jg21 writes "In this analysis of the psychology of Facebook, a British FB user makes some telling points about how simple the reasons behind its success are. Among them, fear of 'online social failure' features prominently. From the article: 'Facebook also digs away at the insecurities in people...your peers can see your profile on Facebook, and while they may have 50, 100, 200 friends they will mockingly see that you have a pathetically small number, confirming your worst fears about the low opinion they have probably held of you over all those years etc.'"

bigkahunafish writes "It seems Apple is planning a cheaper version of the iPhone possibly based on the iPod Nano. This phone would be priced below $300 making it more affordable than the $500-600 iPhone. This should bring Apple phone technology into the hands of more users, though this cheaper phone could have more limited functionality. From the article: 'Sales of the [original] iPhone are expected to be limited to a small percentage of the market due to its high price tag, particularly in the United States where 85 percent of consumers tend to spend $100 or less on cell phones. But analysts forecast that a cheaper phone from Apple, which leads the digital music player market, could pose a much bigger threat to long-established phone makers such as Nokia, Motorola Inc, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Sony Ericsson, owned by Sony Corp and Ericsson.' I just hope they don't make a phone based on the iPod Shuffle."

JimDaGeek writes "I recently moved to Columbia, SC where I have Time Warner as my cable ISP and pay for an 8 Mbps connection and have been very happy with the service, speed, and reliability. In contrast I have heard bad things about Comcast. So now that I am up in the Philadelphia PA area visiting my parents, I decided to test out the speed and reliability using the Speakeasy speed test. The results surprised me. Here are the reported download speeds in Kbps: New York, 18,946; Washington, 15,821; Atlanta, 11,257; Chicago, 10,042; San Francisco, 4,230. What is going on? I know my father is not paying for a 10+ Mbps connection. Is Comcast giving priority to popular speed-test sites?" From Comcast's site, in the Philadelphia area they seem to offer download speeds of 6 or 8 Mbps, with an option for a "PowerBoost" to 12 Mbps on large files. This wouldn't explain the results JimDaGeek got of almost 19 Mbps down.

Update: 07/10 12:07 GMT by KD : A friend in Massachusetts had a tree fall on his house. The Comcast guy who reconnected the lines told him that they are boosting the line speed to 20 Mbps down / 2 Mbps up in certain areas to be more competitive with Verizon FiOS.

An anonymous reader writes "When I was a wee-little IT Manager, I interviewed for a position at an online CRM provider in San Francisco, a job I certainly was qualified for, at least on paper. One of the interviewer's questions was 'What is the first thing you do when you get to work in the morning?' I thought saying 'Read Slashdot' wouldn't be what he was looking for — so I made up something, I'm sure, equally lame. I didn't get the job. But the question has stuck with me over the years. What do real IT and MIS managers do when they walk in to the office in the morning? What Web sites or tools do they look at or use the first thing? Remember, this is for posterity, so please be honest."

MojoKid writes "Shuttle Computer single-handedly invented the SFF PC or Small Form-Factor PC a few years back. Their line of XPC mini-PC systems, no bigger than a toaster oven, has evolved nicely over the years. This article takes a look at the features and performance of a new XPC from Shuttle that is built on a i975X/Core 2 Duo platform and is designed with the PC enthusiast in mind. The SDXi features a number of unique features like a built-in water-cooler for Radeon GPU-based graphics cards and a slick, flamed-out paint job that you've just got to see." Update: 07/08 23:53 GMT by KD : Here is a link to the version split over 12 pages, in which the images are clickable thumbnails.

freakxx writes "Seven new 'wonders of the world' have been announced today in a ceremony in Lisbon, Portugal. People throughout the world have voted actively to elect the new 7 out of 21 finalists. The final lineup is: Chichen Itza, Mexico; Christ Redeemer, Brazil; The Great Wall, China; Machu Picchu, Peru; Petra, Jordan; The Roman Colosseum, Italy; and The Taj Mahal, India. The Pyramids of Giza was the only candidate that used to be among the original seven wonders. Did we really need seven new wonders of the world? Why was this decided via a website poll (pdf) and SMS messages?"

foniksonik writes "'On 28 June, Taser International of Arizona announced plans to equip robots with stun guns ... the new stun-capable robots could be used against civilians.' Non-lethal weapons experts are concerned that the robots will have to stun the suspected criminal for longer periods of time while awaiting human police to come make the official arrest. "If someone is severely punished by an autonomous robot, who are you going to take to a tribunal?" asks Steve Wright, a security expert at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK."

