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Displays
Samsung SyncMaster T200 20” LCD @ TrustedReviews
Soyo DYLM26E6 26” LCD @ Benchmark Reviews
Misc.
Everything you need to know about SATA @ Hardware Secrets
Monster Cable Outlet To Go 3 @ DragonSteelMods
Cooling
Noctua NH-U12P tower CPU cooler @ SPCR
CPU cooler roundup @ CDRInfo
Input Devices
Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 7000 @ HardwareLogic
The perfect Razer desktop @ TweakTown
IBM is partnering with the US Department of Agriculture & Mars Inc., the company making all those M&Ms for you to eat, to sequence and map the cocoa genome. Scientists believe that the research could improve the quality of cocoa plants, resulting in higher yields and better resistance to bugs and disease. You may ask, “Why cocoa?”
IBM said cocoa has been somewhat neglected when it comes to agricultural research compared to major crops such as corn, wheat, and rice. But it notes that the crop is economically important, and not just to Africa. For every dollar's worth of cocoa imported to the U.S., one to two dollars of American agricultural products are used in turning it into chocolate, according to IBM.
A blogger has written an interesting entry about people that choose to work for Microsoft over Google. He has some solid observations on Google as a startup vs a mature company. The grammar is a bit poor but doesn’t make the blog unreadable.
The technology press makes it seem like people are ditching Google for hot startups like FriendFeed and Facebook. However the truth is has a [sic] more nuances than that. Now that Google is just another big software company, lots of people are comparing it to other big software companies like Microsoft and finding it lacking.
I told you last week about Ian Usher auctioning his life. The auction is finished and he didn’t get as much as he had hoped, settling for AU$100K less than his target. Now that the auction is over, he’s planning to travel in search of a new beginning.
Bids had reached as high as A$2.2 million, only for Usher to discover there had been a glitch on eBay's system which allowed the participation of non-registered bidders who had put in bogus offers.
Google has quietly begun testing on new social features that will appear on the customizable iGoogle start page. The rollout will expand in July and will include support for the open standard “OpenSocial” later in the summer.
Mashable blogger Kristen Nicole noted that up until now, Gmail was the closest thing the Google suite has to a "functional portal" where users could manage all Google applications. "But the upcoming iGoogle start page is really going to be a very social portal that makes sharing easy, by way of Google Reader items, chat, and activity streams that keep you connected across the board," she noted.
PCWorld has an interesting article on the origins of many technical terms that we use (and abuse) today. Some are pretty obvious while others are much more obscure. Cool stuff.
Technology we take for granted today was new not so long ago, and somebody had to name it. Though sometimes it's hard to pin down exactly who deserves credit -- or blame -- here's a shot a some of the more familiar ones.
This ain’t your average website review. 2008 Fiction Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz reviewed GTA IV for the Wall Street Journal and has a lot to say. I thought the review was very well done and interesting to read. What do you think?
GTA IV is brilliant, but despite what virtually all the reviews claim, it ain't the revolution. If you played GTA III or higher, GTA IV won't exactly catapult you to higher plane of existence or induce metanoia. GTA III was the revolution, and established the grammar for the franchise.
Sound & Vision magazine has an article on how Netflix’s queue works. If you’ve wondered why some movies arrive almost immediately after placing them in your queue while others take longer, wonder no longer.
And the outfit is quite efficient: According to the company, some 96% of customers clicking around the site receive their movies the next day. This basically means, barring some major mail-ending catastrophe in your ZIP code, any disc ordered on a Monday morning will most likely appear in your mailbox by Tuesday — unless all copies are at far-away distribution hubs, which occasionally adds a day or two to the delivery date.
NBC is poised to deliver over 2200 hours of live Olympic competition from Beijing available online, complementing 3000 hours of on-demand highlights and 1400 hours of TV coverage spread among six networks. That a lot of sports, all coming in August.
The computer coverage will also play a clear secondary role to TV. No events that are scheduled to be televised will be available online until after they are seen on TV, said Perkins Miller, senior vice president for digital media at NBC Sports. The Web site will offer a full TV viewers' guide, track medal standings and give real-time results. It will have bios of more than 10,000 athletes, NBC said.
Imation Corp. showed off the Atom Flash Drive, a USB drive that is 1.5” long and no larger than a paperclip. It weighs in at less than one ounce and can store up to 8GB of data. It’s also compatible with Vista’s ReadyBoost technology.
ComputerWorld has released their 15th annual “100 Best Places to Work in IT” list for 2008. The criteria is detailed here.
The top-five lists show the best of the best — the organizations that excel in five areas of employment: diversity, career development, retention, benefits and training.
Who are the top 5?
1. The Capital Group Cos. 2. Quicken Loans Inc. 3. General Mills Inc. 4. The Mitre Corp. 5. SAS Institute Inc.
Is your company in the list? Should it be? Discuss here.
The American Library Association (ALA) will launch an innovative project to track and measure the impact of gaming on literacy skills and build a model for library gaming that can be deployed nationally. Funding for the project will be provided by a $1 million grant from the Verizon Foundation.
We don’t normally comment on press releases but this one is interesting enough to warrant some discussion. Are libraries going to become gaming centers? Talk about an odd convergence.
