Can a Sinking Dollar Actually Make You Money?

Few people give thought to how much a burger costs in Botswana, but the global value of our currency could have huge implications here at home. The U.S. dollar has been under pressure in recent months, but what does that really mean to us?
First, lets explore some advantages to a strengthening dollar:

Lower prices on imported [...]

Holes in Leopard's firewall

Researchers find that setting the Apple firewall to block all incoming Internet traffic doesn't work.

Report: Even more cash for Facebook?

Looks like the "$240 million poke"--also known as the high-profile stake in Facebook that Microsoft acquired on Wednesday--may not have been the only deal-making. Forbes' Elizabeth Corcoran posted a quick blog entry saying that she'd heard two New York-based hedge funds had each handed over about $250 million ...

Apple: 250,000 iPhones bought to unlock

Throughout all the hoopla over the hacking of the iPhone, it was never very clear how many people were actually trying to escape from AT&T. Apple ventured a guess on Monday.

During a conference call to discuss the company's blowout fourth quarter, Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim ...

Dashwire: Manage your cell phone on the Web

It takes a second to realize that what you see on Dashwire.com's cool gray interface is content from your mobile phone. That's probably because you're not used to reading it so easily.

There on Dashwire's spacious Internet dashboard are your photos and videos, contacts, bookmarks, ...

Take ‘Plus One’ Up a notch

Why don’t you take Minus One, Plus One to another level and consider supporting black artists who perform music not specifically marketed to urban audiences.
Diversify your concept of blackness, folks.
In the meantime, check out Rissi Palmer. A black woman born in Pittsburgh and raised in St. Louis.
A recent MSNBC article said,
Rissi Palmer still laughs about [...]

Just how many electric car start-ups are there?

How many electric car and plug-in start-ups are there in the world today? I count 16, but I have may missed some.

BustedTees offers sales commission through Facebook app

BustedTees, the Web site responsible for that "Prose before Hos" t-shirt that you wore to your English 101 final exam, has announced a Facebook Platform application that offers to split cash revenue with users willing to install it.

The application has soft-launched and is set to launch formally in a ...

Intel's Andy Bryant gets promoted, in a sense

One tidbit mentioned during Intel's blowout third quarter was the promotion of long-time Chief Financial Officer Andy Bryant to something called "chief administrative officer."

Bryant has been the CFO at Intel for 13 years and will step up to his new title effective immediately, so that Stacy Smith can ...

One helluva week for Microsoft, Leopard notwithstanding

During the Microsoft antitrust trial, one of the company's PR execs named Mark Murray would dutifully approach the press microphone on the courthouse steps in Washington, D.C., each afternoon to declare: "It was another good day for Microsoft."

That was called playing the part of loyal soldier in ...

Tipping: doin’ it and doin’ it and doin’ it well

About.com has a great article on the subject and Charlyn Chisholm is right when she says that “in reality, tipping etiquette has evolved into a secret subculture with hidden expectations that aren’t always well understood.” Also, tipping is never required, but is expected in many places. As a former server I’d like to offer a [...]

Handvertising: Marketing (re)discovers the human body

Borders between the human body and technology are slowly disappearing; advertising, network, commerce and consumer are converging as well.

The undead take Manhattan at Zombiecon '07

What is a zombie, anyway?

Is it a childhood nightmare, a modernized niche of folklore, a box-office-tested horror film staple, an ironic riff on American consumerism, or simply an undead corpse hungry for fresh human brains?

Maybe it's all of the above. On Saturday at noon, somewhere around 200 zombies assembled at a bar in midtown Manhattan and proceeded to terrorize the city well into the night. This was Zombiecon 2007, the third annual edition of the pre-Halloween flash mob, and these reanimated corpses took the day very seriously. Among the crowd were undead clowns, airline pilots, ballerinas, doctors, chefs, Roman generals, prom couples, and tennis players. There were also zombified versions of Santa Claus, Pirates of the Caribbean protagonist Captain Jack Sparrow, singer Amy Winehouse, and author Hunter S. Thompson.

(Others, like yours truly, just spruced up jeans and a T-shirt with theatrical blood and white face paint.)

Also spotted: Lindsay Campbell, host of video blog Wallstrip, in a full-on goth-zombie ensemble as she interviewed fellow members of the undead for the cameras.

...

Apple honors Al Gore on Nobel Prize

Apple has dedicated the majority of the free space on its home page to honor company director Al Gore on having received the Nobel Peace Prize earlier Friday.

Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the coveted prize for their evangelism regarding the causes and effects of ...

Rikki-Taiki-Mazda

This agile mongoose of a car has finally made its debut at the 2007 Tokyo auto show.

As you can see, the Mazda Taiki's aerodynamic design gives the illusion that the back wheels are tucked under wings. This is the fourth car Mazda has released in its Nagare (which ...

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The EU opens up Microsoft. Kind of. Sort of. Not really?

