BBC NEWS | Technology | Reviving Malaysia’s hi-tech dreams

It is difficult to overestimate the impact that Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed had on his country during his 22 years in power.

Arguably the most impressive of his achievements was to be among the first of the world’s leaders to grasp the potential of the internet, all the more striking because he was already 70 years old at the time.

The Big Picture: Google vs Microsoft: Now We’re Getting Serious

New Scientist Letting babies cry will only end in more tears - News

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PARENTS of bawling babies take note: comforting them may work better than leaving them to cry - at least during the first few weeks of life.

Boudders’ Worlds Fastest Growing City slideshow on Flickr

In many areas, it is not easy to see Dubai’s sky without at least one crane in your view; Industry experts cautiously estimate that 15 to 25 per cent of the world’s cranes are in Dubai. Some US$ 90 BILLION are on-going in Dubai alone.

Seed: Scent of a Terrorist

Scent of a Terrorist

Taking the lead from man’s best friend, the military wants to turn odor recognition into a science.

The Perils of PC Posture - Yahoo! News

We’re going to take a shot in the dark and assume that you are sitting in front of a computer monitor while you read this article.

Attention-Juggling in the High-Tech Office - New York Times

TECHNOLOGY is having a double-edged impact in the workplace, says Ed Reilly, president and chief executive of the American Management Association. It improves productivity, he says, but it may also be a distraction that prevents high-quality thinking. Here are excerpts from a conversation:

Dream Zone: AUDIO: The Happiness of Man - Habib Ali al-Jifri, translated by Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad

Shaykh Habib ‘Ali
beautifully elicidates how to overcome the lower-self, understand why
we were created and live a life of true happiness in this world and the
next.

Live translation by Shaykh Abdul Hakim Murad (TJ Winter).

AUDIO: Track 1 - Track 2 - Track 3 - Track 4 - Track 5 - Track 6 - Track 7 - Track 8 - Track 9 - Track 10 -Track 11 - Track 12 - Track 13 - Track 14 - Track 15 - Track 16 - Track 17 - Track 18 - Track 19 - Track 20 - Track 21 - Track 22

Audio on the Guidance Media website (www.GuidanceMedia.com)

BBC NEWS | Help | RSS | RSS Feed (Really Simple Syndication)

In a world heaving under the weight of billions of web pages, keeping up to date with the information you want can be a drag.

 Wouldn’t it be better to have the latest news and features delivered directly to you, rather than clicking from site to site? RSS allows you to see when sites from all over the internet have added new content.

You can get the latest headlines and articles (or even audio files, photographs or video) in one place, as soon as they are published, without having to remember to visit each site every day.

I’d wholeheartedly recommend GreatNews as the best RSS Reader around. And its completely free.

Do gyms breed terrorists? By Brendan O’Neill

There have been three major terror attacks in the West over the past five years—9/11, the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, and the 7/7 suicide attacks on the London Underground. For all the talk of a radical Islamist conspiracy to topple Western civilization, there are many differences between the men who executed these attacks. The ringleaders of 9/11 were middle-class students; the organizers of the Madrid bombings were mainly immigrants from North Africa; the 7/7 bombers were British citizens, well-liked and respected in their local communities. And interpretations of Islam also varied wildly from one terror cell to another. Mohamed Atta embraced a mystical (and pretty much made-up) version of Islam. For the Madrid attackers, Islam was a kind of comfort blanket. The men behind 7/7 were into community-based Islam, which emphasized being good and resisting a life of decadence.

The three cells appear to have had at least one thing in common, though—their members’ immersion in gym culture.

» Gmail in Arabic and Hebrew | Googling Google | ZDNet.com

Google is about to announce two new languages being rolled out for
Gmail — Arabic and Hebrew.  You can find the announcement on
their “What’s New” page.

Gmail in two more languages
Now you can also use Gmail in Arabic and Hebrew. There are even some specially-designed features for right-to-left languages.

Along with these new languages comes a couple new tools
to use when composing messages in right-to-left languages.  These
tools basically give the sender the option on a paragraph by paragraph
basis to change the direction of text.

