- Big A edited by Rich
*RsAii*
According to SI.com, Roethlisberger said his fractured ribs did not show up on X-rays taken before he led the Steelers to a 27-23 win over Arizona on Feb. 1, but were revealed only during an MRI test he had last week.
According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Roethlisberger flew into the Chrysler's windshield and then hit the ground head first. Blood pooled around him on the pavement, the paper said.
- from an ESPN article
Police sources have indicated that Roethlisberger suffered fractures to the jaw and right sinus cavity, as well as a nine-inch laceration to the back of the head, the loss of two teeth, and several chipped teeth. His facial injuries were severe enough that witnesses on the scene did not immediately recognize him, even after he identified himself as "Ben"....
-Wikipedia
Some Apple retailers in the United States have been given price lists for a new Apple laptop line, and there’s a big surprise: an $800 laptop. The information comes from a source we would categorize as reliable, would have access to such information, and who has been accurate in the past.
One of Sony's upcoming PSP games, Resistance Retribution, will utilize a newly developed technology called "PSP Plus." The feature will allow players of Retribution to connect their systems to the PS3, in order to enable use of PS3 wireless controllers. Using the DualShock will enable dual-analog control in the game. In addition, rumble will be supported. This potential use of connectivity was hinted at in a patent filed over a year ago.
Other games may be able to potentially utilize PSP Plus -- however, it is currently a Retribution-only tech.
After finally being confirmed as a standalone expansion for Master Chief's final ride, Halo 3 Recon is the talk of the town walking out of Microsoft's TGS 2008 press conference. Taking on the role as an elite Orbital Drop Shock Trooper for the UNSC, Halo 3 Recon follows a brand new hero in an all new storyline. Taking place between the story of Halo 2 and Halo 3 as Master Chief is away on butt-kicking business, players are in store for what Microsoft is calling "a top-secret mission with a gripping story."
Featuring exclusive multiplayer maps, Forge items and four player co-op as well as saved films, screenshot capability and campaign scoring; Halo 3 Recon is sure to light up Xbox 360's when it releases in Fall 2009.
Lifehacker Reports:Google releases Google Desktop 5.8 for Windows .... and promises 50% less memory usage during startup and faster shutdown. Once you get it installed and running, check out how to get more from Google Desktop.
The Google phone has finally arrived! The G-1 has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and a trackball for navigation. Other features include 3G network connectivity and the ability to zoom on something by tapping on the screen.
an area, and blow up the image. They also show how you can use the dedicated keyboard and then use the touch screen to access links on a Web page. They show the long press so that you can click on a link and then send an e-mail directly. The phone will be locked to the T-Mobile network. Brodman said Google and T-Mobile will be marketing the device together. There is no Microsoft Exchange support. But it could be a perfect opportunity for the developers in the Android Market to develop something.
The phone uses browser technology called WebKit that uses the same base technology as Google's Chrome browser. Andy Rubin called it Chrome Lite. Brodman said the device is aimed at the consumer market.
The price: $179 with a two-year service contract.
You can order it today at www.T-MobileG1.com, or it will be in T-Mobile and some retail stores on October 22. It will be available in the United Kingdom in November and other European countries next year.
[Straight from CNET.com]
Consumerist Reports:Those "new" tires of yours could be six-years old and ready to disintegrate on the highway. Tire rubber dries out after six years, but unlike in Europe and Asia, American companies are allowed to sell expired tires long after they turn into death donuts. A 20/20 investigation found that the "new" tires on sale at Sears and Walmart can be up to 12-years-old. Inside, how to tell when your tires were born...Yeesh.All tires bear a Department of Transportation number hidden on the inner wheel wall. At the end of the number is a four-digit sequence that shows the week and year the tire was made. Tires with the notation 3502 were made in the 35th week of 2002. If you only see three digits, get new tires immediately; your tires are from the 90's and are way past their effective lifespan.
Miners in Lesotho have discovered a huge gem stone which may become the largest ever polished round diamond.
The stone weighs 478 carats and is the 20th largest rough diamond ever found, said Gem Diamonds.
The company said the uncut rock was recovered recently from the Letseng mine, owned by the company in Lesotho.
