In every family, there’s generally at least one prankster. He loves to put Vaseline on a doorknob, saran wrap your car, or sneak the occasional whoopee cushion under your chair. And while it’s not always fun to be on the receiving end, we must admit, we’ve pulled a few jokes on people and enjoyed the laughs that ensued. As it turns out, helping others play jokes on friends and family can be a pretty lucrative business: In fact, Joel Comm, the developer of the iFart application for the iPhone and iPod Touch,

Microsoft has applied for a patent on metered, pay-as-you-go computing. U.S. patent application number 20080319910, published on Christmas Day, details Microsoft's vision of a situation where a “standard model” of PC is given away or heavily subsidized by someone in the supply chain. The end user then pays to use the computer, with charges based on both the length of usage time and the performance levels utilized, along with a “one-time charge.”

A computer with scalable performance level components and selectable software and service options has a user interface that allows individual performance levels to be selected,” reads the patent application's abstract. The patent application was filed June 21, 2007. “The scalable performance level components may include a processor, memory, graphics controller, etc. Software and services may include word processing, email, browsing, database access, etc. To support a pay-per-use business model, each selectable item may have a cost associated with it, allowing a user to pay for the services actually selected and that presumably correspond to the task or tasks being performed,” the abstract continues.

Hewlett-Packard’s ready to release its latest MediaSmart servers, and, for a change, they don’t hate the Mac.The EX485/EX487 are designed for home or home office use, in large part to enable you — or your friends and family — to access any media (music, photos, videos, etc.) via the Internet. You can network all your media files from all the computers in your home and create an online server that you can, in turn, make available to grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, godparents, best friends from high school,

Silverstone Sugo SG04 Case Review @ Ninjalane and other reviews from around the web can be found by visiting our forums!

“The smaller form factor has often been overlooked by many motherboard makers because it yielded a low return on investment but as we see the hardware segment evolve we will begin to see more case designs to support the new platform. In a way the SUGO SG04 will be the benchmark for all to follow.”

Acer Enhances Award-Winning Aspire 8930G Notebook PC with New Intel© Quad-Core Processor Technology Aspire 8930G-7665 Notebook Designed for Extreme Gaming and Multimedia Performance SAN JOSE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Acer America, part of the world’s third largest PC company (source: Gartner data, 3Q 2008), today introduced the Aspire 8930G-7665 notebook PC, utilizing the new Intel© Core™2 Quad Mobile Processor Q9000. The new quad-core processors allow for extreme mobile performance and speed

With the introduction of the new Intel Core i7 processor architecture, the company affectionately known as “Chipzilla” has once again topped itself in terms of performance. Intel planted a gift in the Core i7 launch in the form of the Core i7 920. This is Intel’s entry level Core i7 processor which runs at a stock speed of 2.66 GHz, not too far off from the high-end Core i7 965 Extreme model which runs at 3.2 GHz. While the high-end Core i7 965 sells for over $1,000, the Core i7 920 sells for a more palatable

Twitority is a new alternative to Twitters own search engine, promising better search results than those achieved using Twitters methodology. Over the weekend after Christmas, Seemic CEO Loic Le Meur put up a blog post saying Twitter’s search engine is insufficiently discriminating. If you’re looking for the best Twitter posts on a topic, he says, you want results from the most authoritative people to be ranked higher than Tweets from the rabble. Le Meur proposed a search engine that ranked Twitter posts

There’s a big kerfuffle brewing over on Facebook over the posting of photos showing moms breastfeeding their babies. Apparently, Facebook has not only pulled some of these photos, but it has also sent warnings to some users who posted the photos; and even terminated the account of at least one user. Facebook claims that the pictures it pulled were obscene. The ensuing response has been both a growing virtual protest and well as a physical protest that took place just this last weekend. On Saturday a “handful”

Swiss air rescue organization Rega says that an MP3 player was the key to locating two lost French tourists. No, the two weren’t found by rescuers listening for music. Rather, the light from the display of the MP3 player was enough for rescues to home in on. Rega said it received a distress call from the French tourists late Friday. Unfortunately, the phone battery went dead before they could be located. The tourists, one a skier and one a snowboarder, got themselves lost late Friday outside marked runs near

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