Is the software giant getting off too easily with the EU? With all the hoopla surrounding Microsoft's capitulation to the EU's demands over interoperability, it's important to remember just how far the deal doesn't go.

New York jumps on the Lunch 2.0 bandwagon

Free food at Lunch 2.0, courtesy of TheLadders

(Credit: Brett Petersel/Lunch 2.0)

There are a lot of cool things going on in NYC these days when it comes to technology (do I really have to say that anymore?)--so many, in fact, that you can't hit ...

High school students like iPods, sharing files

The latest version of financial analyst firm Piper Jaffray's biannual survey of high school students and technology states the obvious, but also contains some interesting tidbits.

(Credit: Disney)

Let's get the "duh" stats out of the way first. In case you were unaware, the survey confirms that Apple ...

'Chore Wars,' where 'World of Warcraft' meets toilet cleaner

SAN FRANCISCO--Housework is a lot more fun with a battle axe and a couple of dwarves.

Chore Wars, a game shown off by noted game developer Jane McGonigal at the Web 2.0 Summit recently, gives users "experience" points for various household chores. Collecting those points then lets you advance

...

The Path from Victims to Victors

In their new book, “Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors,” Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint, Professor of Psychiatry and Faculty Associate Dean for Student Affairs at Harvard Medical School, consider the ways black people can rise above a history of oppression, seeming hopelessness, fear and lack of education on the [...]

Geotagging to Flickr

Manually tagging things is a pain and, if one doesn't have obvious geographical features in the photo, it may be hard to locate them exactly on a map. So--how about marrying GPS data to the photos? It's a sound idea, it's doable, but it requires a slightl

MySpace, Skype to partner for voice function on IM client

MySpace and Skype are set to announce on Wednesday that the eBay-owned telephony client will be providing voice chat services for the News Corp.-owned social network's instant messaging client, MySpaceIM. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

Through this deal, MySpace users will be able to link ...

Mozilla: Smartphone performance has a ways to go

The iPhone isn't a true mobile computer yet, but it's on the right track, according to a Mozilla executive.

Will there be two separate Firefox browsers for smartphones and PCs or one to rule them all?

(Credit: Mozilla)

"Getting a no-compromise web experience on devices requires significant memory (>=...

Hakia launching new spin on social searching

Up-and-coming semantic search company Hakia is launching a new social feature next week, called "Meet Others." It will give you the option, from a search results page, to jump to a page on the service where everyone who searches for the topic can communicate.

For some idealized (yet realistic) types ...

Paper Bag Test 2007

It’s not really surprising to me that a Detroit party promoter thought he could get away with having a party just for light-skinned women. Read about it here. Depending on your environment, such coontastic ideas are the norm; go unchallenged and are often encouraged.
But I wonder if he would have gotten the same negative backlash [...]

News.com Extra: PlayStation's new life in the lab

Plus: How Google maps the world. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.

As New York's tech scene expands, Valleywag hires an Alleywag

The Gawker Media-owned Valleywag might tout itself as "Silicon Valley's tech gossip rag," but the effervescence of Bubble 2.0 has expanded far beyond Sand Hill Road. So far, in fact, that the San Francisco Bay Area tattletale blog--following in the footsteps of TechCrunch, which hired Business 2.0...

This day's Apple: Lawsuits, 'jailbreaks' and Nanos

From time to time, I'll post a brief summary of some interesting items I come across during the day that I don't have time to call out in more detail. If you see anything interesting out there, drop me a line at tom dot krazit at cnet dot ...

Video stores getting crushed by Web

Video stores appear to be heading the way of the car hop and drive-in theaters.

Movie Gallery, which operates under the names Movie Gallery, Hollywood Video, and Game Crazy, filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday, according to a story by Bloomberg. The collapse of the country's second-largest video-rental chain is

...

The Terrible Truth About the 401(k): PART II

Some thoughts from people much smarter than I am:

http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/08/pf/expert/expert1.moneymag/index.htm?section=money_pf (Fred’s article)

http://robots.cnnfn.com/2007/09/25/pf/expert/expert.moneymag/index.htm

http://www.investmentu.com/IUEL/2005/20050929.html

http://financialrevolution.blogspot.com/2006/03/why-you-can-beat-market-mutual-funds.html

http://www.personalfund.com/learnmore.html

French argue over aerial robot surveillance

Flying drones would monitor people in Paris, subway-connected suburbs and demonstrations.

Report: MySpace to launch developer platform

Have you gotten sick of the word "platform" yet? Sorry.

According to a post on TechCrunch, MySpace.com is planning to follow in Facebook's footsteps and open up a set of application program interfaces (APIs) so that developers can create "MySpace apps" in the vein of Facebook apps.

TechCrunch'...

Google's OS dreams calling on Linux

Can Google's application development prowess be transformed into a next-generation mobile operating system?

