1) MP4 Player
2) Touch HD Handset
3) HD TV
4) WII Fit
5) Internet Video Service

Okay, that’s the list, here is why we chose them:

1) MP4 Player

Lets face it, we all love music. Whether you are waiting at an airport, stuck at a train station awaiting an all too often late train, at a really boring convention, music can help pass the time, and change a laborious activity into a please rest while listening to your favourite tunes!

Add MP4 Video Functionality, and you have a winning combination that puts the MP4 player firmly at the top of out gadgets for 2009 list.

2) Touch HD Handset

When it comes to mobile phones, the goal posts are always ont he move. New phones tend to be released quicker than whippets out of the starting gates, meaning its tough to stay up to date with the latest offerings. After much arguing, all in the office decided that despite this, at least one mobile phone HAD to appear in our list. We decided the Touch HD is the best of the bunch that we had used so far this year. The Touch screen, 5 megapixel camera and TouchFLO 3D interface all helped it pip the iphone to the post.

3) HD TV

Come on, do you REALLY think we would go without a TV? Here in the Sci-Technews office, we love film. HD Tv gives a much clearer, crisp image, and an almost cinema like experience. We couldn’t even consider living through 2009 without a decent HD TV, meaning this we simply HAD to have this in our top 5 list.

4) WII FIT

Right, well the gadgets we have mentioned so far, whilst all being top notch bits of kit, don’t do our fitness levels any favours! – We decided that the inclusion of a WII Fit may well redress the balance! – With the WII FIT, you get to have fun with one of the best gadgets around, without the guilt of being a couch potato! – With this console, you get to keep fit whilst having fun!

5) Internet Video Service

These days when you want to watch a movie, you are not tied to a Cable movie subscription channel or a trip to your local DVD rental store.

Amazon, for example, offer a Video on Demand service (previously known as Amazon Unbox), and offers over 40′000 moviews and TV shows that can be view on your TV by use of a broadband connected device. (For example, TiVo). – Alternatively, you can hook up you PC to a TV via a TV out connection.

Vudu Box, starting at around $299, is another good choice, offering over 10′000 moview and TV shows, including a good selection of HD options.

First, the reason I care, is the harddrive. The Air had two options when it came out- a measley but micro sata drive or laughable but unique SSD flash harddrive. As long as computers have justified the name they have all, unless broken, used a mechanical harddrive. The wonders of minaturisation have produced smaller, faster and more capacious progeny, that still utilise a little disc spinning very fast. They have always been delicate and to this day, if they fail, it is almost invariably catastrophic. For an extra three months wages the Apple wizards will sling in a flash harddrive. It weighs less, has no mechanical parts and therefore uses significantly less power and is an order of magnitude less delicate. Mechanical hard drive technology is certainly more developed but they will be consigned to the same fate as W.- put out to pasture and hopefully forgotten. Indeed in the latest update the Air now has the option of a 128Gb flash drive, following the trend throughout most IT technologies of a doubling of price/performance in twelve months. So, you bought the first Air on the day it came out- you’re a dillon and probably only use it as a handbag. This latest offering boasts only fifty percent HD capacity of the MacBook so it won’t win any races but at least now it is adequete. Begging the question once again, why pay premium prices for mediocrity? For the same reasons you’ll cheerfully dump other baseline functionality like an optical drive, a second USB port, the firewire port and the extra boot-space for a weeks shopping.

Head to head, the Air can only compete on looks and exclusivity, but it seems to be pushing us to think that the way we use our systems is on the verge of significant change. That, it seems, is the interesting point- thirty years ago who would have dreamt of leaving the house without a grappling iron, a compass, three weeks emergency rations, a sextant and star charts for both hemispheres. These days we trot out, carefree with a cash card and a satnav. The Air can hijack at wifi-point the optical drive of any networked machine (including PC), do we really need four optical drives per machine, enough ram to tup field of ewes and a harddrive big enough to store the entire sum of human knowledge? No, your home terminal can do that; the portable should be small, light, functional. But, before you forego your grappling iron there need to be satelites for your sat to nav with. Invention, development, dissemination, assimilation.

Ah, so you mean it’s rubbish and expensive now, but by one in a year or two?

Nearly.

The process uses well established technology, indeed the inventor Paul Baskis filed patents for the process after a brain wave to evolve a clunky inefficient precursor process. The technology is identical, the genius is in the application. Presented with the prospect, the most popular response is ‘what’s the catch?’, in this case it almost seems like there isn’t one. “Thermal depolymerization, says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, has proved to be 85 percent energy efficient for complex feedstocks, such as turkey offal: “That means for every 100 Btus (British thermal unit) in the feedstock, we use only 15 Btus to run the process.” He contends the efficiency is even better for relatively dry raw materials, such as plastics.

