NEW NET Issues List for 13 Jan 2009
Below is the final list of issues for the TUESDAY, 13 Jan 2009, NEW NET (Northeast Wisconsin Network for Economy and Technology) 7:00 - 9:00 pm weekly gathering -- the first for 2009. This week we're upstairs at Tom's Drive In, 501 N Westhill Blvd, Appleton, Wisconsin, USA.
The ‘net
1. Get (Almost) Any Book For Free http://tinyurl.com/76tc9h (BachelorsDegreeOnline) “Reading a book is fun, but when you forgot it at home, are bored at work or are just curious to get a sneak peek at whatever you ordered from Amazon, online book sites can be handy too. Below is a list of over 100 free (and legal) sites to find great literature for download…”
2. Yelping in
3. Skype 4.0 in February, Lite for Android http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2338475,00.asp “…Android phones will now have at least one edge over Apple's iPhone: They'll be able to make Skype calls…the eBay-owned company announced that the next version of its extremely popular Windows version, Skype 4.0 would launch in early February…8 percent of the total number of call minutes in the world were carried over Skype. Even Oprah has joined in, using the service several times a week for a seminar based on Eckhart Tolle's book…The redesigned interface gives prominence to video, and Durchslag said the company wouldn't be happy unless the percent of video calls surpassed 50 percent over the next 18 months…the application still lacks multi-party calling, like what's possible with the Web-based TokBox service…”
4. Wikipedia's War on Gaming History http://www.brighthub.com/computing/windows-platform/articles/22166.aspx “…there is a dirty little secret at Wikipedia: they don't want to preserve historical information about online games…I need to explain something about the current status of Wikipedia culture and Wikipedians. There are huge numbers of editors there whose main reason for participating is the goal of becoming an administrator. To become an administrator, you need contributions…In addition to contributions, you also need to do administrator-like things…Cleaning up Wikipedia in the name of "making it a better place" is a great example. Exposing "troublemakers" to higher ups so they can be banned or locked is another example…The best way for an editor to become an admin is get lots of stuff deleted, and get people you irritate while doing it banned…Banning in this manner is completely forbidden by Wikipedia policy…Wikipedia is broken - possibly beyond repair…Wikipedia has too many people desperate to become administrators for all the wrong reasons…Many Wikipedia "editors" are horrendously full of themselves…Many Wikipedia "editors" are perfect examples of the expression "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing…This is a cautionary tale for people with interest in any obscure or niche topic. Wikipedia cannot be relied on to preserve history or information about non-mainstream topics. The current culture actually discourages it…”
5. ProjectThingy: Innovation in Collaboration http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/projectthingy_innovation_in_co.php “…ProjectThingy is project management software that can be seamlessly integrated into your site giving your team and clients a familiar project environment and full collaboration capabilities. While we love Basecamp and use it daily here at ReadWriteWeb, the idea of embedding this type of software into a page using only a few lines of code is appealing. Easy to use, you just point to the domain you want it to live on, create a username, password and voila - ProjectThingy spits out the code for you to cut and paste to your site…Free: 1 Active Project, 50MB Storage…”
6. Tough Love For Microsoft Search http://searchengineland.com/tough-love-for-microsoft-search-15968 [Danny Sullivan gives a detailed explanation of why Microsoft continues to have the third place search engine with < style="">there are those within Microsoft who DO love search…Google does need a counter-balance, and Microsoft has a quality search product that could provide this…the same people within Microsoft who are so diligently trying to succeed are let down by a company culture overall that sees the internet and search in particular as a kind of sideshow…it’s not so much a stretch to think Gates or Ballmer would make an appearance at one of my events. It’s not just me. No major search conference has ever seen either man make an appearance. Over the years, I’ve noted them individually turning up at fairly minor computer security, software developer or financial conferences. But make a real effort to get in front of that search audience they’ve said is so important to them and their company’s future? Hasn’t happened…along comes Google out of nowhere making all this money off of search and starting to encroach into the Microsoft OS/software areas. You could almost hear the groan from
