Aug. 1935—Known as the “notificator,” the new machine is installed in streets, stores railroad stations or other public place where individuals may leave messages for friends. The machine is similar in appearance to a candy-vending device.
rgarbacz writes “Today at 13:12 GMT ESA launched successfully new and long awaiting spacecrafts: Herschel — the 3.5m mirror infrared telescope, and Planck — the CMB mapper. The spacecrafts were carried by the Arian 5, which lifted off from Kourou in French Guiana. They will stay in L2 to perform the research. Herschel and Planck are one of the most expensive and important missions of the European Space Agency. They were built to perform measurements with an outstanding quality. Planck will measure CMB with accuracy below 1%, over 10 times better than the previous mission WMAP. Because of this high sensitivity both spacecrafts are cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero by on board liquid helium, and staying in L2 is very helpful to maintain this state. Both spacecrafts are designed to observe the Universe at its infancy, the Herschel — the first stars (those real ones), and galaxies (whichever came first), the Planck the first photons which were set free, the so called cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB).”
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demishade writes “Peacekeeper, the browser benchmark from the makers of 3DMark comes out of beta and shows an interesting (though perhaps not surprising) tidbit — the more popular a browser, the worse its performance. While it should not be surprising to anyone that IE slugs at the last place, the gap between Firefox and Chrome, is. Once IE’s market share goes the way of the Dodo will web developers start cursing Firefox? How long until Google comes out with a JavaScript intensive application that will practically require Chrome to function?”
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PL/SQL Guy writes “The Kindle has a number of “remote kill” flags built in to the hardware that, among other things, allow the text-to-speech function to be disabled at any time on a book-by-book basis. ‘Beginning yesterday, Random House Publishers began to disable text-to-speech remotely. The TTS function has apparently been remotely disabled in over 40 works so far.’ But what no one at Amazon will discuss is what other flags are lurking in the Kindle format: is there a “read only once” flag? A “no turning the pages backwards” flag?”
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LegionKK writes “”Ultimately, deciding whether you should take an online quiz comes down to a question of trust: Are you comfortable putting your information — personal or financial — into the owner’s hands? Remember, even if you don’t directly input data, it can be passed along. Such is the case with Facebook, where just opening an application automatically grants its developer access to your entire profile. And don’t assume that the developer isn’t going to use the information within. […] The ads can follow you long after you click away, too. Just look at RealAge, a detailed quiz that assigns you a “biological age” based on your family history and health habits. The site, a recent investigation revealed, takes your most sensitive answers — those about sexual difficulties, say, or signs of depression — and sells them to drug companies looking to market medications.””
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In a bid to educate pirates, copyright holders hire companies such as BayTSP to track down people who share their titles on P2P networks. The alleged infringers then receive a warning and are given the opportunity to resolve the issue. However, this system is vulnerable to abuse and therefore completely useless.
Creative Labs has found a great new way to minimize the risk that a customer will actually benefit from a rebate offer.
A few years back you dropped significant cash to switch over from the virus-laden world of Windows to a shiny new Mac, but over time it’s gotten slow and crufty. Let’s clean it up.
We don’t know where, when, or by whom this was filmed, but it looks very real to us, confirming our earlier suspicions that the Pre will be packaged in a box.
a list of cool websites that are free and hopefully will make your lives easier
