Facebook will enhance its social-networking site’s privacy features over the next 12 months as a result of a set of recommendations from the Canadian government. Facebook will increase the information it provides to its users about its privacy features, as well as make technical changes to tighten privacy controls, the company said Thursday. The changes [...]
Archive for August, 2009
Find free apps for your iPhone
The only thing better than cool iPhone apps? Free iPhone apps. Of course, iTunes’ App Store doesn’t do a particularly good job highlighting the freebies, particularly those apps that used to cost a few bucks but are now permanently, or temporarily, gratis. Enter FreeAppAlert, a Web site that catalogs all newly free iPhone apps. The [...]
Gigabit Ethernet fit for a tank
Ethernet continues to go places its inventors probably never imagined. This week GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms got a US$645,000 contract to supply a custom version of its Gigabit Ethernet switch to rumble around inside the US Army’s Abrams tank. Specifically, GE Fanuc said it would supply a custom version of its IPv6 capable fully managed [...]
Apple sneaks malware protection into Snow Leopard
Apple is dipping yet another toe into the anti-malware pond with a feature in the latest beta version of its forthcoming Snow Leopard operating system. The protection was quietly added earlier this month to Snow Leopard 10A432, the most recent build of the new version of Mac OS X that is due for release this [...]
NASA speeds moon communication to near real-time
How often do you go to make a call on your cell phone and you’re stymied by a bad connection? Consider trying to make that call from … well, the moon. NASA engineers did when they were setting up the communications system that would send massive amounts of data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter across [...]
Early Risers Are Mutants
By Cassandra Willyard ScienceNOW Daily News 13 August 2009 Don’t hate those people who are perky and efficient after only a few hours of sleep. They can’t help it. New research suggests that a genetic mutation may explain why some people sleep less. Researchers don’t know exactly why some people do fine with as little [...]
Scientists Reach for Event Horizon With Man-Made Black Holes
Blithely disregarding the doomsday predictions of numerous filmmakers, scientists at Dartmouth College are trying to figure out how to build their own itty bitty black holes. It’s a daunting task, and it better be, because black holes are no laughing matter (or anti-matter). Their unrelenting gravitational pull sucks in everything around them, even light. And [...]
Three tools to boost your multi-monitor experience
Screen real estate just might be the one aspect of using a computer that has the greatest impact on productivity. While the penny pinchers at your company might initially scoff at spending the extra funds on what might be perceived as a luxury, all you have to do is plunk a second LCD panel on [...]
A Mathematical Model for Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse
We may think we know how best to eradicate the zombie threat, but movies and books give us, at best, an anecdotal account of how to deal with the undead. A new paper, however, offers mathematical models for human survival. In a paper published in Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress, a team of mathematicians from [...]
Government jobs portal ups search facility
If you’re looking for a job in an Australian government department the Australian Public Service (APS) jobs portal, APSjobs, now offers a 12-field search facility to better connect agency personnel requirements with job seekers. The APSjobs portal at http://apsjobs.gov.au/ purports to link people to vacancies in the APS, the Australian Parliamentary Service and other Australian [...]