Archive for the ‘technology’ category

How many men vs. women use social network sites

November 30th, 2009


socialnetworkgraphArticle from Derek Baird via Barking Robot on Males vs. females on social networking sites. He reports:

To determine the ratio between male and female users on these sites we used site demographics data for the United States gathered from Google’s Ad Planner service.

Before we move on to the chart, here are a few quick observations based on the results we got.

* 84% (16 out of 19) of the sites have more female than male users.
* The social news sites Digg, Reddit and Slashdot have significantly more male users than female. The standout here is Slashdot which takes male geekdom to new heights with 82% male users. :)
* If we hadn’t included the three social news sites, all of the sites would have had more females than males.
* Twitter and Facebook have almost the same male-female ratio; Twitter with 59% female users and Facebook with 57%.
* The most female-dominated site? Bebo (66% female users), closely followed by MySpace and Classmates.com (64%).
* The average ratio of all 19 sites was 47% male, 53% female.

And here’s a chart with the male/female ratio for all the sites, for your viewing pleasure:

from this source at royal.pingdom.com

Man fakes moon landing

October 31st, 2009


from this article …

After hearing about preparations for the 40th anniversary of the moon landing at Kennedy Space Center last year, British engineer Iain Sharp decided to develop a tribute of his own. His offering, a remake of the 1979 Atari game Lunar Lander, in which players try to settle a module onto the moon’s surface, is a complex mix of scrapped PCs, fishing line, inkjet printer motors and miniature space vehicles.

To enhance the retro look, Sharp suspended the lander from a moving carriage with the fishing line. As the line unspools and the lander descends, the player turns a modified car steering wheel to rotate the module and then hits a button to fire the “rockets” and push the craft in the direction it’s pointing. The line spools up, and printer motors shift the carriage along a track, carrying the lander across the moonscape. more …

Low Cost MacBook

October 30th, 2009

from this articleMacBook 2009
The new 13-inch MacBook brings the company’s “white plastic” model in line with the rest of its notebook offerings, but remains distinguished from the 13-inch MacBook Pro by its slightly larger and heavier polycarbonate body, limited upgrade options for CPU and RAM, and a few significant missing features: no FireWire, no backlit keyboard, no SD card reader, no external battery level indicator, and no IR receiver for using an Apple Remote.

Previous versions of the lower-end MacBook cut costs by supplying a whimper GPU or video output options and supplying a slower processor, but today’s version uses the same NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics chip supplying the same output display features, and supplies the same 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo processor with a 1066MHz front side bus and the same 2GB of fast DDR3 RAM as the entry level MacBook Pro. The new MacBook also delivers a much improved, LED backlit display that’s much closer in quality to the 13.3-inch MacBook Pro. more …