World of Tech

The registration fee for domain names ending in .com and .net are going to get higher, as VeriSign raises the prices. Basically the price of registering .com domains will increases to$6.86 from $6.42, while the fee for .net is going to increase to $4.23 from $3.85. This is the second time VeriSign raised the prices since 2006, so some analysts are getting alarmed by this trend. Personally speaking I think that the prices are still relatively low, as the cost of hosting is the major expense for webmasters, especially those with a lot of traffic and downloadable resources such as videos, audio or software. VerisSign claims that the .com and .net infrastructures are continually being fortified against more sophisticated cyberattacks, so let’s hope that this company will spend the extra money it will be receiving on security.

Celrun TV is a Korean product which is a premium HD multimedia player. It has a lot of features such as Ethernet, Wifi BG, digital and analog TV tuners, two USB ports with USB host, an optical out, has 320GB internal HDD, PVR function allows to record video, RGB, S-VIDEO and HDMI output. The list is for sure impressive, but on the main features that makes Celtun TV so special is the ability to play almost every codec including avi, wmv, mpg, mpeg, mp4, asf, ts, ps and many others. Taking into account that there are so many codecs available, having a device that can play nearly every code can be really useful. Alternatively if you just plan to play regular videos, then you may want to spend your money elsewhere.

Do you want to make a prank on someone? All you can to do is hide an annoying sound gadget somewhere during daylight and when it will be dark the sound gadget is going to simulate the sound of dripping water or barking dog. If a person decides to switch on the light to find the source of the sound, then the gadget is going to switch off itself. The idea behind the gadget is brilliant, as it will be very hard to actually detect the source of the sound. If you got interested then I can tell you that this device costs approximately $10, so it won’t be a big investment.

It seems that UK is making some steps towards fighting with piracy. It has to do a lot with a paper called “Creative Braitain: New Talents for The New Economy”. UK wants force internet service providers to fight with illegal file-swapping by April 2009 or the government will introduce its own legislation to make them do so. While it is a noble cause that UK wants to encourage creativity I think that the way they want to implement it is flawed. How does UK imagine ISP to fight with illegal file-sharing? Obviously that would mean monitoring every download that a user makes or blocking peer to peer programs like torrents. When it comes to the first solution it seems similar to monitoring every phone call you make. That is ridiculous and it is really sad that many citizens of UK do not understand that their privacy right will be completely ignored. Second solution to block programs like torrents is flawed as well, because they offer the possibility to distribute non-copyright content like Bibles or other important materials.

When it comes to processors, there has been recently a trend that Intel and AMD were increasing the number of processor chips rather then the speed of each chip. I have a quad-core processor myself and I was thinking that is already a lot of chips and that I won’t see anything high then quad very soon. It appears I might have been wrong as Intel Dunnington is an upcoming six-core processor, which will be probably the last major Xeon processor update before Nehalem. The processor has a total of 9MB of L2 and 16MB of L3. Dunnington compares extremely well against any other processors, including many quad-core. The processor will be available in the second half of 2008, so those of you who are power maniacs will not have to wait too long.

Those of us who have a lot of plants in our household could sure use help when it comes to watering plants. One of the recent gadgets that can help you with this task is monitoring chemical signs, such as an increase in salt and sugar content. Actually such devices are being sold to farmers, so you may not benefit from them that much at the moment, but I believe it is still an interesting device to hear about.

This device can spot any problems with the plant a lot earlier then physical sings. For example increase in salt and sugar content in the cells occurs a lot earlier then anything else that we can spot with our bare eyes. The data can then be trasnmited to the farmers computer, along with the information with which plants there are problems. By using such devices farmers can ensure that there won’t be any unpleasant surprises.