Business Week reviews the new Roomba

I couldn't resist a new robot story... While I don't own a Roomba, I've been obsessing about them ever since their release 4 years ago. With a new version of Roomba (500 Series) hitting floors everywhere today, Business Week has prepared a review. Four out of five stars from the reviewer, you can't please all of the people all of the time! I'll still dream about you Roomba, probably even more!

Online games new tool in epidemic research?

The CBC is reporting that researchers at Tufts University are considering online gaming platforms such as World of Warcraft (WOW) and Second Life as a means of studying social interaction and the spread of disease. "By using these games as an untapped experimental framework, we may be able to gain deeper insight into the incredible complexity of infectious disease epidemiology in social groups." The researchers cite a case two years ago where a programming error caused an outbreak of a highly contagious disease within WOW which left thousands of characters dead. See, there are lessons to be learned from game playing!

Endeavor touches down

Congratulations to those on board and on the ground!

HD-DVD gets some life

CBC is reporting that Paramount Pictures Corp. and DreamWorks Animation SKG have thrown their hats in to the HD-DVD ring, saying that all future movie releases will be solely on the format, thus giving HD-DVD a much needed boost in the format war with Blu-ray. The studios bring with them some of the summer's hottest titles in Blades of Glory, Transformers and Shrek the Third. Blu-ray had recently pulled ahead in the race with news that Blockbuster Inc., the worlds largest rental chain was getting behind that format by only offering Blu-ray. The Paramount / DreamWorks announcement is good for me... we've got the XBox 360, a decision made partially because I was hedging my bets at the time on HD-DVD... who knew?

Monster of a hack

The BBC is running a story regarding an alleged hack of Monster.com that has resulted in the theft of hundreds of thousands of users data. Citing Symantec as the source of the article, BBC says that a computer program was used to hack the employer side of the job search site and to harvest data pertaining to user names, e-mail addresses, home addresses and phone numbers. There have apparently been reports of phishing e-mails sent out to Monster.com users, the e-mail encourages users to download a "Monster Job Seeker Tool", which in fact is a program that encrypts files on the victims computer and leaves a ransom note demanding money for their decryption. Be careful of those unsolicited e-mails, no matter how legitimate they sound!

Skype pointing finger at Microsoft and me?

While the folks at Skype do admit to finding a previously unknown bug in their software as the result of last weeks outage, the bulk of the blame seems to be pointed directly at Microsoft and Windows users. In their Skype blog post, What happened on August 16, the company states "On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update." Shame on us all for wanting to apply those critical updates!

Online retailers benefit from bad weather

Record rainfall has resulted in record breaking sales for online retailers in Britain. The BBC is reporting that online sales for July nearly doubled the mark set last year, up from £2.34bn to £4.2bn. According to the Interactive Media in Retail Group sales gains can also be attributed to improve websites, and faster Internet connections.

Robocop on it's way?

Wired's Danger Room blog is reporting that armed robots similar to those deployed in Iraq will soon be hitting the streets home side. "Other than some R&D with the shotgun mount, we haven't used it operationally," Massachusetts State Police Trooper Mike Rogowski tells Danger Room. "But they're on the way. They're coming,". Cool!

Google educating advertisers

Google is trying to keep it's AdWords customers informed about click-fraud a practice that involves fraudulent clicks on Google's AdSense network aimed at increasing revenues for a site or costing competitors money by clicking on their ads. Google's "Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center" contains content meant to educate advertisers and keep them up to date on fraud detection and fraudulent practices. Google does not pay sites to display their ads, but rather site owners are paid for clicks on the ad and some have resorted to creating software agents that automate these clicks, either on their sites or on ads of competitors, for the reasons mentioned above. Inforworld story here.

Hurricane shortens shuttle mission

Fearing that Hurricane Dean might disrupt operations, NASA has ordered Space Shuttle Endeavor to depart the International Space Station today and is scheduling landing for Tuesday. NASA is concerned that the hurricane might make course for Houston, Mission Control, which would necessitate a relocation of flight controllers to Cape Canaveral the back up control center which is not considered as good a location. Boy, never a dull day for this mission! CNN story here.