7. Delete 10 Facebook friends, get a free Whopper http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10136679-36.html “…Facebook's developer platform has been used for a zillion marketing campaigns so far, but this one is actually dead-on hilarious…Burger King has created "Whopper Sacrifice," a Facebook app that will give you a coupon for a free hamburger if you delete 10 people from your friends list…Now is the time to put your fair-weather Web friendships to the test," the Whopper Sacrifice site explains. "Install Whopper Sacrifice on your Facebook profile, and we'll reward you with a free flame-broiled Whopper when you sacrifice ten of your friends. The funniest part: The "sacrifices" show up in your activity feed. So it'll say, for example, "Caroline sacrificed Josh Lowensohn for a free Whopper…”
8. LinkedIn Engagement Metrics Will Soar in 2009 http://tinyurl.com/9l372u (SarahLacy) “…in a world where Facebook and Twitter meet most of my connecting needs, the only uniquely powerful application for LinkedIn in my view is job hunting, and I haven't had to look for a job since I've been a member. So…I've never had much reason to spend a lot of time there. So what changed today? I got a request to introduce a friend hunting for a job with her ideal potential employer, and unlike nearly all LinkedIn notification emails, I felt motivated to click on it right then. While I was there, I wrote a recommendation for her…Then, I realized I hadn't updated my profile to include Yahoo and BusinessWeek, so I did that. And then uploaded a picture. Then, I went through a very full inbox of requests. Before I knew it, LinkedIn had sucked up nearly an hour of my day. What roped me in? The ability to easily and tangibly help someone I care about get a job…LinkedIn has always been a great tool for convenience and a decent tool for connecting, but this request satisfied all three. Convenience is the most obvious: As opposed to my friend asking via email or casual conversation if I knew anyone at the company in question, LinkedIn told her who I knew, told me who it was, and made it drop-dead simple to forward an introductory note. In terms of connection, it reminded me that I really liked this person, and she'd helped my career greatly in the past, making me want to repay that kindness and giving me an easy way…”
9. No More Free Jott For You http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/13/no-more-free-jott-for-you/ “…In August voice-to-text service Jott moved out of beta and added a premium feature for $4/month. Since then, the company says, about 30% of Jott’s active users have opted for the premium, no-ads version of the service….The free version of Jott is going to end on February 2, CEO John Pollard told me today. The terrible advertising market, he says, means every customer has to pay their own way from now on. Customers will need to pay $4/month to continue the service, the current price for a premium account…”
10. Ultimate Review List of Best Web Hosting Providers http://tomuse.com/reviews-top-website-host-companies-compare/ “…Over the past few weeks I’ve been searching the web to find the best hosting providers available. After encountering so many, I thought it would be helpful for others if I reviewed each hosting company and provided a comprehensive comparison chart…”
Security, Privacy & Digital Controls
11. Mumbai police to eliminate unsecured Wi-Fi connections http://tinyurl.com/7ecwa5 (TimesOfIndia) “…In an initiative taken by the Mumbai police, in the backdrop of terror mails sent before blasts and terror attacks, policemen will be sent to various locations in the city in search of unsecured Wi-Fi connections. "If a particular place's Wi-Fi is not password protected or secured then the policemen at the spot has the authority to issue notice to the owner of the Wi-Fi connection directing him to secure the connection," DCP Sanjay Mohite said. The notice will be issued by the police under section 149 of the Criminal Procedure Code which is to prevent the commission of a cognizable offence…Terror mails were sent through unsecured Wi-Fi connections prior to the Delhi and Ahmedabad blasts…”
12. Nortel's China Syndrome http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/11/nortel-huawei-buyout-tech-enter-cx_ag_0112nortel.html “…Nortel, whose stock has lost 96% of its value last year, announced in September that it would sell its metro Ethernet business…The most interested potential acquirer of that division of Nortel may be Huawei, which bid $400 million for Nortel's offering…recent rumors suggest Israeli networking company Radware may be bidding as little as $50 million for the same division…given Huawei's history, a tieup with the company would raise the specter of a hidden back door in a router or switch, siphoning that data to foreign spies…Before he founded Huawei in 1988, Ren was an engineering director for the Chinese military's telecom research department. Today, "Huawei maintains deep ties with the Chinese military, which serves a multifaceted role as an important customer, as well as Huawei's political patron and research and development partner…The U.S. now has to understand the fact that we no longer corner the market on high tech devices and software," he says. "We all have to recognize that hardware and software are going to come from China. We have to make risk-based decisions…direct spying isn't simple, argues…author of The Myth of Homeland Security. Hiding undetectable vulnerabilities or data-thieving code in networking hardware is tricky work…The chance that a Chinese company would build trap doors into our core infrastructure is a silly thing to worry about when federal government is outsourcing much of its operations already…”
