It's easy to forget, but all USB thumb drives are not created equal. There's a difference between the plastic cheapies tech companies are constantly ennuggeting and then crapping their press releases into and, say, a Super Talent 200x... and even amongst the big boys, different file systems get wildly different results.
Kristofer Brozio took nine of the best USB flash drives around and put them in a head-to-head performance test. Overall, the OCZ and Super Talent drives come out ahead. This may all seem pretty useless: you usually don't need a flash drive to do more than transfer a document or two between colleagues. But as someone who has been installing a good chunk of OSes on his Asus 1000HA netbook lately (more to come!), this has me looking to pick up a Super Talent.
A New Zealand man has landed himself in a real-life version of Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers' film about two fitness centre employees who get their hands on a disc containing the memoirs of a CIA agent, with comic - and deadly - consequences.
Chris Ogle inadvertently found 60 US military files, including names and telephone numbers for American soldiers after buying an MP3 player in a secondhand shop in Oklahoma, USA. He came across the data when he connected the $18 (£12) device to his computer - hardly the rock tunes, snapshots and video one might expect to find on a secondhand MP3 player.
The military data included US social security numbers and even which female troops were pregna
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Sony says it sold 4.46 million PlayStation 3 games console in the Christmas quarter (October-December), which was down 9% from 4.9 million units in the same period last year. That's pretty unusual or, I suspect, totally unknown for a successful games machine.
But Sony scored a hat-trick of declines. PSP sales of 5.08 million units were down by 68,000, while sales of the old faithful PS2 more than halved: they were down by 2.88 million units to 2.52 million.
Sales of PSP game sales fell by 2.8 million units to 15.5 million, while sales of PS2 games plunged by 31.2 million to 29.7 million units. The only bright spot was that sales of PS3 games climbed by 14.8 million units to 40.8 million.
Not surprisingly, the games division's sales fell by a third to ¥393.8 billion ($4.36bn), while operating profits fell by 97% to ¥400 million ($4.42m).
The whole company didn't do much better. Sony's revenues fell by 25% to ¥2.15 trillion, and pr
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Poring over the Guardian's 1000 novels everyone must read list last week was one of those exercises that left many of us sighing, Marvell-like, "Had we but world enough and time …" The imperative in the series title created a thousand little trade-offs in the head: no, dammit, I still haven't read Vanity Fair, but I did get through Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves on a Barbados beach as I was about to turn 40.
It all evoked once again the unanswerable question so often put to readers: "Where on earth do you find the time?" The worry is that the answer might involve some kind of guilty confession. People who genuinely can't find the time to read are not necessarily unequal to the task; more likely they're bringing up children, working late, or cleaning the windows instead of lolling on the sofa turning pages.
Where did I find time to read Middlemarch last year, or the three ... Read more »
Around our neighbourhood at the moment there are a lot of kids sitting exams. Inevitably, the conversation at the kitchen table has been turning to what they're reading. The recent award of the Newbery medal (a major prize) to Neil Gaiman for his children's page-turner The Graveyard Book makes this subject extra topical.
Does TV make you fat? There’s a growing body of evidence connecting more TV watching with poorer diets.
The latest study in the field has found that kids who watch more TV than their peers while in middle and high school have less healthy diets five years later. As young adults, they eat more fried foods, fast food and sugary drinks and consume fewer vegetables, fruits and whole grains.
“We can’t say we know the specific mechanism linking TV and diets, but we see this relationship,” says Daheia Barr-Anderson, lead researcher of the study and a scientist at University of Minnesota’s School of Kinesiology. (Kinesiology is the study of human movement.)
Barr-Anderson offers some common-sense explanations for the TV-diet connection. She says that many snack and soda ad
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Totally incredible. The boss told us “Don’t worry if you hear strange noises at the office these days, a construction company was hired to add more room to the building. This way, we’ll be able to hire more people!”
Interesting, right? Normally, we don’t hear good news like these at the office, especially in time of financial crisis, where many people are afraid to lose their job. So if the boss wants to hire more people at the office, chances are you will not get fired!
Well, that was not such good news after all… See by yourself the pictures of the office furniture when the construction began…
YouTube wants to be on your TV set bad. It’s squeezing its way in through Apple TV, TiVo, and now videogame consoles: the Nintendo Wii and the Sony PS3. Just point those videogame browsers to www.youtube.com/tv and you can now watch a customized version of YouTube from your couch. The YouTube Blog reports:
Currently in beta, the TV Website offers a dynamic, lean-back, 10-foot television viewing experience through a streamlined interface that enables you to discover, watch and share YouTube videos on any TV screen with just a few quick clicks of your remote control. With enlarged text and simplified navigation, it makes watching YouTube on your TV as easy and intuitive as possible. Optional auto-play capability enables users to view related videos sequentially, emulating a traditional television experience. The TV Website is available internationally across 22 geographies and in over 12 languages.
Absent from the list of supported game consoles, of course, is the Xbox 360. That’
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Last year I wrote about my resolution to be a more effective (or simply effective) pitcher in my rec league. While I was confident of my chance at success, I missed the mark for a variety of reasons (injury, time, laziness, a complete lack of physical talent, etc.)
As it turns out I'm not alone. A recent resolution study indicated that 52 percent of participants were optimistic they would reach their goals, yet only 12 percent actually achieved their goals. According to the study, "An extra 22 percent of men achieved their resolution when they engaged in goal-setting, and women were almost 10 percent more likely to be successful when encouraged to persist in the face of setbacks."
So here's my (second) attempt at creating a lasting team sport resolution through goal-setting:
Here are some of the stories, studies, fads and other foibles of the dietary world that made headlines in 2008.
Diet Books: There is never a shortage of diet books hitting the shelves. A few noteworthy ones were; Toxic fat by Barry Sears, The GenoType Diet, by Peter D'Adamo, In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan. The latter gets my vote for food-related book of the year. For exercise-related books, Lou Schulers' New Rules of Lifting for Women and Eric Cressey's Maximum Strength are two stand-out strength training books.
The Economy and how it affects our dietary habits: It may be too early to tell how the economic meltdown will influence our eating habits and health, but needless to say, people are certainly going to be thinking about scaling back their spending. Ali wrote a wonderful 4-part series called "Dieting on a Budget".
Cancer and exercise: Weight training, high intensity cardio and other exercise can have ma
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