NASA's Nasty Little Virus

So, get this junk, y'all. NASA has worms. Seriously.

One of the awesome, super special astronauts has a worm in his laptop -- and this is not the first time NASA's been infected, it turns out.

This is disturbing on so many levels, and I am not soothed by the fact that NASA has dealt with it before, nor am I soothed by the fact that they don't really seem to see a problem with this little malware boo boo. I mean, what else would they say, that they were scared to death? That they're terribly afraid that mission data and other important, space related stuff was in jeopardy? Of course not. NASA isn't honest, no one that big is. That's like believing politicians tell the truth.

My biggest problem here -- and it seems to echo in a lot of the blogs and news reports I've read on this -- is how can they be so sure nothing was seen, taken, accessed? How do they know? It's all well and good to pat the public on the head in the hopes of making them think that some little super smart, sixteen year old hacker is just up to some mischievous tricks, har-de-har, those darn kids, but that does not answer the question of how in the frigging world does the International frigging Space Station attract malware? How? What? Huh?

We'll know the answer, I guess, when Russia blows us up or something.

Gaming Technology

Keep up with the latest in the gaming industry over at Technology-Wizard.com, a gaming technology that covers the latest games and gaming industry news. Gaming technology has never been covered like this before.

"We can rebuild him. We have the technology."

Well ... kind of. See, Nike made this. It’s the PreCool vest. The way it’s made, it’s supposed to take longer for the core temperature of your body to heat up to the point where you start getting exhausted. Right now, it’s being used during the Olympic Games over in Beijing – just as a prototype, of course.

You fill the vest up with cold water, which adds about 8 pounds onto you. The fabric keeps you from freezing, there’s insulation, and even a layer of aluminum that will reflect heat.

Naturally, it’s supposed to help you when you’re out on the playing field. Supposedly, like you’re the Six Million Dollar Man, it will make you faster, stronger, healthier – just better, basically.

And a little known fact: it’s actually styled after the mini dresses that were popular in the 60s.

You know, my birthday was Sunday...

...and if any of you awesome readers that I don't really know would like to get this for me, I'll ... well. Write a post on your piece-o'-technology-o'-choice. Okay?

Seriously, I don't even really have anything to say. I just think this is beautiful. It's the diNovo Edge from Logitech. Mind you, up to this point, I've really only thought of Logitech as a good product that I looked for when I wanted to get something useful but basic for, you know. Cheap. Like, I've got 9856 of their optical mice, one wireless optical mouse, one wireless keyboard (they came in a set, don'cha know?), and two webcams. Why? Because I needed them at the time, they were moderately cool in the tech department, and more importantly, I could afford them.

I cannot afford this. Well, I can, and I'll probably by it eventually because my GF got one for frigging FREE, and I saw it up close and touched it and admired my reflection in its shiny, shiny surface ... and then I had to leave it. And my soul still weeps.

Also, typing is a dream, it is hot as hell, and it's got what they call "backlit stealth controls" and I'm sorry, but that just seeps of awesome like an infection and I want one.

I sing in praise of getting 5 bars on my cell phone.

Good news for us poor shmucks who still don’t have decent cell phone service in our homes. I live in central New York and my cell phone only gets bars in, like, three rooms of a nine room house – only a third of the whole frigging house!

..but anyway! Sprint’s offering up this thing called the Airwave, which is made by Samsung. Essentially, it’s a miniature cell phone tower that works through your broadband. It covers up to five thousand square feet and as many as three cell phones can be used at the same time within its range. Admittedly, T-Mobile’s @Home is similar to this, and it may or may not be cheaper ... and I, for one, have T-Mobile, but whatever, teeny little home based cell phone towers in general are super neat, and considering all the snarking I do about cell phones in general and coverage in particular, it gets a couple of stars from me.

And now, couch potatoes rejoice!

Thanks to a new technology known as WHDI, or Wireless Home Digital Interface, the world of television is changing. This comes as all televisions – or at least television channels – are going to be undergoing brand new make overs, with all of them set to change over to digital in 2009. With Wireless Home Digital Interface, you will be able to mount big screen monitors right on the wall of your living room, bed room, et cetera, as well as surround sound speakers – without a great big mess of unsightly wires. Housewives all over the world are going to be rejoicing right along with their television watching husbands and children (that is a huge bit of generalization, but I’m sure you guys know what I mean). These little boxes will work with high definition TVs and they, too, are set to be available by 2009. Amimon Ltd., a company operating out of Israel, developed these little beauties. Companies like Panasonic, LG, Toshiba, and others are now planing to follow suit and develop their own wireless systems.

