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Sun Jan 24 11:57:25 EST 2010
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A Gamer's Week: January 24 - This week, it's been all cloak and dagger here at Softpedia as we've played Assassin's Creed II for a review but we've also written our usual Weekend Reading and EndWeekGame pieces to give you something interesting to read. And, of course, we have a selection of this week’s news to take a look at.On Monday, we talked about the PC market and the titles...

Softpedia's Week in Handsets: January 18-January 24 - This week's summary should end up being a rather short one, based on the fact that only a few noticeable events happened during the past seven days. Among the most important news of the week, we have a fresh series of reports on Microsoft and what flavor of Windows Mobile it might officially unveil at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next...

Fast Desktop Capture - Sharing files, especially digital pictures, has been one of our most common endeavors since quite a while now. Holiday photos, mobile-phone snaps, images found or grabbed from various websites, they're all passed around for amusement, just as others are part of business projects, web design or similar work-related tasks. The diversity of graphical file types and uses is matc...

Weekend Reading: Sim City 5, UrbanSim and Baghdad - One of the series that shaped me as a gamer was the Caesar games created by Impressions and published by the now defunct Sierra. I first played Caesar II sometime in 1997, right around the time I was developing a nice little obsession with Roman history, and I felt incredible power at controlling an entire province in Ancient Rome and developing i...

Too Many Options Are Depressing, Lead to Uncertainty - They say it’s good, recommended actually, to have more choices to go with, instead of just one thing that we have to stick with no matter what. However, a new study in consumer behavior comes to show that, where options are concerned, having too many is actually detrimental to us. Having too much choice often leads to depression and feel...

Lukka Sigurdardottir Designs Wedding Dress Made of Cake - Finding the perfect wedding gown is admittedly an extremely stressful, difficult challenge that most women face only after bracing themselves and making sure they have enough time for it, just in case. Brides looking for something a little more out of the ordinary can find inspiration in a dress designed by Lukka Sigurdardottir entirely ou...

Facebook US User Base Doubled During 2009 - When a new year begins, we all start to create statistics and reports regarding the year that has just passed, and to make predictions for the ongoing one. When it comes to Facebook, we could only expect it to increase its popularity and its member base even more. It is when we analyze the 2009 reports that we find the interesting aspects of this servic...

Google Chrome to Get Phantom Tabs - Web apps are constantly becoming more complex and, though there is an effort from most developers to make them lighter and from browser makers to render them faster, they still end up eating up quite a bit of resources. And with most people having more and more tabs opened at the same time, this adds up. Any modern PC is more than able to handle even the heavie...

Twitter Account Hijacking Weakness Revealed - A security researcher used a vulnerability in Twitter's Flash widget in order to demonstrate how an account on the micro-blogging platform can be hijacked. The flaw apparently stems from a rookie programming mistake, widely known since 2006."We’ve been notified about a vulnerability in our Flash widget and out of an abundance of caut...

Nicole Kidman Losing Movie Roles Because of Her Frozen Face - She’s repeatedly said that she’s doing nothing to make her face artificially younger but, for many, the fact that she can hardly (admittedly) show any emotion is enough to conclude that something is not ok. Movie producers also seem to think the same, and they choose to avoid Nicole Kidman because they fear she might ruin t...

Geckos Used as Inspiration in Nanotube Innovation - Among all the wonders of nature, geckos really stand out for their amazing ability to stick to virtually any surface, regardless of how smooth it is. This is only possible because the animals have millions of microscopic hairs on their feet, which are able to interact with any surface via electrical attractions called van der Waals forces. Now, ...

Mixed Shipment Growth Predicted for Taiwanese Motherboard Makers - Even though the economic downturn still hasn't passed, 2009 was generally a better year for the industry and many companies predict or have already reported revenue and/or shipment growth for last year, especially the fourth quarter. No doubt, the most representative example is AMD, which posted profits after multiple consecutive ...

WISE Discovers Its First Asteroid - NASA's most recently launched telescope, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has managed to discover its first asteroid, a never-before-seen object dubbed 2010 AB78. Experts managing the mission say that this is but the first such space rock to be identified by the powerful infrared observer, and that thousands of others are expected to be identif...

Kate Gosselin Caught Smacking Child in the Face - Kate Gosselin is, according to many, one of the toughest and most shrewd businesswomen in the industry and that’s a lot when we’re talking about a woman who, at the end of the day, doesn’t have much talent and whose biggest achievement is giving birth to sextuplets and having a reality show. Depending on who you ask, Mrs. Gosseli...

Protecting Sensitive Data with AD RMS - The beauty of Active Directory Rights Management Services is the way it spans across a range of Microsoft products. Companies that leverage the Windows client, Windows Server, and the Office productivity suite, but also Exchange Server 2010 can also seamlessly take advantage of AD RMS in order to ensure that their data is safeguarded. Of course Windows Serv...

