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Sat Jun 27 20:50:00 EDT 2009
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Monitor Startup Locations - System Optimization is a process that doesn't always end the way we want. We need to work on many levels in order to optimize or to achieve the optimization state we want. From Startup List to User Account control, from CPU or Memory usage level to advanced registry edition, all steps are meant to help our system work faster and cleaner. The first step, Startup List m...

Skype IPO in Jeopardy - Skype hasn't proven the success eBay was hoping for when it bought the company in 2005 for $2.6 billion. The idea at the time was to integrate the voice-chat capabilities in its auction site, offering users a way to communicate, but it since gave up on the thought and recently announced plans to spin off the company as an Initial Public Offering.

A Gamer's Week: 20 - 27 June - Hello and welcome to another edition of A Gamer's Week, your guide to all of the big news in the gaming industry unveiled in the last seven days. We've seen some pretty big announcements about fresh games, teasers about future ones, and competitions for those that have already appeared. Without further ado, here's this edition of A Gamer's Week.Monday s...

Windows 7 Upgrade Paths Test Matrix - Microsoft ripped through the last translucency veil covering Windows 7 and made the pricing details for the operating system public. Furthermore, the company also started selling the platform,...

Cellular 'Position Lights' Made from Nanoparticles - In a groundbreaking, new study conducted at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, German researchers have set the basis for understanding how nanoparticles appear in nature. The work has also yielded cadmium sulphide particles coated in membrane bubbles at the microscopic scale, to be used as &ldquo...

Google Voice Ready to Get Airborne - Google is getting closer and closer to launching its new service, Google Voice, as it already started sending invitations to users who signed up on a waiting list for the Net-augmented telephone service. The service hasn't yet been released publicly, but it seems that it shouldn't be too long before the company decides that it is high time to do so.

Facebook Becoming More Like Twitter, May Add 'Fans' Feature - Facebook is continuing its transformation, taking another step, two smaller ones actually, towards becoming more like Twitter. A change in that direction is the blurring of the lines between Facebook Pages and Profiles with several tweaks and, apparently, a new feature that will allow users to become 'fans' of a profile, much like...

Windows Marketplace for Mobile to Be Launched with 600 Apps - Microsoft announced earlier this year that the Windows Marketplace for Mobile was expected to be launched sometime during the fall, along with the first mobile phones powered by the company's Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system, and it seems that things are already starting to move on. In a recent interview with MobiFrance, Audrey Zolg...

FTP Credentials for Major Websites Compromised - Security researchers from antivirus vendor Prevx have uncovered a major security breach that affects more than 68,000 websites, including some high-profile ones. FTP credentials belonging to the likes of Amazon, Cisco, BBC, Symantec, McAfee, Monster, or even Bank of America have been found on a Zbot dumping site hosted in China. Jacque...

Nano-Killers Can Destroy Bacteria on Implanted Prosthetics - One of the main dangers plaguing all sorts of medical tools, devices and human implants at this point comes from a bacterium known as Staphylococcus epidermidis. Opportunistic by nature, the organism regularly lives on our skins, and is as harmless as it comes. However, when it hitches rides inside us via needle...

Men Consent on Attractiveness, Women Less So - According to a new scientific study, men exhibit much more consensus when it comes to rating attractiveness than women do. The paper, authored by Wake Forest University Assistant Professor of Psychology Dustin Wood, and co-authored by Queens College expert Claudia Brumbaugh, shows that women fail to agree on whether another pe...

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Build 10A394 Activates Dock Expose - 9to5Mac is reporting that Apple surprised Snow Leopard beta testers by offering the latest Snow Leopard Seed Update via the operating system’s software updater. ...

Weekend Reading: Game Demos, Piracy and The Sims 3 - Piracy is one of the big, ugly problems of the videogame industry and it mostly affects PC game releases. So, you would think that with the launch of one of the most anticipated PC-only games of the year, Electronic Arts would make sure to limit piracy. Still,

Download Fennec 1.0 Alpha 2 for Windows Mobile - Fennec, the mobile version of the popular Firefox browser, has been updated once again. While until now Windows Mobile users were able to enjoy the Alpha 1 release of the software solution, the Alpha 2 version has been released into the wild, and is now available for download. At the same time, the development team also updated the Fennec version f...

