Wow. I never had any teachers like this in public or middle school.

Good article

I'm sure this will become relevant soon.

Slight tweaks which can shave your time by less than one percent can definitely make a difference over a 2K+ mile race.

"Not yet 5, he can hold seven-pound weights with arms extended, something many adults cannot do. He has muscles twice the size of other kids his age and half their body fat.

DNA testing showed why: The boy has a genetic mutation that boosts muscle growth."

Blake Irving must be one very uninformed person at MSN (or his nose grew alot while he was talking) if he thinks that users were happy about the 2MB limit - which was a reduction from the initial Hotmail storage limits.

Here's Hotmail's response to GMail: 250MB storage, 10MB per email msg, and virus cleaning and scanning.

Looks like MS is revamping a lot of interfaces in Longhorn, down to the driver.

"Due to intense competition domestically and from China, CD-R disc prices have fallen to US$0.12-0.14 from leading Taiwanese makers, US$0.09-0.10 from second-tier makers and below US$0.08 for some small makers, local makers indicated."

"However, the supply of LDs used for 16x reading/writing is not currently adequate, as average yield rates are still below 30%. In addition, the technical adjustments needed to match 16x DVD+RW burners with 16x DVD+R discs will not occur until early August, as Japanese makers including Mitsubishi Chemical and Taiyo Yuden plan to begin production of the 16x discs no earlier than the end of July.

The delayed production of 16x DVD+RW burners is expected to prolong the product life cycle of 12x DVD Dual burners and 8x DVD DL (single-sided double-layer discs) burners. Originally estimated to stay on the market 2-3 months, the products are now expected to remain for 1-2 quarters, the makers pointed out. Lite-On IT and Accesstek produce 12x DVD burners while BenQ does not."

Presidential elections are usually won by the incumbent party; in the past 104 years, incumbents have lost only 10 times.

But those incumbent losses have been heralded every time by poor stock-market performance, either in the four years leading up to the election or in the last year before the election, according to recent research by Ken Tower, chief market strategist at CyberTrader, a unit of Charles Schwab (SCH: Research, Estimates).

Tower's analysis found that, when the Dow Jones industrial average gained less than 20 percent in the four years leading up to election, incumbents lost six out of 10 times.

"He said the Ferrari, Toyota, McLaren-Mercedes and Williams-BMW teams had spent more than $400 million this year, while Minardi, which has yet to notch any points this season, has a budget of $40 million.

Minardi is at a disadvantage because advanced computer technologies - and the money that pays for them - play a significant role in the success of Scuderia Ferrari, the team that has dominated Formula One for the last five years and has won seven of the first eight races this year - with Schumacher, a 35-year-old German, as its marquee name and Rubens Barrichello as its No. 2 driver. "

Fodder for CSI TV series.

"Modafinil, which is classified as a mild stimulant in sports doping, received attention last summer when White tested positive for it at the world track and field championships in Paris. Six other American athletes have since admitted using modafinil.

'We had the sleepiest track team,' Catlin said. 'What is cute and funny in a sick way is that narcolepsy is an extremely rare disease. For a doctor to see one case in a lifetime is a lot, let alone to have two members of a relay team.'"

Love this quote from one of the main open source projects for software developers.

"'We have always said that CVS is not secure,' he said. 'We have never made any quibbles about that.' "

This is a great advertisement for Agilent. NOT! This harsh treatment of long-time workers will come back to haunt them. Their reputation will become tarnished. People will talk, this will lead to people avoiding employment at Agilent, and then customers will start to go elsewhere.

Meanwhile, he has been applying for jobs online and received callbacks from four IT recruiters. Three of them had Indian accents, he said. Among the first questions they asked: 'Can you work in the U.S.?'

Friday afternoon, Cotterill cleared his desk and turned in his computer gear. His manager approached him and apologized for not arranging a department luncheon. They talked for a few minutes, then the manager began preparing a Functional Exit Interview Memo he wanted Cotterill to sign.

'When he started filling it out, he asked me how to spell my name,' Cotterill said. 'I've been working for him three years, and he still didn't know how to spell my name.' "

The writer writes about the pros and cons of Visual Studio 2005 (aka Whidbey) and Visual Studio Team.

VS Team is the first Developer division attempt at a complete life-cycle solution. I wonder if the VS team uses VS Team for their work? I doubt any mid-to-large division at MS is using VS Team.

That's always been one of the problems the Developer Division has had. Their target audience doesn't seem to include the developers in the same company, their target seems to be the developer in a department of a corporation.

I hope morale has improved in the Developer Division since VS.Net first shpped two years ago. It'd be hard to believe if it's gotten worse.

I agree with the columnist. MS is a better place to work than almost anywhere else. Quit your whining. Shrimps vs. weenies.

Bandwidth is the big problem for the future. There's just not enough of it.

At a picture size of 7,680 by 4,320 pixels - that works out to 32 million pixels - UHDV's resolution trounces even high-end digital still cameras. HDTV, by comparison, has about two million pixels, and normal TV about 200,000 (and only 480 lines of horizontal resolution versus 4,000 with UHDV).

Add to that UHDV's beefed-up refresh rate of 60 frames per second (twice that of conventional video), projected onto a 450-inch diagonal screen with more than 20 channels of audio, and you've got an impressive home theater on your hands.

So while current projection technology cannot meet the demands of UHDV, the standard excels in other crucial areas, for example breadth of view. While both UHDV and HDTV use the widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio (standard TV uses 4:3), HDTV offers only a 30-degree field of view horizontally, whereas UHDV's massive screen size expands this to about 100 degrees, said Mr. Okano, who said his research indicates that this angle is where "immersive sensation" peaks.

In developing UHDV, NHK has also focused on sound. The standard calls for 22.2 sound: 10 speakers at ear level, 9 above and 3 below, with another 2 for low frequency effects. It is a setup that is well beyond the level of the multichannel systems currently in vogue, like the 5.1 surround system.

All those sound channels and all those image pixels add up to a lot of data. In test, an 18-minute UHDV video gobbled up 3.5 terabytes of storage (equivalent to about 750 DVD's). The data was transmitted over 16 channels at a total rate of 24 gigabits per second, thousands of times faster than a typical D.S.L. connection.

Great. Ohhh. This COULD be BADDDDD!!!! We DON'T know.

"A study to be released today reports that dust on computers contains a flame retardant with a toxic chemical known to pose reproductive and neurological hazard in animals. The report was published by advocacy groups that included the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.

The report, along with other recent studies, suggests that people are exposed daily to such chemicals in the office and at home. Right now, though, scientists can't predict what, if any, harm these chemicals -- known as PBDEs -- have on humans."