13. Who's Watching You on the Web? http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/whos_watching_you_on_the_web.php “…Ever wanted to have instant information about any trackers used by a website you visit? Then take a look at Ghostery, a Firefox extension that alerts you to any Web Bugs present on a site…Ghostery 1.3.1 has been given a clean bill of health by Softpedia meaning it is free of spyware, adware and viruses…”
14. AVG Technologies buys Sana Security http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39591100,00.htm “…Czech antivirus-software company AVG Technologies has bought Sana Security, the Californian makers of identity-theft prevention software. The deal, which closed on Friday and was announced on Tuesday, gives AVG its first offices in Silicon Valley…Sana's ID-theft prevention products are based on behavioural technology that identifies malicious code by analysing its behaviour, rather than by checking signatures…We're seeing over 40,000 new [malware] samples coming through our lab every single day," Smith said. "Although we can handle three times that amount, the rate at which they're growing is massive…Sana's software only uses one percent of the user's CPU power…Asked whether AVG would integrate Sana's technology into its popular free antivirus product, Smith said only that such a move was being evaluated…”
15. NSA, DHS, Industry Gang Up on Dangerous Software Errors http://tinyurl.com/8d2q4j (Business Week) “…a broad coalition of companies, government agencies, academics, and advocacy groups launched a program to assure than software is free of 25 common errors that lead to the bulk of security problems…Software buyers, particularly governments and large corporations are being urged to demand that vendors certify that code they sell is free of these 25 errors, and there’s nothing like potential legal liability to get a company’s attention. In addition, colleges are pledging to train students in writing software and employers can use the guidelines to assess the skills of the programmers they hire…the problems are the same ones that have created security liabilities for decades…”
16. The evil genius of XP Antivirus 2008 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/22/anatomy_of_a_hack/print.html “…xpantivirus.com…is registered to Chebotarev Oleksandr, in Odessa, Ukraine (http://whois.domaintools.com/xpantivirus.com). This had me very curious and I wanted to know more about what this site was attempting to achieve. Consequently, I fired up a virtual machine and started investigating. What I found was an interesting tale of trickery…It appears likely that these sites are all related and that there are multiple fronts for them. Virus-securityscanner.com appears to be hosted at an ISP in Pennsylvania at the time of this writing, but that is likely to change by the time you read this. In fact, between the time I started researching this and the time I wrote the article, the site name had changed to virus-onlinescanner.com…If you click cancel, it just goes directly to a download for a fake anti-malware program…more than likely they have a few hundred different obfuscated versions of the same malware sitting on the server. After downloading the file, I sent it to virustotal.com, a site that scans files on demand using a large number of reputable commercial anti-malware engines…only GData and Kaspersky detected the current version as malware…the malware did not actually take any malicious action beyond what I have documented here…the software may include detection logic to discover that it is running in a virtual machine, causing it to forego some of the malicious actions it otherwise would. Such logic is becoming more common in malware as it makes it far more difficult for researchers to analyze the software…Fortunately, other anti-malware software did detect it. Figure 20 shows the warning from AVG Free…”
Mobile Computing & Communicating
17. Palm strikes back with new OS, pré handset at CES http://tinyurl.com/957fdv (Ars technica) “…Palm announced its next-generation smart phone platform, called webOS…Palm also announced a new phone, the Palm pré, set for launch in the first half of 2009. It features a 3.1-inch multitouch screen with 320x480 resolution over a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, all squeezed into a small, 4.8-oz package…As a dedicated iPhone user, I experienced something very strange and quite unexpected while watching Palm demo the new OS: my iPhone suddenly felt old and played out. It's like Palm started with the iPhone, copied all the best ideas, and then made the whole package better…The entire UI is based on a "desktop + cards" paradigm, where "cards" replace "windows" or even "apps…This card paradigm is truly fascinating, and it appears to be a very effective way to do multitasking on a smartphone…Palm has completely redeemed itselves from the Foleo fiasco by launching the very first phone that truly builds on what Apple started with the iPhone and takes it to the next level…”
