The Rigged-Up Net

The health risks of passive smoking may have been substantially underestimated, according to the first large-scale study looking at tobacco-derived chemicals in the blood of non-smokers.

Passive smoking danger was underestimated

A colorful new $50 bill with touches of red, blue and yellow will start showing up in banks, cash registers and wallets this fall.

More colors to be added to $50 bill

An extract of prickly pear cactus could herald help for hangovers, quelling some of the wretched symptoms that strike the morning after a night out.

Cactus extract offers hangover help

Women on a high-protein diet, including those following the Atkins regime and some sportswomen, could be significantly reducing their chances of conceiving, a study involving animals suggests.

Atkins diet could lower female fertility

For the first time a woman has become pregnant after having thin slices of her ovaries removed and frozen during cancer treatment, and then re-implanted.

First pregnancy from frozen ovaries

So what’s a smart businessman to do to cash in while the market is hot for all things Trump?

It’s Trump’s ‘World’; we’re just living in it

It’s the road sign in every trucker’s dreams: “No cars allowed.” And as much as John Golka likes the idea of driving his 18-wheeler on highway lanes free of cars, he sees a problem with a proposal to create such lanes

Truckers leery of toll-lanes idea

Supply of flat-panel TV sets and computer monitors is finally catching up with demand — which could mean big price drops.

Prices of flat-panel TVs, monitors could drop more

Children who watch a lot of television produce less melatonin, new research suggests – the “sleep hormone” has been linked to timing of puberty.

Television watching may hasten puberty

Magnets are big-time materials, finding roles in products ranging from motors to medical-imaging systems. Now, a team of engineers’ improvement of a custom-made magnetic material increases the odds that refrigeration will soon join the roster of magnet-based technologies.

Cool Magnet: A little bit of iron gives magnetic refrigeration a boost

802.11i is officially done! w00t!

Wi-Fi security standard sealed and delivered

Using electrodes to create pockets of plasma in an aircraft’s exhaust plume could reduce noise during take off, say aerospace engineers at Ohio State University in Columbus, who recently applied to patent the idea.

Plasma pockets could reduce aircraft noise

Distributed denial-of-service attacks can paralyze even the most well-structured networks for days, costing millions of dollars in lost sales, freezing online services and crippling a company’s reputation.

How to defend against DDoS attacks

(Written by Paul Froutan)

So, everyone knows that I find both eating and cooking boring and otherwise a chore. Turns out, its not that I don’t enjoy eating, but I don’t really typically understand what I’m looking for when I’m tasting something… furthermore, cooking is boring becuase I was always told that it was an art… well… no more… Dirk, turned me on to this new show called “Good Eats” on Food… Basically, Alton Brown shows us all that cooking is a science – which makes my analytical brain understand cooking for a change… furthermore, when I saw Shirley Corriher on the show, I was sold… that woman is one smart cookie.

You can read a Wired arcle about the show here:

The Thermochemical Joy of Cooking

Oh, and Dirk… thanks for insisting that I Tivo an episode of the show – you’re right – I love it. 🙂

By studying the genes of an unusually muscular child, scientists have identified a gene in humans which has also been used to create “mighty mice” in the lab.

“Mighty mouse” gene found in humans

You can see a picture of it here at yahoo news.

KEO is a satellite built to return to Earth 50 000 years from today. It shall bring back to our far away descendants every message that each and every one of us is invited to put on board

KEO space odyssey

Basically, its a high-tech time-capsule… go put your message in it via their website.

Get The FUD: in which we consider the implications of Microsoft’s laughably misnamed Get The Facts roadshow.

Halloween XI

“Sony has developed a new projector that can give a bright, unfaded picture without the need to eliminate ambient light. The secret is that they project onto a black screen instead of a white one. Their screen uses species filters so that white ambient light is absorbed, but the red, green, and blue light from the projector is reflected. Sony sees a possible use in home entertainment systems because of the ability to have a much bigger picture than conventional TVs as well as businesses adopting the projectors for presentations.”

Sony Projector Gets Bright Images From Black Screen

Computer trade show Comdex, once the biggest event on the tech calendar, has been canceled this year, a victim of the growing interest in shows emphasizing consumer electronics and specialist IT gear.

Organizer cancels Comdex 2004

Microsoft will sell a version of Windows for high-performance computing–a niche in which rival Linux is blossoming–with a first version planned for the second half of 2005.

Microsoft confirms supercomputing plans

From what I saw at LCI this year, this is going to probably be one of the toughest markets that MS is going to try to get into…

So it looks like the dot-com bubble is officially over.. Saleforce’s IPO looks very “normal” from their chart today:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=CRM&t=1d

While not actually teleporting matter from place to place as in Star Trek, physicists have now plucked a quantum property from one atom and transmitted it to another. That feat of quantum teleportation, reported independently by teams in Austria and the United States in the June 17 Nature, moves scientists nearer to building a class of so-called quantum computers that’s expected to be astonishingly speedy at certain tasks, such as scouring databases for specific information.

