As much as all these - staying connected, getting news, social networking - are necessary, it consumes a lot of time which on a non-connected day can be used doing something else. This is a typical example of technology being a necessary evil.

It's not just Internet, there are many things - otherwise known as technological blessings - that fall in the same category. Take cell phone as an example. I have a few hundred contacts and their phone numbers in this device. How many phone numbers do I remember? Less than five of them. It is great that I can reach any of my contacts in a click, but losing my cell phone can be a really frustrating experience (I better take a back-up).

This day without Internet connection also made me think about technological dependence from another perspective. Every technological advancement creates new human dependencies on the technology. Eventually it becomes a necessary part of our lives which we - by default - expect to have. The importance of that thing is realized on the day you are without it. So here's an experiment: think of one thing that you by default expect to have all the time. Live for a day without it. You will definitely appreciate having it more than ever before!

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #112 for the week of October 5th - October 11th, 2008 is now available.

In this Issue:

* Ubuntu Countdown banner for WordPress
* Follow up: Xubuntu Hug Day
* Ubuntu Free Culture Winners announced
* New Ubuntu Members
* Ubuntu Stats
* Getting help from the Launchpad team
* Launchpad to be off-line
* In the Press & Blogosphere
* Server team meeting summary
* Upcoming Meetings & Events
* Updates & Security

If you have a story idea for the Weekly News, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki!

I hope to make this interesting and to perhaps at some point get a fan base.

I am currently in discussions with some people to start up a pod-cast which will explore the tech and political worlds but from a non conventional perspective with tons of humorous banter. But look for that in the future.

Also I just joined twitter, I believe the url for that is twitter.com/justinconnors so add me or "follow me" as the twitterites say.

Peace look for a blog in the near future.

In my last post I talked about how I wasn't a massive fan of the Macbook and was exchanging it for an Alienware m15x. I chose this laptop after being a fan of Alienware products for years, and wanted something which be able to handle developing and some gaming applications with ease.

When I ordered the laptop I tried to choose a spec that combined performance and value. I went for the 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB ram, 120gb HD and a 8700m-GT 512mb graphics card. With a few various extra bells and whistles, including the glowing FX keyboard this totalled around £1427 (US$2410).

You can track the 9 stages of your order on Alienware's site, and a customer service operative will give you a call at certain key points, which did make me feel like i was buying a special product. The expected shipping date was around 2 weeks from placing the order, however after 2 weeks it was still on the pre-production phase, and I received an email to say that the keyboard was out of stock. After a further 2 weeks the production started and my laptop was shipped.

Opening the package again showed that Alienware know how to make it feel like a special purchase. The black packing foam held a socked laptop, and another thin box contained the various extras, including a leather, ring-bound owners manual,  an Alienware logo emblazoned cap, and a fairly high-quality mouse mat, mine with a dent in the top edge.

On booting it up, it seemed like it was quite competent in handling Vista and all of its tarty Aero features, but I did note that the RSS Feeds I had been impressivley asked to chose when ordering were missing from my sidebar.

I duly installed all the necessary vital apps, iTunes, Firefox, etc. and attemped to play an MP3. It sounded like a bowl of Rice Krispies, i.e. full of snaps, crackles and pops. Thinking it may have been my speakers, I tested it out with a pair of headphones and found the same problem. Upon googling, it seemed that it was a problem shraed by many other Alienware customers.

Another disappointment was the touch-sensitive controls above the keyboard. These are suppsoed to control things like volume, power settings, and launch various Alienware applications. I don't know if my fingers are not very conductive, but I found these very difficult to use, sometimes pressing them to no effect, especially the volume, which I had to rub like a stubborn stain to get any louder or quieter.