18. Palm Pre vs. iPhone vs. G1 http://i.gizmodo.com/5126870/in-a-nutshell-palm-pre-vs-iphone-vs-g1 “…Let's drill down and see how the Palm Pre compares with the iPhone and Android's G1…Multitouch touchscreen/gesture control: All three are capacitive, only the Pre and iPhone have multitouch…Multitasking: The G1's notifications drawer was definitely a step in the right direction, but the Pre's interface is the first smartphone OS that was built with multitasking as a core design element…Hardware…Development platform…Web Integration…App Store/developer community…Wireless charger…The Network…Physical keyboard…Camera…Battery…Copy & Paste…Browser…”
19. Texting a signal of wider trends http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7822564.stm “Ask anyone over 25 what digit they use to ring a doorbell and most people will pop up their index finger. But ask a youngster and they are much more likely to extend a thumb. "Where texting is happening they use the thumb," Anand Chandrasekher, head of Intel's ultra mobility group, told BBC News…The next generation of computer users is kids and the way they use it is totally different," he said…If you look at what's happening underneath we think it's about the internet and the internet becoming pervasive," said Mr Chandrasekher. "People want it wherever they are…Research by Intel suggests that 80% of people with a smartphone get frustrated when accessing the net with one…That frustration, said Mr Chandrasekher, helped to explain the growing interest in so-called netbooks…”
20. Ford Sync Version 3.0 http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-10138116-48.html “We've been pretty impressed by Sync's Bluetooth phone and MP3 player connectivity, but Version 3.0 of Sync gains a whole new dimension with an array of connected services that includes navigation, traffic conditions, business search, weather, and other information sources. To use these services, you hit the voice command button in a Sync-equipped car and request services. The system uses your Bluetooth paired phone to connect with a server where you can request, by voice, directions, traffic conditions, a local business search, and other services…this new version of Sync requires a GPS chip, which wasn't installed with earlier versions of Sync, so there won't be backward compatibility…There is no subscription fee for the first three years of ownership…”
21. iPod touch use “exploded” http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/01/10/ipod-touch-use-exploded-christmas-day/ “…Net Applications (a Web metrics firm), and AdMob (a mobile Web ad network) both produced graphs last week with sharp Christmas day spikes of the kind you usually see only from runaway hits. “iPod Touch requests on AdMob’s network exploded on December 25th,”…Ad requests from the devices — a rough measure of Web traffic — increased 3.4 times from November to December. Since July those requests have increased more than 16-fold, from 18 million to 292 million…Apple sold 3.5 million iPod touches in 2008 Q1, which closed at the end of December 2007…”
Open Source
22. Widespread vulnerabilities found in programs which use OpenSSL http://tinyurl.com/8e7rvp (Netcraft) “New vulnerabilities were discovered yesterday in multiple programs using OpenSSL, one of the standard cryptography libraries on Linux and Unix systems. Due to a common mistake in checking return values from functions checking digital signatures, several programs may be vulnerable to spoofing of digital signatures. The most important affected program is ISC Bind, which is the most widely used DNS server on the internet…”
23. A Software Populist Who Doesn’t Do Windows http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/business/11ubuntu.html “…Mark Shuttleworth, the charismatic 35-year-old billionaire from South Africa who functions as the spiritual and financial leader of this coding clan. Created just over four years ago, Ubuntu (pronounced oo-BOON-too) has emerged as the fastest-growing and most celebrated version of the Linux operating system, which competes with Windows primarily through its low, low price: $0. More than 10 million people are estimated to run Ubuntu today…Canonical, based in London, has more than 200 full-time employees…The Macedonian education department relies on Ubuntu, providing 180,000 copies of the operating system to children, while the Spanish school system has 195,000 Ubuntu desktops. In France, the National Assembly and the Gendarmerie Nationale, the military police force, rely on Ubuntu for a combined 80,000 PCs…”
