The simulation of the behaviour of crowds of people and swarms of animals (not just mythological ones) is also being applied to many other unusual situations, from designing better closed-circuit television (CCTV) security systems to managing the traffic of ships in harbours. The same technology has also been used to improve the understanding of archaeological ruins and to model entire ecosystems in order to design wildlife-management strategies.
Read the article: Simulating crowd behaviour
So how should we make a decision? The key is something called metacognition, or thinking about thinking. Because the mind is like a Swiss Army knife – it’s stuffed full of different mental tools, each of which is well-suited to a specific situation – it’s essential that we learn how to adjust our thought process to the task at hand.
Read the article: Decision time
Finally, free up your Hotmail account. POP all mail to a GMail account and enjoy the better spam filtering and user-defined filtering!
Read the article: Windows Live: Hotmail Enables POP3 for US Users
Web site Zyb backs up and syncs your cell phone’s contacts and calendar data so that you’ll never have to go through the pain of manually entering in contacts on a new phone again. Just tried, and looks like an amazing service!
Read the article: Cell Phones: Back up your phone contacts online with Zyb
BumpTop is a fresh and engaging new way to interact with your computer desktop. You can pile and toss documents like on a real desk. Break free from the rigid and mechanical style of standard point-and-click desktops. Interact by pushing, pulling and piling documents with elegant, self revealing gestures. BumpTop’s stunning interface makes clever use of 3D presentation and smooth physics-based animations for an engaging, vivid user experience.
Read the article: BumpTop
“Matthaus Krzykowski and Daniel Hartmann, founders of the stealth startup Mobile-facts, have found that you can take Google’s smartphone operating system, Android, and use it as a desktop operating system. The dauntless duo found that it took them only “about four hours of work to compile Android for the netbook.”
Read the article: Startup Founders Turn Android into Desktop OS
If Santa left a new digital camera under your tree this year…
Read the article: How To: How To Use Your New Digital Camera
When you uninstall a Windows application, the uninstaller doesn’t remove all the files and registry entries created by the application. Sometimes the developers were too lazy or they thought those files might be needed if you reinstall the application. The end result is that your computer loads slower because your registry contains more entries and the hard drive stores unnecessary files.
Revo Uninstaller is a software that lets you completely uninstall programs and it’s easier to use than the built-in “Add or remove programs”. You can search for a program or locate it in a more intuitive way: enter in the Hunter Mode, open the program you want to uninstall and drag the target to your program’s window.
Read the article: Completely Uninstalling Windows Applications
Ever wanted the quick launch bar to be wider so that you could fit more apps into it and yet have space for the application tabs? Simply detach the quick launch bar and make it as a dock on the desktop attached to any screen side. The method described below will work on Windows XP and Vista alike.
Go to
C:\Users\{YourAccount}\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer
and drag the “QuickLaunch” folder to the desired screen-border. For best results, right click on the newly formed quick launch bar and select choose the options to remove the title, have small icons, uncheck auto hide and make it appear always on top.
Technorati Tags: windows, xp, vista, quick launch
A new feature introduced today in Gmail allows free voice and video chat right from within Gmail. Nice!
Read the article: Official Google Blog: Talk face-to-face right from within Gmail