppliers and the Iraqi and Libyan governments as part of his new job with a private American defense consulting firm, Wired.com has learned.

Weldon, who is currently being investigated by the FBI over alleged corruption during his time in office, visited Libya in March to discuss a possible military deal, according to a letter describing the trip from Weldon to Defense Solutions CEO Timothy Ringgold. In May, Weldon, together with Ringgold and another company representative, traveled to Moscow to discuss working with Russia's weapons-export agency on arms sales to the Middle East.

Both trips were part of the company's effort to tap into the growing -- and often legally murky -- market for selling weapons from former Eastern Bloc countries to the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Ex-Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pennsylvania, is helping broker deals between Russian weapons suppliers and the Iraqi and Libyan governments through his company, Defense Solutions.
Photo: H. Rumph Jr/AP

The Russians want to sell weapons to Iraq directly, but "must go slow on Iraq because of political reasons" and want to work with an "intermediary" like Defense Solutions, CEO Ringgold subsequently wrote to colleagues. "They have not spoken with any American company that can offer the quid pro quo that we can or that has the c