Technology

Think you can multitask while driving? Think again. According to a recent report, drivers who use their cell phones to text while behind the wheel are six times more likely to crash their rides. "When people talk on the phone while driving they are ... four times more likely to get into an accident," says University of Utah psychologist Frank Drews. And thanks to Drews' last study, we now know texting behind the wheel means you're actually six times more likely to crash. (Source: com.au ) Studies Push Legislators to Act Talking on your cell phone while operating a vehicle has become illegal in ... (view more)

Hewlett Packard has acknowledged a complaint that its webcam technology discriminates against darker-skinned users. But it doesn't address the racism issue directly -- instead, HP points to a technical limitation. Technology Locks onto Faces The ... allegations involve a feature in the webcam which recognizes faces and then "locks on" to them, automatically moving to keep the picture in the shot as a head moves around. The assertion comes shortly after a YouTube user uploaded a clip which appears to show that the feature fails to lock-on his face. (Source: youtube.com ) In a company blog post on ... (view more)

With email messages favored over hand-written letters and online news sources being read as opposed to the daily newspaper, those individuals working in pulp and paper mills have good reason to be fearful of the longevity of their employment. ... However, these people now have a glimmer of hope for the continued existence of their industry, thanks to modern research that looks to transform ordinary paper into a lightweight battery . At Stanford University in California, scientists announced the successful creation of the first line of "paper batteries" in existence. 10x The Power of Lithium-Ion ... (view more)

What could have been the first mass-market Internet tablet-PC-based device has been abandoned in a copyright dispute. Michael Arrington, the man behind the CrunchPad, says the firm physically manufacturing the product wanted to go it alone, but the ... two sides are locked in an irresolvable dispute. The original concept of the CrunchPad was to produce a simple Linux-based tablet PC for easy web access, filling the gap between accessing the web on a smartphone and carrying around a full-blown portable computer such as a netbook or laptop. CrunchPad: a Blogger's Brainchild One of the most notable ... (view more)

Since the " Swine Flu " can infect a person at any moment, many companies have beefed up their remote access capabilities to enable their employees to work from home in the case of sudden illness. More specifically, remote access technologies ... provide companies with secure access to applications from any location. These applications can be retrieved using a number of Internet-ready devices and enable IT administrators to enforce security and information usage policies. These policies are then used to ensure that the devices connected to a corporate network from a remote location meet internal ... (view more)

Apple's iPhone continues its assault on the Nintendo DS with the release of id Software's legendary shooter, Doom. Originally released in 1994, the game still looks great on Apple's uber-popular smartphone. The original Doom was released on PC in ... 1993. It wasn't the first first-person shooter (FPS) -- that distinction arguably belongs to id's own Wolfenstein 3D, released in 1992 -- but it might just be the most memorable. The game's storyline wasn't exactly Shakespeare (futuristic teleportation experiments on Mars go wrong, unleashing hell's minions on unsuspecting space marines), but it sure ... (view more)

As part of the Japanese Science and Technology Agency's "Erato" project, students at Keio University have created a robot designed to alleviate the burden of performing one specific household chore: folding the laundry. Visitors at the Digital ... Contents Expo in Tokyo were greeted with a plethora of new tech-based innovations this year. The exhibitors demonstrated ideas that were necessary, practical and futuristic. Foldy the Robot Folder For example, "Foldy" the robot works with a camera mounted above a flat surface, like an ironing board. A person comes along and places an article of clothing ... (view more)

T-Mobile is taking a huge financial hit in the fallout over the Sidekick data loss . But Microsoft, which bears at least part of the responsibility for the mistake, is paying the price with its reputation. As reported earlier this week, the phone ... network had to admit that some users' data had been permanently lost due to a problem with a server run by Microsoft-owned company, Danger. The handset works by storing data such as contacts and appointments on a remote computer rather than on the phone itself. Microsoft Recovers Lost Data BBC news reports today that Microsoft has in fact recovered ... (view more)

Users of the Sidekick range of smartphones have been warned that technical problems may mean some of the data they stored on the device has been permanently lost. The story follows a period of around a week during which no users of the device were ... able to access any data services. The phones are carried by the T-Mobile network in the US, and are produced by Danger, now a subsidiary of Microsoft. One of the key aspects of the devices are that they work on cloud computing , meaning most data is stored remotely at a Microsoft owned server rather than on the device. In theory this make for a ... (view more)

The null character (also referred to as a null terminator) is a character with the value zero, and is used in nearly all mainstream computer programming languages. Use as String Terminator The character has special significance in C programming ... language and its derivatives, where it serves as a reserved character used to signify the end of strings, such as a sentence. The null character is often represented as the escape sequence '\0' in source code. Strings ending in a null character are said to be null-terminated. Security Exploit: Poison Null Byte The "poison null byte" was originally used ... (view more)