The process is genuinely revolutionary, testing has proven that any carbon based waste can be used and irrespective of it’s input toxicity, the end products are pure and extremely useful. “So far, says Terry Adams, nothing hazardous comes out from any feedstock we try.”By varying the feedstock and cooking/coking times it is possible to select any number of relatively benign and industrially valuable chemicals. “That’s what’s so great about making water a friend,” says Appel. “The hydrogen in water combines with the chlorine in PVC to make it safe. If you burn PVC [in a municipal-waste incinerator], you get dioxin—very toxic.”

So, the catch. As far as it’s possible to ascertain, there is no procedural catch but there does seem to be a political catch. This process was patented by Baskis in 1994 after the first Gulf war but long before the second. Even the most politically illiterate amongst us must recognise that oil control dictates much of the foreign policy of the G8, turn off the lightswitch and civilisation shall revert to savagery within a week of the supermarkets closing. This is how the greasy politicos excuse many of their ‘questionable’ actions.

It is undeniable that our reliance on hydrocarbon fuels is having a severe and detrimental effect on the environment but more pressing is energy security, TDP however, has several unintended benefits, for example converting all the U.S. agricultural waste into oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil annually This waste is no longer polluting and is now useful. And, as the Yoo Ess is importing around 4.2 billion barrels of oil per year, their security and supply is assured. So why, fourteen years after the patenting of this process is the empire still holding a gun to the head of the arabs for ’security’? Other environmental considerations- if you incinerate waste, why not TDP it? Instead of filling the air with dioxins why not find yourselves with barrels of lovely oil and a bucketful of exotic minerals. Looking further ahead, carbon capture may not just mean trapping nasties in trees, it may be a filter attached to your exhaust that, when full, will give you an extra tank of fuel. Indeed, pretty much every landfill site has the potential to become a minable resource

For many years, the oft maligned ‘greenies’ have been calling for decentralised production of energy and processing of waste, now it seems probable that without political interference there won’t be a town dump, each town will have it’s own refinery. Appel is certain that the process is scalable— ‘Plants can sprawl over acres and handle 4,000 tons of waste a day or be “small enough to go on the back of a flatbed truck” and handle just one ton daily.’ Given the political, social, environmental and financial instability caused by energy production and use, is it not time that we stopped mitigating the consequences and start using a better paradigm?

Aurora was designed with the intent of creating what the Web of the future will look like. Featuring an integrated Web and desktop environment, Aurora functions in three dimensions on the desktop.

The Aurora concept browser is part of the recently launched Mozilla Labs initiative. Keeping to its open-source roots, Mozilla is throwing open the doors for contributors to work with their teams to help shape the direction of the Web.

“Today we’re calling on industry, higher education and people from around the world to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions for the Web,” states the Mozilla Labs blog.

“Our goal is to bring even more people to the table and provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.”

In a video released on the Mozilla Labs blog, the Aurora concept Web browser is demonstrated in the interactions between two people working in separate offices who are surfing the Web at the same time. At first, Aurora seems to be a normal browser as Jill looks for the latest Cubs score. Alan, in a different location, sends Jill a text message and the two of them begin discussing rainfall for their farms.

Then things really start to look different.

The Aurora concept browser is separated from current Web browsers in its integration with the desktop. When looking at a Web page, the page is framed by four distinct elements that make a browsing experience easier and more intuitive.

On the top of the screen, called the Shelf, users have access to frequently used objects. The History Stack, on the left of the screen, gives users a reverse chronological set of recently used objects. The User Stack, on the right of the screen, is a reverse chronological temporary storage space for things users want to keep on hand. The Wheel, at the bottom of the screen, gives users a visual reference for all the objects they are actively connected to.

Next, Aurora gives us the Spatial View, which organizes things on the Web as objects and stores them as they were the last time Jill accessed them. As Jill moves along the Z axis—going back in time through her history—she finds the weather report from the last time she accessed the page. After refreshing the page, the Aurora browser allows Jill to grab data from a Web page and send it to Alan.

In the Spatial View, the power of the Wheel becomes apparent. All the information that passes through the Aurora browser is analyzed and semantic similarities are noted. These similarities then form the basis for the content clusters in the browser.

