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Study: IT Staff Lead Sedentary Lifestyles

Paul Lilly — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:03:13 -0600

According a new study, UK's IT workers rank as the least active professionals with the unhealthiest diets. The study, which was commissioned by weight loss and personal training agency Fat Free Fitness, pinged more than 1,700 professionals running the gamut from Taxi drivers and shop attendants, to marketing gurus and customer service reps.

It shouldn't come as any surprise that those paid to sit in front of a PC all day tend to lead sedentary lifestyles (Maximum PC notwithstanding), but what's a little shocking is that only 19 percent of those surveyed met the government's activity guidelines recommending 30 minutes of moderate exercise five times a week. That puts IT workers in last place by a wide margin. Receptionists ranked as the second unhealthiest bunch, with 26 percent meeting the government's guidelines.

Just 14 percent said they ate five portions of fruit and vegetables every day, but even more startling, the study found that the average IT worker consumes the caffeine equivalent of 10 cups of coffee every day.

Study: Internet Users Not Socially Inept After All

Paul Lilly — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:29:38 -0600

There was a time when computer geeks might have been viewed as social outcasts, but that's certainly not the case anymore. And according to research by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, those who stay connected to the Internet and tote around a mobile phone tend to have more friends than those who don't.

It's not just about quantity, either. Researchers found that owning a mobile phone and participating in different Internet activities usually means a more diverse group of friends.

"Contrary to the argument that Internet use limits people's participation in the local community, local institutions, and local spaces, our findings show that most Internet activities are associated with higher levels of local activity," say the researchers. "However, we find some evidence that use of social networking services -- for example, Facebook, MySpaced, LinkedIn -- substitutes for some level of neighborhood involvement."

We blame the latter findings on Mafia Wars and Farmville.

Image Credit: untoldentertainment.com

Study: Most Americans Support a Texting-while-Driving Ban

Paul Lilly — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:37:04 -0600

According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, an overwhelming majority of Americans feel text messaging while driving should be made illegal. Not only that, but over half surveyed said those caught sending a text while behind the wheel should be punished just as harshly as drunk drivers.

"If you're going to drive, drive; if you want to talk or text, pull over to the side of the road," Constance Drake, 71, of Toms River, J.J., said in a follow-up interview with the New York Times.

Americans don't seem split on the issue, at least according to the poll. Only 3 percent of respondents saw nothing wrong with texting and driving at the same time, while the other 97 percent disagreed. And around 80 percent said it should be made illegal to talk on a cellphone while driving, unless it's a hands-free phone. That's up from 69 percent in a 2001 ABCNews poll.

What's your stance on texting or talking on a cellphone wile driving? Tell us in the comments section below.

Image Credit: gtchannel.com

Study: Most IT Managers Want Better Cost Visibility

Paul Lilly — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:07:18 -0600

One of the biggest challenges of staying within a budget is not even knowing what you're allowed to spend. That's exactly the situation most IT managers find themselves in, suggests a new white paper by Digital Fuel.

The study the white paper is based off of pinged over 130 IT managers who were directly involved with the related costs and budgets of more than $10 million. And while 84 percent of the respondents classified detailed insight in IT costs as critical, more than half of those polled complained that their level of IT cost visibility isn't where it should be.

This type of environment presents a frustrating challenge in figuring out how to manage IT costs, as evidenced by the respondents indicating that coming up with a cost-model and breaking down the IT costs ranked as the most difficult. IT managers who took part in the study also noted a strong desire to better assess cost inefficiencies in their IT departments.

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Study: HDDs Headed for the Bargain Bin, Not Obsolescence

Paul Lilly — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:39:46 -0500

Maybe not next year, or even the year after, but sometime in the not too distant future, mainstream storage duties are destined to make the jump from mechanical hard drives to flash-based SSDs, right? Not according to a new study published in a recent issue of IEEE Transactions on Magnetics. Not only are hard drives in it for the long haul, but the cost to storage ratio will shrink dramatically, the study suggests.