Next I wanted to see how the machine would fare with some games, after all it is billed as a gaming laptop. I installed Spore, which was playable with some fairly basic settings, but slowed to a jog if I attempted anything like turning on anti-aliasing. Next up to give it a real workout I tried out the new chapter of Crysis, Crysis Warhead. Now Crysis is well known for bringing many systems to its knees, begging for mercy as blood pours out of its pipelines, so I didn't expect much. The auto-setting switched everything to low, no AA or AF and it looked terrible. Even then in scenes of higher action, it slowed to what I guess was about 25fps. Any higher settings was a no-goer the frame rate dropping below the magical eye-fooling rate.

Overall I was left feeling wholly underwhelmed by the m15x, and felt like I'd paid a massive premium for the brand alone. More disapointing than that though, was finding that the company I once held in high esteem, made nothing more than Dell's (their parent company) with lights under the keys. I have now sent back the laptop under the 10-Day Moneyback guarentee, and instead going to buy a desktop. For the same price I can get 4x the machine, and use the Macbook if I need to go out and about.

Obviously this review is only based on my spec, and I'm sure you can buy a much better performing Alienware if your willing to pay extra, up to £3,000 for the m15x, but to me it just wasn't worth it.

I nearly have all the components for my new desktop build, and am very excited about it, but thats for another post, I just hope it will finally meet my (impossibly? :) ) high expectations!

Bourdais was in a battle for position on the track with Ferrari's Felipe Massa, who had seriously cocked up his race in Japan with one error after another. Bourdais did everything correctly, he was outside of the pitlane area, he was on the inside of the corner, and was next to the metal barrier on his right side when Massa drove up on his left, and proceeded to try to drive straight through Bourdais as if he didn't see him as he aimed for the apex of the corner without any regard for the car which was already in that position.

Of course, Massa hit the side of the Toro Rosso and span, losing point scoring places as a result. As Massa slowly made some places up, the TV screen announced that the incident between him and Bourdais would be investigated "after the race." Meaning when the TV cameras had gone and the potential for bad PR on the main evening news had dissipated and they could work out which penalty to apply to Massa without hurting his World Championship chances.

In the end, they decided to penalise the innocent man who was driven into. There must be some rule giving a more severe penalty to someone receiving their second stop-go penalty in the same race (he had already driven into the side of Hamilton on Lap 1) so they couldn't give Massa a second drive-through penalty. Because he had finished in 8th, and the 9th placed man (and a few others) were all within a few seconds of him at the finish because of his most un-World Championlike driving the stewards couldn't give him a penalty because that would mean taking away a single point from him. Never mind they'd already taken a race win away from Lewis Hamilton in Belgium when they last fiddled when Rome was burning. So, they had to blame someone for the accident, and that left Bourdais.

After all, he was clearly at fault because Massa span and Massa never spins! Cough, cough, don't mention Silverstone or the first two races of 2008... Oh, and of course, Massa doesn't make mistakes either - it's not his fault he continually drives into other cars... after all, he is half blind.

Bourdais carried on to finish in a fine 6th, one place ahead of his team mate, Monza winner and latest wunderkind, Sebastian Vettel. But after the penalty, he was demoted to 10th place!

The politics of this are interesting. First of all, Bourdais is French, the only French driver in F1 at the moment, and the FIA offices are in Paris. Ferrari is Italian, and I think most mediterranaean types would not have complained much about Ferrari favouritism from the FIA stewards before, since it was always "Les Anglais, Les Rosbifs" who were being penalised previously. Oh, and Frenchman Jean Todt, erstwhile head of the Ferrari F1 team is rumoured to be being groomed to be the next FIA president after Max Mosley retires next year. Oh yes, and Bourdais has the audacity to have made his name in the US, where F1 has no glowing reputation to uphold to such an extent that they won't even be going to Canada in 2009 - so they feel safe to treat Bourdais shabbily as they think there will be no come back.

Ferrari, the clowns of Singapore, are clearly continuing to disintegrate and the only question left is will the FIA follow the sinking ship down proclaiming to all and sundry that it was the iceberg's fault all the while?

PS Spaniard Alonso won. In a French team. What should have been a great news story, is now just an also ran to yet another Ferrari fiddle. Poor Alonso. Poor Bourdais. Poor Formula One.

