(Reuters) - John Stuart has been chained to his BlackBerry for years, first as a systems manager for Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley and then as chief information officer for Beverly Hills Wealth Management.

But this week, Stuart ordered an iPhone from Apple Inc, ending his 7-year relationship with BlackBerry maker Research in

Brain scans of NASA astronauts who have returned to Earth after more than a month in space have revealed potentially serious abnormalities that could jeopardise long-term space missions.
Doctors examined 27 astronauts who had flown long-duration missions with the US space agency and found a pattern of deformities in their eyeballs, optic nerves and pituitary glands that remain unexplained.
The problems are similar to those caused by intracranial hypertension, a rare medical condition that occurs when pressure

The nanocontent company Twitter is buying the microblog site Posterous, according to posts on both services (Twitter | Posterous). Terms of the deal are not yet public.
Posterous is a blog platform with a focus on simplicity. Like competitor Tumblr, it's designed so users can quickly create short posts. Items can be posted from the Web, the Posterous mobile app, or from e-mail.
The announcement posts say that the Posterous service Spaces will stay up and running

If you're reading this, odds are that you're not living in one of the dozen countries that Reporters Without Borders has

Apple, already selling out of new iPads on its online store, could break the 1 million mark on Friday alone when it is released.
That's according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who gave the estimate in a research note today.
The figure would far outstrip first-day sales figures for the original iPad, and would likely exceed comparable iPad 2 sales. (Apple didn't disclose that figure.) It highlights the exploding interest in tablets even as other companies

When U.S. Cellular picked up the Samsung Galaxy S II, it gave me a chance to lay some fresh eyes on a familiar device long after it ceased being the de facto best Android Gingerbread phone around.
I'm happy to report that it's still a terrific phone, and one with components that can stand against most of the next wave of more advanced phones, with one major and one minor sticking point. The major caveat: it won't support

ntel looks to be the latest tech company to want a piece of the online TV action. But it's a tough business and judging how others have fared, it's hard to say whether the chipmaker could ever be successful.

On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Intel, the world's largest maker of microsprocessors for computers, is considering offering an online TV service to consumers that would compete with services from cable operators, satellite TV providers, and phone companies.

Many of us have never been properly trained on how to do or use certain things we really should be good at. Putting on condoms and installing infant car seats are just two skills that come to mind; when we get them wrong, the health consequences can be grave.
The same can be said for improper asthma inhaler use--a serious and expensive problem considering some 5,000 people visit the emergency room due to and 11 people die from

APPLE could face a consumer backlash and scrutiny by Australia's consumer watchdog if it continues to advertise its new iPad in Australia as 4G-capable, when it is not 4G-capable here.

Consumer advocates yesterday said it was confusing for Apple to label its mobile network-capable iPad as "WiFi + 4G" when it could not connect to Australia's fourth-generation mobile networks.

Dell said in a statement today that the new ultrabook — the company's pride and joy at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) — will be priced from $1199 for the 13-inch Intel Core i5-powered model with a 128GB solid state drive (SSD) and 4GB of DDR3 RAM.

The next model up is priced at $1499, and features similar CPU and RAM specs, while boasting an SSD of 256GB. The top-of-the-line configuration comes in at $1699, complete with an

Samsung's Galaxy Tab 8.9 has a lot going for it. It packs the popular Galaxy Tab 10.1 into a smaller, more portable package and it has the honour of being Australia's first 4G tablet. This all seems to add up, and yet, we're still not sold on Samsung's latest slate.

Design
At risk of attracting a vulgar image in the minds of our more tender readers, the phrase "if you've seen one, you've seen them all" is most

Russia's crisis-hit space agency intends to send its first manned mission to the Moon and deploy research stations on Mars under an ambitious plan presented to the government this month.

The Kommersant daily said the mission statement from the Roscosmos space agency through 2030 reveals no financial details but includes plans to find outside sources of funding that do not put additional pressures on the budget.

