Inspired by this post on TechCrunch, which I saw via Mark Cuban’s blog (don’t hate me because I’m a blogger, Mark!), I’ve been inspired to go ahead and declare e-mail bankruptcy today.

I’ll sort through and reply to a few critical messages, save a handful that I need for future reference in a separate file, and then nuke the rest of the 2,000-plus e-mails in my inbox.

I can’t wait.

Of course, it may end up being as effective as Michael Scott’s famous declaration of bankruptcy, but it will undoubtedly feel good for those brief 30 seconds or so before the next e-mail plops into my inbox.

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The maths for guessing the future of computer processing power is no longer “Think of a number and then double it.”

It should be getting easier in this multi-core world. We’ve gone from single brains to two brains and now quad-core microprocessors, so eight should be next, right?

Actually, the answer is three.

Advanced Micro Devices came out with the industry’s first triple-core chip today and it signals that cores are being viewed more flexibly than pure performance drivers. Instead, they are providing different price points and functionality for users.

“We’ve really started a debate in the industry with this,” Pat Moorhead, vice president of AMD’s advanced platform marketing, told me.

“Just like there’s a spot for $20,000, $30,000 and $40,000 cars, there’s room for two, three or four cores in the market. I see our competitor [Intel] now agrees – it’s announced a six-core server processor.”

Mr Moorhead says there are plenty of PC makers ready to support triple-core. It’s an in-between solution – for basic capabilities go for dual-core, for top performance, it’s quad-core, for something perhaps 30 per cent better than dual-core, triple-core will fill an important niche, he says.

The big shift is that Moore’s Law – the doubling of transistors on chips around every 18 months – is being de-emphasised by the two major processor makers in favour of “visual computing” – combining microprocessors with graphics processors to provide 3D interfaces and high-definition video.

“It’s going to become all about video, you get this incredible high-definition playback at 1080p with triple-core combined with our graphics,” says the marketing man, hammering home the message.

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I blog a few hours a day, so sometimes I like to set my laptop out in the living room instead of my blogging room and its a messy thing. I tend to put my laptop on the coffee table that is not that ergonomic and on my lap until the heat starts to set in. So I thought, maybe there is a better way to do this instead of moving my computer table into the living hall.

Check out the DAVE, which is an IKEA laptop table that comes in 2 colors - white and black. It’s height-adjustable, the triangular shape is not exactly spacious but adequate for a laptop, and has holes on it for cords to move through. DAVE currently retails for a cheap $24.99.

photo via gadgetell

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Thomas Edison has always been credited as the first person to record sound, but scientists have just discovered he wasn’t.

Edison was the first person to record sound intentionally and play it back, but some French scientists inadvertently managed to record a woman singing a song nearly 20 years before Edison patented the phonograph.

The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

Best of all, the researchers who made this discovery, put made the recording into an MP3 and put it online. Click to hear a voice (though admittedly a very garbled voice) that predates the Civil War.

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Vista SP1 may not give your system much more juice aka performance, but there are other ways to speed Vista up. Spending a few minutes or cash optimizing your Vista PC can help it humming smoothly.

Get flashy: If you have an extra USB flash drive that you don’t use for much else, Vista can cache disk reads on it, thereby boosting performance beyond what you’d get from your hard disk alone. Simply insert your flash drive into a USB 2.0 slot. If the drive is fast enough, a prompt will appear, asking whether you want to open the folder for the drive or use it to ‘Speed up my system using Windows ReadyBoost’ (see the screen shot at left). Choose the latter option, and follow the remaining prompts. When you’re calculating how much space to set aside for ReadyBoost to use, Microsoft recommends that you let ReadyBoost use one to three times the amount of RAM on your system.

Play your cards right: USB thumb drives aren’t the only way to boost system performance–fortunately, since USB memory sticks protruding from a computer (particularly a laptop) are easy to dislodge, and they can be a pain to remove and stow for traveling. If your PC has a reader for SD (Secure Digital) or CompactFlash cards, you can use those media in place of a USB stick to handle your ReadyBoost needs.

Seize control: Speeding up Vista isn’t enough; you need to prevent the OS from slowing you down. The annoying Vista pop-ups that ask you to ‘Allow’ or ‘Deny’ many actions are examples of Vista’s User Account Control at work. The process makes you safer, but your productivity may suffer if you must constantly respond to UAC’s demands. For ways to reduce the intrusiveness of this feature, see “Annoyance Buster: Make Vista’s User Account Control Work for You.”

See if your hardware is slowing you down: In Explorer, right-click Computer and choose Properties. Next to ‘Rating’, click Windows Experience Index. The item with the lowest score is the biggest drain on your getting a better Vista experience. For example, if the lowest score is attributed to Graphics, it may be time to invest in a new graphics card.

