Nicao pointed me toward a piece of interesting reading yesterday and I thought it was worth sharing on your July 4th weekend. It is a piece over at DailyTech where they compare Apple to the Chinese government as they march against free speech and toward large-scale censorship. If you've got a spare 3 minutes, spent it wisely and read this article. It's some food for thought.
Ironically both Apple and China claim no religious stance, yet they could moralize with the best fundamentalists. And both do so with a warped idealistic naiveté that is comical and tragic all at once. Do Apple and China really think they can block their users from adult content? Do they really think that they can block their users from taking religious stands?
If your USB storage tastes lean toward the high-end of style and price then the new MNEMOSYNE
16-gigabyte USB storage cube may be the device for you. Created by
Italy-based designers Toshi Satoji and Katsuya Masaki, each black cube
is constructed with a unique puzzle pattern and carved from a single
block of aluminum.
The term netbook, coined by Intel, conveys little
useful information about this category of machines. Sure, they all have
wireless networking, but so does every other laptop. What the term
originally helped to identify was a class of small, ultralightweight,
cheap-as-dirt mobile PCs.
Netbooks are tiny –
usually between half and two-thirds the size of a garden-variety laptop
– and they typically weigh around 2.5 pounds. With their cool, slim
designs, they outclass some fancy ultraportables. And best of all,
these diminutive laptops start at around $200 (in some cases $100, when
purchased as part of a mobile broadband promotional deal).
The brainchild of budding entrepreneurs and research labs, these
tech failures were intended to become commonplace in our fast-changing
world.
Unfortunately, they turned into Frankensteins that no
one wanted – mostly for scientific reasons, technical dependencies, or
a poorly conceived business model.
The Firefox 3.5 download frenzy continues, and in the first 24 hours has surpassed 2 Million downloads. For those of you keeping track at home, Firefox 3.0 had over 8.3 million downloads in the first 48 hours so the downloads are going to need to pickup alot to get past the previous record. ComputerWorld has more on the Firefox 3.5 release over here. If you haven't jumped on the Firefox bandwagon and want to give it a try, head on over here to get your very own copy of Firefox 3.5.
At about noon Pacific, Firefox director Mike Beltzner said that a
million copies of Firefox 3.5 had already been downloaded, and that the
download rate was close to 80 per second. "We didn't do as much
outreach this time," said Beltzner, comparing the low-key approach
Mozilla took in the days preceding today's launch to last summer's
promotion for the then-new Firefox 3.0.
Microsoft has released their new search engine Bing, and so far the reviews have been very positive. ChannelWeb is reporting that Bing has increased 1% in their market share (taking Microsoft up to 8.23% of search traffic), which might not seem like a big deal, but anytime any search engine gains ground against Google people get excited. Bing is closing in on Yahoo (Yahoo currently had 11.04% of search traffic), but still has a long long ways to go before it catches up to Google's 78.5% of search traffic. For more on Bing, Yahoo and Google head on over to ChannelWeb.
Microsoft's new Bing search engine
has eked out a slight gain in market share, according to statistics
released Wednesday, but it has a long way to go before it catches up
with industry leader Google.
Microsoft had 8.23 percent market share in June " the first month
its Bing online search engine was available, according to StatCounter
Global Stats, a Web site traffic analysis firm. That put Bing not far
behind Yahoo's 11.04 percent market share but far behind Google's 78.48
percent.
Ahh yes, the Pirate Bay Saga takes another interesting turn (Surprise!), a day after being announced that the Pirate Bay had sold, allegations are flying like cannon balls that the company taking them over has some insider trading going on. Luckily for the Pirate Bay guys they've got tons of legal experience so fighting a insider trading charge shouldn't be a big deal. For more on the ongoing Pirate Bay story head on over to Wired.
Securities regulators are investigating potential insider trading of
Global Gaming Factory before it announced its planned purchase of The
Pirate Bay for $7.7 million, exchange AktieTorget told Swedish media.
AktieTorget, a Swedish exchange listing some 116 public companies,
suspended trading in Global Gaming a week before the announcement as
trading volume and share prices jumped without public news to account
for it.
“There are reasons to suspect that information was leaked,” said Peter Gönczi, executive vice president at AktieTorget.
The news just keeps rolling in and this time around we've got a few power supplies worth noting. The first is from HardwareSecrets and they use and abuse the BFG ES-800 PSU this morning. These guys have probably the best PSU testing platform around and the BFG unit managed to pass at 767W, but failed at their next highest scenario. It works alright, but it's a very "quiet" PSU.
The main problem with this power supply is noise and ripple. The first sample we got presented noise levels outside specs from test two on, with -12 V at 195 mV during test one but at 50 mV or below on other tests.
Bjorn3D puts the In-Win Comander 650/750W PSUs through the paces as well and shows off how these PSUs can handle their machine. They are somewhat modular and this is a good thing in my opinion, as I'm starting to get sick of the cable clutter from large non-modular PSUs.
Both of the IN-WIN power supplies did fairly well during testing. Even though they dropped below 12 Volts during full load testing, but a 0.03 below 12 volts is not enough to even remotely something to be concerned with. The moisture in the air can change the outcome of the testing. As with any testing it is never 100% foolproof.
We have just posted up a review of relatively little MeOrb cooler from Thermaltake
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