Single women rival single men as tech device owners, according to a Forrester Research survey released Thursday.
Obviously, to an organization filled with female tech geeks, the study was met with bemusement.
But the survey of more than 1,000 single adult males and more than 1,000 single adult females in the United States and Canada had some interesting gems.
Did you know that single women prefer laptops while single men prefer desktops? Among the adult singles surveyed, 47 percent of women said their next computer would be a laptop, and 29 percent said it would be a desktop, while 47 percent of men said their next computer would be a desktop and 38 percent said it would be a laptop.
Forty-four percent of all single women surveyed own a game console, compared to 53 percent of single men, confirming reports from International Game Developers Association and Entertainment Software Association illustrating that women do play video games.
When it comes to handheld-game devices, 27 percent of single women surveyed count themselves as owners while 29 percent of single men said they have one, according to the study. Single women, meanwhile, surpassed single men slightly on digital-camera ownership, 78 percent to 76 percent.
Alas, less than 20 percent of single women said they followed technology news, compared to less than 40 percent of single men.
(Credit:
Forrester Research)
MTI Micro, a subsidiary of Mechanical Technology Incoporated, unveiled a portable charger on Wednesday that uses replaceable fuel cartridges.
MTI Micro is not the first, and hopefully won't be the last, company to go to the fuel cell for portable convenient power. (People refer to these new tries as "fuel cell gadget chargers," though to me that seems like it refers to a charger for powering fuel cell gadgets.)
MTI Micro's Mobion prototype uses replacement fuel cell cartridges.
(Credit: MTI Micro)Just this past September, Medis came out with the 24-7 Power pack, a charger powered by a liquid fuel cell, for only $40 with replacement packs for about $20.
The MTI Micro Mobion prototype works with cartridges of the liquid fuel methanol. Each cartridge offers about 25 hours of power. When it's depleted, users just pop it out of the charger and replace it with another one.
Sounds promising, but we're still waiting to hear back from MTI Micro on the pricing of the charger and those cartridges. The company says the MTI Micro Fuel Cell Charger will be available as a product toward the end of 2009.
So, what does 25 hours of fuel cell power get you?
According to MTI Micro, you could use it to fully recharge any cell phone 10 times. You could also use it to power an MP3 player to play 10,000 songs or watch 100 hours of video.
As a person who travels a lot and tires of carrying various adapters, this is definitely something I'd want to try. As I'm generally a carry-on only traveler, it's a good think this "liquid" gadget could be taken onboard.
Among the many other problems with the latest James Bond film Quantum of Solace, I was particularly struck with its seemingly careless stance on technology.
The latest Bond flick does get those bloody stares right. But what happened to the cutting-edge gadgets?
(Credit: Sony Pictures)While I know they're just movies, the Bond franchise films--like Ian Fleming's novels--have always been geopolitical snapshots of the time in which they were made.
According to this movie, the British are pinning their hopes on skillful driving and fisticuffs to get the job done, while those dabbling in high-tech solutions to solve world problems are off-the-mark.
As in Casino Royale, there is no Q. Apparently, in this Bond's world, MI6 does not arm its agents with insight and tools from teams of high-tech experts. The few gadgets used are pitifully unimaginative. (CNET News readers wrote in better gadget ideas.)
In Quantum of Solace, Bond has a cell phone he can use to call MI6 and give the name of a potential villain he's met. MI6 can look up the name and send a photo of the guy to Bond's cell phone to confirm it's the same guy. Guess what? I, too, can call a friend, have them look up a name, background, and photo; and have the info sent to my cell phone. So can millions of teenagers.
... Read moreBeware of flashing your keys in public.
Computer scientists at the University of California at San Diego have developed software that can make a duplicate of a key from just a distant photo of it using technology available to almost anyone.
Referred to as Sneakey, the system is capable of "teleduplication--extracting a key's complete and precise bitting code at a distance via optical decoding and then cutting precise duplicates," according to Sneakey's Web site.
Part of the project's mission is to make people realize that traditional keys are not really as safe as they might think. Relatively modest technology is now capable of the imaging and computer vision algorithms necessary to duplicate an image precisely, according to the group.
To illustrate the point, they photographed a set of keys they casually placed on the table at a cafe from about 195 feet away using a telephoto lens. From that image (shown), they were able to extract enough data to duplicate the keys on the ring perfectly.
The group was able to duplicate keys from a set photographed at about 195 feet away.
(Credit: University of California at San Diego)It gets worse. The group's software was also capable of extracting enough visual data to make a duplicate key from an image taken by a cell phone camera.
Not only that, but the keys photographed do not even have to be in profile. Sneakey's software can determine a key's bitting code--its series of unique cuts--from nearly any angle.
Stefan Savage, the computer science professor at UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering who led the project, presented his group's work Thursday at the ACM Conference on Communications and Computer Security in Alexandria, Va.
"There are experts who have been able to copy keys by hand from high-resolution photographs for some time. However, we argue that the threat has turned a corner--cheap image sensors have made digital cameras pervasive and basic computer vision techniques can automatically extract a key's information without requiring any expertise," Savage said in a statement.
While the group is not planning to publicly release the code, it inferred in the project statement that anyone with a basic competence in MatLab, a technical computing language and environment from MathWorks, would be able to duplicate its efforts.
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