The diamond, which is as yet unnamed, has the potential to yield a 150 carat cut stone, and could sell for tens of millions of dollars, the company said.
"Preliminary examination of this remarkable diamond indicates it will yield a record-breaking polished stone of the very best colour and clarity," said the company's chief executive Clifford Elphick.
It would be bigger than the 105 carat round-cut Koh-i-Noor diamond, which is part of the British Crown Jewels.
It would still be dwarfed by the Cullinan diamond discovered in 1905, which was 3,106 carats uncut and yielded a teardrop shaped diamond of 530 carats called the Great Star of Africa.
The Letseng mine is owned by a mining company of which Gem Diamonds controls 70% and the Lesotho government 30%.
Is anybody else starting to find it funny that Verizon is all over the BlackBerry Storm while Research in Motion itself has yet to issue any sort of formal release or announcement???
While New Yorkers continue to feel the pressure of the financial sector's fallout, other cities are faring far better.According to the latest Best-Performing Cities survey from economic think tank the Milken Institute, metro areas like Provo-Orem, Utah, and Raleigh-Cary, N.C., are actually bucking national unemployment trends by offering opportunities in growing sectors like technology and health care. (The survey tracks data on job creation, wage increases and the amount of the region's GDP that stems from technology products and services created between 2002 and 2007, the most recent data available. The survey also takes into account the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment data from March 2007 to March 2008.)
Besides playing host to growing industries, another defining feature of the cities that topped the Milken Institute's list was that these locales were relatively unaffected by the housing meltdown, says Ross DeVol, director of regional economics at the Milken Institute. In fact, cities in California and Florida that traditionally make the list fell off this year due to the impact of the subprime mess on housing and construction labor markets.
Provo-Orem, Utah
Utah isn't just about skiing and Mormons. In fact, Provo, home to Brigham Young University, is quickly becoming a hotspot for tech talent. Big IT services and hardware players, including Micron Technology and Novell collectively employ around 3,000 residents, says DeVol. And, in the past five years, angel investors have pumped more than $30 million into Utah start-up businesses, many of which are in Provo-Orem, says Alan Hall, an angel investor and founder of Grow Utah Ventures, which focuses on economic development. All of this has helped Provo-Orem's employment grow at a rate that's far above the national average. Between 2002 and 2007, employment grew by an impressive 16.5 percentage points, according to DeVol.
Raleigh-Cary, North Carolina
College students used to flock to New York and Washington, D.C., post-graduation. Now, they're heading a little farther south. Not only is Raleigh's relatively low cost of living attractive to young folks, but so are the job prospects. Tech giants like IBM, Cisco Systems and privately-held software maker SAS Institute employ some 20,000 of the metro-area's residents, says Devol. For non-techies, drug maker GlaxoSmithKline is the largest biopharmaceutical employer in the region. Between 2007 and 2008, Raleigh experienced a 3.6% bump in job growth, the largest in the country. (One caveat: From March to July, Raleigh-Cary's unemployment rate has increased from 4.1% to a recent 5.4%, according to the BLS).
Salt Lake City
Wall Street may be seeing red, but this Mormon mecca is making profits hand over fist. Job growth was up 2.2% between March 2007 and March 2008, in large part due to banks like Zions Bancorp and Wells Fargo, which collectively employ around 13,000 of the city's residents, says DeVol. Credit-card issuer Discover Financial Services also calls Salt Lake City home. Both Hall and DeVol agree that these companies are not likely to fall like their peers on the East coast. Health care also dominates the city's economy.
Intermountain Health Care, for example, operates a hospital, clinics and doctors offices, and employs more than 27,000 area residents.
Austin-Round Rock, Texas
The capital of Texas may be best known for cultivating the live music scene, but it's also proving to be fertile ground for tech companies. IBM, as well as electronic components firms Applied Materials, Flextronics and Samsung Austin Semiconductor have offices there, and collectively employ more than 13,000 residents, says DeVol. Many of these employees are picked up after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin, says Greg Garrison, president of Startup Staffing Group, a finance, HR and recruiting company. Overall, this metropolitan area registered the fourth largest job growth -- 2.89% -- between March 2007 and March 2008 of all the cities Milken surveyed.
