5,261 Posted Topics
 | You cannot fault the Japanese arm of Mc Donald’s for moving with the times and giving away Flash MP3 players as prizes in a competition to customers who bought large Coca-Cola drinks. But, to be honest, I would rather have had the usual tacky plastic movie tie-in toy because at …  |
| | There’s a serious amount of money to anyone who can prove that the answer is yes, and rather surprisingly it is online DVD rental service [URL="http://www.netflixprize.com/index"]Netflix[/URL] that is posing the question and providing the cash. It all revolves around the movie recommendation system that Netflix developed, CinematchSM, that can predict … |
| | The 2006 Virus Bulletin Conference is currently taking place in Montreal, and some interesting trends are emerging from the various security vendors speaking at the event. Trends such as the way that the widely distributed attack using worms, viruses and Trojans are increasingly becoming a decreasing concern. At least once … |
| | BT is an unlikely sounding pioneer in the global battle against spam, but that is exactly the role the UK telecoms giant is adopting as it claims to be implementing the world’s first fully-automated spam buster system to track down and tackle professional spammers but also botnet-infected customers on the … |
| | Of course, it all depends who you are listening to when it comes to browser client market share statistics. The Seattle Times was listening to OneStat.com when it reported that Internet Explorer is on the rise for the first time in a couple of years (up 2.8 percent from July … |
| | Search supremo Google has, as widely rumored, acquired YouTube for a none too shabby $1.65 billion. Where the speculation was wrong, it would seem, is that YouTube will not get gobbled up under the Google brand, and will continue to operate independently for all intents and purposes, retaining the YouTube … |
| | In just a few hours time, Sony Pictures will point to the future by releasing the new Adam Sandler movie, Click, in 50Gb Blu-ray format. To put that in a little context, it means that the one disc will feature the high-definition movie, plus uncompressed Pulse Code Modulation audio, and …  |
| | I am more used to reviewing routers and network webcams from D-Link than reading about the company launching a cellphone, let alone one which will run on a Linux OS and be populated with open source software. But apparently that is exactly what it is going to do, and do … |
| | Google Labs has launched a new search engine just for you, software developers that is. [URL="http://google.com/codesearch"]Google Code Search [/URL] can help all programmers by quickly filtering billions of lines of source code, all from the default and familiar search interface, to reveal reusable code-snippets. Be it a specific programming term … |
| | Just days after telling delegates at the ToorCon hacking convention in San Diego that Firefox was critically flawed, and the online reporting hysteria that followed, one of the two coders who gave the damning presentation has now admitted that it was just a joke. Neither Mozilla, nor the reporters and … |
| | More than 7 million Sony batteries have now been recalled since the middle of August when Dell made its big 4.1 million battery recall announcement, a figure which has risen to 4.2 million over the weekend interestingly enough. Toshiba has now joined the feeding frenzy by recalling 830,000 laptop batteries; … |
| | This morning [URL="http://www.sophos.com"]Sophos[/URL] published details of the most prevalent malware threats and hoaxes that have been causing problems for users of its IT security products across the globe during the month of September 2006. Interestingly, despite the sadly predictable news that the number of new threats discovered by Sophos had … |
| | Toshiba have announced the first notebook HD-DVD Write Drive, which can read and write HD-DVDs as well as standard DVD and CD. Of course, announcements and availability are completely different beasts, so do not expect to see this little beauty until nearer the end of the year. The SD-L902A, don’t … |
| | [URL="http://www.pgp.com"]PGP Corporation [/URL] will announce on Wednesday the availability of numerous application upgrades across its entire portfolio. I have persuaded them to let me break the embargo and bring the news to DaniWeb members a couple of days early. With global organizations increasingly facing highly publicized data breaches, regulatory pressures, … |
| | The General Public License is not something to be messed with lightly, after all it is ‘the law’ as far as many open source projects are concerned. Which is why the Free Software Foundation is running into trouble with plans to introduce a proposed version 3 of the GPL to … |
| | According to reports from both the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) 2006 is proving to be a bumper year as far as online advertising spend is concerned. Showing a 37% increase over the same period last year, US Internet advertising revenues were up to $7.9 billion. In itself … |
