Love games? This PC's for you
By Times Wires
Published September 17, 2007
The world's largest personal-computer companies are launching new and cheaper gaming PCs in a move to take costly high-performance features, previously of interest to only the most avid players, to the masses. Hewlett-Packard Co. launched the Blackbird 002 desktop PC this month, its first HP-branded foray into the PC gaming market. The Palo Alto, Calif., company says the sleek, black system will start at $2,500. That's roughly half the cost of many high-end gaming PCs. Gateway Inc., soon to be bought by Acer Inc., plans to introduce a gaming PC in November called FX540 and follow up with gaming-oriented notebooks in January. And two makers introduced midrange machines in June: Toshiba Corp. launched its Satellite x205 series of gaming notebooks, starting at roughly $2,000. And Dell Inc. launched its XPS 720 gaming desktop, which starts at roughly $1,700.
New tool mines Wiki trustworthiness
Because anyone can edit Wikipedia, the Web encyclopedia's reliability varies wildly. Now a computer science professor hopes to give users a better baloney detector: software that flags questionable lines in Wikipedia entries. Developed by Luca de Alfaro and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the software will color text some gradation of orange if there is reason to doubt its content. The deeper the orange, the more likely it is malarkey. The software - available at http://trust.cse.ucsc.edu - is in demonstration mode and operates on an older subset of Wikipedia entries.
Facebook allows public searching
The online hangout Facebook is opening another window to the outside world, letting nonusers search for members' personal profile pages. The company plans to begin letting Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and other search companies index portions of Facebook profiles to help nonusers more easily find them. Facebook (www.facebook.com), which faced a user rebellion a year ago over privacy concerns, stressed that information available through such searches would be less than what someone could find simply by signing up. And users could choose to remain invisible.
Travel site offers weekend-only trips
Looking for a weekend getaway? A new feature from the travel search site Kayak lets you price airline tickets for the next five weekends or for weekends in a specific month. Users can choose to leave as early as Thursday and return as late as Monday. Previously, a Kayak user would have had to search flights for each weekend separately by entering the appropriate dates and jotting down the best prices. "Travelers all over the world are taking shorter vacations, typically opting for long weekend trips," said Steve Hafner, Kayak's CEO. The weekend search feature, he said, is designed "specifically for the flexible weekend warrior."