| People Prefer Angry-Faced Cars |
| fatalfury writes ''Researchers from the University of Vienna asked 20 males and 20 females to rank vehicles based on their appearance. The list of traits included arrogant, afraid, agreeable, disgusted, extroverted, sad, and others. Cars with 'meaner' traits (such as BMW) ranked higher, whereas cars with 'nicer' traits (such as Toyota's Prius) ranked lower. With billions spent on developing new products in the automobile industry, this could spur a trend in meaner-looking cars and perhaps explain why sales of the Prius and other green cars are slow to take off with average consumers.''Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| New York Times Says Thin Clients Are Making a Comeback |
| One of the seemingly eternal questions in managing personal computers within organizations is whether to centralize computing power (making it easy to upgrade or secure The One True Computer, and its data), or push the power out toward the edges, where an individual user isn't crippled because a server at the other side of the network is down, or if the network itself is unreliable. Despite the ever-increasing power of personal computers, the New York Times reports that the concept of making individual users' screens portals (smart ones) to bigger iron elsewhere on the network is making a comeback.Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| National Debt Clock Overflowed, Extended By a Digit |
| hackingbear writes ''The National Debt Counter, erected in 1989 when the U.S. debt was 'merely' a tiny $2.7 trillion, has been moving so much that it recently ran out of digits to display the ballooning figure: $10,150,603,734,720, or roughly $10.2 trillion, as of Saturday afternoon. To accommodate the extra '1,' the clock was hacked: the '1' from ''$10.2'' has been moved left to the LCD square once occupied solely by the digital dollar sign. A non-digital, improvised dollar sign has been pasted next to the '1.' It will be replaced in 2009 with a new clock able to track debt up to a quadrillion dollars, which is a '1' followed by 15 zeros. That should be good enough for a few more months at least, I believe.'' Adds reader MarkusQ, ''I know Dick Cheney has assured us that 'Deficits don't matter' but I can't help wondering if we should be fixing the problem rather than the sign.''Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| What causes pruny fingers? |
| Why do our fingertips get all wrinkly after we've been in the water for a long time? |
| Kenya's elephants send text messages to rangers |
| OL PEJETA, Kenya (AP) -- The text message from the elephant flashed across Richard Lesowapir's screen: Kimani was heading for neighboring farms.... |
| Flexible OLEDs could be part of lighting's future |
| NISKAYUNA, N.Y. (AP) -- On a bank of the Mohawk River, a windowless industrial building of corrugated steel hides something that could make floor lamps, bedside lamps, wall sconces and nearly every other household lamp obsolete.... |
| Sony seeks to harmonize music, electronics |
| LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Now that Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG have broken off their troubled relationship, known as Sony BMG, the Japanese company hopes to harmonize its consumer electronics and its music, a duo that was badly out of sync.... |
| Sun Microsystems, Fujitsu Offering New SPARC-Based Server |
| Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu are rolling out a new midrange server system dubbed the SPARC Enterprise T5440, which will be based on the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor. While Sun and Fujitsu have been offering low-end systems that use the UltraSPARC T2 chip, this server is geared toward midmarket and enterprise companies that want to run database and CRM applications within their data center infrastructure. The T5440, which Sun and Fujitsu will both sell, is expected to compete against other Unix systems such as IBM Power Systems and HP's Integrity line. - Sun
Microsystems and Fujitsu
are rolling out a jointly developed midrange system, the SPARC
Enterprise T5440 server, which is based on Sun's UltraSPARC T2 plus processor
and is designed to run database and CRM
applications.
With the new T5440 system, Sun and Fujitsu are looking to bring a midr... |
| AMD, HP and How Crisis Can Drive Major Changes |
| Crisis breeds change, and given people don't like change, this can result in market shifts in months that otherwise might have taken years. This week, three things happened that I can tie back into this theme. AMD, driven by crisis, provided a strong example of how the U.S. could address its financial crisis by changing what was a going-out-of-business disadvantage into a potential competitive advantage. |
| When Digital TV Is In, Portable TV Is Out |
| In an era of dazzling battery-powered portable devices including iPods, computers and cell phones, it's hard to imagine what it's like to be unable to catch the news and entertainment anytime and anywhere we want. But millions of people who own portable televisions, including those who depend on them when they flee their homes or lose power during hurricanes and other emergencies, may soon return to the dark ages. |
