PC World - 101 Fantastic Freebies Once upon a time you actually had to pay for great software and services -- hard to believe, but true. Luckily, we no longer live in that world. The Internet is stuffed with great downloads and Web sites offering free software and services of every kind. Want to tune up your PC, keep it safe, create graphics, or back up your system with gobs of free storage space? You can find free software and sites to do all that, and plenty more. We revved up our cable modem and searched for the most intriguing free offerings out there.
PART I:Ten Key Elements of Economics PART I:Ten Key Elements of Economics 1. Incentives Matter ALL ECONOMIC THEORY IS BASED on the postulate that changes in incentives influence human behaviour in a predictable manner. Personal benefits and costs influence our choices. If the benefits derived from an option increase, people will be more likely to choose it. Conversely, if the personal costs of an option increase, people will be less likely to choose it. Google developing a micropayment platform and pitching newspaper Google is developing a micropayment platform that will be “available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year,” according to a document the company submitted to the Newspaper Association of America. The system, an extension of Google Checkout, would be a new and unexpected option for the news industry as it considers how to charge for content online. The revelation comes in an eight-page response to the NAA’s request for paid-content proposals, which it extended to several major technology companies and startups.
Ten Things You Can Do with CSS (That You Might Not Have Known You Could Do) 1. Transparent Backgrounds If you're doing anything in, on, or around Web design, you probably already know the basics of using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). But just learning a few rules doesn't mean you know everything. There are many subtle (and not-so-obvious) techniques that combine CSS capabilities in ways to get some striking design effects. Jason Cranford Teague shows you 10 of his favorite things to do with CSS (that you might not have known you could do). Coding Snacks My annoyance is fairly straightforward, as well as (I would hope) its solution:I want to toggle this with a hotkey: I bought a touchpad for my desktop to combat RSI. It's... ok, I guess. See, the driver that it comes with doesn't actually recognize the touchpad, which means that Windows sees it as a mouse. This isn't a huge problem; it works fine.
Date Arithmetic Adding Dates You can add some number of days to a date by simply using the =SUM function. Since Excel stores dates as a number of days, no further work is required. For example, to add 5 days to 1/1/98, in A1, use =A1+5, which gives 1/6/98. To add a number of months or years to a date, you first need to decompose the initial date into its year, month, and day components, add in the desired offset, and then have Excel put the components back together. For example, say you have a date in A1, to which you want to add 3 months and 4 days.
Digg: A Lesson in Freakonomics : Business, Technology, and Stuff This is a follow-up to my earlier posts entitled, Game Theory and Digg and Digg as a Game: Part Deux, which were voted to the Digg front page. I want to spend some time discussing incentives, supply and demand, and voting — inspired by Greg’s and Alex’s comments on the previous two articles and on basic economic principles applied to everyday life, as proposed by those Freakonomics guys (Levitt is a uchicago guy — go Maroons!). In a recent interview, Kevin Rose claims that he has invented an Algorithm that prevents “gaming” Digg and that incentives or “motivations don’t matter.” In his words,
Putting people first Big Data powers the modern world. What do we gain from Big Data? What do we lose? Al Jazeera America examines the role of technology and the implications of sharing personal information in the network’s first graphic novella, Terms of Service: Understanding Our Role in the World of Big Data. The new comic novella, available on Al Jazeera America’s website at is a thought provoking, entertaining field guide to help smart people understand how their personal, and often very private, data is collected and used. Co-produced by well-known cartoonist Josh Neufeld and Al Jazeera America reporter Michael Keller, Terms of Service is an entertaining feature that follows characters “Josh and Michael” as they journey through the challenges of digital privacy and other issues consumers should be aware of in the “brave new world” of technology and Big Data.
Tech & Tonic & What code DOESN'T do in real life (That it does in the movies) As a nod to my days of old and hours and days (read: I’m downplaying that figure a lot) spent whiled away in World of Warcraft or Counter-Strike, I’ve got to reference this new, and actually extremely cool, piece of news that hit the wires just a few hours ago. Big Blue (IBM for those not hip to the lingo) has just announced that they will be developing and opening 12 islands in the massively multiplayer online (MMO) game Second Life. Some of the new possibilities which I would say may become SOP within about five years time are things like off-site training (demonstrations in game — can you call it a game anymore?), marketing campaigns and community outreach as PR ploys in these cyber worlds (haven’t settled on a term yet), and e-commerce … in a virtual world.
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Portals: Success, greed in the new economy of web point payouts The question, "Why is the sky blue?" has been asked 889 times on Yahoo Answers, a Q&A site run by Yahoo. "What is your favorite movie?"