PPS Is Max Mosley's man the financial link between Ferrari money and the FIA Stewards' Ferrari favouritism?

Welcome to yet another Tech terms and definations....I have been asked this a few times..and when I got my PSP slim I was woundering what it meant also..so here is the explantion...and defintion ENJOY :)

WEP - Wired Equivalent Privacy being

is a  to deprecated code to secure  IEEE 802.11 networks. Wireless networks broadcast messages using radio and are thus more susceptible to hacked than wired networks. When introduced in 1999, WEP was intended to provide extra security comparable to that of a traditional wired network.

Hope the clears things up,

Se7en

The Times asks if Americans are becoming news-obsessed as we are in the middle of a very exciting election season as well as stuck in a hot economic mess. They begin with a story of a film production accountant with the last name "Lehman" (coincidence? please....) whose MSNBC-watching habits have gone so far as to elicit a pretty hilarious behavioral tick from her  5 year-old son Beckett.

YANA COLLINS LEHMAN, a film production accountant who lives in Brooklyn, knew something was amiss when her 5-year-old son, Beckett, started to announce to no one in particular, “I’m John McCain, and I approved this statement.”

Ms. Collins Lehman, 36, thought: “Oh my God, I’m watching too much news.”

But it is hard not to, she said, with the financial markets in meltdown, and that crisis increasingly intertwined with a frenzied presidential campaign entering the homestretch. This is why her own news diet has spiked to where it feels as if it’s taking over her life. And maybe her son’s, too.

“It’s such a drain on productivity,” Ms. Collins Lehman said. “It’s a compulsion.”

And of course the NY Times looks to a sociologist to ask about news-compulsion.

ERIC KLINENBERG, a sociology professor at New York University, said people are unusually transfixed by news of the day because the economic crisis in particular seems to reach into every corner of their lives. Usually, he added, people can compartmentalize their lives into different spheres of activity, such as work, family and leisure. But now, “those spheres are collapsing into each other.”

I do not buy Klinenberg's veiled economism but I do see where his view stems from. More philosophically, we would consider his statement about the ability to rationalize and compartmentalize social phenomena parallel to what existential philosophers call "ontological security." In other words, everything is in its right place. Or as the phrase goes, "everything is everything." But as of late, during periods of crisis or social transformation, as the classical sociologist Durkheim believed, we experience a spike in "anomie" or normelessness. Or, as the great George Constanza put it: "Worlds are COLLIDING!!!!!"(Warning: The link is actually in Spanish overdub, which I find to be extra-hilarious.)

But beyond the existential argument, I find another area that the Times reports on to be far more interesting, that of what Pierre Bourdieu called "cultural capital."

For others, information serves as social currency. Crises, like soap operas or sports teams, can provide a serial drama for people to talk about and bond over, said Kenneth J. Gergen, a senior research psychologist at Swarthmore College who studies technology and culture. “It gives us the stuff that keeps the community together,” he said. And for those whose social circles think of knowledge as power, having the latest information can also enhance status, Dr. Gergen said. “If you can just say what somebody said yesterday, that doesn’t do the trick,” he said.

This is something you and I have all experienced, which is the necessity of "one-up-manship" that occurs at all social gatherings especially in situation in which the person who does not know how to explain a derivative and its importance in the current global financial meltdown is looked upon as lacing social currency, in other words, culturally poor. It is most likely the case that we modulate between the one who is disdained and the one who disdains.

