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Need an online dictionary? Just ask Ask.
It would appear that Ask.com, the search site which used to be known as Ask Jeeves, has purchased Dictionary.com
Dropping the 'Jeeves' branding after 10 years, the search engine retained the same 'ask a straightforward question' approach to Internet searching. With the acquisition of Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com that concept will take a huge leap forwards. Assuming, that is, there is to be some kind of back office integration to unleash this new power from within a single search interface.
Currently Ask is ranked the fourth biggest search engine in the United States with...
12,000 laptops lost in US airports EVERY WEEK
According to The Inquirer a new report by the Ponemon Institute, rather appropriately sponsored by Dell, has revealed that an astonishing number of laptops are lost at airports across the United States on a weekly basis.
Asking questions of 800 business travellers at some 106 major airports in the US, the Ponemon Institute also discovered that on average only 30 percent of those lost laptops are recovered. Which is worrying as just under half the people taking part in the survey admitted their laptops are full of confidential business data.
When you work it out over the course of a year...
FreeRunner Linux Phone Liberated on July 4
Taiwanese device maker OpenMoko chose Independence Day in the United States to announce the launch of Neo FreeRunner, its latest Linux-based open smartphone platform. Delivered with minimal functionality, owners are encouraged to develop and/or install their own applications and functionality.
The unit is well equipped, sporting a 400Mhz processor, 640x480 pixel touch-sensitive display, BlueTooth, GPS, WiFi and either a 850 MHz or 900 MHz tri-band GSM radio. Other ecoutraments include a pair of 3D accelerometers for understanding its orientation, 128 MB SDRAM and 256MB of storage.
On the...
Judge hands YouTube video viewing data to Viacom
Sometimes I am left almost loss for words, and today is one of them. Judge Louis Stanton gave a ruling in the federal court for the Southern District of New York which has, quite frankly, dismissed the right to privacy of anyone who has ever watched a video clip on YouTube.
The man who obviously has his finger on the pulse of technological culture (spot the irony) has ordered that Google must pass over to Viacom, the broadcast media giant which owns MTV and DreamWorks amongst others, records regarding every single video clip ever published to its YouTube service. All of them.
What sort of...
Xandros Picks Up Linspire and Freespire
Xandros, Inc. announced July 3 that they have acquired the Linspire and Freespire desktop operating systems. This will further enhance their desktop operating system offerings and their "one stop shop" status for all things Linux. The Click'N'Run (CNR) software distribution facility was also acquired by Xandros. CNR technology allows users to install software with a single mouse click.
Xandros is best known for its mixed-environment BridgeWays management tools and intuitive Linux solutions including SMB and enterprise servers, consumer and business desktops, OEM products, and...
Dish Network Cracking Up?
Dish Network is looking a bit chipped, if not actually cracked or even broken – and maybe Direct TV is poised to pick up all the pieces and put the second-place satellite TV provider back together again.
That’s the picture I’m seeing with Dish, which saw it’s shares drop by $2.20 – or 7% total – after telecom giant AT&T is deep-sixing an agreement to help resell Dish’s programming services this week. Dish’s stock price, trading around $27 per share today, is off from a 52-week high of $42.78.
The news from AT&T seems to be hiding a bigger story. After all, the severing of a...
Solar Energy Technology Spreading Sunshine on Wall Street
In the alternative energy movement, the mantra is a simple one: go to where you want to be – not where you are now. Think of hockey great Wayne Gretzky, who once said “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is has been, or where it is now.”
So it goes for the solar power market, where emerging companies are taking a technology that was once considered to be a unique, but ineffective method of heating and lighting your home, used primarily by descendents of Druid sun worshippers and hemp-loving hippies, to growing popularity in the home and commercial energy...
Microsoft Shoots and Scores with Powerset Purchase
I’ve been highly critical of many of Microsoft’s moves lately, mostly because they have felt like the awkward ramblings of a company one step behind the curve, but the other day Microsoft made, what in my view, is a smart play. They bought Powerset, a San Francisco-based semantic search company and with it, they got themselves a nice piece of technology that could vault them ahead of the pack.