| | I can recall having great fun talking with ELIZA more than a decade ago. Fun yes, serious AI no. It didn’t take long to get bored with the repetitive question and answer looping even if it was wrapped up in the guise of being intelligent machine driven conversation: an oxymoron … |
| | Larry Sanger may have co-founded [URL="http://www.wikipedia.org"]Wikipedia[/URL], and I say ‘may’ as Jimmy Wales seems to dispute this somewhat and prefers to refer to Sanger as merely an employee, but there is no doubt that it was Larry who came up with the name Wikipedia. A great name, it has to … |
| | [I]I’m the trouble starter, notebook instigator. I’m the Dell addicted, Sony illustrated. I’m a fire-starter, notebook fire-starter. You’re the fire-starter, notebook fire-starter.[/I] With apologies to The Prodigy for ruining a perfectly good lyric, but it does serve to highlight the problem de jour: that of flaming laptops. If you thought … |
| | The much vaunted, overly hyped and hugely anticipated Apple iPhone, a handset merging mobile phone and iPod into one unit, looked like being a step closer to reality when a French magazine featured a ‘leaked’ image of the thing on its front cover. Unsurprisingly, this was picked up by [URL="http://www.pdafrance.com/news/2006-09-12/id7496/iPhone-ou-Macphone-sur-20minutes-ce-matin/"]PDA … |
| | Well the spec is hardly earth shattering for starters, a clock speed of 1GHz, 256MB of DDR memory and a 40GB hard drive. No Intel Inside either, or AMD for that matter. Instead your cheap PC will be driven by the BLX Godson CPU, a chip whose architecture is very … |
| | Makes my problems with T-Mobile pale into insignificance! Purchased a new handset/tariff via the website in the UK. Handset, MDA Vario II (very nice) arrived a couple of days later, but no contract documentation. A couple of days later still, a letter arrives welcoming me to a completely different price … |
| | The impossible has been achieved; in as far as [URL="http://earth.google.com"]Google Earth[/URL] has just got even better. The Beta 4 release seems pretty stable here, certainly no mishaps since I’ve been using it and using it I have been: a lot. Not only has the map rendering become much speedier than … |
| | Sometimes, I get wind of something that has all the makings of an April Fool’s Day prank: but not often in September. Which is why I took a second look at the story about an IBM supercomputer in the making, with ambitions to break the petaflop speed barrier, which will … |
| | Since writing [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry846.html"]here [/URL]about the release of a new 'privacy preserving web browser', I have now had a chance to test [URL="http://www.browzar.com"]Browzar [/URL]for myself and can make the following additional comments: I do not buy the 'Browzar is adware' comments that have been doing the rounds of the blogosphere, at … |
| | AOL has announced its [URL="http://developers.aimphoneline.com/"]AIM Phoneline Developer Initiative[/URL] that will allow voice application developers and device manufacturers to create new tools to extend the functionality of the still relatively new AIM Phoneline service. Examples of the new APIs for call personalization (or ringtones as mere non-marketing mortals might say), untethered … |
| | AOL has announced its [URL="http://developers.aimphoneline.com/"]AIM Phoneline Developer Initiative[/URL] that will allow voice application developers and device manufacturers to create new tools to extend the functionality of the still relatively new AIM Phoneline service. Examples of the new APIs for call personalization (or ringtones as mere non-marketing mortals might say), untethered … |
| | Well, maybe for a week or three anyway. That is the theory being bandied around wherever more than three geeks assembly for longer than 10 minutes, or so it seems. Perhaps it is just the company I keep. However, is there any merit in the idea that Vista, and specifically … |
| | Once upon a time, back in the late 1990s, Ajaz Ahmed was the founder of an ISP that literally changed the shape of the UK Internet. The reason as to why is hinted at in the name: Freeserve. Ahmed had the vision to understand that free access to the Internet … |
| | [URL="http://www.privacyinternational.org"]Privacy International[/URL] a human rights watchdog, has announced it is to run the second Stupid Security Awards in order to reward the numbnuts responsible for some of the most ridiculous security measures on the planet. If it is annoying, pointless, intrusive, illusory, self-serving and above all else just plain stupid, … |
| | I have long been a fan of [URL="http://www.blinkx.tv"]Blinkx[/URL] the video search engine that, as far as I am concerned, pretty much prompted the whole genre and introduced the idea of live video search and stream done properly. So I was interested to receive word from Blinkx founder and CTO Suranga … |
| | I was reading the [URL="http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com"]Google Code Blog [/URL]and noticed that Google software engineer Matthias Zenger happened to announce the availability of the updated Google Base Data API last week. This lets you develop applications that can dynamically interact with Google Base, obviously. Perhaps a little less obviously it also allows … |