However, I find the tragic human alienation narrative that the Times story paints is not only a bit "precious" but also empirically iffy in one sense. Information can become a compulsion but it can also, and is in many places in the world, a hard-to-find commodity. And in many ways, I think information-in-use, that is not the concept of information but information as it is used socially and other wise, exists as something that is ready-at-hand, not something is overloading humans' ability to use it. What I mean to say is that the Times report lacks an understanding of information distribution. It assumes that because all of this information exists in our technomediated worlds, that it is used by everyone at once. It is quite clear that people do not use one media at a time; I, along with most of you all, watch TV regularly with laptop close by. Nevertheless, information, especially news, must be accessed through iPhone, TV sets, and computers. It does not land on the doorstop of your consciousness with the help of a news stork. All of this to say, the Times paints the portrait of the overfed individual who obsessively watches the news and goes to Huffington Post by him or herself. This is a very old story from the 1950s in which the individual loses his or her individuality through the colonization of his or her mind by technology (See various books by Riesman, Lasch, Adorno and Horkheimer, Jacques Ellul, and more recently Neil Postman). But this is not exactly an accurate picture of the conditions under which information is distributed--sent out and received.

How many times have you sat around the TV with roommates, friends, significant others and had a burning question which was quite easily answered by someone grabbing the computer or whipping out (pause..haha, had to do it.) their iPhone?

X-posted at Human Potential.

At the center of Senator Obama's tax policy argument is that by raising taxes on the top 5% of income earners, we are only returning to President Clinton's 1993 tax increases. Let's for a moment leave aside that Obama really is looking to raise taxes on social security (above incomes of $103,000) and on everyone's capital gains, regardless of income. Rather, the Obama argument goes that because we had a relative economic boom following the 1993 tax increase, it's perfectly safe to raise taxes in 2009 as well.

Wrong. There is a major difference between 1993 and 2009 that Obama and McCain alike are both failing to articulate. In 1993, the U.S. was one of the world's lowest-tax countries, with Europe mostly at much higher rates, and most of the Asian economies too underdeveloped to be alternatives for investments and businesses. Eastern Europe was under a cloud of uncertainty and instability following the rapid demise of The Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991. The 1993 tax increase left the U.S. as the leading free-market economy, albeit at a smaller margin than before.

As we enter 2009, the U.S. position in the world is extremely different than it was 16 years earlier. We are no longer the low-tax beacon of the major industrialized world. Numerous countries in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia and elsewhere now have lower capital gains taxes than the U.S. The same goes for top marginal income tax rates, where Albania is at 10%, Estonia 13% and Russia 17%, just to mention a few. Here in the U.S., the current top rate is 36% for Federal, and if you live in NYC or California, you probably pay very close to 50% all-in. Our 15% long-term capital gains tax can't compete with the 0% rates in many other countries, but don't forget that many capital gains taxes aren't long-term, at which point you will pay 36% or higher.

The effect of the current high-tax policies is becoming an increasing disaster. There has been no employment growth in places such as Silicon Valley in the last decade, because U.S. companies are choosing to locate more employees in lower-tax areas such as China, India and Eastern Europe. Have you noticed the lack of IPOs in the U.S. this year? For the first time in 30 years, there were no venture-backed IPOs. This has a significant impact to the standard of living here at home.

In this context, it is strange to listen to Senator McCain saying repeatedly that he wants to "Keep taxes low." Well, if taxes aren't low, why does he want to keep them? We have some of the world's highest capital gains and income taxes, so we are hemorrhaging investments and human capital to those places where they are not taxed as much.

So what is the 2009 recipe to strengthen the U.S. economy? Clearly McCain is wrong about "keeping taxes low" because they are already way too high. As for Obama, he proposes an outright train wreck in terms of forcing investors, businesses and high-wage earners abroad. Rather, we should once and for all abolish the capital gains tax – whether for short-term gains, or long-term. We should also become competitive with the fastest-growing economies in the world by cutting the top Federal rate to below Albania's 10% rate. Given that some U.S. states and local governments have combined rates of around 10%, it would be appropriate to abolish our Federal income tax altogether. This would stop the hemorrhaging of investments, businesses and talented individuals leaving our country.