Read more via PC World

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With my Casio S-600 camera out of commission, I would love to get my hands on this new Samsung L210 10.2-megapixel camera.

Firstly I love the Self Portrait mode that allows for accurate exposure and focus for self portrait shots. Using the face detection function, a beeping sound notifies users when a face is located in a specific area. Its useful when you can’t anyone to help you take photos with your partner.

Apart from the 10.2-megapixel feature, and slim design, it has 3x optical zoom lens, 2.5-inch LCD monitor, red eye correction, optical and digital image stabilization, face detection, an SVGA movie mode and allows SD / SDHC / MMC card to be added for extra storage. This baby goes for a cheap $199.95.

via engadget via samsungcamera

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 So the fall-off in paid clicks on Google wasn’t a one-month phenomenon. The comScore report a month ago that the number of clicks on the search engine’s adverts had fallen slightly in January from a year before touched off fears that the Great Google Slowdown had set in. It didn’t matter that comScore itself later argued that quality improvements in Google’s ad system could account for the decline: the seeds of doubt had been sown.

The latest figures show that this was not an isolated phenomenon. The research firm now says that Google’s paid clicks in the US edged up by 3.1 per cent in February, which is at least better than the 0.3 per cent decline the month before. But this still represents a major deceleration from the 25 per cent increase in the fourth quarter of last year, and with search queries still growing strongly it points to a big change in the way searchers respond to adverts.

Only Google’s next quarterly earnings will reveal whether an advertising slowdown is setting in, but even the most rosy interpretation of events has to account for questions like these:

- Why is the click-through rate on adverts falling? It’s one thing for the number of adverts to decline - that shows that Google is pruning the least effective/ relevant. But shouldn’t that actually lead to an increase in the click-through rate? Intead, it fell 5 per cent in the latest month.

- How quickly does pricing in the Google ad market respond to quality  improvements? Higher quality ads should produce better leads, which should feed through into higher prices per click. But this won’t happen overnight. Effective as Google’s ad system is, this is not a perfect market. For now, the fall-off in clicks is the only verifiable fact (at least if two months of comScore numbers are to be believed.)

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There’s an interesting new twist today to Amazon.com’s ambitious “computer-in-the-cloud” plan. From now on, companies which rely on the etailer to run aspects of their computing for them can choose where those tasks get handled.

This raises interesting legal implications. For instance, Amazon now says customers can select whether they want their computing to take place in a datacenter in the US or in Europe. So anyone concerned about the snooping eyes of Uncle Sam (think Patriot Act) might prefer to go off-shore.

And then there’s the tax angle. Will some companies try to avoid local sales tax by taking ecommerce offshore?

The most obvious purpose, of course, is to give users a greater sense of control - something so far lacking in the world of cloud computing. You can now select where you want back-up applications to reside. That might give some customers greater confidence they will be able to avoid the fall-out from failures like the one that hit a number of Web sites powered by Amazon last month. Making the cloud a bit less cloudy seems a smart move.

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AT&T has just announced two new services — and announced expanded access to a third one — for customers who want to listen to music on their phones.

All three sound pretty cool, but sadly they’re all expensive. Folks who can link their phones either to computers or directly to the Internet can probably find cheaper (though less convenient) options elsewhere.

The new services come from a company called mSpot.

One lets users make their own ring tones from a library of 250,000 songs: A $6.99 monthly subscription buys three ringtones. Extras cost $2.99 apiece.

The other lets users pull songs from their computer to their phones from anywhere. A $9.99 monthly subscription buys your the right to transfer 75 songs. Another $2.99 buys you 10 extra songs.

Even if you’re willing to pay those prices, you need a phone that works with one of the two services.

You can get the ringtones on a Samsung SYNC, Samsung A737, Samsung A747 and the Motorola V3xx. More phones will be added soon.

You can use the song-transfer program on the Samsung SYNC, the Samsung A737 and the LG SHINE.

The third service is Napster Mobile, which lets customers browse through and buy from a catalog of 5 million songs.

AT&T began supporting the service last year — but only on one phone.

AT&T will soon make the service available to 12 million customers with many different handset models.

Here’s the full release from AT&T…

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In case you missed the news this morning, Time Warner Cable has added 11 channels to its high-definition lineup. in Dallas, Plano, Richardson and Mesquite.

Customers in all North Texas cities should be able to get around 50 HD channels by year’s end, the company says.

This brings TW’s total HD tally up to 31 channels in those cities. That remains well behind market leader DirecTV, which offers 67 HD channels, but it gives TW customers access to all of the most viewed HD channels.

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