Akram’s Razor - Svend White’s blog on Islam, Muslims & America: Virtually Islamic

Thought I’d share a very interesting blog that charts the intersection of Islam and the Internet called Virtually Islamic.  It’s by Gary Blunt, the author of a number of cutting books and articles on Muslims and the Internet.

SunniPath Answers (http://qa.sunnipath.com):
Faraz Rabbani shows to be need more substance and less kalaam

I have found some of your questions informative and beneficial and I have found some to be lacking in the basic discipline of wisdom and ‘ilm which brother Faraz has shown to be lacking. Either his personal hate of the Ahlul Hadeeth or the Salafiyyah jama’ah is getting in the way of objective criticism and analaysis or either he is not qualified to answer questions related to aqeedah and manhaj of the Messenger of Allaah SAW and the Sahabah RA.

Answer

More GreatNews - The RSS Blog

Shaun Orpen: I figured GreatNews must be something worth checking out. So I downloaded the installer (windows version),
and within minutes GreatNews was up and running on my PC after a
flawless and very easy installation. Next I exported the OPML file from
SharpReader and imported it into GreatNews, another easy process. Then
I closed down SharpReader, it turns out for the last time. GreatNews is
everything I ever wanted in an RSS aggregator.

http://www.curiostudio.com/

Randy: How many times have you read this in the last 12
months? It’s funny how the average Joe reader just loves
GreatNews. It’s even funnier how you’ll never see it mentioned on most
of the other RSS and Web 2.0 related blogs.
Since most everyone who has tried GreatNews thinks it’s the best, I can
only believe that they’ve never even tried it. They should!

The question of banning laptops in class: it’s academic, silly

In the early nineties, laptop in tow, I was almost always co-computing with at least two or three other people in every class. The real ubiquity of laptops in the classroom didn’t come until much later for me, when I was no longer taking classes but teaching them. In my own experience, it wasn’t the convenience of a laptop or its impressive capabilities that was driving student usage.

ScienceCareers.org | Scientific Success: What’s Love Got to Do With It?: Levine: 26 May 2006

Several years ago, Satoshi Kanazawa, then a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, analyzed a biographical database of 280 great scientists–mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists. When he calculated the age of each scientist at the peak of his career–the sample was predominantly male–Kanazawa noted an interesting trend. After a crest during the third decade of life, scientific productivity–as evidenced by major discoveries and publications–fell off dramatically with age. When he looked at the marital history of the sample, he found that the decline in productivity was less severe among men who had never been married. As a group, unmarried scientists continued to achieve well into their late 50s, and their rates of decline were slower.

fadtastic - a multi-author web design trends journal » Blog Archive » The end of an era for Times New Roman?

Times New Roman: it’s the Coke, the Kleenex, the Xerox, the Cheerios of typefaces. Times is a given. It’s natural. It’s expected. No one would ever look at a paper or article or memo and say, “Ew, why’d you choose Times New Roman?” Times is so ubiquitous that it’s invisible—it’s the Mao-poster of types.

How’d Times reach such saturation? Simple. It’s the default font on the world’s dominant word-processing program, Microsoft Word.

But no longer. . . .

Here’s how to make an invisibility cloak - Science - MSNBC.com

Researchers say they are rapidly closing in on new types of materials that can throw a cloak of invisibility around objects, fulfilling a fantasy that is as old as ancient myths and as young as “Star Trek” and the Harry Potter novels.

Unlike those tales of fictional invisibility, the real-life technologies usually have a catch. Nevertheless, limited forms of invisibility might be available to the military sooner than you think.

Should three-year-olds have televisions in their bedrooms?

“How do you feel about letting young children watch television every
day? If you’re like most parents, you feel a vague sense of guilt over
the practice, but you do it anyway. That’s the conclusion drawn by a new study
out from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The survey of more than 1,000
families shows that most parents have absorbed the message from their
pediatricians that extended television time in a child’s earliest years
should be avoided. Many Americans lead lives that are so busy, however,
that the TV becomes an almost essential parenting tool.”

Email: an author’s guide - Blue Flavor

Popular as it is, the web is not the most-used Internet application by transaction volume. Email is. It’s also the most misused. Since it’s such an important and often overlooked component of our online lives, I’m going to step away from preaching about the web for a moment and focus on simple steps to make your email discussions more effective.