Huntsville, Alabama
Alabama has had its moments in the spotlight. Lynrd Skynrd paid homage to the state in its Southern rock classic and Forrest Gump lovingly called the state home. But perhaps one of Alabama's highest distinctions is playing host to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Located in the northern city of Huntsville, the science and exploration center is ground zero for Ares 1, NASA's attempt to carry missions to the moon, Mars and the solar system. Many contractors and subcontractors in the aerospace and engineering sectors, including Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Teledyne Brown Engineering, have opened branches here hoping to tap into employment opportunities, says DeVol. And more jobs are on the way: The Army Space Missile Defense Command recently completed its move from Arlington, Va., and the Missile Defense Agency is scheduled to move more than 2,200 employees to Huntsville in the next few years.
[Straight from SmartMoney]
Skyfire is faster than any mobile web browser you’ve ever used. You’ll load web pages as fast as your PC and eliminate the long delays and error messages you get with other browsers. That’s a big claim, so we encourage you to experience it firsthand
We are currently investigating support for Blackberry, but it's not on our immediate roadmap.
Apparently, the adapter's metal prongs can break right off, thus creating a "risk of electrical shock"
... Google will work hard to make sure its add-on paradigm keeps Chrome stable. "We hope to do them right," he said. "As many people notice in Firefox add-ones, there are problems with instability."
Now, this is pretty cool. The guys over at 360voice.com can help you setup a blog for your 360.Ah, the internet – founded upon crazy men making crazy things for free. Such as a blog supposedly written by your 360, based on what you've been using it for. It monitors your Live account and automatically generates entries about what it's been up to that day (or what it hasn't been up to – expect many posts about neglect if you don't turn it on for a while). The tone is very much American geek, but it's a fun record of your own gaming habits, and of keeping an eye on what your chums are up to. Get set up at www.360voice.com.
Wow, what a week on Wall Street! If you have investments such as stocks, mutual funds, or 401k's, you have seen your portfolio decline significantly. So far just this week the Dow Jones Industrials is down nearly 1,000 pts. The government has already bailed out several large banks, Fannie and Freddie and now AIG, so you may wonder whats gonna happen next on the market and who is the government gonna bail out next?
Google is set to unveil its rival to iPhone, BlackBerry on Sept. 23. It will introduce the Google Phone, with Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile cellular carrier becoming the first company to market the handset, T-mobile said, according to press reports. The phone, to be based on Google's Android operating system and produced by Taiwan's High Tech Computer Corp.
This is probably one of the most exciting applications I've ever seen. If you have a computer at home running XP with a broadband connection, you can use Orb.-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3) “artist or song”and put the artist or song in the quotation marks in place of the words "artist or song" and you'll likely pull up links to downloadable mp3s.
Maxconsole reports:"A Best Buy insider has tipped us off to say that the new PSP 3000's will include the ability to play games on the PSP using a PS3 controller. And you will also be to use composite cables (480i) to play games on the TV instead of requiring a component 480p. This should be treated as a rumor until confirmed."
Everyone who has owned a cellphone over the last 10 years should at some point pour one out in thanks to Cliff Kushler, one of the inventors of the T9 text entry system that knows you mean "DONKEY" when you type 366539 in an SMS. Now Cliff is smartly shifting his focus on touchscreens with Swype—a way to type blindingly fast on a touchscreen by tracing your finger or stylus over the letters you want without lifting up, connect-the-dots style. It looks frankly amazing in a demo—so amazing that we remembered we've seen it somewhere before. Thankfully, it could be heading to the iPhone and Android really, really soon.
Turns out, as the folks at jkOnTheRun also point out, that the idea of this kind of input system has been around since 2004 (when touchscreens were still kind of from the future), when it was developed by IBM and called SHARK. Now, SHARK is called ShapeWriter, who are the developers of the WritingPad Android app and a similar app for the iPhone. How about that?
Swype is currently near prime time for Windows Mobile, with an SDK to bring it to other platforms in the works. ShapeWriter's Android version of WritingPad is forthcoming, and their iPhone version, which was released briefly before being pulled from the App Store for reasons unknown, should be back soon.
