209. AMD's Puma Pounces

 If Intel can build massive branding around a “platform” that is really just a CPU, chipset and Wi-Fi chip chip, AMD can too. Well sorta. While Intel forces PC builders to take all three in order to qualify for “Centrino 2,” AMD is only requiring the CPU and chipset and is letting vendors  pick from a qualified list of third-party wireless vendors for the last component.

 208. Researchers Fear Cell Phones Stifle Sperm Quality

Most research involving cell phone use centers around whether or not we’re putting ourselves at risk for brain cancer. But if you’re a male, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic warned that cell phones might also cause harmful effects to your gonads. The study found more free radicals in semen that had been placed 2.5cm away from an 850 MHz cell phone in talk mode for 1 hour, giving a whole new meaning to the term phone sex.

 207. IBM Commits to Help Companies Become Microsoft-Free

IBM has always had a soft spot for Linux, and in 2008, the company lays out plans to help companies move away from Microsoft and into open-source software. The plan includes partnering with several Linux vendors to bundle its middleware on more Linux systems, and to help them do that, IBM reconfigured its Lotus Foundations software to make it both easier and cheaper to install on Linux-based computers.

 206. Second Life Holds Party to Celebrate 5th Birthday

Most 5-year-olds ask to go to Chuck E. Cheese for their birthday, but such a simple celebration wouldn’t do for Second Life. To commemorate the occasion, developer Linden Labs held a two-week long Virtual World Fair, which took place from June 23 to July 7, 2008. Linden closed off the event to its mature-themed sub-communities, who went on to plan celebrations of their own, birthday suit and all.

 Image Credit: Flickr Miyaoka Hitchcock

 205. Largest Prime Number Yet Discovered, Also the World’s Hardest Password to Remember

If your favorite online portals are saying your passwords are too weak, consider changing them to the nearly 13-million digit long prime number discovered by a UCLA computer running the GIMPS distributed computing software. The prime number, 243,112,609-1, marks only the 45th Mersenne prime ever discovered, which is a prime that can take the form of 2n-1.

 204. Netscape Suffers Same Fate as Old Yeller (SPOILER!)

Netscape didn’t develop rabies like Old Yeller did, but like the lovable dog, it had to be put down by the hands of its owner. After almost 14 years of service, the browser died an honorable death, receiving one final update before AOL recommended its users switch to Firefox. At its height in 1995, Netscape claimed over 80 percent of the browser market share.

 203. SDHC Sets New Speed and Capacity Records

SanDisk soared to the top of the SDHC capacity chart by releasing a 32GB model, while also claiming the speed crown with maximum read and write rates of 15 MB/s and 10 MB/s respectively. Days later, Panasonic came out with a 32GB SDHC of its own and upped the speed ante with maximum data transfer rates up to 20 MB/s.

 202. 5 Billion Songs Served on iTunes, DRM Ruins Meal

Making a pitch for quantity over quality, Apple’s iTunes Store boasts over 5 billion songs sold by June of 2008, most of which came saddled with DRM. Other digital download stores pick up the slack by offering a smorgasbord of DRM-free music, but Apple never appears to be in a rush to follow suit. Such is the luxury the company can afford to make when it claims over 70 percent of online digital music sales.

 201. Low-Life Hackers Target Epilepsy Patients

We know we shouldn’t be surprised by anything hackers do – after all, they have no qualms about stealing your personal data and selling it to the highest bidder. But targeting epilepsy patients with a flashing computer animation designed to cause seizures marked a new low for cybercriminals. Kudos to the Epilepsy Forum staff, who responded quickly to the attacks.

 Image Credit: Coolest-gadgets.com

 200. CompactFlash Flies to 100GB

Chances are, if you own a DSLR camera, you use CompactFlash to store your photos. And if you shoot a lot of pictures in RAW, you might be running out of space. Pretec made the practice of filling up a CF card no easy task when it released a 100GB CF card, the largest capacity to date.

