A woman in northeastern Brazil has given birth to what one doctor called a “giant baby,” a boy weighing 16.7 pounds. Francisca Ramos dos Santos, 38, gave birth to the healthy boy named Ademilton on Tuesday at a hospital in Salvador, 900 miles northeast of Sao Paulo. He was the largest baby born at the Albert Sabin Maternity Hospital in its 12-year history, the hospital said. “Obviously the baby was born by Caesarean section,” hospital director Rita Leal said. “Both mother and baby are doing just fine.” Ademilton “could truly be considered a giant baby,...

Sticky – Usayd Networks Regular Update Hi everyone, its been a while since i’ve done the regular update so I thought i’d do one just before the end of the 1st Month in 2005. Firstly i’d like to thank Tibault Damman for being our main poster, and then of course our other two posters Tim and Diablo for helping out on their part. I have recently informed all employees of changes that are due to occur, hopefully in around a month or so time. This should include a major re-coding of the site which is currently being worked on, as well as many new features. Again, anyone...

Ben Goodger, Lead Engineer for the popular browser Firefox has announced that he is no longer paid by Mozilla, and has joined Google. In a posting on his blog, Ben noted his role will remain unchanged at Mozilla. “I will continue doing much the same work …with the new goal of successful 1.1, 1.5 and 2.0 releases”. Ben, 24, has been working on Firefox since Summer 2003 after the demise of Netscape browser development. Before working on the Firefox project he spent time with America Online/Netscape contributing to a range of their Netscape products (6, 6.1, 6.2, 7.0, 7.1). Mozilla...

A hoaxer who e-mailed the families of people caught up in the Asian tsunami telling them their relatives were dead has been jailed for six months. Christoper Pierson, 40, from Lincolnshire, was arrested on New Year’s Eve after sending 35 e-mails. He sent the messages from an AOL account after reading pleas for information on the Sky News website. Pierson pretend the address – ukgovfoffice@aol.com – belonged to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which was co-ordinating contact with families of missing Brits. At Bow Street Magistrates Court, he had previously admitted one count...

Sony today cut its annual income forecast by over 30 per cent, claiming price erosion in key consumer electronics product categories will hit margins hard. The Japanese giant will still do very nicely in the year to 31 March 2005, however: it said it expects its income to grow significantly over the previous year. Sony now says the year’s sales will total Â¥7,150bn ($69.56bn), Â¥200bn ($1.95bn) below its previous forecast, made last October. Operating income will be Â¥110bn ($1.07bn), well down on the previous estimate of Â¥160bn ($1.56bn) but nonetheless 11 per...

Never again carry a charger with you when you travel, where the whole world, whether it’s an airport lounge in Tokyo, a coffee shop in New York City or a hotel in Stockholm, uses the same solution. Simply pick up your cell phone, your MP3 player, or your PDA, drop it on a pad, and it’ll automatically charge! Just a dream? Founded in June 2001 by two Cambridge U engineering students, Lily Cheng and James Hay, Splashpower Ltd. is trying to make this dream of every gadget freak come true. Their solution: Wireless power recharging… MobileRead [ article ] Very interesting concept,...

This article by a PhD student at Shanghai JiaoTong University (SJTU) Research Institute of Robotics describes an RTLinux-powered robot that placed fifth in the most recent RoboCup competition. The robot has two color cameras for visual sensing along with a laser range finder (LRF) for goalkeeper location, and a wireless LAN allows communication among the robots on SJTU’s team. The robot’s embedded operating system is Red Hat Linux enhanced with the RTLinuxPro real-time extension. Very interesting, read about them: Linux Devices [ article ]

Yes, you read it right. Port-O-Rotary. We’ve gone and hacked into a rotary phone. I find myself talking about nerd things with my friends and peers who could usually careless. Every once and a while, someone who really doesn’t have a clue, says something so crazy, it makes you take a step back. I can’t remember who had the idea of a rotary cell phone – needless to say it had something to do with quite a few rum and cokes. They didn’t have a clue how to do it, they just thought it would be cool. So did I… Why wouldn’t it be cool to see a rotary phone, ringing,...