Talking on a cell phone makes you drive like a retiree â€â€? even if you’re only a teen, a new study shows. A report from the University of Utah says when motorists between 18 and 25 talk on cell phones, they drive like elderly people â€â€? moving and reacting more slowly and increasing their risk of accidents. “If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, his reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver,” said David Strayer, a University of Utah psychology professor and principal author of the study. “It’s like...

Microsoft’s leafy corporate campus in Redmond, Washington, is beginning to look like the streets of New York, London and just about everywhere else: Wherever you go, white headphones dangle from peoples’ ears. To the growing frustration and annoyance of Microsoft’s management, Apple Computer’s iPod is wildly popular among Microsoft’s workers. To the growing frustration and annoyance of Microsoft’s management, Apple Computer’s iPod is wildly popular among Microsoft’s workers. It is unknown if Bill Gates is the happy owner of an iPod. “About 80...

Though Apple computer is known for some of the computing and technology industry’s most notable innovations, its not as if the company hasn’t also taken its lumps. Thomas Hormby submitted the following editorial contribution to osOpinion/osViews, which supplies us with his top ten list of Apple’s (and some of associated partners) most significant flops throughout the company’s history.   OSViews [ article cont ]

“BrandChannel readers have picked the top global brands for 2004. Apple is the leader, closely followed by Google. Arab-centric Al-Jazeera ranks fifth in global as well as Europe/Africa ratings. In regionwise ratings, Google tops North America, Ikea tops Europe/Africa, Sony tops Asia-pacific while Mexican cement brand Cemex tops Latin America An interesting fact is that Steve Jobs headed Apple is the top North American brand while his other venture Pixar comes fifth in the same zeitgeist.” Slashdot [ article ] Good for Al Jazeera especially!

  Apple has released a new PowerBook G4, with every new PowerBook G4 features faster PowerPC G4 processors with speeds topping the charts at 1.67GHz. Want power to burn? The new PowerBook models offer 8x SuperDrives. And each PowerBook comes standard with 512MB of memory and a 5400-rpm hard disk drive. Starting at just $1499. What can I say, that means a longer wait for the G5! I mean saying ‘new powerbooks’ really means nothing more then ‘apple upgraded their pb specs’ which doesn’t mean much but oh well..! You can find them on the Apple website

The founder and chairman of the MIT Media Lab wants to create a $100 portable computer for the developing world. Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital and the Wiesner Professor of Media Technology at MIT, says he has obtained promises of support from a number of major companies, including Advanced Micro Devices, Google, Motorola, Samsung, and News Corp. The low-cost computer will have a 14-inch color screen, AMD chips, and will run Linux software, Mr. Negroponte said during an interview Friday with Red Herring at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. AMD is separately working on...

A police officer used a stun gun on a 75-year-old woman who became distraught when she could not locate a sick friend at a nursing home, according to an internal report. Officer Hattie Jean Macon received a verbal warning and was required to attend a Taser retraining course after the investigation found she acted prematurely when she used the 50,000-volt Taser, according to the report released Thursday. Macon was called to the nursing home after Margaret Kimbrell refused to leave. Kimbrell has said she was distraught after the staff would not disclose the location of her sick friend, and she became...

An audit by a U.S. inspector says the U.S.-led authority that governed Iraq after the 2003 invasion failed to keep track of nearly $9 billion it transferred to Iraqi ministries. The audit released Sunday by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction says the Coalition Provisional Authority failed to establish control systems to verify how the money was spent, which opened it to corruption. In some instances, money was used to pay what the report calls “ghost” employees, explaining that out of 8,206 guards on the payroll at one ministry, only 602 could be accounted for. Former...