 199. HP DreamColor 30-bit Panel

 While most of us would have a hard time justifying the purchase of a $3,500 panel—particularly in these trying economic times—that does little to alleviate our desire for this 24-inch LCD monitor that’s capable of displaying one billion colors. And though marketed to people in graphic design and photography, who’s to say blasting zombies isn’t a color critical task.

 198. Spam Turns 30, Avoids Mid-Life Crisis

Spam has become such a ubiquitous part of computing that it’s easy to assume the practice has been around forever. And it nearly has been. The first spam message was sent back in 1978 by a marketer at DEC (Digital Equipment Company) to about 400 people before the practice even had a name. Thanks for opening that can of worms, asshat.

 197. Windows Home Server w/ SP1

 We liked Microsoft’s Windows Home Server software from the git-go, right up until the point that users began suffering data corruption and file loss. More than just teething pains, the problems were rooted at a very low level. Fortunately, Microsoft fixed these core problems—and added needed features like support for 64-bit clients and integrated server backup software—with the first service pack for the nascent OS, dubbed Power Pack 1.

 196. Death of the Internet, as Written by Mark Cuban

Dallas Mavericks owner and one-time avid blogger Mark Cuban made his fortune on the internet, so it came as a bit of surprise when the outspoken billionaire declared the internet dead. And he didn’t stop there. Cuban said “the internet’s for old people,” though 5 minutes on Runescape would have anyone signing a different tune. Maybe Cuban was just having a bad day, like the ones he suffers each year when the Mavericks exit the playoffs empty-handed.

 195. Ebay Neuters Sellers Ability to Leave Negative Feedback

It’s one thing to raise fees, but many felt Ebay crossed the line when it revamped its feedback system. In order to encourage buyers to leave accurate feedback without fear of retaliation, the online auction side made it so that sellers can only leave positive feedback, even if the buyer ends up being a rotten non-paying bidder. Sellers staged a weeklong boycott in response, which did nothing to change Ebay’s mind.

 194. OLED Keyboard Materializes, Pigs Still Don’t Fly

As far as we know, hell never froze over (perhaps Justin Long will send us a postcard when he gets there), so we can’t explain what cosmic forces brought Art Lebedev’s Optimus Maximus OLED keyboard out of vaporware status and transformed it into a shipping a product.  At almost $1,600, it’s expensive, but it exists. We still can’t say the same for Duke Nukem Forever.

 193. Memory Goes Multi-Core

A PC is a sum of all parts, and the trick to wringing out better performance is to reduce or eliminate bottlenecks. With dual- and quad-core chips now the norm, memory chips struggle to keep pace. Cryptographer Joseph Ashwood set out to tackle the problem by developing multi-core memory. According to Ashwood, his architecture, which “borrows extensively from today’s modern multi-core CPUs,” can muster 16GB/s.

 192. PC Gaming Hardware Market Valued at $20 Billion

According to the bean counters at Jon Peddie Research, not only is PC gaming not dead, but it isn’t even on life support. On the contrary, the research firm declared the PC gaming hardware market to be worth $20 billion. Furthermore, JPR estimates the market will nearly double to $34 billion by 2012. Take that, you cocky console gamers.

 191. Google Gets in the Game with AdSense

Quite frankly, we’re surprised it took Google as long as it did to target with Flash games. The company’s foray into Flash can be viewed as confirmation that the potential for heavy ad dollars are at stake, and its AdSense for Games program isn’t without competition.  But Google’s solution offers a fair bit of flexibility, allowing beta users to implement video, image, and text ads within an online game.

190. Silverlight Stands Over Adobe in Olympics

Michael Phelps may have earned himself a spot in the record books, but it was Microsoft who also scored a major victory in Beijing. Despite Adobe Flash’s wide userbase, Microsoft managed to sweet talk NBC into using its competing Silverlight technology to stream Olympic coverage, and with it all the gold that comes from the deal.