Is the arrow between the "E" and the "X" intentional, or is it serendipitous, a hidden corporate logo easter egg of sorts?
'Ghost Rider' sets box office ablaze
Comic adaptation takes in $44.5 million
By IAN MOHR
Variety.com
'Ghost Rider'
NEW YORK - Sony's Marvel comic adaptation "Ghost Rider" revved an estimated $44.5 million over the first three days of the extended President's Day frame, easily taking No. 1 at the domestic B.O. and becoming the biggest opening of the year so far.
Studio was estimating Sunday morning that the pic could roll to $51 million over four days, which would make it the biggest President's Day opening ever, surpassing Adam Sandler comedy "50 First Dates," (which hit $45.1 million over four days in 2004).
Watch videos from all over the Web right from your Wii with Stumble Video's new Wii-focused video channel:
The revamped video site includes an interface specifically designed for the Wii's Opera browser. Wii owners can use their consoles to navigate through StumbleUpon's video search functions and channel menu, rate and recommend videos, and "discover" more videos that specifically fit their rating histories.
I tried this on my spankin' new Wii and it actually works pretty well; some of the videos are a bit fuzzy, but that's to be expected with the different resolutions. However, overall I found it easy to use..
My team is the San Diego Chargers, who finished up an historic and fantastic regular season with a spectacular flameout in their first playoff game. I will be rooting for the Colts tomorrow, since I usually root for the AFC team in the Superbowl and I'd like to see the "can't win the big one" monkey tossed off of Peyton Manning's back.
The flying car is the equivalent of transportation's carrot on a stick. It's a concept that always seems to be 3-5 years down the road. According to an Isreali inventor named Rafi Yoeli, the flying car will actually be here by 2010 in the form of his X-Hawk. The X-Hawk uses a ducted fan design that allows it to have the same manueverability of a helicopter without exposed blades that prevent choppers from hovering near buildings and the like. Yoeli's own company, Urban Aeronautics, is developing the X-Hawk first as a workhorse vehicle that could be used by firefighters, rescue teams, and the military to aid in the recovery of people stranded in hard to reach places.
Like a helicopter, the X-Hawk can take off and land vertically, it will be able to fly up to 155 mph, reach an altitude of 12,000 ft and remain in the air for two hours. The size of the X-Hawks rotors, which are powere by four internal combustion engines, will be much smaller than a helicopters, which will make the vehicle quieter but also guzzle 50% more fuel. The X-Hawk only exists as a full-scale mockup right now, but Yoeli expects an unmanned Mule version to fly in 2009. A larger version capable of carrying ten people is also planned. The estimated price for an X-Hawk will make a Veyron owner blush: between $1.5 and $3.5 million, and Yoeli admits those estimates might be low.
A senior Dell executive has admitted the company could look to make a gaming handheld in future. Global gaming chief Abizar Vakharia was speaking at Dell's European Innovation event in Marbella. There, Dell had earlier launched the XPS 710 H2C top-line gaming PC.
When quizzed about a future handheld, Vakharia looked serious as he said: "You know, that's definitely one that's on the radar screen, but we have no plans to talk about anything today."
Dell has made no secret of its desire to grow share in the gaming space, underlined by last year's acquisition of Alienware, but it would be some departure for such a major box shifter to launch a portable gaming device.
Any such handheld would be almost certainly a Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC) style device because of Dell's close connections with Intel and Microsoft.
Big media companies and governments ultimately can't stop or reverse their reduced agenda setting power brought about by the Internet and digital media, but must learn to live with it and embrace it as an opportunity, a panel at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland said Friday. Big media conglomerates have less influence amid the continued explosion of news sites, blogs and podcasts, News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch said in the session moderated by Charlie Rose and available via Webcast. "It's so pluralistic," Murdoch said. "We all have less power, much less...(we) the big companies."
ABC, Touchstone TV and the producers behind "Lost" are actively discussing how and when to retire the hit castaway drama.
According to "Lost" exec producer Carlton Cuse, picking an end date for "Lost" would help the show's creative team to map the next several seasons as they plot the show's thick mythology.
"It's time for us to find an endpoint to the show," said Cuse, speaking Sunday at ABC's portion of the TV Critics Assn. press tour. "It's a struggle for us, because we don't know if we have three years, four years or more to go. If we had an endpoint, then we could figure out where everything goes."
Such a move would placate fans of the show, who frequently gripe that they have no indication whether the show's ever-increasing mysteries will pay off. A set timetable would send a message to viewers that all of their questions will be answered eventually.
The iPhone started out the way a lot of cool things do: as something completely different. A few years ago, Steve Jobs noticed how many development dollars were being spent--particularly in the greater Seattle metropolitan area--on what are called tablet PCs: flat portable computers that work with a touch screen instead of a mouse and keyboard. Jobs, being Jobs, was curious. He had some Apple engineers noodle around with a touch screen. When they showed him what they came up with, he got excited.
So excited he forgot all about tablet computers. He had bigger game to hunt.
Jobs had just led Apple on a triumphant rampage through a new market sector, portable digital-music players, and he was looking around for more technology to conquer. He found the ideal target sitting on his hip. Consumers bought nearly a billion cell phones last year, 10 times the number of iPods in circulation. Break off just 1% of that, and you can buy yourself a lot of black turtlenecks. "It was unanimous that this should be it," Jobs says. "It wasn't even by a little, it was by a mile. It was the hardest one too." Apple's new iPhone, which will be available in June, could do to the cell-phone market what the iPod did to the portable-music-player market: crush it pitilessly beneath the weight of its own superiority. This is unfortunate for anybody else who makes cell phones, but it's good news for those of us who use them.
This could be huge. The touchscreen looks to be a killer app that would certainly appeal to fans of iPods as well as devices such as the Motorola Q, Samsung Blackjack and other multiple-use cell phone devices. Apple has proven themselves to excel at design and the form and function of their products are as sleek and slick as they come. This could complete the transformation of Apple from a computer company to a full spectrum consumer electronics company.