Google Voice Chrome Extension Gets Click-to-Call Functionality - Google Voice is one of the most exciting products from the company at the moment. The service is still in a somewhat limited beta but it's clear that 2010 will be the year when Google becomes a very powerful player in the voice communications market. Google Voice is slowly making its way into every product the company has to offer, it's a default option in its Nexus One phone for example, and now the Google Chrome extension got a pretty big update adding much needed functionality like click-to...

Cheryl Cole Leaves X Factor to Have a Baby - A few days ago, Dannii Minogue confirmed that she was, indeed, expecting a child with model boyfriend Kris Smith, which also means she would not be returning as judge on X Factor, as previously suspected. Another celebrity that is making plans for an imminent departure is also singer Cheryl Cole, who will only stay on the show until her contract expire...

Samsung Launches Galaxy Portal i5700 with T-Mobile UK - South Korean mobile phone maker Samsung has launched a new handset running under Google's Android operating system in the UK, namely the Galaxy Portal, which is now available for purchase in the country via wireless carrier T-Mobile. The handheld has already been launched on the market, and is available outside the UK as the Samsung Galaxy S...

Twitter Starts Testing Local Trends - Twitter already owns the real-time information game and now it's making a play in another hot web trend, local info. Some users have begun noticing a new feature dubbed Local Trends, which does exactly what you'd expect: it lists the trending topics in your area as opposed to globally. Twitter has confirmed that it's testing the feature but very few people ar...

MSI HD 5870 Lightning Pictured - The Radeon HD 5870 graphics card from Advanced Micro Devices is already famous for its bleeding-edge overclocking capabilities. Introduced some time ago, the product has been launched in a variety of forms by different hardware manufacturers, each model pushing to surpass the competition with modifications to cooling or clock boosts.Nevertheless, one c...

Particle Collisions Can Result in Black Holes - Over the last few years, numerous controversies have sprung up around massive particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Most often, critics fear that these giant machines will produce particle collisions that are so energetic that they could give birth to very small black holes. Physicists say that this is entirely probable, an...

Android 2.0.1 Rolling Out for MILESTONE in Europe - Mobile phone maker Motorola has already started to roll out an update for its high-end Android-based Motorola MILESTONE handset. According to the company, European users of the device can now enjoy the Android 2.0.1 flavor of Google's operating system, yet it seems that the roll-out will be made at different moments in different countries. For t...

Scott Baio Receiving Death Threats After Posting Pic of Michelle Obama - In the perfect example of how things can sometimes go terribly wrong without as much as an incentive, Scott Baio is now worried about the safety of his family after a comment he posted on Twitter has drawn several death threats. Baio posted a photo of Michelle Obama together with what he considered a funny comment – bu...

Removing Bits of Skull Enhances Brain Imaging - Producing more and more accurate data on the human brain is the goal of all imaging methods used in hospitals today. Scanning the electrical activity of the cortex, or determining firing patterns within various areas of the brain are objectives that require complex medical procedures. In spite of recent advancements, some of these imaging methods st...

Google Grew 58 Percent Globally in 2009 - There is a growing number of people who are claiming that search engines, in their current form, are obsolete and that their fate is sealed. People will start relying more and more on the information from their friends and extended social graph, on places like Facebook or Twitter, and search as we know it will become largely irrelevant. There is some trut...

fring Gets Updated for Symbian and Android - Mobile phone users owning a Symbian or Android-based device have now a new flavor of the popular fring application to enjoy on their handsets. According to the developing team, the new releases are delivered as part of the company's commitment to provide its users with an enhanced experience, while the improvements they bring along are based on the fee...

Conan O’Brien Hosts Last Tonight Show - Last night, Conan O’Brien, whom fans named “Coco” in the recent “I’m with Coco” campaign, hosted his last episode of The Tonight Show. Though it was more of a wake than a regular episode, Coco stuck to the same recipe of the past couple of weeks, holding celebrity interviews and thrashing NBC in the opening monologue. Unt...

Lenovo Releases Elemental Accelerator for ThinkStations - Intent on enabling its professionals to harness the full power of the ThinkStation S20 and D20 professional workstations, Lenovo has launched new software that aims to fully utilize the resources of the NVIDIA Quadro FX graphics used in their configurations. Named Elemental Accelerator, the software supports GPU-accelerated conversion of c...

Windows Mobile 6.5 SDK Now Available for Download - Redmond-based software giant Microsoft has finally decided to deliver to developers around the world the Software Development Kits for its Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional and Standard mobile client. It's a well known fact that the company released the operating system on the market back in October 2009, and the release of the SDK is made prior t...

Earth's Asteroid Defenses Leave Much to Be Desired - According to a new document released on January 22 by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), our planet is still poorly defended in the case of an impending asteroid or meteorite impact. The report suggests that the United States and other countries with important space abilities should do more to safeguard Earth from the threat of space ro...