Chris Beech

New features on the famous website’s front page emphasize user-contributed content and sophisticated interactivity.

On the Internet, 20 months is an eternity — yet that’s how long Yahoo stuck with the most recent design of its front page. In fact, it was enough time for the emergence of an entirely new way of using the Internet, loosely called "Web 2.0" and focused on user-contributed content, media tagging and sharing, social networking, and browser-based services, rather than desktop software.

Catching the Web 2.0 train before it leaves the station is what the just-released redesign of Yahoo’s front page is meant to do. Starting today, visitors to www.yahoo.com/preview* will see a radically different layout, which emphasizes an interactive "Personal Assistant" and links to the most popular content from Yahoo’s large network of sites and services, such as Yahoo Music and the Flickr photo-sharing service.

The redesign is one of most drastic in Yahoo’s 12-year history, and it’s the most visible step yet toward the company’s recently expressed goal of transforming Yahoo from a search portal into a locus for personalized information and community-generated content, ratings, and reviews.

http://www2.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=16883&ch=infotech

As much as people criticize or adore the articles and insights that come from Techcrunch I just realized that he makes bank. And by bank I mean he is raking in around $85,000 a month. This seems AMAZING for a person who writes on a blog also known as an online diary to generate that much money.

http://okdork.com/2006/05/15/michael-arrington-of-techcrunchcom-is-a-millionaire/

We’re all looking forward to the new Blue Ray disc technology set to come out in the next few months. The BR disc has a heck of a lot more space than your typical DVD, but as it turns out, the regular BR disc isn’t as big as they come. In fact, multiple layers allow the typical BR disc to transform in to a much more massive storage space. Company TDK has taken this concept to new heights by developing the 6 layer BR disc weeks before regular BR discs have been released!

The 6 layer Blue Ray disc relies on new technology that allows an incredible 33GB of space per layer! This results in a disc that reaches a previously unheard of size of roughly 200GB! The layers are stacked from top to bottom, and are covered with a 0.1 mm cover layer, followed by a hard coat layer. The hard coat layer will protect against dirt, scratches and other unwanted effects that we know all too well about. This makes perfect sense, as a 200GB disc will probably cost quite a bit, so you don’t want it to malfunction. The prototype disc has layers created from bismuth peroxide that is heated to an unimaginably hot 690 degrees Kelvin.

To put it nicely, this is going to be the most expensive disc in the world. With 200GB of space, you could easily fit all of your favorite shows and family movies. However, a problem arises. The typical recordable disc is burned once, and stays in this state forever; only a re-writable can be used again and again. Will you really know the minute that you’re burning what exactly you want on the disc? Now if a RW version of this disc was to come out, it would be the most expensive AND greatest disc in the industry.

http://www.dlmag.com/news/1446/the-200gb-blue-ray-disc-completed.html

A robotic NASA spacecraft designed to rendezvous with an orbiting satellite instead crashed into its target, according to a summary of the investigation released Monday.

Investigators blamed the collision on faulty navigational data that caused the DART spacecraft to believe that it was backing away from its target when it was actually bearing down on it.

"The inaccurate perception of its distance and speed … prevented DART from taking effective action to avoid a collision," the summary said.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=1965775

Adobe [Macromedia] is working on a new product codenamed Adobe Apollo that integrates the Macromedia Flash Player with the Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader. Adobe Apollo software will provide Macromedia Flash and HTML functionality and will run independent from the web browser.

Apollo will offer data synchronization, the ability to work online or offline, one-click installation and desktop integration. Apollo will join Flash Lite (the mobile client) and Flash Player (the browser client) to form the Flash Platform client family.

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/12/adobe-apollo-acrobat-reader-flash.html

A poll has revealed what sobbing IT operatives already know only too well: their chosen profession is the most stressful on God’s Green Earth and Iraqi A&E doctors should consider themselves lucky not to spend their days at the sharp end of a relentless assault of clueless users and badgering bosses.

That’s the conclusion of a probe of 3,000 "IT experts" carrried out by "online learning provider" SkillSoft, which reveals the staggering fact that "97 per cent of people working in IT claim to find their life at work stressful on a daily basis".

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/16/most_stressful_profession/

Watches can be used for just about everything these days, from watching TV to learning Japanese, we’ve selected ten of the strangest (or coolest) for your enjoyment. Which ones are your favorites?

http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/top-10-strangest-watches

About 10 million LiveJournal and TypePad blogs were offline or barely reachable for several hours Tuesday as the result of a massive denial-of-service attack.

The attack started around 4 p.m. PDT, targeting the popular blogging services and the corporate Web site of their provider Six Apart, company vice president Anil Dash said in an interview Wednesday. Service was back to normal at midnight, according to Six Apart’s Web site.

"Any large service tends to have a pretty constant level of attacks, but this was on a scale that I don’t think anybody could have anticipated," Dash said. "I think it is of a scale that would have impacted any large site on the Web."

In a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack the target is overloaded with requests for information. The requests come from a large number of hosts, typically compromised computers. As a result, legitimate users can no longer access the site.

http://news.com.com/2100-7349_3-6068344.html?part=rss&tag=6068344&subj=news

Piracy is a problem in the tech world and a major strain on doing business with China in particular, but what about when your entire company is pirated? And what if it isn’t a little company, but a huge electronics behemoth as big as NEC? Sounds strange? That’s what we thought until we started researching this issue more.

http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/3000