Wednesday, March 31, 2010

"They’re young, they’re broke, and they pay for organic salmon with government subsidies. Got a problem with that?"

Are you eligible for food stamps? Are you sure? Why not check here and find out? Unfortunately, the rules vary from state to state and are pretty complex within each one, so I can’t give much in the way of useful guidelines.

The Salon article -- brilliantly subtitled "They’re young, they’re broke, and they pay for organic salmon with government subsidies. Got a problem with that?" -- profiles a pair of significantly underemployed urban intelligentsia types who get a combined $350 a month from the government to spend on food. Needless to say, they exercise their good taste by buying stuff of which I have never actually heard, but which I am willing to believe is expensive, hip and a scandalously inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars. Salon even coaxed the sound bite "I’m eating better than I ever have before" from the female of the pair.

Read the full story by Karen Datko

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Apple delivers record monster security update

Apple today patched 92 vulnerabilities, a third of them critical, in a record update to its Leopard and Snow Leopard operating systems.

Security Update 2010-002 plugged 92 holes in the client and server editions of Mac OS X 10.5 and Mac OS X 10.6, breaking a record that has stood since March 2008 . The update dwarfed any released last year, when Apple 's largest patched 67 vulnerabilities .

More than 40% of the vulnerabilities patched today, 37 out of the 92, were accompanied by the phrase "may lead to arbitrary code execution," which is Apple's way of saying that a flaw is critical and could be used by attackers to hijack a Mac. Apple does not assign ratings or severity scores to the bugs it patches, unlike other major software makers, such as Microsoft and Oracle .

Read the full Computer World story

Download the patches from Apple:
Apple OS X 10.5.X users
Apple OS X 10.6.X users
Microsoft Windows Bonjour users

ObamaCare







Does America Really Need More College Grads?

Four Arguments Against Higher Education


Debunking Arguments for Higher Educations


Opposed to Higher Education



Opposed to Higher Education


Analyzing the Higher Education Income Gap


The Practicality of a College Degree


Success Without Higher Education


Arguments Against Higher Education


The Low Quality of Higher Education


Summary
The rapid growth of China, India, Brazil and other emerging powers has dramatically altered the complexion of the global economy in recent years. At the same time, rising deficits, high trade imbalances, a declining dollar, and a lingering economic downturn have placed America's position within the global economy in peril-and have policymakers deliberating over the keys to America's economic future.

One area often cited as critical to the nation's future economic strength is higher education, particularly that America must dramatically increase the number of college-educated citizens to remain a leading economic power.

Friday, March 26, 2010

Verizon winds down expensive FiOS expansion

"NEW YORK — If Verizon Communications Inc. hasn't already started wiring your city or town with its FiOS fiber-optic TV and broadband service, chances are you won't get it.

Where it's available, FiOS usually provides the only competition for cable TV apart from satellite service. Studies have shown that its entry into an area leads to lower cable prices, though FiOS itself has not been undercutting cable TV prices substantially.

But Verizon is nearing the end of its program to replace copper phone lines with optical fibers that provide much higher Internet speeds and TV service. Its focus is now on completing the network in the communities where it's already secured "franchises," the rights to sell TV service that rivals cable, said spokeswoman Heather Wilner.

Verizon is the only major U.S. phone company to draw fiber all the way to homes and the only one to offer broadband speeds approaching those available in Japan and South Korea. The halt to further expansion comes as the Federal Communications Commission has sent Congress the country's first "national broadband plan," aimed at making Internet access faster, more affordable and more widely available."

Read the full story by PETER SVENSSON

Fabulous iPhone App Instapaper Will Be On The iPad, Possibly On Day One Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/fabulous-iphone-app-instapaper-will

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Sending The Perfect Resume by Email



Digital Life with Shelly Palmer Episode #17
Airdate: March 16, 2010

On this episode of Digital Life: Trojan phones. Some great new iPhone apps. Rock Band 3 is on the way and there may be up to 50 iPad competitors coming. Sony's got a secret weapon to help sell 3DTV and Facebook may have a privacy issue on their hands.


Digital Life with Shelly Palmer Episode #16
Airdate: March 9, 2010


Next on Digital Life. The Apple app censors are out in force. Music download price wars. Microsoft branded smart phones. And 3DTV is here. I'm going to help Orlando Jones get some pictures off of his digital camera. I'll talk with Jack Hidary, CEO of iamplify.com, about his latest technology venture.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Romanian street sign warns drivers of 'drunk pedestrians'


Street signs warning Romanian drivers to be careful of drunken pedestrians lying on roads were erected by road safety chiefs worried about the "despairing" levels of accidents.

