technology - "computers"

TechWeb - Of the 22 testers who provided feedback, 18 said that compared with their previous computers, the Mac notebooks offered a 'better or best experience.'

In what columnist Glenn Derene (popularmechanics.com) billed as the 'Ultimate Lab Test for New Desktops & Laptops,' both the iMac and MacBook soundly outperformed Vista-running PCs. 'In our speed trials,' reports Derene, 'Leopard OS trounced Vista in all-important tasks such as boot-up, shutdown and program-launch times. We even tested Vista on the Macs using Apple's platform-switching Boot Camp software-and found that both Apple computers ran Vista faster than our PCs did.

The Mac world is playing detective this week, trying to track down more information about the mysterious company selling Mac OS computers without a license.

mikkl666 writes 'In their official blog, Google announces that they are experimenting with technologies to index the Deep Web, i.e. the sites hidden behind forms, in order to be 'the gateway to large volumes of data beyond the normal scope of search engines'. For that purpose, the engine tries to automatically get past the forms: 'For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML'. Nevertheless, directions like 'nofollow' and 'noindex' are still respected, so sites can still be excluded from this type of search.'' of this story at Slashdot.

Clarence writes 'After some 30,000 years of silence, the Neanderthal race is once again speaking thanks to some advanced computer simulation. A Florida Atlantic University professor is using software vocal tract reconstructions to emulate the speech of our long-dead distant relatives. 'He says the ancient human's speech lacked the 'quantal vowel' sounds that underlie modern speech. Quantal vowels provide cues that help speakers with different size vocal tracts understand one another, says Robert McCarthy, who was talking at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Columbus, Ohio, on April 11. In the 1970s, linguist Phil Lieberman, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, inferred the dimensions of the larynx of a Neanderthal based on its skull. His team concluded that Neanderthal speech did not have the subtlety of modern human speech.'' of this story at Slashdot.

Stony Stevenson writes 'New figures suggest that 92.3 percent of all email sent globally during the first three months of 2008 was spam. The data from Sophos also indicated that 23,300 new spam-related web pages were created every day during the period, or one about every three seconds. For the first time Turkey's contribution to the global spam problem puts it in the top three offending countries. Compromised computers in Turkey are now responsible for relaying 5.9 percent of the world's junk email, compared to 3.8 percent in the final quarter of 2007.' of this story at Slashdot.

AUSTRALIAN workers are among the least likely to use their office computers for personal use, according to an international survey.