24. Linux 2.6.28's five best features http://blogs.computerworld.com/linux_2_6_28s_five_best_features “…the release of the next major Linux kernel: Linux 2.6.28…Here are the five features that I think most of us will appreciate the most as we move into the New Year. Ext4…GEM Memory Manager for Graphics…Disk Shock Protection…Staging Drivers…Network improvements…”
SkyNet
25. Google Pre-Beta of Chrome 2.0 http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_releases_first_pre-beta_of_chrome_20.php “…Chrome team keeps releasing updates to Google's browser on an almost weekly basis, but it is interesting that the latest version in the developer channel is now already being called 2.0. This comes just about four months after Google first released its browser to the public. This new version (2.0.156.1) is only available in the developer channel…”
26. Google School of Personal Growth http://www.soulscode.com/googles-stealth-launch-of-a-school-for-spirituality/ “…Last summer with zero fanfare, Google joined the human potential movement. The vehicle: Google University, which is in a building one street down from the main Googleplex in Mountainview. One of the institution’s four departments: The School of Personal Growth…Google has always had a global vision, and wants to change the world from the inside out,” says Monika Broecker, a leadership coach and therapist from Germany who was an architect of the program. “You need to have inner peace to make peace in the world.”…Tan suggested that Google’s School of Personal Growth is a futuristic model for every workplace. “Google wants to help Googlers grow as human beings on all levels,” Tan said in his presentation. “Emotional, mental, physical and ‘beyond the self…Engineers can only make up 50 percent of any class; they are cross-fertilized with a mix of marketers, managers and employees from sales…” [linked from http://blogs.bnet.com/intercom/?p=1947]
27. Google Online Marketing Challenge http://services.google.com/events/marketing_challenge_2009_reg “…Registrations for the 2009 Challenge are now open until the 23rd of January. After you have registered, Google will be in touch with details to help you get started with your class…”
General Technology
28. Work on Stuff that Matters http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-fir.html “…I want to make clear that "work on stuff that matters" does not mean focusing on non-profit work, "causes, or any other form of "do-goodism." Non-profit projects often do matter a great deal, and people with tech skills can make important contributions, but it's essential to get beyond that narrow box. I'm a strong believer in the social value of business done right. We need to build an economy in which the important things are paid for in self-sustaining ways rather than as charities to be funded out of the goodness of our hearts…Work on something that matters to you more than money…One test of a bubble is how many entrepreneurs are focused on their upcoming payday rather than on the big things they hope to accomplish…It's also clear that if you're thinking more about the competition than you are about customers and the value you're going to create for them, you're on the wrong path. As Kathy Sierra once put it, "In many cases, the more you try to compete, the less competitive you actually are…Create more value than you capture…If you're succeeding at this goal, you may sometimes find that others have made more of your ideas than you have yourself. It's OK. I've had more than one billionaire (and an awful lot of startups who hope to follow in their footsteps) tell me how they got their start with a couple of O'Reilly books. I've had entrepreneurs tell me that they got the idea for their company from something I've said or written. That's a good thing…Take the long view…Our economy has many elements of a ponzi scheme. We borrow from other countries to finance our consumption, we borrow from our children by saddling them with debt and using up non-renewable resources…” [see also http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/010853.html]
29. Nvidia takes on stereo 3D with GeForce 3D Vision http://ces.cnet.com/8301-19167_1-10134983-100.html “…Nvidia's stereo 3D hardware is homegrown, and it's also one of the few products that Nvidia itself is distributing to retail. For $199, GeForce 3D Vision gets you a set of battery-powered, wireless glasses, as well as an infrared emitter that acts as a go-between for your computer and either a 120Hz PC LCD or a DLP HD television. Where iZ3D's glasses are passive, Nvidia's are active, which is to say they require power to perform the appropriate image processing…The visual effect is more than simply cheap Hollywood-style 3D flash. In Left 4 Dead, we had the sense of a much more immersive depth of field than you get from standard 3D games on a 2D display. Nvidia also gives you a dial on the emitter to increase the perception of depth…”
