2 Robots

When it comes to my personal computer, I believe in making as many copies of my data as I can, as often as I can.

Mozy is a little program that runs in the background and backs up your files every now and then to their servers. If you need to restore a file, you can do it through their web site or else through the program you download. However, not is all rosy with Mozy.

Read on.

My wife is looking to buy a car. She is 30 years old. She likes iTunes and reads her news online instead of a newspaper. She is concerned about global warming, and about the war on terror. We’re about to have kids, which brings those concerns to the forefront. So, when we started looking around for a car, we remembered all those cool next-generation automobiles we’ve been bombarded with at auto shows and the news. And we were surprised to find that we could hardly find any.

Read on for the current state of future cars.

This week was a bad one for manned space flight. An accident at Burt Rutan’s Space Ship Company killed 2 workers during an engine test, and injured 4 others. A Nasa contractor found evidence of sabatoge in a flight computer destined to be brought up to the International Space Station in August.

However, what makes this week such a sad day for manned space travel is a recent report that NASA has been allowing astronauts to show up drunk at the space shuttle launch.

Read on for more.

Cingular has been going through a lot of effort to rename itself AT&T. The corporate bigwigs have come to the conclusion that “AT&T” is a much better name, and most people associate it with terrible customer service and monopolistic anti-competitive behavior, which is the direction they would like to be taking Cingular.

Click for the details on how AT&T wants their image to come across.

A few days ago, the European Southern Observatory discovered the first possible Earth-like planet orbiting another star, Gliese 581 (also known as “HO Librae”). Gliese 581 is a red dwarf star — about 1/3 the size of our own sun, and about 100 times dimmer. HO Librae shines red in the sky above the the newly-discovered planet, “Gliese 581 c.” The planet has a year of only 13 days. Because it is so close, its sun would appear to be more than 4 times bigger than our sun, even though it is a smaller star. There is also known to be a neptune-like planet in the Gliese 581 system, “Gliese 581 b,” and scientists suspect there is at least one more planet as well (”Gliese 581 d”).

Gliese 581 c is five times as massive as the Earth and lies in it’s sun’s habitable zone, meaning that it is just the right distance for there to be liquid water on the surface. Further details on the planet are educated guesses, but the staff at the European Southern Observatory have put forth a few.

Something too prevalent in the marketplace today is the complete lack of innovation which seems to plague some companies. On the one hand, you have companies like Apple and Nintendo which truly bring something new to the table; from product packaging to human-electronic interfaces. On the other hand, you have companies like Dell and Sony who just keep pushing out more of the same. Yet, the latter seem more likely to hold big press events and tout their “next big thing.” It seems as if they don’t even know that their products are “me too’s” instead of market leaders.