What your cards fortell?

BROWSER/ HAPPENINGS FROM AROUND THE WORLD

New York's Mayor Bloomberg personally had a city employee fired after he spotted Solitaire open on his computer. A year ago, a state senator in North Carolina wanted to have Solitaire banned from government computers, claiming it would save the government money.

Politicians appear to think that if someone doesn't have Solitaire on their computers, they are "productive workers" during the time that they were otherwise playing.

On the other hand, studies have suggested that a quick game of Solitaire at work can often be good for worker productivity. It gives workers much needed breaks that make them more productive when they are working and makes them happier. Hope your boss knows.

Dinosaur robot

Ugobe, developer of organic robotics, has revealed its first Designer Life Form, Pleo. Modeled after a one-week-old Camarasaurus sauropod, or long-neck dinosaur, Pleo incorporates basic traits of autonomous life. Camarasaurus is the best-known sauropod found in North America and the most abundant of fossils in the Late Jurassic.

A complete, nearly-perfect skeleton of a juvenile, 17-feet (5.2- meters) long, was found in Utah. Pleo has been specifically engineered to mimic life with organic movement and behaviors that allow it to relate to humans on a personal level.

Ugobe's unique and patented robotic motion platform enables Pleo to move in a fluid, lifelike way, while behaving completely autonomously. Equipped with nearly 40 sensors, including infrared and stereophonic sound, Pleo requires no remote control and is free to interact with his owner and environment.

Through the "Life Form Operating System," Pleo is able to use simultaneous sensory inputs along with a sophisticated behavioral platform to act independently and express himself through motion and sound. Pleo can convey emotions, is aware of himself and his surroundings, and evolves in behavior over time.

PCs need to pump up

Nearly half of the current PCs will not be able to take advantage of the "Aero Glass" compositor found within Microsoft's upcoming Vista software, due at the end of this year, states a recent report by Jon Peddie Research. The fault, the research state, was the low-cost integrated graphics controllers customers have chosen.

About 63 per cent of the 203 million PCs sold used an integrated graphics controller, JPR reported. Aero Glass, a specialised subset of the "Aero" Vista interface, requires a DirectX 9.0c-capable graphics card, which only high-end graphics add-on cards can process.

Incidentally, Vista's main selling points is the Aero Glass interface. However, the research notes, that users already have the ability to start constructing a PC that should be Vista-ready before the operating system ships.

Football and Teddy Bear MP3 players

The Shiro AS 1GB MP3 player is shaped like a soccer ball. It is 1.5-inches in diameter and has six buttons on its circumference for all your basic controls, which may not help when you're searching around in your pocket to change a song or up the volume.

Other than its interesting shape, it's got some nice features, including FM, voice/FM recording, timer/stopwatch functions. However, with only 10 hours of battery life, it may not be going for longevity.

The Teddy Bear MP3 player has only 128MB of storage. It will cost about $78 in Japan when it's launched this March. One AA battery offers 8 hours of saccharine play time.

Nokia E61

Nokia has its E-series E61 ready and waiting to launch, hopefully this month in Europe and Asia. Aimed at business users with a QWERTY keyboard and a fairly large display, it supports multiple mobile email clients like BlackBerry Connect, GoodLink, Nokia Business Center, Seven Mobile Mail, Seven Always-On Mail, and Visto Mobile. Runs on Series 60 OS and has 75MB of internal memory as well as a Mini SD card slot. It includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Compiled from the Net.