30. Is it the end of the desktop PC? http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE50601320090107 “…The age of the desktop PC appears to be over as its more portable cousin, the laptop, surges ahead…Not a single desktop model figured on online shopping portal Amazon.com's top 10 selling PC and hardware list the weekend before Christmas…It was yet another sign that the former dominance of desktop PCs is fading as wireless advances and lower prices make laptops the preferred option for millions of PC users around the world…The ability to surf the Internet wirelessly at public places, the need to be able to take your office out with you when you travel, and an increasing range of notebook computers have all led to lower desktop sales…Many companies eagerly awaiting the era of the laptop are in Taiwan, maker of about 80 percent of the world's laptop PCs…”
31. Disk Investigator: Raw Hard Drive Data http://lifehacker.com/5128973/disk-investigator-examines-raw-hard-drive-data “…Disk Investigator takes a different approach than many data retrieval tools by examining the raw data on the disk…Searching for a string like "password" will reveal every single instance of the word throughout the entire disk inside code, help files, documents, where ever it may be found. If you're at your wits end trying to recover a deleted file or mine the depths of your computer for something that is stubbornly resisting being found, if it exists there is a strong chance Disk Investigator will turn it up…”
32. 10 Tiny Pico Projectors http://tinyurl.com/7v7uqb (FastCompany) “…last year the first wave of these ultra-portable beauties, many less than an inch thick, began throwing light at CES. And now there are a slew of different projectors from Dell, Toshiba, Acer, BenQ, Samsung and BUGlabs that use the DLP Pico chipset and connect to laptops, iPhones and other portable media devices. Here are 10 of the tiny-but-mighty Pico products that you'll be losing in your lint drawer soon…”
33. Phoenix Releases HyperSpace http://technologyexpert.blogspot.com/2009/01/phoenix-releases-hyperspace-improves.html “…Phoenix Technologies' HyperSpace technology in late 2007. The idea was to give laptops instant-on capability using (I surmised) a Linux partition. But it disappeared from view after that. However, at CES on Tuesday, Phoenix "re-launched" it, with downloadable "hybrid" and "dual" versions. The Hybrid version is designed for laptops in which the CPU has hardware virtualization built-in, such as the Core 2 Duo…With Hybrid, a user can hot-switch back and forth between the two environments; with Dual, a reboot into the other platform is required…HyperSpace has its own website…”
34. The 2TB Memory Card http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSTRE5086VE20090109 “…The first of a new series of "extended capacity" cards, dubbed "SDXC," will be available toward the end of this year en route to an eventual 2 terabytes of onboard storage capacity in less than five years...The first such cards are likely to provide 64 gigabytes of storage, twice the maximum in existing SDHC memory cards…SD cards account for nearly 80 percent of the memory card market…”
Leisure & Entertainment
35. EchoStar Unveils First Placeshifting HD DVR http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0464494.htm “…EchoStar Technologies LLC…introduced today at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show the EchoStar SlingLoaded(TM) 922 HD DVR, the world's first high definition digital video recorder that incorporates Sling Media's patented placeshifting technology…By integrating Sling Media's Slingbox technology, the EchoStar 922 allows TV aficionados to watch and control their favorite TV shows and sporting events from anywhere in the world via a broadband Internet connection on their laptop or mobile phone…features a massive 1 terabyte hard drive for up to 1,000 hours of storage and supports connecting an external hard drive for more storage…”
36. Toshiba Launches TV With Same Chip As PlayStation 3 http://www.crn.com/hardware/212701349 “…Toshiba Wednesday at CES unveiled plans for a new television powered by…the Cell, chips originally developed by IBM, Toshiba and Sony. Cell-enabled TVs will be able to show as many as 48 separate moving pictures on a single TV screen, with high-definition graphics to boot…Another Toshiba CES announcement concerned new TVs that will use Yahoo, Intel and Microsoft technology to access content from the Web. Toshiba will integrate the Yahoo and Intel-developed Widget Channel applications framework and also Extender for Microsoft's Windows Media Center into LCD TVs…”
Economy and Technology