The bulletins, part of Microsoft’s monthly patch cycle, are slated to provide fixes for an undisclosed number of security vulnerabilities in Windows, Office, Exchange and BizTalk, Microsoft said on its Web site Thursday. The issue affecting BizTalk also relates to “Capicom,” a developer component to add cryptography to applications.

Each of the four product families is scheduled to get at least one “critical” update, Microsoft’s highest severity rating, the company said. Microsoft plans to release two bulletins related to issues in Windows and three related to Office, with one remaining for both Exchange and BizTalk, it said.

Security issues tagged as critical typically could allow an attacker to gain full control of an affected system with very little, if any, action by the user.

Microsoft’s updates will include a patch for a vulnerability in the Windows domain name system, or DNS. The security vulnerability affects Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003. Microsoft warned of the problem last month and has said it was being used in “limited” attacks.

Some of the planned Office patches will likely deal with vulnerabilities in the software that have been disclosed and have been waiting for fixes.

Microsoft gave no further information on the upcoming alerts, other than to state that some of the fixes may require restarting the computer or server.

Last month, Microsoft released six security bulletins. Shortly after it released the fixes, several new Office zero-day bugs and the Windows DNS bug hit. Some security watchers have come to call this phenomenon “zero-day Wednesday.”

Quoted : http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6181296.html

Delegates to a climate change conference expressed confidence Thursday that they can overcome China and India’s objections to a report mapping out measures to combat global warming.

The report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the United Nations network of 2,000 scientists — calls for fast action to avoid catastrophe. However, some of the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, including the United States, have disputed the recommendations, leaving scientists worried that officials might water down the report due out Friday.

The report must be unanimously approved by all 120-plus governments represented at the conference, and all changes must be approved by the scientists.

French delegate Michel Petit said the debate, which was not open to reporters, was going “more smoothly than we anticipated.”

Who’s Responsible?

“China and India were the governments having more questions and requesting changes in the existing text,” he said, “but up to now, every time we were able to overcome their concerns and come to an agreement.”

In two previous reports this year, the scientists said global warming is being caused largely by the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere and predicted catastrophic consequences unless humans stop burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases.

The latest report is expected to urge countries to deploy an array of measures — including energy-efficient technologies, a shift away from coal, and agricultural reforms — to keep world temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), thereby limiting the impact of global warming.

China, the world’s second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after the United States, has indicated it wants the report to better reflect its belief that richer countries are responsible for global warming and should take the lead in cleaning up the problem, delegates said.

“China is being the most vocal about the language,” said Edward Mulbah, a delegate from Liberia. “They don’t want to be held responsible for consequences in the future.”

A member of the Chinese delegation refused to discuss specifics of its demands, other than to say China wanted the document to reflect scientific truth.

Place for Nuclear Power

China also has joined with the United States to suggest the proposed cap on greenhouse gas levels is too low and reaching the target would be too expensive. The two countries are expected to attempt to insert language into the final report that would weaken the conclusion that quick action can stabilize greenhouse gas levels.

India, for its part, has objected to language that says significant emission cuts can be made in developing countries, delegates said. India argues that development must come ahead of caps on emissions.

However, delegates said scientists had overcome most of the objections from India and China, providing data on such basic issues as how mitigation measures corresponded to various emission levels.

Delegates also were debating different categories of energy use and ways to cut emissions, working into the night so negotiations could be wrapped up Thursday.

One contentious issue has been whether and how to refer to nuclear power in the final summary. The United States is pushing for a strong reference to atomic energy as a clean source of electricity. Environmentalists are arguing that other ways of cutting carbon emissions, such as renewable energy sources, should get priority.

Many environmentalists consider nuclear energy too dangerous and costly to be a serious means of cutting greenhouse gases. “We don’t believe that nuclear is a solution,” said Stephan Singer of the World Wildlife Fund.

Species Threatened With Extinction

Singer also called for governments and business leaders to quicken the pace of mitigation, saying “this can be done much faster than most governments want us to believe.

“The current IPCC debate, the current documents, and the fight about this — and then about the economic costs — are a reflection on the commonly perceived thinking that fighting climate change costs a lot of money, will harm the economy, will burden citizens, and will compromise the necessary economic growth and poverty alleviation in many countries,” he said. “That is … utter nonsense.”

The two previous IPCC reports said unabated greenhouse gas emissions could drive global temperatures up as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.

Even a rise of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit could subject up to 2 billion people, mostly in the developing world, to water shortages by 2050 — and threaten extinction for 20 percent to 30 percent of the world’s species, the IPCC said.

© 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
© 2007 ECT News Network. All rights reserved.