What about the budget deficit, you say? Wouldn't abolishing the income tax and capital gains taxes reduce tax revenue? Of course it would. So the answer is to cut government spending correspondingly. The Federal budget now exceeds $3 trillion, or $10,000 per U.S. citizen, of which the Department of Defense is little over 20%. Big ticket items are Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, for starters. Medicare and Medicaid in particular, are hugely inefficient and unnecessarily bureaucratic ways to induce people to over-consume health care services, and should be abolished in favor of lower taxes that would lead to a booming economy. The list goes on, but the Federal budget can be cut from over $3 billion to around $2 billion immediately, followed by another cut down to $1 trillion over time as Social Security payments dwindle in favor of a private 401(k)-style private system. The government can also raise funds by selling property, including land. After all, various agencies of the U.S. government is by far the largest property owner in the country, and could fill several years worth of budget gaps by auctioning off vast amounts of lands and buildings no longer necessary when we cut off the bureaucracy and the socialist apparatus currently consuming our tax dollars.

Here is Loren's video review on the shipping Andriod. Loren and I go back to the PodTech days. I hired Loren after seeing how his videos were made. He is a talent for sure but now he's breaking stories and getting his hands on the Android phone before the tech elite here in Silicon Valley.

Go Loren Go

Also here is Loren goofing on Mike Arrington while he stays at his house.

A. The Basic Premise

Salla's paper is entitled Eisenhower's 1954 Meeting With Extraterrestrials: The First Contact and Treaty with Extraterrestrials, and, like much of Salla's more academic work, it is thoughtful, thought-provoking, and an excellent summary of the various cases that have been made for the occurrence of this event. Its even tone avoids some of the more hysterical prose one sometimes finds associated with his work. Salla opens his paper with as apt a summary of the case for this meeting as any:

"There is circumstantial and testimonial evidence supporting Eisenhower's meeting with extraterrestrials and the start of a series of meetings that culminated in the signing of a treaty with a different group of extraterrestrials. The most intriguing circumstances surrounding Eisenhower's alleged winter vacation to Palm Springs, California from February 17-24, 1954. Firstly, the 'vacation for the President' which was announced rather suddenly and came less than a week after Eisenhower's 'quail shooting' vacation in Georgia. According to UFO researcher William Moore, all this was quite unusual and suggested that there was more to the one week visit to Palm Springs than a simple holiday. Second, on the Saturday night of February 20, President Eisenhower did go missing, fueling press speculation that he had taken ill or even died. In a hastily convened press conference, Eisenhower's Press Secretary announced that Eisenhower had lost a tooth cap while eating fried chicken and had to be rushed to a local dentist.... Moore's investigation of the incident concluded that the denitist's vist was being used as a cover story for Eisenhower's true whereabouts. Consequently, Eisenhower was missing for an entire evening and could easily have been taken from Palm Springs to the nearby Muroc Airfield, later renamed Edwards Air Force Base. The unscheduled nature of the President's vacation, the missing President and the dentist cover story provide circumstantial evidence that the true purpose of his Palm Springs vacation was for him to attend an event whose importance was such that it could not be disclosed to the general public. A meeting with extraterrestrials may well have been the true purpose of his visit."

And that, in short, is the "evidence" for this meeting, a meeting that Salla rightly points out was first alleged by one Gerald Light in a letter to Borderland Science dated April 16, 1954. Since then, the original allegation of a February 20, 1954 meeting with "ET" has been dressed up a bit, to include two different races of ETs - the usual "greys" and the humanoid "Nordics" - vying for Eisenhower's diplomatic attentions, with the "nordics" serving dire warnings about the "greys" and not willing to enter into technology exchanges with the USA, and the "greys" - with whom an eventual treaty was allegedly signed - willing to do so in exchange for the right to "abduct" a limited number of the population and perform their now well-known "medical experiments" on humans. And of course, along the way, we are feted to a quotation from General of the Armies Douglas MacArthur, from his well-known "ET" warning speech: "We speak in strange terms, of harnessing the cosmic energy, of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy. The nations of the world will have to unite,for the next war will be a interplanetary war. The nations of the earth must someday make a common front against attack by people from other planets."