37. Money From Side Projects http://tinyurl.com/a33yvw (PseudoCoder) “…Over the past few years I’ve been cranking out random side projects whenever I get a decent idea…At the moment I have 10 or so sites up and running. Two of the sites make a little money… these sites pretty much run themselves, which is as awesome as it sounds…PlanbookEdu.com - This is a site for school teachers, designed to make their lesson planning easier. It originally launched in January of 2003 and the new version was re-launched this past July. There are currently over 3000 registered users, with 171 paying $20/year for premium features. That works out to $3420 for 2008. In 2007 there were 84 paying users ($1680)…RSStalker.com - This site gets approximately 50 hits a day from actual users…and over 50k hits a day from various RSS aggregators. Once a user has setup their feed there is no reason to go back to the site. If they buy a product using a link in the feed I get a commission from Amazon. In 2007 RSStalker sold 1049 items, generating $68,368.62 in revenue for Amazon and $3,358.20 in commission for me. The 2008 numbers are very similar: 1070 items, $76,875.06 revenue, $3,675.17 commission…”
38. Business wiki AboutUs lands $2.5 million from Voyager Capital http://tinyurl.com/9f7ndd (TechFlash) “…AboutUs, which today is announcing a $2.5 million venture round from Voyager Capital, has something going for it that many Internet startups can only dream of. Last year, the 3-year-old business wiki turned a profit, generating revenue through online advertising and consulting services. You heard that right. A startup is actually making money through online advertising…You can think of AboutUs as a Wikipedia for businesses…”
39. Yahoo offers Carol Bartz CEO post http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10141742-93.html “…Yahoo has offered the chief executive post to former Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz and she intends to respond to the offer "quickly," said a source familiar with the talks…”
40. A123 Systems seeking $1.8B from Feds for U.S. battery plants http://tinyurl.com/8qceb9 (MassHighTech) “…lithium ion battery maker A123Systems
Civilian Aerospace
41. SpaceX Aims For 2009 Re-usability Demo http://tinyurl.com/95qe2o (AviationWeek) “…Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) hopes to recover the spent first stage of its Falcon 1 launcher as early as the upcoming fifth test flight…Musk says "Flight 5 is a better shot, but I think on Flight 6 it's highly likely we'll recover the first stage…Falcon 9 is set to conduct three demonstration flights under the existing Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) agreement with NASA. The first flight, C1, is targeted for mid-2009 and will be a short-duration mission involving four and a half orbits of the Dragon cargo vehicle, while C2, scheduled for the following November, will be a more complex mission requiring a 6-mile flyby of the International Space Station…”
42. Virgin Galactic denies reports of White Knight 2 rudder problems http://tinyurl.com/7gju8w (Telegraph) “…The journal cited an unnamed source as providing the information about the supposed difficulties during the test flight at the Mohave Desert in California. It claimed that Peter Siebold, the test pilot, was unable to keep the aircraft on the runway…this was denied by Will Whitehorn, Virgin Galactic's president. "There are no issues we know of at all at this stage which will affect the programme or the overall design…It was a highly successful test flight and everything is going to plan.," said Mr Whitehorn, adding that the next test flight would take place in a fortnight…”
43. SPACEHAB secures new missions http://finance.yahoo.com/news/SPACEHAB-Subsidiary-Secures-bw-13994053.html “SPACEHAB Inc…Astrotech subsidiary located in Titusville, Florida was awarded two contracts totaling $3.2 million from United Launch Alliance (ULA) in support of the ground processing of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites, GOES O&P. Both satellites are scheduled for launch in 2009…”
Supercomputing & GPUs
44. AMD Teases Cloud Computing Game Revolution http://tinyurl.com/82gxpt (PCWorld) “…AMD divulged plans for a client-server solution that would deliver "graphically-intensive applications" to "virtually any type of mobile device with a web browser without making the device rapidly deplete battery life or struggle to process the content…Streaming video games would upend gaming as we know it. For starters, the technology would challenge the need for offline retail sales, eliminate lengthy software downloads, spiraling local storage requirements, messy DRM software, expensive computer components, and reduce PC hardware driver and code compatibility quirks…But the single most important super-secret undesignated feature of technology like AMD's Fusion Render Cloud? It's pirate-proof. Why? Because it eliminates the very thing bootleggers need to do their dirty work -- physical media…”
45. Nvidia Closing in on 2 Teraflops http://tinyurl.com/877o2w (PCWorld) “…Nvidia…GTX 295 graphics cards has two graphics processing units (GPUs) with 240 cores each…The card delivers 1.788 teraflops of performance…The graphics card also supports PhysX, a hardware and software engine that adds physical reality to games, like smoke billowing from an object after an explosion, or the behavior of a rock after it hits a target…The monster of a card supports around 1.8GB of graphics memory…”
posted by myDigitechnician at 13.1.09
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