| | Some press releases grab your attention for all the wrong reasons, although from the PR perspective if it has grabbed my attention it has obviously worked. One such scurried across my desktop the other day: [URL="http://www.logitech.com"]Logitech [/URL]rolls out its coolest mouse ever, the headline proclaimed. Oh crikey, thought I, here … |
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| | The trouble is that there are far too many wannabe journalists, and not enough experienced, trained, professionals. While I am all for the whole blogging concept (duh) and even have a certain respect for many of those participating in 'people journalism' the problem seems to be that far too many … |
| | It’s bad enough, as an individual, to discover that the domain name you wanted has been snapped up by some corporate pirate looking to make a mighty profit by sitting on it and selling it on. It is even worse when these cyber-squatters snap up a domain you had been … |
| | I admit it; there are times when I have gone to Google (and Yahoo, MSN, Ask and even occasionally a decent Meta-Search such as Dogpile) for no other reason than to see what people are saying about me online. I like to think that I have an excuse, what with …  |
| | Earlier this year [URL="http://www.mcafee.com"]McAfee [/URL]sponsored a rather interesting survey of search engine safety. Safety, that is, from the ‘how safe are the links they deliver and you click’ angle. Now, for the longest time, I have harbored a passing suspicion that the dodgiest links you can follow from any search … |
| | Thursday 24th August could be a date for your diary if you happen to be in the market for compilers and development tools for the high-performance computing arena. Especially that which nods towards parallelization and optimization functionality in order to squeeze multi-core processors to the max. The [URL="http://www.pgroup.com/"]Portland Group[/URL] have … |
| | I had assumed the term was being used as an euphemism, for something that happens to rhyme with dogfood funnily enough... :D |
| | The news that [URL="http://www.boeing.com"]Boeing [/URL]is to scrap its [URL="http://www.connexionbyboeing.com"]Connexion [/URL]in-flight Internet access service will surprise many people. The fact that it had an in-flight Internet access service will surprise many more. Unless you were a business traveler, flying in Asia where the service was most prevalent, and then one who … |
| | It has been a busy week for both [URL="http://www.w3.org"]W3C [/URL]and anyone who is serious about XML. The [URL="http://www.w3.org/XML/Core/"]W3C XML Core Working Group[/URL] has published the fourth edition of XML 1.0, and second editions of XML 1.1 and Namespaces in XML 1.0 and 1.1. Forming, as they do, the bedrock for … |
| | Please forgive me if I am a little slow in flagging this up, but it has only just floated across my radar: you can now implement Google AdSense for search results on your own page, displaying the all important revenue generating adverts alongside the search results without directing readers off-site. … |
| | I was born in London, and although I no longer live there (having swapped the rat race for a life of rural seclusion) I am a regular business visitor. Unsurprisingly then, I tend to travel a lot by the good old London Black Cab. While more expensive than taking the … |
| | When you are the world's biggest PC maker, your problems tend to be on the large scale when they hit. Such is the case of what the US Consumer Products Safety Commission is calling the biggest recall in the history of the consumer electronics industry. The problem is that a … |
| | OK, so that would just be silly, would it not? Nobody in their right minds would accept a job working in IT on Mars. Yet so far 70 people have applied to the [URL="http://www.imbp.ru/Mars500/Proj_M500-e.html"]Mars-500[/URL] project in Russia, for the unusual position (literally) of an IT Manager willing to be sealed … |
| | The race is on to find the best online coder, as registration for the 2006 [URL="http://www.google.com/codejam/"]Google Code Jam [/URL] US heat starts. You have until September 5th to sign up if you want to prove you are king of the American coders by solving a series of problems to test … |
| | I was caught up in the travel nightmare that has been unraveling in the UK this week, the result of a major gambit in the ongoing ‘war on terror’ being foiled. Like many business travelers, I had been due to fly, short haul across into mainland Europe, when the news … |
| | Born August 12th 1981, the IBM Personal Computer changed the world. Hard to imagine now, but back then it really was the start of a revolution. All those personal computers that came before it were nothing more than toys in the eyes of the business world, the marriage of Microsoft … |
| | Sometimes, the cleverest of folk say the dumbest things. Case in point, I am sure that Dr. Maressa Hecht Orzack is very clever, as a clinical psychologist at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts you would have to assume as much. So why has she claimed that as many as 40 percent … |
The End.