Web 2.0 applications: Google vs. Yahoo vs. Microsoft vs. the world - CNET.com

Which Web-based e-mail service should you use? It depends on your
personal taste, of course, but a clean page layout, speed, and security
are paramount. For now, the next-generation editions of Yahoo Mail,
Gmail, and Hotmail are still works in progress and not widely
available. You can get a Gmail account today either by sending a request via mobile phone or getting another user to invite you, but you’ll need to join a waiting list in order to try the Yahoo Mail beta or the Windows Live Mail beta.

Fair use strengthened in court decision

The Second Circuit Appeals Court has just handed down an interesting copyright ruling
that furthers cements certain fair uses of copyrighted images. The
case, Bill Graham Archives (BGA) v. Dorling Kindersley (DK), centers on
the use of seven Grateful Dead concert poster reproductions used in a
coffee table book on the band published by DK. The facts of the case
were clear: DK used the seven images without a license after it could
not come to terms with BGA, and BGA took the firm to court, demanding
an injunciton and the destruction of all unsold copies of the book.

Comment is free: The Teflon pharaoh

For western and Arab media alike, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt is seemingly beyond criticism. Thank goodness for the bloggers.

10 dumb things users do that can mess up their computers

Users find plenty of ways to run into trouble, from gunking up their system with shareware to leaving it exposed to attackers to forgetting about using surge protectors. Share this list with your own users so they can sidestep preventable problems like these.

Infothought: 10 Things You Might Not Know About Google

PCWorld.com - First Look: Windows Media Player 11 and MTV Urge

It’s all about me: Why e-mails are so easily misunderstood | csmonitor.com

In a world where businesses and friends often depend upon e-mail to communicate, scholars want to know if electronic communications convey ideas clearly.

The answer, the professors conclude, is sometimes “no.” Though e-mail is a powerful and convenient medium, researchers have identified three major problems.

Feld Thoughts - Ignore the first 10,000?

For the past few months, whenever I talk to someone about a Web 2.0 application and hear that they already have “10,000 users”, I’ve been telling that them the first 25,000 users are irrelevant

In iTunes War, France Has Met the Enemy. Perhaps It Is France. - New York Times

THE French take pride in their revolutions, which are
usually hard to miss — mass uprisings, heads rolling and such.
So, with the scent of tear gas in the air this past month from the
giant protests against a youth labor law, it was easy to overlook the
French National Assembly’s approval of a bill that would require Apple Computer to crack open the software codes of its iTunes music store and let the files work on players other than the iPod.
While seemingly minor, the move is actually rather startling and has
left many experts wondering (as ever): What has possessed the French?

Official Google Blog: Avoiding RSI

There is a Chinese saying that “To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.” In other words, how long can you tap on that keyboard or sit in that chair before you hurt yourself. We’re not designed to remain as sedentary or perform the fine motor movements for the long uninterrupted hours that we have to do in so many of our jobs. Evidence suggests that prolonged abnormal posture and repetitive movements contribute to neck, limb and back pain. These conditions are collectively known as overuse syndromes, or repetitive stress injury (RSI).

AJ’s Blog - Desktop Zen - Reducing Visual Clutter on your Desktop

MacGyver Tip: Exterminate with a lizard - Lifehacker

The San Diego Reader’s got advice for people with a bug
problem in their home who can’t afford extermination: get a
lizard to patrol the insides of your walls.

The gecko family of lizards, when not making insurance
commercials, spend their time eating bugs. Cockroaches are a particular
favorite, I’m told. When you get home, release the little guys
under the sink or anywhere else they can find their way into the walls.
The next sound you hear should be contented chomping.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Indians ‘want hi-tech products’

Technology companies in the West should stop thinking about India as a place to dump cut-price, low-tech versions of their products, a senior Indian researcher has said.

Copernic Desktop Search 2.0 Beta - Download Squad

The newest version of of Copernic Desktop Search—2.0—is now in beta. The beta isn’t feature-complete, but includes a ton of changes, including a redesigned UI, significant performance improvements, simultaneous searching in all categories, smart query corrections (”Did you mean…”), saved searches, wildcards, and a completely redesigned deskbar. You might recall that late last year Copernic was acquired by meta-search company Mamma.com, so it’s nice to know that that hasn’t impeded their development process. Copernic Desktop Search 2.0 Beta is free and you can download it here.

