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Showing posts from December, 2005

Best (and Worst) Gadgets of 2005

From Wired.com: 2005 has been a banner year for gearheads, with more hot gadget launches than you could shake a USB cable at. But there's a great chasm separating pre-launch buzz from real-world performance, and not all gizmos live up to the hype. Here's a look back at the most anticipated product launches of 2005. Some were hot, some were not, and we made the call. ...[ more ]

2005: Stormy Year for Desktop CPUs

Excerpt: When we look back on 2005, it's easy to declare trends: "The Year of Dual Core" or "The Year of 64-Bit." It was all those, and more. By the same token, not all that much new arrived on the scene. Sure, AMD and Intel managed to ship dual-core processors for mainstream desktop systems, but neither offered much new architecturally. Intel finally shipped its version of x86-64, dubbed EM64T. Although less efficient in subtle ways at 64-bit processing than AMD's 64-bit architecture, EM64T gets the job done. What was striking about 2005 was what didn't happen. Intel didn't ship a 5GHz CPU—or even a 4GHz CPU. AMD didn't snag Dell as a customer (unless you count the Dell online store selling boxed Athlon 64 CPUs). Intel cancelled Tejas, the successor to Prescott. Transmeta isn't a CPU company any longer, but is now an IP (as in "intellectual property") company. And VIA's Centaur group shipped new processors that didn't get m

Steam uses almost 1000TB of bandwidth!

From Steampowered.com This was a busy week for us as far as releases were concerned, with updates to Counter-Strike: Source, the Source engine running in 64 bit, and Day of Defeat: Source. We hope everyone is enjoying the new content. The plan is to keep releasing updates and new games next year. There are literally millions of people in the community that connect to Steam each month, so we compiled a couple of statistics for what has happened in the past year: Steam has delivered approximately 10 million gigabytes of data since the first of the year. You could fill 125,000 80 GB hard drives with this data to make a line over 11 miles long. Not that you would want to, but the visual helps. There have been a total of 50 billion player minutes in our multiplayer games since the start of the year. If a single person sat down to play on their own, it would take 2.28 million years to accomplish this. This is assuming that you're not planning on sleeping during this 2 million year stretc

GOOGLE CAN'T DO ANYTHING BY ITSELF

Google has bought seventeen companies in 2005 (and we expect many more are disclosed), one more point of why I hate Google. An excerpt: With all of the recent acquisitions by Yahoo! and Google, I decided to take a closer look at some of the companies that Google has purchased. I’m glad I did. I came across a couple of papers I hadn’t seen before, and learned a little more about some of Google’s employees that I didn’t know. ... [more]

An Explosion on the Moon

NASA scientists have observed an explosion on the moon. The blast, equal in energy to about 70 kg of TNT, occurred near the edge of Mare Imbrium (the Sea of Rains) on Nov. 7, 2005, when a 12-centimeter-wide meteoroid slammed into the ground traveling 27 km/s.

Woman swallows cellphone playing "keep-away" from boyfriend

From engadget.com One of the nice things about our little site is that we sometimes get to bring you helpful tips along with the usual lineup of snarky posts. Today's lesson involves the proper way to keep someone from using/looking at your cellphone for either saving precious minutes or keeping those steamy convos with/pics of your mistress a secret. A bit of common sense would indicate that either removing the battery, the SIM card, or smashing the phone to bits are all good ways to accomplish this task, yet a woman in Kansas City felt that the best way of making her mobile inaccessible to her boyfriend was to put the whole damn thing in her mouth and swallow it. Not surprisingly, the cell got caught in her throat (this is why we buy RAZRs, people!) and she had to be rushed to the emergency room, where her condition is not currently known. We are looking forward to someone eventually lodging a phone in their nasal and ear cavities, so we'll have witnessed cells stuck in each