Croakyvoice writes "JK Rowling has today given fans of the Harry Potter books the name of Book 7 of the very popular series via a Christmas present on her site, to get to the name you need to follow a complicated procedure but thankfully the name of the book has been revealed as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."

guruevi writes to let us know about a review of Microsoft Vista in the NY Times, in the form of an article and a video, by the known Mac-friendly David Pogue. In the article, Pogue recasts Microsoft's marketing mantra for Vista: "Clear, Confident, Connected" becomes "Looks, Locks, Lacks." Pogue writes that Vista is such a brazen rip-off of Mac OS X that "There must be enough steam coming out of Apple executives' ears to power the Polar Express." But the real fun is in the video, in which Pogue attempts to prove that Vista is not simply an OS X clone.

RobertinXinyang writes "MSN's MoneyCentral has an article on the possibility that the $100 laptop project fails to meet its goals, and the potential of the project to harm people in developing nations. The article goes on to liken the project to 'good-natured showboating', and cites the unreality of a family using the glow from the laptop's screen as the only source of light in their hut. Perhaps there are better things to do with our time and money in developing nations?" From the article: "The entire idea may be misguided and counterproductive. At least that's what Stanford journalism lecturer an Africa watcher G. Pascal Zachary thinks. The basic argument is that with $100 you could almost feed a village for a year, so why waste that sum on a laptop? What are they thinking? The fact that these people need electricity more than they need a laptop is only part of the problem. The real problem is lost mind share. The people are harmed because these sorts of schemes are sopping up mind-share time of the people who might be doing something actually useful."

The results of two scientific studies have shown that dolphins are capable of recognizing rhythms and pitch and are able to reproduce them. In order to best demonstrate this ability the scientists chose the epic, Batman theme song and were able to teach a shortened version to the dolphins who reproduced it in response to certain stimuli.

peterdaly writes "Automatic commercial detection is the "killer app" feature that none of the commercial DVR's dare to include. MythTV's automatic commercial detection does a great job of properly separating commercials from content. Here's how the commercial flagging works."