Imeem Removes User-Generated Photos and Videos - Social music service imeem has announced that it will remove all user-generated videos and photos from the site on June 30, in an effort to simplify it. The website says that the features weren't very popular and it didn't make financial sense to keep them. “We’re making these changes as part of an overall effort to simpli...

How to Make Good on Your Pledges - In what Swansea University Professor Larch Maxey described as the “irony of our times,” the expert was invited to fly from his home in England to the United States, to attend a climate change conference at the Smithsonian Festival. Maxey, who, for the past 15 years, failed to wrap his mind around the whole ‘...

US Asks China to Rethink Deployment of Internet Filtering Software - The U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk have sent an official letter to the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and Ministry of Co...

Eric Schmidt: the Economy Is on the Rebound - Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, saying that the worst part of the economic downturn was over and that the economy was set to recover shortly, perhaps as soon as in the fall. The company has been hit by the economic conditions Schmidt said and, while the searches are ...

Nokia Launches 11 3G-Based Phones in China - China is getting ready for its upcoming 3G networks, which will be deployed by all three carriers in the country, China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom, and the market is expected to represent a great opportunity for mobile phone makers to boost their sales. Nokia, the world's largest handset vendor, already made a step in this direction, and r...

Third ESA Deep-Space Station Under Construction - The European Space Agency (ESA) announced on June 22nd plans to expand its network of deep-space surveillance stations, when it informed the Argentinian government that it had selected a 30-square-kilometer area, on which it would build a new, giant, 35-meter radio antenna. Once completed, the plant will be the agency's third ...

Download Opera 10.0 Beta Build 6526 Mac - Opera Software has released a new beta version of its popular cross-platform web browser. For Mac users, Opera 10.0 Build 6526 Beta delivers UI improvements (on top of the major refresh added...

Sprint Picks on iPhone with Palm Pre - Sprint released the new Palm Pre smartphone into the wild about three weeks ago, putting a lot of hope in the handset's performance on the market, and now it has begun to market its device a little more aggressively than before. To be more precise, the company touts it as having more capabilities than the iPhone, the leader on the market. Even ...

$1-Million Netflix Prize Claimed - Almost three years ago, in October 2006, Netflix, the online movie-rental company, announced a contest challenging the world's leading computer scientists to come up with an algorithm for recommendations that was better than the internal one by at least ten percent and advertising a $1-million prize. One team has just posted a solution that i...

Download LimeWire X 5.2.3 Mac Beta - LimeWire X is a free, peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing client for Mac OS X. It uses the Java platform to locate files, as well as share files, and it is one of the few P2P file-sharing solutions of its k...

NASA Launches 'Free Spirit' Website - With NASA's Spirit rover stuck in loose Martian soil since May 6th, its mission control team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, is working around the clock to recreate the exact conditions on the Red Planet inside a test sandbox, using an exact replica of the MER rover. Because engineers at the American space agency believe it ma...

Fallout 3 Point Lookout DLC Impressions - Fallout 3 was one of last year's biggest games and in many journalists' eyes, the best one of 2008. It brought players a huge open post-apocalyptic world filled with unique creatures, characters and, most importantly, quests.It offered dozens of hours of gameplay and was truly one of the most robust titles that we had seen in a while. After it...

BlackBerry Tour Might Hit Verizon on July 12 - BlackBerry Tour already generated a lot of fuzz among BlackBerry enthusiasts, and it seems that a little more will come from it in the near future as well, starting with a new rumored launch date for the handset on Verizon Wireless. According to the latest news on the Web, the phone should hit the mobile phone operator as soon as July 12.

Ulysses to End 18-Year Mission Around the Sun - The Ulysses robotic space probe is a joint NASA/ESA mission to the Sun, launched on October 6th, 1990, from the space shuttle Discovery, during flight STS-41. The craft's main purpose is to analyze the surface of the Sun from various latitudes, and to determine the interactions that exist within the yellow dwarf. It has been doing this for the past ...

Michael Jackson's Death Sends Search Engine Traffic Through the Roof - There is no doubt Michael's Jackson's death was a worldwide event, and the sheer number of people looking for information about the news or the pop superstar exceeded many previous records. This was apparent yesterday, as many sites and services

Nokia to Launch ARM-Based Android Netbook in 2010 - Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia is expected to come to the market next year with its first netbook running under the Google Android operating system. The company has been rumored before to be working on such a device and, though nothing has been said officially until now, it seems that the netbook might become a reality, at least this is what D...