B. The Basic Case

Note what we have:

(1) A sudden vacation of President Eisenhower during Feb 17-24, 1954, to southern California, where,

(2) on the night of Feb 20, 1954, he allegedly visits ETs and out of this a treaty eventually and allegedly is signed with "the greys" to allow abductions in return for technology exchanges, a technology exchange which the more humanoid "nordics" refused.

C. An Anecdote from Argentina and an Alternative

But as I mention in my forthcoming book from Adventures Unlimited Press, The Nazi International, there is anecdotal evidence and stories from local Argentines that Eisenhower paid a visit to the country in 1954, ostensibly for the purpose of visiting a massive hotel-in-the-middle-of-nowhere with a strangely unique German aspect. The hotel, a picture of which is in the book, courtesy of Mr. Harry Cooper and Sharkhunters International, was built prior to and during the Second World War. While not going into the details here (you'll have to wait for the book for those!), this region of Argentina became somewhat of a postwar Nazi International "Vatican", and a visit to there by Eisenhower certainly raises eyebrows. While there is nothing in the President's schedule during that year - much less during the alleged "ET summit" in February 1954 - that suggests or immediately sustains such a view, it cannot be easily discounted, either. Clearly, something was afoot and amiss with the vacation of February 17-24, 1954, and "ET" is not a likely explanation, but aliens- in the sense of "foreigners" - might be the reason. While Eisenhower was not known publicly to visit Argentina until 1960, the possibility that he did so in 1954 - and to this particular region of Argentina no less, and during a suspicious time frame at that (again, you'll have to wait for the book to see why this time frame is significant!) - and that he was contacted by "humanoid" nordic "ETs" does raise the disturbing possibility that the refusal to share advanced technology may not have come from extraterrestrial sources at all, but from something far more terrestrial, far more human, and much less undefeated than standard history would allow.

And this, of course, puts President Eisenhower's departing warning to the American people in a chilling perspective: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

In the light of that solemn warning, and the dark historical context of secret summits and secret trips to unknown wilds of Argentina, the question that I first raised in my book Reich of the Black Sun now occurs yet again, and with an even deeper and uglier significance: Just whose military-industrial complex was he really warning about? Howsoever one parses his remarks - whether that of conventional analysis or the more speculative "ET" version of Dr. Salla, or my own "Nazi International" reading of his remarks - the warning hovers ignominiously in 2008 over an America increasingly fascist in its politics and mores, and increasingly isolated and resented by the rest of the world which sees through the panicked masques of the Anglo-American financial plutocracy to something more sinister, more familiar, and more self-evidently evil...

....something wearing armbands, and a swastika. It is a symbol that casts a haunting shadow over the late President's remarks about a "disastrous rise to power" and his equally stunning statement that we should "take nothing for granted." On the reading of events given here, the German-American boy from Abilene, Kansas, who had fought that disastrous "rise to power" of a formidable military industrial complex, who rose to be President, and who, if local Argentines are to be believed, visited the Nazi International's "Vatican" sometime during 1954, came himself to take "nothing for granted," not even his own victory over that power he may once thought was once and forever defeated.

As they say....keep that dial right here.

• New NetworkManager with connection sharing
• Improved printer handling
• Remote virtualization and easier virt storage
• Sectool, an auditing and security testing framework
• RPM 4.6, the first big RPM change in several years

Especially the first and the third part are pretty important to me since prefer to have networking "made easy" and also plan to get more experience regarding virtual machines. However, for me all the other goodies from Fedora 9 are also new since I never came around using Fedora 9 after some very bad experiences. So I decided to take the beta and give it a try with all goodies together: KDE 4.1, encrypted main partitions, kvm, new NetworkManager, PackageKit, etc.

And so far I must say I'm very pleased. The system pretty much works and KDE 4.1.x is really amazing. Of course, there are still quite some glitches, but after all, Fedora 10 is still in development, and many glitches seem to be X related and and my Nvidia card with the binary drivers is certainly a good candidate to be the source of some problems.

