Two researchers, Maryam Kamvar, a PhD student supervised by Shumeet Baluja, looked at a million search queries made to Google mobile. Guess what they found? approximately 20% of searches were for porn. The arstechnica article is here and a link to the orginal pdf here

With Apple re-releasing their computer to run on the Intel line of processors I say everyone should buy a Mac and dual boot. Since I can't have my way, here's what to do for this up and coming holiday. If you cannot wait until January to get a new system with Vista preloaded on it and up to specs. You can try to read Microsoft rough guideline for hardware or read on to get my opinion.

Microsoft currently recommends 512 megabytes of memory, or RAM, for the striped down version of Vista, and it will probably recommend 1 gigabyte of RAM for full Vista. And going based on historical experience I'd say double it. The striped down vista will be able to run on just able any video card. But to experience the full Vista graphical shading and transparencies you will need a DirectX 9 video card that supports both "WDDM" and "Pixel Shader 2." Don't worry just about every card on the market today will support that. For the striped down version of Vista you will need an 800 megahertz for better, and the full experience will need a 1.5 gigahertz or better processor, also the faster the processor the better. And any hard drive over 40 gigabytes will be more than enough but, if you want to store a lot of movies and mp3's 250 gigabyte hard drives are dropping in prices.

OK so its old news we all know Vista has been pushed back until 2007. What we don't hear about is how this is also pushing back Windows Fiji, the follow up OS to Vista that was due out in 2008 now due around 2009. As well as pushing back Fiji's successor Vienna all the way back to 2012. Longhorn Server will still be released in 2007 as well as Fiji server in 2009 and Vienna, sometimes called Blackcomb, server to be released in 2013.

After a discussion with a friend I was reminded of one of the funniest things I have read I wanted to share it with you. My favorate quote

While I was shopping for these products at my local health food store, I also noticed an herbal supplement called "Virility For Men," which roused (heh) my curiosity. So I ended my week of "all-natural experiments" by trying out this herbal Viagra. I didn't think it would do anything, though, so I ate the entire bottle. Turns out, this might have been a mistake.

http://www.zug.com/pranks/natural/index.html

An article on ZDNet talks about a Swedish study that found that heavy users of cell phones had a 240 percent increase in brain tumors on the side of their head that the phone was used on for more than 2,000 total hours, or approximately one hour of use per workday for 10 years (or 9-5 Monday-Friday for 1 work year).

If you read the study results you will see that the "results" aren't nearly so impressive as they claim. The short of it: they looked at a bunch of people who already had brain cancer, and then determined how many of them used a cell phone roughly an hour per day. I don't know about you, but most people I know use cell phones that often on average, and so it comes as no surprise to me that approx. 85% of the people in the study had high cell phone use. What this shows is ALMOST NOTHING because it doesn't compare what the rate of high cell phone use is among the general population. All it proves is that in a group of people who had brain cancer a lot of them used cell phones. Think of this analogous example: if I took a group of people with brain cancer and surveyed them we would probably find that a very high percentage of them (1) drink coffee every day (2) watch television every day (3) breath air every day, but you wouldn't immediately say "OMG, [Coffee, TV, Breathing] causes brain cancer!" Anyone who believed this story without at least reading a description of the study should stop breathing now so that they don't get cancer.

I think it speaks for itself.