Some would argue it already has, but study authors Professor Mark Kryder and PhD student Chang Soo Kim of Carnegie Mellon University predict that by the year 2020, a two-disk, 2.5-inch HDD with 14TB of storage capacity will run a mere $40. And if that weren't enough to keep mechanical storage media relevant into the next decade and beyond, the duo also suggest that flash memory technology will run into technical roadblocks that will halt its continued scaling before 2020.

The predictions surprised even the study's authors, who set out to examine 13 up-and-coming nonvolatile memory (NVM) technologies and see if one of them had the potential to leapfrog HDDs on a cost-per-terabyte basis by 2020.

"We were surprised to find that the study indicated that, even in 2020, hard drives were likely to be considerably less expensive on a cost per terabyte basis than any of the competing technologies," Kryder told PhysOrg.com. "It was also somewhat surprising to find that the technical potential of a technology was not necessarily well-correlated with where the industry was investing the most dollars; rather, industrial firms are tending to invest where they have they most know-how. This is not necessarily the wisest decision, but is quite understandable."

Before dismissing the findings as unlikely, it should be noted that Kryder previously served as CTO for Seagate, so he's at least familiar with the storage sector. Nevertheless, do you see HDDs standing in the spotlight for another decade?

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Web Surfing Boosts Brain Activity

Paul Lilly — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:31:45 -0500

Does your significant other ever accuse you of spending too much time online? Next time it happens, just fire back that you're exercising your brain, thank you very much.

That may sound far fetched, but according to a study conducted by UCLA scientists, surfing the Internet, even for just a week, has a fairly significant impact on brain functions in middle-aged and older adults.

"We found that for older people with minimal experience, performing Internet searches for even a relatively short period of time can change brain activity patterns and enhance function," said study author Dr. Gary Small.

The research team conducted the study with 24 volunteers between the ages of 55 and 78. Half of the partiipants were already daily Internet users, while the other half spent hardly any time online. All participants were given an initial functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan before and then another after the experiment.

In between brain scans, participants were instructed to perform Internet searches one hour a day for seven days over a two-week span. After doing so, the follow-up scans noted increased activity in regions of the brain controlling language, reading, memory, and visual abilities.

"The results suggest that searching online may be a simple form of brain exercise that might be employed to enhance cognition in older adults," said Teena D. Moody, senior research associate at the Semel Institute at UCLA.

Study: Display Ad Click-throughs on the Decline

Pulkit Chandna — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:15:24 -0500

Online display ads account for around a third of the $40 billion online ad market. Advertisers mainly commission display ads to apprise internet users of their presence and not necessarily in the hope of immediate results. But click-through rates for display advertising have slumped to such abject levels that it is just too optimistic to expect immediate results with banner ads.

According to market research firm comScore, American internet users are increasingly becoming immune to display advertising. A recent comScore study found that the number of American internet users that click on a display ad at least once every month fell by 50% over a 20-month period. But according to Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore, it is not always correct to measure the success of online ads with number of clicks as the yardstick.

Image Credit: Donttreadonme.tv

Study Finds Windows 7 isn't Faster to Boot than Vista

Paul Lilly — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 08:06:16 -0500

Uh oh, Windows 7 might not trump Vista across the board after all. According to PC tune-up software company Iolo Technologies, the OS of the hour takes longer to boot than Vista in most cases, no matter what you might have heard.

Iolo claims its lab unit found that a new machine installed with Windows 7 takes a minute and 34 seconds to fully load. Vista, on the other hand, takes a minute and 6 seconds, the company said. This isn't a straight boot time into Windows, says Iolo, who records how long it takes each OS to boot into a usable state where "CPU cycles are no longer significantly high and a true idle state is achieved."

Further crashing the Windows 7 party, Iolo says the situation becomes more dramatic over time. On a three-month old machine, Windows 7 took 2 minutes and 34 seconds to boot in Iolo's lab, or a minute longer than when first installed.