It also sees Russia purchasing a large

Russian and South Korean scientists have signed a deal on joint research intended to recreate a woolly mammoth, an animal which last walked the earth some 10,000 years ago.

The deal was signed by Vasily Vasiliev, vice rector of North-Eastern Federal University of the Sakha Republic, and controversial cloning pioneer Hwang Woo-Suk of South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, on Tuesday.

Hwang was a national hero until some of his research into creating

The first privately owned passenger spaceship is on track for a test flight beyond the atmosphere this year, and nearly 500 people have signed up for rides.

Another company just closed on $US5 million equity financing, enough to finish building a two-seater rocketplane called Lynx.

Both firms - and a half-dozen more - are looking at flying not just people, but experiments and payloads owned by research laboratories, businesses and educational institutes.

An iPhone 4S buyer has sued Apple for promising more than it delivered with automated "Siri" voice-activated assistant software built into the coveted smartphones.

A suit filed in a California federal court argued that Apple advertising touting the wonders of Siri amounted to "intentional misrepresentation" and unfair competition, according to documents available online on Tuesday.

Lawyers representing a New York City man who bought an iPhone 4S want class action status to represent

BEDFORD, Massachusetts: Ever since Rosey the Robot took care of the Jetsons in the early 1960s, the promise of robots making everyday life easier has been a bit of a tease.

Rosey, a metallic maid with a frilly apron, "kind of set expectations that robots were the future," said Colin Angle, the chief executive of the manufacturer iRobot Corp. "Then, 50 years passed."

Now Angle's company is trying to do Rosey one better

BRAIN scans of NASA astronauts who have returned to Earth after more than a month in space have revealed potentially serious abnormalities that could jeopardise long-term space missions.

Doctors examined 27 astronauts who had flown long-duration missions with the US space agency and found a pattern of deformities in their eyeballs, optic nerves and pituitary glands that remain unexplained.

The problems are similar to those caused by intracranial hypertension, a rare medical condition

The Rdio digital music service has a new look and feel.

Like its rivals in what has become a very crowded space, Rdio provides subscribers with access to a huge global catalog of music in the cloud, 15 million tracks in Rdio's case.

But all that music creates a challenge for the user—how do you figure out what to listen to and how do you discover new music? "We don't think machines" can help you figure out the problem,

A charitable marketing program that paid homeless people to carry Wi-Fi signals at the South By Southwest festival in Austin has drawn widespread debate.

Update at 3:45 p.m:

Some of the homeless men and women involved are defending the program. Participant Dusty White told the Associated Press that the experience of talking with SXSW attendees and earning some cash "made me feel proud."

"I felt like it was a positive thing," said White. "They could have done this with

IDC said Tuesday that it now expects worldwide shipments of 106 million in 2012, up from the previous forecast of nearly 88 million. The new figure represents 54% growth from nearly 69 million shipments in 2011.

The November introduction of Amazon's low-cost Kindle Fire, which runs a modified version of Google's Android operating system, helped 2011 growth, IDC said.

Tom Mainelli, IDC's research director for mobile connected devices, said he initially expected the Fire to take sales away from

For the new iPad's biggest feature, Apple may have been forced to rely on a bitter rival: Samsung.

In other words, the two giant companies appear to have been able to set aside all about those seemingly endless patent lawsuits and legal efforts to quash sales of each others' products around the world. Apple to Samsung: Come home, there's money to mint.

Bloomberg, citing component analysis firm iSuppli, reports that Samsung is the

Samsung may have accidentally spilled the beans on Apple's plans to sell a smaller iPad.

By the end of the year, Apple will release an iPad with a 7.85-inch screen, according to a report from the Korea Times, which cited an unnamed Samsung official.

The disclosure comes with Apple just days away from releasing the new iPad, which has an enhanced resolution display, but remains the same 10-inch size as previous models. Steve Jobs had previously dismissed the size

If you've never owned a tablet and you're considering the new iPad for your first fling, think twice. You may be buying more tablet than you need.
 

