Your guide to interesting stuff
U.S. crude oil futures soared nearly $5 a barrel in opening trade to touch a fresh peak of $70.80 a barrel as one of the country’s biggest storms, Katrina tore through the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, forcing 40% of oil producers and refiners to shut down operations.
Read further here.
Another step closer to opening Gmail for public. After Google opened up Gmail registration by letting new users to sign up by using SMS, Google today quietly increased the number of invites an existing Gmail user can give away to 100 to reach more new users.
Link: Gmail.
First we have the car that parks itself, and now we are about to have a car that drive itself. Not yet, but General Motor has announced that they will produce cars that feature self-driving system known as the Traffic Assist, which uses lasers, video camera and a computer to recognize signs, detect obstacles, and of course, control the cars. The system is said to be able to maneuver the car at up to 60 mph even in heavy traffic.
Switch that Autopilot on!
Despite the fact that it has been widely reported and complained, I’m still getting this stupid error.
Come on Streamyx, if you can’t fix the problem, at the very least please correct the typos!
The xThink Calculator is an on-screen calculator that works like a whiteboard. You write your numbers and operations on the screen, and it evaluates them automatically. A perfect tool for tablet PC users and those with an external tablet. It works even if you draw them by using your mouse, but who would want to do that anyway.
Evaluation copy is available for download here. Beware, it’s a 15MB download, and it requires a .NET framework. (via)
The 2nd episode of Security Now! podcast it out now. To those of you who are not familiar with it, it’s a new podcast run by Leo Laporte, the famous tech guy who hosted The Screen Saver on TechTV before, and who runs This Week in Tech (TWiT), a weekly technology podcast.
What makes this episode special is Google Talk instead of Skype was used throughout the conversation. So if you are curious how well Google Talk performs, you may download the podcast here.
Link: This week in tech.
Sirius is a company that provides satellite radio. When it launches its portable player S50, it’s normal that we think it has the capability of receiving satellite broadcast while on the go. Well, that’s not quite right.
S50 must attach to an included car dock, a $100 home dock, or a $300 wall-mountable or desk-mountable executive docking station before it can receive radio content. Other than that, it’s just a portable device with MP3 and WMA capability. It does however let you capture and store up to 50 hours of SIRIUS content, or a mix of SIRIUS programming with MP3/WMA files, enabling listening on the go. But that does not equal portable satellite radio.
The Sirius S50 will be available in October in the United States with the price tag of $360.
Due to the fact that VOIP users can’t connect with a live emergency dispatch operator when calling 911, the FCC has set a Monday deadline for providers of Internet-based telephone calls to get acknowledgments from their VOIP customers that they understand the problems they may encounter when dialing 911 in an emergency. Users who fail to respond will have their service disconnected next week.
The major players cried to extend the deadline.
Are you an online game addict? Now here is the good (bad) news. To prevent the people from becoming addicted to online games, the Chinese government has unveiled a new system to prevent individuals from playing online games for more than three consecutive hours, and that system is going to be installed for every online game in the country.
The new system will cut the ability level of a player’s online game character by half after 3 consecutive hours of gameplay, and will further cut it to the lowest level allowed by the game after 5 consecutive hours of gameplay.
Another plane went down yesterday, and this marks the fifth airline accidents in the month of Aug, 2005.
Below is the summary of those incidents, according to the Associated Press (available here).
Aug. 23: At least 41 people died when TANS Peru Flight 204, a Boeing 737-200, tried to make an emergency landing during a storm. It split in two on impact.
Aug. 16: 152 people died when a Colombian-registered West Caribbean charter went down in Venezuela. The pilot had radioed in that the plane’s engines failed.
Aug. 14: 121 people died when a Cyprus-registered Helios Airways Boeing lost cabin pressure, ran out of gas and plunged into the mountains north of Athens, Greece.
Aug. 6: 16 people were believed to have died when a plane operated by Tunisia’s Tuninter crashed off Sicily.
Aug 2: All 309 people survived aboard an Air France Airbus A340 that overshot the runway and caught fire.
The experts say the probability of getting killed on a plane is much lower than on a car. They probably are still right.
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