globeandmail.com: A real page turner

ANN ARBOR, Mich. In a dimly lit back room on the second level of the University of Michigan library’s book-shelving department, Courtney Mitchel helped a giant desktop machine digest a rare, centuries-old Bible.

Mitchel is among hundreds of librarians from Minnesota to England making digital versions of the most fragile of the books to be included in Google Inc.’s Book Search, a portal that will eventually lead users to all the estimated 50 million to 100 million books in the world.

You can delete your old Friendster account and those embarrassing blog entries. But can you erase your online identity altogether?

Source: Globe & Mail

“In his blog, SJ Klein, director of community content for OLPC, notes a collaboration among Creative Commons, One Laptop per Child, and TextbookRevolution.org. They are compiling together free and CC-licensed works — and they are asking for people to help them by submitting links to free books, movies, and music. Creative Commons will be burning a LiveDVD to be distributed at South by Southwest; OLPC will be making bundles of books to send all over the world; and Textbook Revolution will be compiling a list of good and free college-level textbooks for the relaunch of their site.”

Source: Slashdot

Technorati Tags: OLPC

Called Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, the new game will arrive in stores this summer, a surprise to many analysts and fans who had expected the next title to come out closer to the year-end holiday shopping season.

woot woot! GH just keeps getting better and better!!

Source: ZDNet News

A private firm funded by Google Inc launched its Web-based DNA test in Europe on Tuesday, hoping to build on a successful start in the United States, where the $999 service went on sale in November.

Subscribers to 23andMe mail a saliva sample and, four to six weeks later, get the results online, allowing them to learn about inherited traits, their ancestry and — probably with the help of a professional — some of their personal disease risks.

Sounds interesting, until you read Michael Crichton’s “Next”

“Next” has a subplot about a 4-year-old named Dave, the alleged Gandler-Kreukheim sufferer. Among his symptoms are excessive hairiness and a talent for climbing trees. Why? Because Dave is a transgenic creature, part human and part chimpanzee. He was created in a laboratory by a scientist who, in the course of research on autism, inserted his own genes into a chimpanzee embryo. The researcher hoped to create and then dissect a fetus, but things got a little out of hand.

Just believe this: Oddity after oddity in “Next” checks out, and many are replays of real events. “This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren’t,” Mr. Crichton writes, greatly understating the book’s scary legitimacy.

I just finished this book and trust me people, you DO NOT want to go there!

Yes it’s fiction, but replays many real events and it could all to easily become reality. Read it, you’ll know what I mean.

Source #1: Yahoo News

Source #2: New York Times Book Review – “Next”

Technorati Tags: Next, DNA Testing, Google

This is great stuff

DENVER (Billboard) – In the two months since MTV Networks and Harmonix released the music-based videogame “Rock Band,” players have purchased and downloaded more than 2.5 million additional songs made available after the game’s initial distribution.

Source: Yahoo News

The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era. Screenshots at The Coding Studio.

KDE 4.0 Screenshots

I heard from LC last night and she is having a tad bit of trouble with her Text Messages and wireless is hard to get so she might not be posting as often as normal. But she is having a great time and the weather is really warm. Stay tuned for any updates that may come in.

The Firefox Web browser community has created thousands of wonderful extensions that make surfing and working with the Internet fun and productive. While many extensions are homes runs, here are a few that just don’t make it out of the ballpark.

This is a good one to end the year on,Baldy

Read the Article

Technorati Tags: Software