Monday, April 5, 2010

IT News HeadLines (HardOCP) 05/04/2010



10 Chrome Extensions For Boosting Productivity
Here is a fantastic list of some pretty nifty extensions for Google Chrome. Hopefully they can offset my excessive [H]ard|Forum browsing! Ok, not likely, but still some pretty cool ones in there. Here's one I'm sure to use: With the Copy Without Formatting Chrome extension, you can easily and directly copy unformatted text from Chrome and paste it anywhere, allowing you to cut out the middleman and streamline this task. Comments
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Has this Easter Bunny thing Become Out of Control?
The residents of Long Beach, California think so. Rabbits for lack of a better phrase, "Breed like rabbits." How would like to have the job of rabbit hunting on Easter and do you think that person has kids? "It's just gotten out of hand," said Tim Wootton, deputy director of facilities and a member of the school's Rabbit Population Management Task Force, or as he calls it, the Bunny Committee. The task force's task: a massive round-up of abandoned bunnies and their offspring. Comments
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Google Buys Episodic To Beef Up Youtube
Google has recently purchased Episodic with hopes of turning Youtube into a profitable machine. "Episodic's publishing platform manages live and on-demand video content and enables ad insertion and credit card transactions." Comments
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Is Apple a Brat the Refuses to Share?
The industry is a buzz about the latest in the "iApple me have" and "iGoogle me want" battle. Google is the search provider for the iPhone. So that means the search giant can see all search data from iPhones and taylor apps to those searches. Apple saw the peeping tom and are working on a iPhone-centric search engine. "We believe Apple could utilize data unavailable to Google, data generated by the company's App Store, to create a mobile centric search engine, which would be a unique offering to Google's search engine," Munster wrote. Comments
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Graphene-Based Electronics May Become A Reality
Scientists have discovered a new, more reliable way to create graphene. Hopefully this leads to 100 GHz processors for all of us in no time. "In recent years, however, some physicists and engineers have come to believe that without new breakthroughs in new materials, we may soon reach the end of Moore's Law. [But] Metallic wires in graphene may help to sustain the rate of microprocessor technology predicted by Moore's Law well into the future." Comments
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University to Issue Freshmen iPads and MacBooks
Seton Hill will be supplying next year's freshmen with iPads, MacBooks, a tree to hug, a Volkswagon bus, backpacks and flowered shirts. Well, maybe I exaggerated a bit after MacBooks. The Greensburg, Pa., liberal-arts school, with about 2,100 students, announced the mobile technology program this week. Freshmen will receive both an iPad, which is a tablet that can run iPhone smartphone applications, and a 13-inch MacBook laptop. After two years, the university will replace the laptop, which students can take with them on graduation. Current students will have the choice of opting into the laptop program. Comments
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Strong USB 3.0 Product Shipments in 2010
Gigabyte and Asustek are planning on increasing their USB 3.0 support for a wider range of products in the coming year. This move could have the effect of dropping prices due to the increased competition. Kao pointed out that Gigabyte currently only offers USB 3.0 support in its Intel X58-, P55- and H57-based motherboards as well as AMD 790FX, 790X and 800-series products. On the other hand, Chen (Asustek) noted that the company will initially adopt USB 3.0 in its high-end and mid-range notebooks including the company's N, U and G-series, and the company currently has 10-15 models which already support USB 3.0. The company expects to start adopting USB 3.0 in its entry-level models in early 2011. Comments
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Top Broadcast Journalism Prize Goes to... a Website?
To further prove the growing importance and influence of the internet, a website has received the coveted Peabody award for journalism excellence. Just when you thought the net was only for Facebook and pr0n. But the latest winners, announced on Wednesday, include a website: National Public Radio's "topically boundless counterpart," as Peabody calls it. Everybody else knows the site as npr.org. Comments
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Verizon Plans 3D TV Via FiOS for Holiday 2010
If you are among the lucky few (if you consider 3 million customers a few) to have Verizon as your cable supplier, you should start looking for that brand new 3-DTV set in the near future. "We're monitoring the early sales of 3D TVs and expect to announce a 3D offering well in advance of the holiday TV-shopping season, when 3D television sales will expand," Shawn Strickland, vice president of FiOS product management for Verizon, said in a statement on Friday. Comments
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50th Anniversary of the Weather Satellite
Its hard to imagine not being able to check the weather radar before making daily plans or depending strictly on the weatherman's expertise in forecasting the weather, but that was the case 50 years ago. Forcasting has now established itself as a true science. With continued improvements of the instruments and technology, the satellites began giving scientists the ability to track changes in climate, from the subtle onset of drought and its impacts on vegetation, to monitoring global sea-surface temperatures that signal atmospheric phenomena, such as El Niño and La Niña Comments
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