Technology

Own an Xbox or a Playstation 2? According to one research firm, your answer to that question could reveal a number of things about your personality, including gullibility, confidence, and distrust. It's a pretty remarkable study of the things we've ... ALL used at one time or another -- toys. By combining radically new text mining software with the work of personality psychologists, research consultants Anderson Analytics believe they have found a legitimate way to interpret the subconscious thoughts of children (and in the case of many video game players like myself: immature young men). As you ... (view more)

Stepping outside the bounds of its usual focus on security and operating systems, Microsoft has recently licensed touch-screen technology. Dubbed "Touchlight", the technology is one of twenty projects being offered to venture capitalists for ... development in cooperation with Microsoft. Signing on for Touchlight is EON Reality, who will use the technology for exhibitions, technical demonstrations, and training exercises. EON hopes to begin commercialization of the Touchlight and other similar projects before the year ends. (Source: microsoft-watch.com ) Touchlight: How It Works Microsoft's ... (view more)

Matt Nagle is 25 years old. His recent activities include playing video games, checking e-mail, and using a TV remote. Being able to successfully complete of those tasks might've seemed like an impossible dream for the young man just a few years ... ago. But that's because he's paralyzed. The injury that changed Matt's life forever happened in 2001. A knife wound severed his spinal cord, leaving him unable to move any of his limbs and most of his torso. Luckily, he managed to retain a bit of control over his head, neck, and shoulders. Matt's life may soon change forever once again -- this time by ... (view more)

Only days after the announcement that Ricoh Technologies has developed a device able to play both HD DVD and Blu-Ray discs, rumors quickly surfaced that an Israeli firm (Matteris Limited) is working on a disc that will use holographic technologies ... to hold a whopping 1 TB (or 1000 Gigabytes) of data. (Source: teamxbox.com ) By using the nano-technology at its disposal, Matteris hopes to fit literally millions of bits -- grouped into holograms -- into the volume (instead of the surface) of the medium at hand. Every individual hologram is formed into 1000 x 1000 bits, a process that is allowing ... (view more)

As North America becomes increasingly dependent on the Internet, WiFi is becoming a household term across the continent. City planners are building WiFi into future plans, and in many U.S. cities wireless Internet can be reached from the average ... cafe. What is WiFi, exactly? The name WiFi was originally coined by the company WiFi Alliance as a descriptor of its Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN). However, as wireless technology and the name itself have become so popular, WiFi is no longer a licensed term, and it even appears in recent versions of Webster's dictionary. By engaging anything ... (view more)

With the popularity of WiFi, cell phones, the Blackberry, and laptops booming, the tech industry is being forced to come to grips with a world constantly "on the go." Desktop PCs are increasingly becoming immense paper weights for many consumers, ... and second quarter market research shows that this is having a drastic impact on many traditionally powerful tech manufacturers. From the beginning of 2006 until the recent end of the second quarter, the average AMD Athlon 64 desktop PC price sunk from $608 USD to $526 USD. The result is great for the spread of budget-priced systems to homes and ... (view more)

Generation Y can thank science for outsmarting their elders. Recent technology developed by a security company has produced a high frequency ring tone for cell phones that is –- for the most part -– only addible for adolescents and children under t ...he age of twenty. It allows children to receive calls and text messages while adults are none the wiser. The new technology proves useful for those in the favored age range in many different facets. Looking to break the monotony of a lecture or seatwork? Why not write a message or two to your buddies? Phone privileges axed? Why not pull a fast one ... href="/news/1276/science-helps-teen-cell-phone-users-pull-fast-one" class="more-link">view more)

Maybe the Styx really were onto something. Decades after the song "Mr. Roboto" changed the definition of bad dancing, robots are once again at the center of technological news. Recent headlines have outlined the increasing role robots may play in ... the future of North American life, from Microsoft software to national defense. There are a few definitions of robots: yesterday Microsoft released the basic outline for a platform that would use system tools, including browsers, programming formats, and operating systems similar to those used for the artificial intelligence in robots. Microsoft is ... (view more)

The Xbox 360 is Microsoft's newest video game console, the successor to their original Xbox. It was released on November 22, 2005 in North America, December 2 in Europe, and December 10 in Japan. It will be released on February 2, 2006 in Mexico, ... February 24 in South Korea, and March 2, 2006 in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. The Xbox 360 will compete against the upcoming generation of consoles, including the Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Revolution, and was officially unveiled on MTV on May 12, 2005, a week before the E3 trade show. Except in Japan the console is ... (view more)

BitTorrent is the name of a client application for the torrent peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution protocol created by programmer Bram Cohen. BitTorrent is designed to widely distribute large amounts of data without incurring the corresponding ... consumption in server and bandwidth resources (and typically, monetary fees attracted as a result of that). The original BitTorrent application is written in Python and its source code has been released under the BitTorrent Open Source License (a modified version of the Jabber Open Source License), as of version 4.0. The name "BitTorrent" refers to the ... (view more)