Some glitches

The main glitch in the system is the same reason why I haven't yet filled bug reports against the glitches: I have no realiable browser. Firefox is crashing all the time with segmentation faults (unusable for more than maybe two minutes, but very hard to exactly reproduce), Konqueror sometimes seems to kill the DNS/internet connection somehow (!), and Arora often takes seconds to start actually loading a page - and additionally cannot log me in to my wordpress.com account. The fact that the NetworkManager applet (Gnome one) dies occasionally isn't helping.
Another problem right at the start was that the GDM login manager somehow didn't realize that I switched the keyboard layout to German. It took me quite some time to figure that out. Also, if I deactivate quiet boot and rhgb (and I always do that) the password dialog for my encrypted file system is lost in the kernel output.

The good things

Besides these annoying glitches (well, Beta is Beta) the system is stable - and promising: I'm looking forward to test the network connection sharing, which seems to be nicely integrated with the rest of the system. Also, the encryption is of course very important - and since Luks is used it would make sense to provide a GUI to easily add and remove other keys for the decryption. Last but not least KDE 4.1 is important for me - maybe the most important reaon of all. Even with Nvidia drivers it is working surprisingly well, but more about that later.

Conclusion

To summarize, Fedora 10 is shaping up quite nicely, and the Beta already runs much better for me than the Fedora 9 release. However, I wouldn't advise normal users to start using Fedora 10 because it is still in heavy development - too much is still changing at the moment. I for example got an update right before the weekend which made it impossible to run the binary Nvidia driver on the system and had strange side effects when I connected an external monitor - sad if you want to watch DVD in the evening and show off KDE 4's bling the next morning.

Plotted using concentric circles (# Walmart Stores)

Heatmap version of Walmart store openings 

From what I read on the BrightKite (here) blog see SpacialKey may be implemented with Brightkite (here) the location based social networking tool.

Prepare for an epic showdown between two gnarly gunslingers when the first Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Android phone hits the streets in a couple of weeks. The first shipment of the T-Mobile (NYSE: DT) G1 sold out through preorders from existing T-Mobile subscribers, so the company tripled its order to Taiwanese handset maker HTC. The bigger batch sold out, too.

That means that about 1.5 million G1s are destined to fill preorder sales, in addition to another couple of million sets being earmarked for retail sales. It's a far cry from the 10 million second-generation iPhones Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) originally hoped to sell this year -- it may already have reached that goal, according to the Silicon Valley rumor mill -- but it's a heck of a rush for an unproven software concept on never-before-seen hardware.

I find this very interesting, considering that the form factor for the G1 is less than ... erm... attractive! But rumours have it that more Android enabled phones are coming next year, and will be looking like the highly attractive HTC Touch HD. 

The most interesting stall was from Microsoft because of Microsoft Surface, it was my first look at this futuristic invention, very very interesting, viewing the demo of Microsoft surface I am quite sure that we will be seeing more of them pretty soon. Considering that it costs 15,000 dollars a piece I don't think its going to be a big investment for hotels, pubs etc to use it as a customer attraction.

Since I have been working with REST in WCF now a days and have had some issues getting the required information, I discussed it with Mike Taulty at microsoft and he was very kind to guide me towards Astoria Data Services to sort out our requirements.

Listening to QA with Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook was interesting and made me think the possibilities that the internet holds today.

 In the begining, a felt a wanted it, but after to think better, i to conclude I don`t need it now, in this moment a have the Nokia 3500. I know it`s not a smarthphone, but is very useful for the basic function (do and receive calls, take pics, record voice and sound, use internet, check the mail, besides the nokia 3500  is very resistent and shipper.

After years of testing, the Active Denial System -- the pain ray which drives off rioters with a microwave-like beam -- could finally have its day. The Army is buying five of the truck-mounted systems for $25 million. But the energy weapon may face new hurdles, before it's shipped off to the battlefield; a new report details how the supposedly non-lethal blaster could be turned into a flesh-frying killer.

ABC News: Army Orders Pain Ray Trucks; New Report Shows 'Potential for Death'

Thanks.