It seems increasingly likely that Google, the ubiquitous tech company, is about to throw its hat into the race to develop the next big mobile device. Google's no gadget-maker, but it does develop quite a ...

Does Al Gore deserve the Nobel Prize?

For someone who has a reputation for being boring and wooden, Al Gore certainly is polarizing.

...

Are you Financially Literate?

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My Facebook fetish

CNET News.com's Charles Cooper wants his boss to know there's a reason why he wastes all that time prowling around Facebook each day.

Is Twitter testing out mobile advertisements?

Is Twitter going to turn your mundane messages about salads, cats, and Arcade Fire concerts into revenue dollars? Signs are pointing to yes, as oddball messages appended to Twitter's microblog "tweets" indicate that the company is dabbling in text message ads. Some other folks around the tech blog world ...

The mobile future is wide open

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--If you're not exactly sure what you want in a mobile computer, don't worry: the folks who are building them aren't entirely sure themselves.

The consensus among five panelists gathered here at the ARM Developers Conference was that this is a very interesting and ...

A patent on a poker game?

It's almost time for another patent and intellectual property auction from Ocean Tomo, and the gem in the catalog this time is a patent on a poker game.

Invented by Anthony Cabot, the game, informally called Multiway Poker, involves dealing 25 cards facedown in a 5x5 array. You then ...

don’t have n!**a ears

have you seen chris rock’s ‘i think i love my wife’? there is a scene when he’s riding on the train to some new music his ‘friend’ gave him to open up his mind to musical artists outside of the typical ‘black people’ music. chris rock paraphrased the experience as one having ‘nigga ears’.
while i [...]

News.com Extra: The great tech worker divide

Plus: Flight of the extreme UAVs. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.

Rumor: Facebook to take on iTunes?

AllFacebook blogger Nick O'Neill wrote on Friday that an "extremely reliable anonymous source" had told him that Facebook is working on an in-house rival to Apple's mighty iTunes Store. According to O'Neill, the company is in the process of looking for an executive to head this division--his ...

Trouble in iPhone paradise

I think it's officially safe to say that the honeymoon is over for the iPhone.

Just like the day you discover that your gorgeous new wife leaves used tea bags in the sink and that she never really liked baseball in the first place, iPhone owners are waking up ...

Your virtual ticket into Wikipedia

Knowledge is power, though in this industry, just trying to keep up with the knowledge and constant change is a feat in itself. Social, local, mobile, SEO, PPC, and e-commerce...can you keep up?

The online industry has a number of big shows that demand attention, but if you've ...

Does God care if I am Rich or Poor?

I go to church pretty often, not as much as I should but more than some. I also try to read my bible everyday—sometimes I am successful, other times not so much. So I know a little bit, but what I am having a hard time with is this – If the good book says [...]

Why the digital-download divide is only going to widen

The recording industry may have won a controversial copyright conviction, but CNET News.com's Charles Cooper says this is only a brief chapter in an endless saga.

SugarLoving: Sugar Inc.'s saccharine answer to Digg

Sugar Inc., the women's-oriented blog network that grew out of a single celebrity gossip title and now encompasses about a dozen others with the word "Sugar" in the title, has now branched into social news. On Monday, the company launched SugarLoving, which is a way for you to submit ...

Ask me about Apple, Thursday at 11 a.m.

It will be open season on anything related to Apple on Thursday morning on CNET.

I'm going to be hosting an "Ask the Editors" session in the CNET Forums starting at 11 a.m. PDT, 2 p.m. EDT. Travel over here to submit any and all questions you ...

Xerox unveils smart-document software

The lives of office file clerks may get a little easier if Xerox delivers on its promise of new smart-paper technology.

Researchers from the company's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) on Thursday announced three new technologies that augment digital and paper documents.

First is the hybrid categorizer, software that ...

Saving the Planet One Bag at a Time

Since I’m all about the slogan “be the change you want to see in the world,” I’ve been hunting for some “cool” canvas bags that I can use at the grocery store instead of the plastic bags that eventually go to waste. I could just get a plain canvas bag, but I need something that [...]

Turn your smart phone into a Garmin navigator

New software on a microSD card hooks into certain handsets' GPS chips to add location-based services.

Pinch yourself: Facebook to 'group' friends

It hasn't happened yet, nor is there a timeline for it, but Facebook has stated that it's working on allowing its members to "organize that long list of friends into groups so you can decide more specifically who sees what." No formal announcement was made, but you can ...

Report: Apple developing OS X minitablet

Apparently the Newton doesn't fall very far from the Apple tree.

AppleInsider is reporting that Apple has a project underway to develop a minitablet computer based on the OS X operating system it has developed for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. The site is calling it "the return ...

UC Berkeley first to post full lectures to YouTube

YouTube is now an important teaching tool at UC Berkeley.

The school announced on Wednesday that it has begun posting entire course lectures on the Web's No.1 video-sharing site.

Berkeley officials claimed in a statement that the
university is the first to make full course lectures available on

...