Officials in Pecica, a village town about 13 miles from the Hungarian border in the country’s west, ordered the bright red signs, complete with the phrase “Attention - Drunks”.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Survey: Macs cost notably less to support than Windows PCs

"Macs are often the black sheep in the many enterprise environments which have been dominated by Windows for nearly two decades, but the growing consumerization of IT is slowly changing that perception. Though Macs often have a higher up-front price than many business-class PCs, Macs are usually believed to have a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) due to lower support costs. A recent survey of IT professionals in large enterprise environments that have a mix of Macs and PCs overwhelmingly agree that Macs cost less than PCs to support.

The Enterprise Desktop Alliance, which seeks to make it easier to integrate Macs in Windows-centric IT deployments, surveyed IT admins from companies that made large deployments, including universities and government agencies. Responses included in EDA's analysis include those from environments with a mix of Macs and PCs that had a total of 50 servers or over 100 Macs.

A majority of respondents said that Macs cost less in terms of time spent troubleshooting, user training, help desk calls, and system configuration. Admins generally agreed that costs related to software licensing and supporting infrastructure were the same between the two platforms."

Continue reading the full story by Chris Foresman

Monday, March 15, 2010

I'm not breaking up with Windows, but we're seeing other people

I’ve decided to avoid Windows 7, whenever possible, and rely on Mac and Linux to power my primary systems (you may have seen ).

So, a lot of you are probably wondering why I’m stepping away from Windows at this point. From a technological standpoint, Windows 7 isn’t too bad. As I’ve said before, the best thing you can say about Windows 7 is that it does a better job of getting itself out of the way.

My issues with Windows 7 are mostly bigger concerns with Microsoft
• Microsoft still badly overcharges for Windows
• Microsoft should have made Windows 7 a free upgrade for Vista owners
• Windows 7 does very little to innovate on the OS
• Microsoft refuses to change the default installation of Windows for better reliability
• After so many versions, Windows 7 feels like the Weasley’s house in Harry Potter, with stuff bolted on all over the place

Read the full story at techrepublic.com by Jason Hiner

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Meet America's New, Euro-Style Welfare Queens

At Last -- The Full Story Of How Facebook Was Founded

How To Get More Stuff Done At Work



CAPE WIND: Wine-Sipping Hypocrites Preach Gospel Of Renewable Energy...As Long As It Doesn't Wreck The View



Movies:

Intel's 6-Core Gulftown Gets Tested, Wicked Fast!



Six cores. That's how many are in Intel's ridiculous new Core i7-980x. MaximumPC takes us deep inside the world's fastest CPU, with full, mind-searing benchmarks.

Meet the world's fastest CPU. OK, so we just gave away the big reveal to our report before you even flipped one page, and without so much as the common courtesy of a spoiler alert. For that, we do not apologize, because it's not like you couldn't have guessed how this one would end up. After all, Intel's new 3.33GHz Core i7-980X builds on all the goodness of the ass-kicking quad-core 3.33GHz Core i7-975 Extreme Edition, but is smaller, cooler, and has an additional two cores under its heat spreader. With Hyper-Threading enabled, that's a cool 12 threads at the ready. How could anyone screw that one up?

With Hyper-Threading enabled, that's a cool 12 threads at the ready. How could anyone screw that one up?

In fact, Intel's Core i7-980X seems to be one of the most flawless launches we've seen from the company in some time. By flawless, we mean there are no contortionist acts, such as explaining to consumers that a new socket (LGA1156) will have the same CPU branding as an incompatible existing socket. Nor is there the head-scratcher of a very novel, yet very limp, integrated graphics chip in a CPU (Clarkdale), which, by the way, won't work in boards that lack graphics output ports.

With Core i7-980X, you update your BIOS, drop the chip in, and-voilà-you spend hours rocking a six-core high. Put simply, Core i7-980X is 24-ounces of prime-rib red meat for performance enthusiasts who really haven't had much to gnaw on since the original 3.2GHz Core i7-965 Extreme Edition came out two years ago.

So we're done, right? You don't need to read on? Sorry, there's still more to learn. If you want to know if your motherboard works with the new chip, what applications can really exploit the six cores, and how this bad boy performs, you'll have to keep reading.

Read the full story at gizmodo.com

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Stamp-Sized Paper “Chip” Diagnoses Diseases For Just a Penny



As far as mobile, ad-hoc medical labs for developing countries go, you can’t get any more mobile or ad-hoc than something the size of a postage stamp. One Harvard University chemist has developed an ultraportable “paper” chip that can diagnose killer diseases like malaria, HIV, hepatitis, and tuberculosis for just a penny at a time. A finger prick’s worth of blood on one side of the paper, according to inventor George Whitesides, produces a colorful, tree-like pattern on the other that indicates what ails you. The surprisingly low-tech secret? Water-repellant comic-book ink.





Continue reading the story at inhabitat.com