Digital Culture

We invite you to experience Karnak — to learn about an ancient site that still resonates today because of its monumental pylons, towering columns, stunning reliefs and architectural marvels. Enter the temple precinct and discover its rich religious, political and architectural history.

"Progress in simulation-based engineering and science holds great promise for the pervasive advancement of knowledge and understanding through discovery," said Clark Cooper, program director for materials and surface engineering at NSF and also a sponsor of the report. "We expect future developments to continue to enhance prediction and decision making in the presence of uncertainty."

Microsoft hopes you'll succumb to a Jedi Mind Trick: that you'll buy a netbook with a version of Windows 7 that will only let you run three applications simultaneously and that won't have a media player or simplified networking, but that you'll like Windows 7 so much you'll then want to buy a notebook or desktop running a full version of Windows 7. And Microsoft wonders why European regulators are so willing to see the company in court.

described as "broken" by one industry expert and as "childlike" by another...

Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 percent a year, will start to exceed supply as early as 2010 because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry Web sites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC's iPlayer... Beginning in 2012... PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the Internet an "unreliable toy."

Last year, a team of Swiss and Australian social scientists published a study concluding that the practice of self-Googling (or "ego-surfing," as it's sometimes called) can partly be traced to a rise in narcissism in society, but that it is also an attempt by people to identify and shape their personal online "brand." The authors of the survey no doubt returned to their cubicles and Googled themselves to see if the study was posted online. (It is.... To give people a bit more control over search results, Google introduced a feature this week it calls a "Google profile," which users can create so that a thumbnail of personal information appears at the bottom of U.S. name-query search pages. Once users create a Google profile, their name, occupation and location (and photo if they choose) appears in a box on the first page of the search results for their name. Next to the thumbnail info, there's a link to a full Google profile page that in many ways resembles a Facebook page.

HP is looking to draw in more small- and medium-sized-business users with its new ProBook s-series, a low-cost line sporting the Suse Linux, Vista or XP operating systems. Other features include the ability to link to an external modem as well HP Protect Tools for added security.

Mozilla on Tuesday released Firefox 3.5 beta 4, a release that promises improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed. It is now available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux via an online download.

just because Microsoft believes XP has outlived its usefulness doesn't mean you have to find a fresher OS. There's plenty of life left in your XP machines, though keeping XP hale and hearty is now up to users more than ever.

General Electric Global Research says it has figured out a way to put up to 500GB of data on a regular-sized DVD disc under laboratory conditions. GE says its breakthrough was achieved by writing 3-dimensional patterns that represent data onto a disc made of highly reflective material. The disc then acts as a mirror that makes it possible for a laser to pick up the entire piece of data. GE's process doesn't just put information onto the surface of the disc -- as DVDs and CDs do -- but etches the micro-holographic patterns below the surface of the disc as well.

first time Microsoft has relied on virtualization to provide backward compatibility... directly from the Windows 7 desktop without having to first open a separate virtual machine window...

While the Internet has dramatically changed lives around the world, its full impact will only be realised when far more people and information go on-line, its founders said Wednesday. "The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past," said Tim Berners-Lee, one of the inventors of the World Wide Web, at a seminar on its future.

Today Linden Lab announced more concrete plans for separating out adult content from the rest of Second Life. Originally discussed last month, the plans began by soliciting community feedback for definitions of adult content and, eventually, filtering that out of search results and locating it on a separate virtual continent from most of Second Life's activities. The specific plans now include definitions of PG, Mature, and Adult content for ratings and preferences, a more rigorous age verification system, either through payment information or the Aristotle system added in 2007, and the launch of a new viewer with more controls.

Tuesday marked the official unveiling of Bluetooth Core Specification Version 3.0 + High Speed (HS), the next iteration of the personal area networking technology. The revision aims to improve the speed of data transmission by harnessing the power of 802.11 connections, borrowing part of their bandwidth to transmit large files.