Semantic search involves looking beyond keywords at the meaning of the search itself. When you search for “jaguar” are you looking for information on the car, the operating system or the...
Ballmer Again Chomping At The Bit for Yahoo
The Wall Street Journal reported this morning (and thousands of others since then) in a front-page story that Microsoft is seeking new channels of opportunity for acquiring the search business of Yahoo. Redmond has reportedly been in talks with Time Warner and WSJ parent company News Corp., cooking up a deal that would see Yahoo’s constituent pieces scattered about like orphaned mice.
But such a scenario, which the Journal story characterized as cherry-picking Yahoo’s most valued asset, was not something Yahoo wanted, but was apparently what Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had wanted all...
ISO Uses PDFs Too, Standardizes Format
The International Organization for Standardization today announced that Adobe’s Portable Document Format is now an ISO standard. Well it’s about time! The PDF has only been around for 15 years!
This is great news for all areas of publishing, for Web developers and Web site admins, even operating system makers have reason to rejoice. While Adobe has been a great custodian of its portable format, starting with the introduction of PostScript in 1990, passing the torch to a standards body seems a logical next step toward its long-term preservation, which is chief among the ISO’s stated...
Apple iPhone 3G creates shortage of flash memory chips
Could it be that Apple, having placed an order for some 50 million 8Gb flash chips, is planning to sell rather a lot of the new iPhone 3Gs? At the very least it will mean that the competition, such as Samsungs other customers, will have to go hang.
Indeed, Samsung has been warning them that NAND flash is about to become pretty scarce for a while.
Looking at the math, and remembering that 8Gb is the same as 1GB, it works out to enough flash to build either 3 million 16GB iPhone 3G handsets or 6 million 8GB iPhone 3G handsets. Or, of course, a combination of the two.
Given that Apple...
Microsoft announces host of new Internet Explorer 8 security features
According to the official Microsoft Developer Network IEBlog Internet Explorer 8 will come packed with a whole host of new security features. These will include the SmartScreen Filter which replaces the Phishing Filter in current versions of the browser. Eric Lawrence, Program Manager for Internet Explorer Security says that this will be "a replacement that improves upon the Phishing Filter in a number of important ways" which include:
Improved user interface
Faster performance
New heuristics & enhanced telemetry
Anti-Malware support
Improved Group Policy support
Eee, that's clever
If I wanted to sell a domestic computer I'd do what Apple did a while ago and make it look good. It's supposed to go in someone's home. That's the secret of the laptop-on-a-stick, sorry, the iMac. It also sells into the corporate environment to an extent. This surprises me.
Someone has now decided to ape the company and put a laptop-on-a-stick into the PC-compatible world. The EEE model will be out later this year and there can be little doubt that it will go into businesses in the same way the Apple equivalent has done.
The interesting thing to me is that we're all supposed to be more...
Seeing double, twice, with Matrox M-Series QuadHead GPU
Matrox has announced what it claims to be the first true QuadHead GPU, the Matrox M-Series. Which begs the question, just how many monitors do you need? With 512 MB of memory, native PCIe x16 performance and a fanless design for quiet operation you might think Matrox has done enough with the new M-Series graphics card family. But you would be wrong. These babies are capable of stretching desktop applications across not two, but no less than four monitors.
Taking multi-monitor to a whole new dimension, Matrox insists that the M-Series represents the first true QuadHead GPU within the...
Good-bye Windows XP, Hello Open Source?
That’s it. I’ve had enough. Today I draw a line in the sand with me and Windows XP on one side and Microsoft and any of its new operating systems—including Vista—on the other, for ever more.
What got me started on this—the reason for this pledge—is simple: Yesterday Microsoft said again (but I believe it this time,) that it will stop selling Windows XP in January, 2009. WHAT? Why on Earth would a company discontinue its most stable release yet? Simple. Because it wants to sell more copies of Vista, which in my (admittedly inexperienced but reasonably well-read) opinion is...
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