daily

Daily Planner Plus aims to be the organizational tool to end all organizational tools. However, rather than being a jack of all trades, the program ends up being a master of none thanks to an over-abundance of useless features.

This program has a look unlike any other planning software we've tested. Users first see a large open screen with small command icons running along the top and settings running along the left side of the screen. Initially, this looked more like a design program than a planner. The commands along the top range from creating a daily journal, calendar, … Read more

A recent post on Barron's Tech Trader Daily suggests that Apple plans to "attack the low end of the smartphone market" by offering a $99 version of the 8GB iPhone.

According to Barron's, RBC Capital analyst Mike Abramsky believes that Apple will reveal updated 16GB and 32GB iPhones at the Worldwide Developers Conference on June 8 (as expected), keeping $199 and $299 price points. The article suggests that "Abramsky thinks even an evolutionary upgrade will drive a healthy upgrade cycle; he estimates 20 percent of the 21 million iPhone-installed base will upgrade within the first … Read more

Part of what reminded me about watching the 93rd Indianapolis 500 race this last weekend actually was Sarah Fisher's appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to promote the upcoming race. As usual, Fisher came off very sweet and gave a fun interview (hard not to when your foil is Jon Stewart, after all) and much was made of how she was the first woman to be racing an eighth Indy 500...not bad, girlfriend. Well as you probably know by now, Fisher didn't win (though she finished 17th on the lead lap, and overall ranked 25th … Read more

You love your puppies, but maybe hanging out with them at home just isn't enough for you and you want to peek at others' puppies, too. Now you can indulge this puppy love whenever you want, wherever you want, with the potential of seeing an unlimited number of puppies, as long as you have an iPhone.

TheDailyPuppy.com, a Web site that dog enthusiasts have no doubt been using as their home page, announced Wednesday the availability of its application for the iPhone. Now you can get puppies delivered to you via just a few touches of the finger--and … Read more

Birthday Calendar Reminder offers people a foolproof way of remembering loved-ones' big celebrations and other important dates. This simple concept is a great way to keep yourself in the loop, but may prove to be redundant for many.

Birthday Calendar Reminder is a no-frills way to watch important dates. An icon is stored in the lower right-hand tray of your display and can be easily accessed. From there, users of popular calendar systems like Microsoft Outlook will recognize a similar day, week, or month option of display. These give the user control over what they see and how far in … Read more

Updated at 7:40 p.m. PDT with more information from the worm's creator.

As a second Twitter exploit began circulating on the micro-blogging site Sunday, a teen-ager from Brooklyn told CNET News he created both worms because he was bored and wanted to draw attention to the Twitter flaw.

Much like Saturday's StalkDaily worm, the "Mikeyy" worm posts unwanted messages to users' pages. The "Mikeyy" worm began spreading on the micro-blogging site early Sunday, posting messages such as "Mikeyy I am done...," "MikeyyMikeyy is done.," and "Twitter please … Read more

A worm apparently infected Twitter on Saturday.

The worm may originate with the StalkDaily.com site, and Twitter warned people against visiting the site or linking to it.

"If you have been locked out of your acct due to the StalkDaily issue, pls do a p/w reset; we may have reset your p/w for safety," Twitter informed its users on Saturday afternoon.

Details about the worm itself were scarce, but the micro-blogging site was awash in the news by Saturday night. "StalkDaily Worm Runs," "#stalksdaily," and "Twitter hit by" were … Read more

If you're a Twitter user, you've probably seen tweets directing you to a person's "Mugshow." This is yet another Web gimmick that makes you scratch your head when you first learn about it, but over time it begins to make a modicum of sense. Think of it as the essence of Twitter, in pictures. Kinda.

Both Daily Mugshot and Daily Booth ask that you come back to the site once per day, take a snapshot of yourself, and publish it in your timeline of pictures. You can add comments to your pictures, share them with others, and view other users' pictures. That's it. Twitpic they ain't, but they are fun.

Maybe you find the concept ridiculous. But if you don't, which one should you use -- Daily Mugshot or Daily Booth?

It's time to find out.… Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--If there was one name that stood out on the agenda of speakers at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival here this week, it was famed FiveThirtyEight.com blogger Nate Silver.

Known as a statistical wunderkind, his models predicted the final outcome of the 2008 presidential election to within .4 percent of the final popular vote. But more important to many Democrats who had their hopes for electoral victory dashed by George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, FiveThirtyEight.com--which got its name from the total number of electoral votes available--was able to provide daily affirmation that Barack Obama was really winning, even when many were tempted to believe he would be overcome by Sen. John McCain.

Silver was SXSWi's keynote speaker on Sunday, and he and interviewer Stephen Baker of Business Week went onstage in front of an audience of about 2,000 fans, most of whom were there to hear Silver talk about the secret sauce behind his hugely popular blog.

What many might not know is that Silver first came to prominence not in the political realm, but in baseball, where he authored Baseball Prospectus, a well-regarded baseball statistics site. Many might see the connection between baseball and politics as far-fetched, but to people like Silver, it's a very direct path.

Still, before starting FiveThirtyEight.com, he wasn't entirely a political neophyte. Silver had already begun to make a name for himself in the liberal political blogosphere with a series of data-rich posts on DailyKos. When he began to recognize some significant holes in the national polling establishment, he decided to step in to fill the void.

After his keynote interview, Silver sat down with CNET News and talked about the election, how his site got started, and more about the philosophical similarities between baseball and politics.

Q: Many Democrats were emotionally tied to what you were doing, in the sense that your data kept them calm during the election. Did your own numbers keep you calm? Nate Silver: Yeah, I think so. I'm just one of those people that likes to try and dissect a problem and once you started to dissect, some days you feel better about it. If I ever get cancer, the first thing I'll probably do is go on the Web and collect a bunch of data about different survival rates. I just feel better about things when I do them that way. It's a nerdy kind of thing to do.

Q: We were able to get up every day and look at the data and see what was going on. And this is not something you could do because it was your own data. How your own data affect how you felt about what was going on? Silver: I wouldn't be frustrated by it if McCain or Obama picked up points on a particular day. Sometimes you get frustrated if you know that something you did reveals something about your model. When something doesn't feel right, and you go and make changes. And we made a lot of changes over the course of the campaign where, even as recently as two weeks before the election, we were tweaking little parameters, and what started out as a pretty simple system--taking weighted averages of polls--became much more complex over time. But, yeah, we were never saying we had the perfect answer. We were always trying to improve things as we went along.

Q: The blog had an overt liberal position, but you always said the statistics were objective. What kind of feedback, if any, did you get from conservatives? Silver: We had a pretty good balance. We had probably about a 2-1 ratio in terms of liberal versus conservative readers, based on the comment threads. Now that we're not in an election, I think it's swung more toward the liberal side, both in terms of my writing and what people are reading about.

We try and be fair. That's the main thing, we try and be forthright. There's so much commentary from conservatives, also from liberals, that is just entirely disingenuous about certain things. It's a lot of cheerleading and cherry-picking of data. We're trying to present a case that by and large is a liberal's case, because it's my case. It's how I see the world. But we're trying to use data to do it where a lot of people just make bad arguments. … Read more