It's no joke. Everyone (okay, techies and media types) is in a tizzy about a virus that has infected an estimated 10 million computers worldwide and is designed to do something (no one knows what) on April 1. It could be a massive prank, a giant spam campaign, or nothing. Be that as it may, here are my bets:
5. Empty all of the AIG executives' bank accounts
4. Switch all the pages of The Huffington Post with pages of The Onion (but no one will notice)
3. Start Twittering all of President Obama's private BlackBerry messages
2. Send a post to all of your Facebook friends telling them that you've been secretly in love with them for years
1. Delete every blog on the Web so that people will have to buy a newspaper
Got your own guesses? Comment!
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From pocket protectors to pocket projectors, one of the latest gadgets to fire up geek dreams is the so-called pico projector. About the size of a deck of cards, a pico projector can beam images of up to 60-inches (measured diagonally) on a blank wall or screen.
They're designed to be used with a portable player, such as an iPod or cell phone, to give you a larger image for watching video clips or even delivering a Powerpoint presentation.
Naturally, there are drawbacks to these tiny projectors. To find out what they are watch JQ's segment on the Fox Business channel.
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Over breakfast with Jon van Bronkhorst of Seagate this morning, we chewed over the opportunities for digital storage ranging from cloud computing companies (not as great as the hype would make it appear), the future of solid state drives (growing, but not there yet), and consumer sales.
I'm always looking for a silver lining in this economy and van Bronkhorst says there is one in retail sales. “We've been surprised on the upside in terms of units sold,” he says. It turns out, perhaps not so surprisingly, that people look at storage as a necessity. In other words, I may not buy a new PC this year, but storage? I could use more. There are drives for backing up, small business network support, stashing media like music, photos, and video, and even DVR extenders. (Regarding the last, beware that if you hang a hard drive off your digital video recorder box and the box fails—as they are wont to do—the stuff stored on the hard drive becomes inaccessible too.)
There's also the magic tipping point. When terabyte drives are just over $100, people start buying them in droves. Naturally, Seagate will have some nifty new options to feed these markets coming out in the next couple of months. The company will even get into the SSD market for corporate customers later this year.
Oh, and about that $1,000 omelet, I did not indulge, tempted as I was to try eggs stuffed with enough Sevruga caviar to pay for my mortgage. I was more in the mood for Ossetra, anyway.
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