Dating and social network site BeautifulPeople.com has axed some 5,000 members following complaints that they had gained weight. The members were singled out after posting pictures of them that reportedly showed they had put on pounds over the holiday period.
The site allows entry to new members only if existing members vote them as sufficiently attractive to warrant it. The US, the UK, and Canada topped the list of excluded members. The site has always been unrepentant about its selection process, calling itself the largest network of attractive people in the world.
The move was reportedly prompted by members themselves, who police the membership of the site to maintain a high - if highly subjective - standard of attractiveness. As a business, we mourn the loss of any member, but the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld, said site founder Robert Hintze.
Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded.
A staggering majority of UK consumers are not getting the best out of their high-definition (HD) televisions, according to a survey. Although 56% of UK households now have an HD television, 91% still watch standard DVDs and get their television through standard set-top boxes. Full HD broadcasting can be viewed from Sky, Virgin and Freesat but will eventually be available on Freeview. For full HD, films must be played on an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player.
Games consoles that some consumers have already offer HD content. Sony's PlayStation 3 already has a Blu-Ray player built in, and the next versions of Microsoft's XBox 360 and Nintendo's Wii are rumoured to include Blu-Ray as well. However, the survey of 2000 adults showed 81% admitted to not getting the best from any of the hi-tech gadgets around their homes - from mobiles to laptops.
That means that many consumers who have all the technology in hand to view full HD may not be setting up the devices and the cables properly to do so.
Intel has unveiled a prototype chip that packs 48 separate processing cores on to a chunk of silicon the size of a postage stamp. The Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC), as it is known, contains 1.3 billion transistors, the tiny on-off switches that underpin chip technology. Each processing core could, in theory, run a separate operating system.
Currently, top-end chips for desktop computers typically contain four separate processors. Intel and rival AMD will both launch new six-core devices in 2010, allowing computers to simultaneously tackle a number of complex tasks, such as processing graphics. The chip has won the "cloud" name because it brings together the computing resources typically filling several racks in a data centre.
A computer that utilizes an electronic pen (called a stylus) rather than a keyboard for input. Pen computers generally require special operating systems that support handwriting recognition so that users can write on the screen or on a tablet instead of typing on a keyboard. Most pen computers are hand-held devices, which are too small for a full-size keyboard.
The pen has other cool tools. The special paper has a calculator printed on it, and if you tap its "buttons," the pen will perform math problems. Draw a piano keyboard, and the pen will play notes as you tap the keys.
A translation tool, which will allow users to write a word in English and get a translation in Spanish, should be available in mid-2009. It's called the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, and it contains an audio recorder and a tiny infrared camera that records everything the pen writes.
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