Wii enhancements: Wee!

There’s good news for gamers, yet again. The Nintendo Wii is possibly the greatest gaming system ever in life (warning: the preceding was a completely biased opinion and no, the author does not care), and Nintendo has plans to make it even better. Hot on the heels of the wildly popular Wii-Fit, which is has revolutionized the lives of fat-bottomed (warning: the preceding was a Queen reference, who caught that?) gamers everywhere, Nintendo intends to enhance the standard Wii-mote with a wee, teeny box called the Wii MotionPlus. It’s supposed to enhance the Wii-mote’s response and precision, and to make playing games on the Wii an overall more intense experience – namely because it is much more motion sensitive. Nintendo’s also introducing Wii Music, which lets gamers play fifty different instruments, just the way they are really played. The balance board is going to double as part of a drum kit – it will be the bass drum. Ba-dum ching, baby.

Can your cell phone kill you?

Recently in Moscow, over a dozen people were either injured or killed outright. The cause? They were struck by lightning. The underlying cause? Well, a lot of authorities there are blaming it on cell phones. For instance, one woman was struck by lightning while she was talking on her cell phone. People are actually blaming these strikes on several different pieces of portable technology; they consider MP3 players and other music devices to be just as much to blame.

Now, I definitely do not intend to make light of this situation; I used to live in fear of being struck by lightning. However, there is no real scientific proof that the weak electromagnetic fields put off by cell phones and other hand held, metal made devices could lure a stroke of lightning, even though evidence does support the fact that people carrying metal objects when they are struck by lightning may be more fatally wounded.

Still, it bears the question – who wants to be out in the middle of an electrical storm talking on a cell phone anyway?

Gamers, geeks, and Internet fr33ks: rejoice!

Experts in Australia have apparently created a new technology that is supposed to allow people to surf the Internet one hundred times faster than they do now. For that matter, a professor working with the product says that this probably won’t cost users anything.
The new technology evidently works to increase and improve the performance of optic fibers; the professor involved likened it to a scratch on a piece of glass, wherein the circuits will use the glass as a kind of path that the information will follow.
It’ll be a while before this technology reaches the market, but right now tests have conclusively shown that, in its current stages, this new technique has made surfing the web sixty times faster. Researchers on the product believe that with some more development, it can easily be one hundred times faster.

Eco-friendly washing machines ftw!

When you stop and think about it, it’s really about time that the overall design of washing machines get a new make-over. Xenos is taking a huge step in that regard – they have created an economically friendly washing machine. It is completely water efficient – namely because it uses plastic instead of water. It has been proven that a combination of friction and the cleaning solvent used are what ultimately gets clothing and fabrics clean. Keeping that in mind, Xenos uses a mixture of those factors and only 2 percent of water to get the job done. Apparently, you’ll be able to use one cup of water, a bit of your detergent of choice, and a butt-load of plastic chips that are used over and over again, all of which will work together to basically beat the dirt out of your clothes and get rid of stains. That’s right, the plastic chips will actually absorb stains.

This machine isn’t on the market yet, but the tests done on it thus far are showing some real promise. Not only is it water efficient, for instance, but the process of actually washing clothes followed by the way the chips themselves are extracted so they can be reused (for about one hundred times) leaves the items in the washer pretty dry, so you either won’t need to use your dryer at all, or you’ll only have to use it a bit for thicker fabrics.

Text messages are officially taking over the world.

PhoneTag – and various other companies – have this new thing now, in the ever widening world of telephone technology. Voice recognition software in cell phones isn’t all that new, but this looks awesome. They have services that can convert your voicemail messages into text messages; they will transcribe your voicemail, and then send to – well, anywhere, really. You can get it sent to your email and/or your phone, plus you can sign into your account on the company’s web site and retrieve your messages. Different companies offer different services, like the ability to have people send you silent messages, so your phone doesn’t even make a sound or anything, plus there are some features that will let you play an MP3 as sort of a soundtrack to your message. Most of them will let you put these services on home and business phones as well as cell phones. I had occasion to read about a lot of the companies offering things like this, and from what I saw, people were digging places like SpinVox, PhoneTag, and VoiceBox, more than companies like CallWave, mostly because the latter makes you change your voicemail number. Anyhow, people seem to like them because you don’t have to take down messages before and you can read through them even in places where you’re not supposed to have your cell phone switched on, like the movie theatre and malls and things.