Teleporting Matter’s Traits: Beaming information quantum-style

Full-size, four-door sedans are considered about as hip as leisure suits. But the new Chrysler 300 is surprising everyone, including Chrysler CEO Dieter Zetsche

Chrysler 300’s sales are as hot as its looks.

San Antonio-based Rackspace Managed Hosting on Tuesday announced a new application platform service level agreement for its Intensive Hosting customers.

Rackspace develops new application platform service agreement

“What we’re doing today that we weren’t doing two years ago is we’re running more and more highly critical applications that are Web facing, but they’re not Web sites,” says Graham Weston, CEO at the hosting firm Rackspace that saw revenue jump 54% in the past year. “Really managed hosting has grown up to where it really is the mainstream way of hosting a critical application.”

Interest in ASPs, Web hosting picking up

Rackspace gets super-sized line of credit from Comerica Bank

Rackspace, a privately held managed hosting provider, continues to show profitable and significant revenue growth across all three of its business lines (including ServerBeach and Intensive Hosting). While the company assembles its own servers for a large part of its customer base since it finds the practice enabling higher profits, the company still bears a big capex requirement when growth continues so good for so long as is the case currently. As opposed to raising capital through another equity transaction or IPO, the company said this week that it secured a $25mn revolving line of credit from Comerica Bank. Comerica has been the companyÂ’s banking firm since inception, which T1R believes most recently included a previous credit facility sized somewhere in the $5-10mn range.

Just as Dell started off in a dorm room at the University of Texas at Austin, Rackspace Managed Hosting began in a dorm room at Trinity University in San Antonio.

Rack and reign

Expanding the capability of the Windows server on which Trimble had been running its GPS application meant moving from Windows 2003 Advanced Server to Windows 2003 Data Center to be able to scale up to four nodes, Johnson says. Even then, Windows 2003 Data Center couldn’t promise the scalability that Linux could. Besides vendor enthusiasm, another factor that has contributed to Linux’s corporate success is economic uncertainty. “The economic downturn has ended up being very good for Linux,” says Dirk Elmendorf, founder and chief technology evangelist of Rackspace Managed Hosting, a provider of IT-hosting services. “It shook people up. They had to start thinking about how they were going to change their business to survive in a new environment. Companies don’t want to change anything when things are good.”

Linux Going Mainstream

Super Mario Bros…

http://homepage.mac.com/mrspleen/iMovieTheater6.html

This month’s featured host is Rackspace Managed Hosting . We chose Rackspace for this month because they’ve done a great job as host to all iNet Interactive sites including WebHostingTalk . Find out what Ryan Elledge, President of iNet Interactive has to say about the quality of service that Rackspace has provided. Then read the interview with Rackspace co-founder, Pat Condon.

Featured Host – Rackspace Managed Hosting

It’s a far cry from the Rackspace that customer-care vice president David Bryce found when he arrived in 1999. The company manages the technology back end of Web sites for clients as diverse as e-tailers, game sites, and online ad agencies–folks for whom having a reliable site is obviously critical. Yet the tech-support staff appeared to feel no urgency about addressing problems, Bryce says, and sometimes seemed openly hostile to customers (sound familiar?).

Cuckoo For Customers

Large-breasted, narrow-waisted women have the highest reproductive potential, according to a new study, suggesting western men’s penchant for women with an hourglass shape may have some biological justification.

Barbie-shaped women more fertile

Hotel guests diving into their in-room minibar for a late-night snack might be surprised at what they find. No longer are the little in-room fridges and snack centers just a convenience for guests who don’t want to wander to a nearby 7-Eleven.

Hotels get creative to elevate minibar

A list of numbers serves to illustrate how Wal-Mart deals with tradeoffs among the interests of workers, customers, and shareholders:

Wal-Mart’s Magic Numbers

I’ve played with the “hypersonic sound” stuff while I was at CES last year, and its quite amazing.

Focused beams of sound could direct music or speech to a single person in a crowd. Two inventors have staked competing claims to a potential audio revolution.

The Sound War

A truly extraordinary cure for some forms of blindness is being proposed. The idea is to add light-absorbing pigments from spinach to nerve cells in the retina, to make the nerve cells fire when struck by light.

Spinach pigments proposed as blindness cure

Mike James pocketed $3,000 in 10 days by selling loads of old stuff on eBay. He sold his battered cowboy boots. He unloaded some dust-collecting artwork. He even hooked a buyer for his Eddie Bauer fishing vest.

Firms jump on the eBay wagon

A year later, companies enjoy success
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Texas has secured the No. 2 spot among the states for woman-owned businesses, taking into account the number of businesses, the size of the workforce and the amount of sales.

Texas ranks second for woman-owned firms

It goes without saying that even a moderately fast CPU these days requires a fast-spinning (read noisy) fan to avoid the risk of overheating. Combine that with a PSU fan, GPU fan, chipset fan and one or more case fans and your average PC can so easily become a major distraction. And it’s not just the sound from fans that can cause annoyance. A high proportion of the noise created by PCs can also emanate from the hard disk(s), particularly while ‘seeking’, or from any optical drives that have been installed. Just imagine then trying to follow the dialogue in your favourite DVD movie with the constant din of your computer in the background.

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