Filed under: Computers

If you’ve ever read the comments that stack up below some of our posts, you may have stumbled across a few that make you wonder just what the person who created the post in question was smoking or drinking when they wrote it.

According to Josh Quittner in Fortune, there might be a solution to end to those babbling, nonsensical, and sometimes even amusing comments that certainly give us a chuckle. Software engineers in Albuquerque are working on a so-called “stupid filter” that would pop up a message whenever a user tries to submit an inane comment.

The filter would, upon detecting such a comment, redirect it back to the user and ask that he or she try to re-write it to a point where it makes sense. The hope is that, after a few tries, the people making irritating comments would just go away. The trick, of course, is actually separating the stupid from the sensical, and the inane from the ironic.

The filter is intended to be distributed for free, meaning, if all goes well, the days of the exclamation point being the most commonly used character in the comment field may soon be over.

From CNN Money

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Good News in the Roshan Family. Sussane Roshan is Pregnant with her second child. Hrithik Roshan will be on Cloud 9 after his junior arrives. The couple is already blessed with a baby boy Hrehaan and soon he will be joined by another partner. The baby is expected to arrive next year in June. Hrithik […]

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Filed under: Blogs, Google (GOOG), Apple Inc (AAPL), Cisco Systems (CSCO), Research in Motion (RIMM), Economic data, Intuitive Surgical Inc (ISRG)

Interesting day is unfolding before us. The Dow Jones is off 1.4% while the NASDAQ index is off nearly 3%. So what gives? Why is this happening?

The big gains for the calendar year happened more with NASDAQ stocks than Dow stocks. Look at the performance of Intuitive Surgical (NASDAQ: ISRG), Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Research in Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM). All have experienced superb performance because of excellent growth in revenues and earnings. This is where money had been hiding as financials and other sectors have been hurt this year.

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The portfolio manager community is now playing defense. If there are gains and we are in November, it is bonus protection time. Remember the first rule of the government bureaucracy: protect the bureaucracy. Same with fund management, as November is the time to lock-in performance for maximum bonus payments.

OK, this may all be a bit facetious.

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO)’s John Chambers said in very careful words that there is growth still on the horizon, but financial institutions were backing off on technology spending. Also, the fact that Cisco did not guide its revenues and earnings outlook higher did not help either. So investors are wondering if the near-term revenue and earnings for the great performing names of 2007 might see a touch of a slow down. Time will tell.

Stock prices follow earnings growth. The ultimate barometer for any stock is the growth and sustainability of its earnings. With the Fed chairman issuing a slight cautionary tale and Cisco, a global tech giant, saying the same thing, the high performers are paying the price.

Georges Yared is the CIO of Yared Investment Research and the author of Baby Boomer Investing…Where do we go from here?

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These Sweet Icicle Lamps are definitely something worth getting to spruce up your dekstop, featuring a cool, otherworldly glow that soothes frayed nerves whenever you get yelled at by your boss for not completing the assignment given on time. Each of these lamps come encased with a bright cold cathode tube in a block of crystal clear acrylic. You can choose from two sizes, and they will come in both blue and white tube colors. While it isn’t expressly available in the US, Rakuten is selling them for approximately $112 to $141 each.

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Filed under: Multimedia, News

Travis Williams, Senior Producer of PAIN, has written a post on the PlayStation.Blog today outlining the six different modes of gameplay the game will ship with when it is released later this month. A video has also been posted which showcases these gameplay modes - be sure to check it out. Williams is also desperate for people to continue making suggestions about the game so that they can be incorporated later, even going so far as to setup a poll on the PlayStation.Blog sidebar with the question “Who would you like to see in PAIN?” (We voted for “Sony Video Game Characters, of course).

PAIN’s six gameplay modes will be split equally between single player and multiplayer and involve titles such as “Spank the monkey”, “HORSE” and “PAINdemonium.” It’s clear the developers have a special sense of humour. So check out the blog post for more info, watch the video and vote on the poll. Isn’t the internet grand?

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Filed under: Action, Comedy, Casting

If it wasn’t for those Shiny Happy Fabio followers, comedian Zach Galifianakis would’ve stopped Bubble Boy before his journey even began. (He was the ankle-weight-wearing bus dude who wouldn’t give the kid a nice, cheap discount.) Since then, he’s been a hacker, a homeless man, Santa, a friend of time-traveling Tru, and taught a certain kid about hunting Into the Wild – just to name a few. Now he’s got two more roles on the way, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

One of the roles will be in Tom Vaughn’s What Happens in Vegas. He’s going to play “Dave the Bear,” Jack’s (Ashton Kutcher) anti-marriage best friend who is less than happy when Jack marries Joy (Cameron Diaz) during a drunken night in Vegas. As I told you when news broke on the project, the pair get hitched and then undermine each other to get the big payout they win in Vegas. I imagine the Bear will plot against the aptly-named Joy, as THR says he’s playing her nemesis.

