Miscellaneous

Intel said Tuesday that it is investing $12 million in a visual-computing research center in Europe. This comes as Intel prepares to bring out its first graphics chip in more than a decade by early next year.

Opening Tuesday, the Intel Visual Computing Institute is located at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. The company says the center "will explore advanced graphics and visual computing technologies."

The investment, to be made over five years, represents Intel's largest European university collaboration, the company said.

"Intel's visual computing vision is to realize computer applications that look … Read more

What I'm about to say may make me seem like a Luddite or curmudgeon, but I'm disturbed by the news that an increasing number of Americans are reachable only by wireless phones.

A new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that more than 20 percent of American homes have only cell phones and another 14.5 percent of homes received all or almost all calls via cell phones even though they had a landline. The CDC says that it's the largest six-month increase in reliance on cell phones since it started the survey … Read more

During peak hours, BBC iPlayer pumps out 12GB of data every second, and 7 petabytes of data every month. It is insanely popular on Apple's iPhone--but mostly after midnight--and the next version of iPlayer will land this year with some exciting new features.

These are just some of the fascinating facts revealed by iPlayer boss Anthony Rose, in an exclusive one-on-one interview with sister site CNET UK.

Rose's official job title is controller, vision and online media group, and he heads up many of the BBC's Internet activities, including the BBC home page and the site's … Read more

After arriving first on torrent sites and then last week showing up on Microsoft's developer program Web sites, the release candidate of Windows 7 operating system arrived on the main Microsoft.com late on Monday night. The software was slated to be made publicly available on Tuesday.

The release candidate version, officially build 7100, is expected to be the last major public test of the product before it is finalized. The company will only officially confirm it plans to release Windows 7 before Windows Vista hits its third anniversary of broad availability in January. However, the software maker is … Read more

For the uninitiated or nongamers out there, the Konami Code (UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT B A) is arguably the most famous cheat code in video games.

It has been used in countless games and has references in multiple forms of pop culture. Lately, some sites have taken to using the code to trigger amusing events on the page. Recently, ESPN used the code to spawn unicorns and rainbows all over its pages.

Now, Facebook has dropped the code into its site. When entering the Konami code, followed by Enter, a lens flare is generated every time … Read more

I've got some news that might make you feel odd, quite literally (or maybe I should say, mathematically).

Today is 5/7/09, one of a few instances when three consecutive odd numbers make up the date. As a matter of fact, it's one of only six times this will happen in the century. Today is the third this century.

If you think Pi Day (March 14) is special, note that it happens 100 times in a century. So, mathematically, today is about 16.66 times more special than Pi Day.

For this reason, folks at Oddday.net … Read more

Google's still-nascent efforts to dominate the mobile market, already reeling from Apple's surging iPhone platform, were dealt another blow on Thursday when Intel and Novell announced that they will collaborate to promote Intel's Moblin operating system, a rival Linux distribution for mobile devices.

Whereas Google is initially targeting smartphones with Android (though an Android-based Netbook has apparently been released), Intel is targeting Moblin at Netbooks.

Additionally, Android and Moblin aren't simply two different Linux distributions, in the way that Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server are. Android and Moblin use Linux in different … Read more

As part of a series of blog posts, Google has released more information this week about some of the goodies we can expect out of version 1.5 of the Android operating system, which has been going by the code name Cupcake, and which wireless carrier T-Mobile is expected to push out to U.S. customers at the end of next week. High on the list of upgrades is the ability to record videos and upload them to Google-owned YouTube.

Based on what we can ascertain from Google's introductory video, shooting a video on the Android 1.5 platform … Read more

If you're feeling adventuresome, you can get a jump on the rest of the world by being one of the first to try out Windows 7, the next version of Windows. I've tested out the beta version for the last few months and, so far, my experience has been quite positive.

Microsoft still hasn't announced the date of the final commercial version of the upcoming operating system, though it's widely expected to be out by the end of this year. But Microsoft is allowing anyone to download and install a free copy of the operating system … Read more