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News-o-matic

  • There's a cool CNN report on YouTube showing how a knowledgeable thief hacked a Virginia ATM machine into giving out twenty dollar bills instead of fives. That way he (and others using the machine) could take out $1000 and actually get $4000. Amusingly, it took nine days for anyone to report what had happened.
  • CNN has a scary prediction that more than half the world's coral reefs may be gone in the next 25 years. Sea temperatures are said to be the worst attributing factor, although pollutants and algae are also to blame.
  • Scott Adams of Dilbert fame lost his voice over a year ago to a weird but interesting affliction called Spasmodic Dysphonia. Part of the speech control centre in his brain went on the fritz, meaning that he lost his voice in certain situations. He could still sing just fine, and according to his blog, he could still speak professionally on stage. He just couldn't speak to people normally. This kind of situation really makes me think about how much we don't know about the brain and it's inner workings. The cool thing is that Scott discovered that he could speak in rhyme, and that doing so helped remap his brain so that he could talk normally. Wowzers.
  • Engadget got to play with the Zune and the Zune store recently, and they really didn't have a good time of it. Apart from the software crashes, just getting onto the Zune store seemed to require more work than a tax return. They do note that they tried things on a different PC and it seemed to work just fine, but it's all a bit of a worry.
  • Samsung demoed a rather funky triple-clamshell portable PC with WiMax and CDMA at an industry conference in South Korea. I'm not sure about the overall ergonomics of the device, but having it run a full version of Windows XP is very useful.
  • Flickr has a nifty photoset of souvenirs overlaying their real-life counterparts.
  • I also found a cool 360-degree panorama shot of a Notting Garden stitched together from 140 separate images on Flickr. It's good work, although I do recommend the extra mega huge original size.
  • The new version of Google Earth can overlay historic maps such as Tokyo 1680, World Globe 1790 and London 1843 over parts of the modern world. The resolution isn't really the best, but that's probably because their satellite technology back then was a bit lacking.
  • Business Week has an interesting article on Ikea and its success. I was recently surprised that they actually sell extra shelves for the Ikea shelving unit I've got, which will allow me to store another row of DVDs in there. Those clever Swedes.
  • About a million years ago, a video of a guy miming along to Natalie Imbruglia's Torn made the rounds. Now there's a new video on YouTube of him doing the same song, but this time he's joined on stage by Natalie herself, and it's pretty good.
  • Valve's Half Life 2: Episode Two has been pushed back to mid next year, which also means that Team Fortress 2 and Portal have also been delayed. Dammit.
  • There's an excellent first look at the new GeForce 8800 on the Tech Report, and the thing is damn fast. It uses several clusters of multipurpose stream processors to achieve its performance, and uses an estimated 681 million transistors on its main G80 processor. The flagship 8800GTX will probably be ridiculously expensive, but I might consider the 8800GTS in a few months if I'm building a new rig.
  • Speaking of new rigs and CPUs - Anandtech had a nice chat with Valve recently about multi-threaded game development. There's a lot of interesting stuff about their implementation of a hybrid threading system, particle systems, complex AI and even using multiple machines to dramatically improve level compile speeds in the Valve offices. Then Anandtech finishes off the article with some nice benches of the Intel QX6700 Quad machines on some of the new Valve tools. Once again, I am reminded that my next machine should really be a quad if I'm going to retain any geek cred at all.
  • It's early days in the HD-DVD v Blu-ray format war, but the DVD Wars page indicates that HD-DVD is ahead by a small margin. That page has some very interesting facts and figures, and is updated daily to provide a cool Flash-based timeline of each format's progress. I wonder what these graphs will look like in a year?