Copernic Desktop Search is still clearly the very best desktop search application…

How Piracy Opens Doors for Windows - Los Angeles Times

Bill Gates may not be entirely dismayed by software thieves. They seed the world market and make Microsoft a standard.

NPR : Apple Does Windows with New Intel Machines

Apple has announced a major change in its approach to rival Microsoft. The company will now help users of its Macintosh computers run the Microsoft Windows operating system on their computers. Previously, only hackers had been able to get Windows to run on Apple’s new Intel-based machines. Steve Inskeep talks with New York Times columnist David Pogue.

Technology News: Commentary : What if Microsoft Bought Apple?

While neither Apple nor Microsoft is in critical shape, it does appear that both firms need each other right now — with an urgency that is unprecedented. It may be time to explore the notion that a little cooperation could reduce, or solve, both firms’ “impossible” problems.

30 years in Apple products: the good, the bad, and the ugly - Engadget

Has it really been 30 years since two buddies named Steve sold off their prized possessions (Woz’s HP calculator and Jobs’ VW van) to raise money and launch a company? Has it really been 30 years since the two Steves, tired of selling blue boxes, built the Apple I and began selling it for $666.66? Yes, it has, and if you don’t believe it, just compare Jobs’ hairlines from ‘76 and today. And while the company has become known for many things, from its groundbreaking GUI to the iTunes Music Store, we know Apple has always been a hardware company at heart. So here’s to you, Apple: the good, the bad and, yes, the ugly from the past 30 years. Happy Birthday. [read more]

Wired 14.04: Geekonomics

What if everything in life were free? You’d think we’d be happier. But game designers know better: We’d be bored….

Wired News: Global Warming: Be Very Afraid

According to Oklahoma Sen. James M. Inhofe, the threat of global climate change is the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” Yet when Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer for The New Yorker, surveyed the world’s leading climate scientists, she discovered an alarming unanimity to their message: The world needs to wake up, and fast… [read more, please]

A messy desk messes with your career - Lifehacker

…. a messy desk at the office can give off a bad impression and negatively affect your career. Her[e are] suggested techniques for keeping things clean and clear…

Windows Is So Slow, but Why? - New York Times

This NYT article asks some scathing questions, and suggests some strong reasons…

Translation: Is the Whole World Watching? - New York Times

HOW you see something,” said Nigel Parsons, the managing
director of Al Jazeera International, “depends very much on where
you’re sitting.”

Those words could well serve as the manifesto for the channel, the
English-language offspring of the polarizing pan-Arab network, which
will make its debut in more than 40 million households in late May.

Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | If distributed processing can search for aliens, why not web pages?

Inspired by projects that harness spare time on PCs, one programmer wants to hand back control of internet searching to users

Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study | The Register

Nature magazine has some tough questions to answer after it let its Wikipedia fetish get the better of its responsibilities to reporting science. The Encyclopedia Britannica has published a devastating response to Nature’s December comparison of Wikipedia and Britannica, and accuses the journal of misrepresenting its own evidence.

Comment is free: Style and substance

Shabina Begum should be allowed to wear what she wants, but is wrong to suggest Muslim women must wear the jilbab.

Forbes’ 20 most important tools of all time - Lifehacker

Forbes chooses the 20 most important tools of all time, the gadgets
and utensils “that have most impacted human civilization and
helped move the course of history.”

The knife is number one on the list, which also includes the abacus,
eyeglasses, the pencil and the telescope. Surprisingly, duct tape did not make the list, but Forbes did honor the versatile sticky stuff that cures warts and makes wallets in its very own article.

Time magazine: multitasking is bad for you

The cover story in Time magazine this week, entitled “Too Wired For Their Own Good?”, condemns the youth of the nation as gadget-obsessed, perennially multitasking, social failures who can’t really get into anything important or even relax. The article brings up example upon example of dysfunctional teenagers and their equally disjointed families.

The fuqaha’ say: Means take the ruling of ends.
Traditionally, reformist fuqaha would keep in mind that: When means become ends, they become b