Go iGoogle yourself.

Google’s upping the ante and it looks like they’re seriously attempting to compete with social networking sites like MySpace and FaceBook. They’re all about supporting OpenSocial now and they are finally – finally – reworking that bland homepage. I guess they’ve finally started listening to people’s complaints about it. These new improvements to iGoogle are an answer to public opinion as well. They plan to incorporate some of the elements and features already implemented in Gmail to spice things up a bit. iGoogle will have chat functions similar to Gmail and there will actually be real gadgets. The tabs are going to run up and down on the left side rather than on the top and you’ll soon be able to see what your friends are doing, via news feeds similar to what you can find on MySpace. Another social networking site ... I don’t know though. Google might be asking for trouble, throwing themselves into the ring with MySpace.

Invent an engine, win $3 million!

You guys may have noticed (or maybe you haven’t – I haven’t really been around long enough yet for all y’all to know my habits) that I stay the crap away from politics around here. That’s partly because I don’t want to get my butt spammed off, but also because I’ve got absolutely no clue about I’m voting for yet. That being said ... let’s talk about John McCain. He’s making me think of Al Gore lately, and I kind of like him for that. Then again, Dana Carvey’s Gore-theories on a recent comedy special sort of make me want to write in the guy’s name, for President of the World, so he can rule over global warming. But anyway...

Johnny’s put this offer on the table, see, and it really makes me wish I’d paid more attention in chemistry and physics and ... you know, whatever. Three million dollars, folks, for being able to come up with a battery for hybrid or electric cars – but not just any battery, oh no. It has to be able to actually work – I mean, really make it worth buying a fuel-saving car. Power, size, cost, and capacity – they’ve all got to be aces. And how does he propose to fund that giant reward? Everyone in America, every adult and child, gives one dollar. You know, I could get down with that. Dang, I’d donate a butt load more than that, if someone proposed a similar idea to get the country the crap out of debt.

Pitch-Perfect Technology

So. Good news and bad news, all in one package. Celemony Software, a Munich based company, has come out with some new recording technology. Direct Note Access is a computer program which can create digital recordings in which each note is perfect. It can change the individual notes of a specific instrument, for example, without it being necessary to touch any of the other notes. Everything can be entirely pitch perfect with little to no effort – because, yes, it is possible to perfect a singer’s pitch as well. So why is this bad news, too? Because I imagine that it means there will be tons more singers of the Ashlee Simpson/Brooke Hogan/et cetera variety, who can’t really carry a tune but get a record deal anyway, because they look good and computers can make them sound good, so hey, why not? I’m a music snob, ergo it’s bad news to me. Of course, that’s likely Ashlee’s problem already: her real problem on that SNL debacle was probably due to the fact that her studio made her sound so perfect that lip-synching was her only option for a live performance.

XP Becomes Extinct

It’s happening. It’s really happening. XP is going the way of the dinosaur and the Commodore 64, according to CNET. I’ve got a secret for all you cool cat techs, computer mavericks, and technology miscreants out there – I’m not superbly computer savvy. I know, big shock – but I’m not completely computer illiterate either; I know enough to like what I like and hate what I don’t. Windows XP works for me – and Vista makes my soul cry. Windows Vista makes a lot of people’s souls cry, but that doesn’t mean much to the bottom line. Dell’s already let go of Windows XP, setting it free like the proverbial true-love butterfly, but it’s pretty clear that XP was never meant to be for a lot of us. Folks who prefer Windows as an OS just got kind of screwed without either lube or the courtesy of a reach-around. Dell’s just a step of ahead of the game; other computer manufacturers are due to start phasing out their XP machines, and they should all be out of the way by 2009.
Windows in general and XP in particular have a lot of problems and get a lot of crap; I bitch about them myself often enough. But it’s still sort of disturbing that despite the majority’s rabid hatred for Vista, it’s getting the nod as Windows supreme. It happens, though. It’s quite akin to the way AOL is now basically AIM.