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Apple CEO Steve Jobs on Wednesday rolled out Mac OS X Lion, the computer company's latest operating system.And with that, Apple has pretty much tapped out all the major big-cat names: Cheetah. Puma. Jaguar. Panther. Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard.
All have been used as nicknames for the software that runs Apple's computers.Craig Saffoe, curator of the Great Cats and Bears unit at the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, has worked with big cats for 16 years. And he says hope for a feline future at Apple is not lost.Want to make a bigger push into cloud computing, Mr. Jobs? There's the clouded leopard, Saffoe says.For a classy, ancient-Latin flair,Apple could shift into using genus and species names. Panthera and Tigrus sound cool to us."Of course, within the species you have several different subspecies," Saffoe said. [Read the full article]
"Fallout: New Vegas" starts off with a bang -- literally: Your character is shot in the head and buried, still alive, in a grave in the desert.The rest of the game is spent tracking down and meting out futuristic justice to the men responsible for scrambling your brain."Fallout New Vegas" was developed by Obsidian Entertainment and is not a direct sequel to the main "Fallout" series. It takes place in and around Las Vegas, Nevada, which was spared a direct hit from the nuclear attack that devastated the world during the Great War.Players will start by traversing the Mojave Wasteland and walking through a lot of desert landscapes and crumbling cityscapes before finally making it to New Vegas and the domain of the mysterious Mr. House.Two main political and military factions, the New California Republic and Caesar's Legion, are warring over possession of Hoover Dam, the region's only consistent supplier of electricity. [Read the full article]
This story is part of Our Mobile Lives, a weeklong CNN.com series about smartphones and their impact on our lifestyles and culture.(CNN) -- Matthew Callahan's laptop is sitting in its case, which is most likely where it will stay for the next nine months he's on the road.An actor in a touring production of "Legally Blonde The Musical," Callahan relies on his smartphone, an iPhone 4, to keep him connected to the outside world while he's on tour."It literally makes life on the bus completely fine," said the performer, who last toured in 2006 -- pre-smartphone."That was kind of a nightmare," he said. "I caught up on a lot of reading, but that's about all I could do. My laptop was a 15-inch monster that didn't fit very well on a bus. My seatmate wasn't happy."Thanks to his travels, Callahan realized his smartphone could double as a computer and TV. [Read the full article]
It didn't work. After much research, the cheapest phone he could make still cost about $20, only a dollar less than the cheapest on the market, he said.If he wanted to bring cheaper cell phone service to the world's poor -- people who can't afford a $25 mobile handset, many of whom live on $1 a day -- he had to come up with a new idea.It costs 10 to 20 cents to activate. It basically lets groups of people share a single phone, while still maintaining individual phone numbers and private accounts.CNN spoke with Waller, who is founder and CEO of a company called Movirtu Limited, after a lecture on Wednesday at the PopTech conference in Maine, an event focused on new ideas in technology that benefit society at large.There are over a billion people who do use mobile phone services today but do not own a mobile phone handset. So what they do is they borrow phones or they share a phone. [Read the full article]
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