The Fun Guy writes "The Institute of Food Technologists summarizes some recent research on food. All things considering, it should settle some arguments among geeks about the caffination of beverages. 'Caffeine is a well-known stimulant added as an ingredient to various carbonated soft drinks, but which drink contains the most, and how can consumers know? A study in the Journal of Food Science used high-performance liquid chromatography to analyze the caffeine contents of 56 national-brand and 75 private-label store brand carbonated beverages. Caffeine contents ranged from 4.9 mg/12 oz (IGA Cola) to 74 mg/12 oz (Vault Zero). Some of the more common national-brand carbonated beverages analyzed in this study were Coca-Cola (33.9 mg/12 oz), Diet Coke (46.3 mg/12 oz), Pepsi (38.9 mg/12 oz), Diet Pepsi (36.7 mg/12 oz), Dr Pepper (42.6 mg/12 oz), Diet Dr Pepper (44.1 mg/12 oz), Mountain Dew (54.8 mg/12 oz), and Diet Mountain Dew (55.2 mg/12 oz). The authors found that store-brand beverages generally contained less caffeine, and they also suggest that consumers would benefit from having the actual caffeine content labeled on the beverage.'"

ThinkGeek writes "Dating back to the venerable DEC VT100, the 80 column terminal has served us well for over 25 years. Even now, many open source projects and common conventions require lines of code and documentation to fit on that terminal. I am not alone, judging by code I've seen in and out of the open source world, in finding that number insufficient for coding, much less more verbose writing. Given that modern graphical displays (and all popular editors) are capable of far more, is it time we came up with a new standard-sized terminal? If so, what should the new standard be?"

Roland Piquepaille writes "According to the Ludington Daily News, Michigan, Danish agricultural engineers have built a robot to help farmers with weeds. The Hortibot is about 3-foot-by-3-foot, is self-propelled, and uses global positioning system (GPS). It can recognize 25 different kinds of weeds and eliminate them by using its weed-removing attachments. It's also very environmentally friendly because it can reduce herbicide usage by 75 percent. But so far, it's only a prototype and the Danish engineers need to find a manufacturer for distribution."

Many users have written to tell us about a magnetic machine promising "infinite clean energy". Engadget has the first picture of the device and is reporting that the announcement (along with a short video) of this supposed device will be released later tonight. "CEO Sean McCarthy tells SilconRepublic how it works. Namely, the time variance in magnetic fields allows the Orbo platform to 'consistently produce power, going against the law of conservation of energy which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed.' He goes on to say 'It's too good to be true but it is true. It will have such an impact on everything we do. The only analogy I can give is if you had absolute proof that God wasn't real.'" In my experience if something seems too good to be true it generally is. I wouldn't get your hopes up.

geordie_loz writes "The BBC is reporting that the UK National Archive is warning of old formats being a 'ticking time-bomb' where data is going to be lost because of incompatibility in newer versions of software, and software not existing at all. More surprisingly, Microsoft has offered a solution via the OOXML format."

Acererak was one of several readers who noted that DVD Jon has released information on unbricking an iPhone. You sacrifice all cel phone functionality of course, but you have an iPDA that will work on your WiFi. Currently the hack is windows only but it doesn't look very complicated.

foobarf00 writes "LinRails is a binary package that includes Ruby-1.8.6, Rubygems-0.9.4, Rails 1.2.3, Mongrel 1.0.1, MySQL-5.0.41, ncurses-5.6, OpenSSL-0.9.8e, and zlib-1.2.3. Its goal is to make it easy to get a Ruby on Rails development environment running in no time. This initial 0.1 release doesn't have a Web server in the package; opinions are solicited as to which to include."

A number of readers made sure we know that Bill Gates is apparently no longer the world's richest person. His wealth, estimated currently at $59.2 billion, has been surpassed by that of Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim. Slim, the son of a Lebanese immigrant, runs businesses in a number of industries from Mexico City. Stock in his wireless company, American Movil, recently surged in price by 27%, boosting his net worth to $67.8 billion. Last April Slim passed Warren Buffet, who had long held down the number 2 spot. In this audio Bill Gates says he won't care when he is no longer number 1.