For role number two, Galifianakis is going to get scientific by starring in the Disney/Bruckheimer flick, G-Force. His role is that of “the lead government scientist in charge of a guinea pig commando program, helping [to] send the highly trained elite agents on a dangerous mission.” Elite animal agents, that is. Sounds like appropriate wacky-scientist casting to me. But for now, we’ve got Largo, Visioneers, and Little Fish, Strange Pond on the way — all of which are in post-production.

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Filed under: Action, Sony, Fandom, James Bond, Remakes and Sequels, Daniel Craig

Poor Daniel Craig! Even when his casting as James Bond was just a rumor, he was slagged for being too short, too blond or too “not who I had in mind (Clive Owen, etc.) as the next James Bond.” Then he delivered a brusque, sexy performance as 007 in a movie that was miles better than everybody assumed it would be — and now he’s getting attacked for doing what any sane actor in his position would do. Craig has signed up to do another four sequels as the world’s favorite secret agent, but Alice Fisher of The Guardian thinks he should stop while he’s ahead.

Fisher acknowledges that the deal “makes good business sense” and that Casino Royale revitalized the franchise. Yet “it’s hard to be thrilled by this announcement when formulaic movie franchises seem to be throttling cinema. … Craig shook up Bond’s familiar character, reinvented him as an action man. If the spy is now allowed to just putter along through four more similar adventures that invigoration will have been worthless.”

Fisher appears to be advocating the end of the James Bond series even more than she bemoans the Daniel Craig deal, somehow dreaming that if franchises like Bond, Saw, Pirates, Harry Potter, and Aliens / Predator simply go away, cinema will somehow be better for it. Newsflash! Sequels and series have been embedded in the film group brain since the invention of celluloid. The problem isn’t the existence of franchises, it’s the decline in the quality of ideas and the execution thereof. Like all intelligent people, I’m concerned that the next James Bond may be too jokey, sure — a concern well expressed by Danny Leigh, another Guardian writer — but that’s because I want to see more good, thrilling James Bond adventures — not because the series should end.

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Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Audio, Portable Video

After handing out hot coffee, tea and pretzels for those waiting outside, T-Mobile’s well lubricated and exceptionally tanned staff in Cologne threw its doors open to Europe’s first “official” iPhone owners. Of course, people the world-over are already toting Apple’s finest courtesy of those firmware hacks and unlocks. In fact, the 1.1.2 firmware found on the UK and German iPhones is already hacked. Judging by the buzz in the Hackint0sh forums, the new Jailbreak is seemingly just hours away from release. Fanatics of the hardcore persuasion can check the orderly mayhem in the video after the break.

[Via Pocket-lint, image courtesy of iFun.de]

Continue reading A few hundred Germans become Europe’s first “official” iPhone owners

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Filed under: Gaming, Portable Audio, Portable Video

Yes, another trivial yet oddly enthralling game-related update from Sony: the “Deep Red” PSP. The PSP-2000 DR is the official moniker in case your big box rep fails to see the obvious when these hit Japan on December 13. Hey, it happens.
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[Via Impress]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Filed under: Audio/Video, Computers, Video Games, iPod, iPhone

With ‘Guitar Hero III’ sales posting over $115 in one week and the hype for this month’s ‘Rock Band’ reaching an Axl-esque pitch, it’s safe to say that America’s hunger for rock n’ roll games is damn near insatiable.

So it was a surprising treat earlier this week when Harmonix, developer of ‘Guitar Hero’, ‘Guitar Hero II’ and ‘Rock Band,’ announced that it was releasing a brand new music game for the iPod — title ‘Phase.’

The game is similar to ‘Guitar Hero’ in the way it is played and only costs $5, but what is most exciting is that the game uses the music you already have on your iPod and converts those tunes into what you see on the screen.

Ever since the original ‘Guitar Hero’ camer out, fans have longed to not only play the songs that came pre-packaged with the game but also to incorporate whatever songs they wanted into the game’s rhythm-based rocking.

The music-recognition software of ‘Phase’ is nowhere near the depth of a ‘Guitar Hero’ or ‘Rock Band’, but Harmonix’s ‘lil iPod game looks to be the first step towards playing your own selection of tunes on a giant HDTV or, in our case, a crappy Magnavox. Thrilling nonetheless.

‘Phase’ is available on the iTunes store now.

From Boing Boing Gadgets.

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