Many of the new iPad's updated features are difficult to appreciate as a newcomer. If I showed you an iPad 2 and told you it was the new iPad, there's almost nothing about the device to indicate that I'm lying to you. Without a frame of reference, the iPad 2's

Oracle is coming under fire this week from industry and financial analysts who say some of the company’s systems and strategies may be out-of-sync with the market.  Of course, it’s easy to argue that some times things happen and quickly get blown out of proportion but is that the case here or is there something going on at Oracle that we should all be concerned about?

Join me and ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett for a live video

Microsoft’s next generation Windows 8 Server addresses VDI head on and gives enterprise customers three flexible Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) options: Pooled Desktops, Personal Desktops, and Remote Desktop Sessions (formerly Terminal Services), the company’s web site noted.

“Your IT professionals can customize a mix of deployment scenarios to meet your organization’s needs and manage all of them from one unified console,” Microsoft wrote about its forthcoming server.

“Built on Hyper-V and Remote Desktop

With the release of the new Windows 8 Consumer Preview, we’re seeing a lot of commentary–good and bad–on Microsoft’s next major revision of its operating system.

One of the major bones of contention with Windows 8 is the implementation of the Metro Start screen as the default interface. I’ll delve more into the pros and cons later, but the Metro interface doesn’t lend itself to seamless integration with OS X in a virtualized setting. There are

All the hoopla around mobile payments is all fine and good and I find it fascinating, but the reality is that many small businesses have a hard enough time just collecting traditional payments. Improving cash flow is probably a goal that all small-business owners hold close to their hearts.

I wrote about this topic in January, after a conversation with one of the Web services companies hoping to alleviate this challenge, Bill.com. Recently, I spent time

It is difficult to find one speaker that is good enough in both languages to be able to train the TTS to use one voice. The aim is to get a seamless transition between the human and the synthesised voices.   You might be able to find a truly fluent speaker who could train the TTS, but it might be difficult across all languages.

The translator uses a reference speaker, in this case, a Chinese speaker to

You use Word’s spelling checker every day, and probably just as often encounter some of the tool's puzzling behavior. Do you know how to get rid of a word that you mistakenly added to its dictionary, for instance, or how to hide the red wiggly lines that appear all over your document?The following ten tricks will help you to work more efficiently in Word 2010, and they will even make you and your documents look smarter.

This default feature

While I was cruising the show floor here at South by Southwest, I stumbled upon the retro keyboard from Metadot Corporation called the DasKeyboard.

If you remember what it was like to type on an old IBM Selectric typewriter, you know about what the experience of typing on the DasKeyboard ($129) is like. The company actually had a couple of old IBM Selectric typewriters at their booth.

The DasKeyboard’s keys are large with slightly concave tops and they make

It’s nice that Apple continues to launch new and improved devices while maintaining the same prices as the previous versions, but $500 and up is still a lot of money. Imagine how devastating it would be to shatter the display or spill cup of coffee on your iPad a few weeks after you buy it.

Here are six things you can do to protect your iPad for your own use, and preserve its resale value for when the next

Buying the new iPad on launch day this Friday is a tricky task, but it’s not impossible. Apple says demand for the new iPad is "off the charts," so if you want to pre-order one online now, it won’t reach you until next week at the earliest. That means your best bet to get one this weekend is to head out to a brick and mortar store.

Delivery times for online pre-orders with Apple for the new iPad have

Eye-Fi Pro X2 SD Cards let you use Wi-Fi to transfer images straight from your camera to your computer, or post them to a website. The cards hold 8GB of data and can handle JPEG, RAW, and video uploads. (Read "Eye-Fi Pro X2 Increases Capacity and Speed" for more info.) When the Eye-Fi Pro X2 card launched a couple years back it cost $150. Prices have fallen since then, of course. For a limited time, Amazon.com has the best