If you’re a Chicago resident, you are undoubtedly aware that the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) allows you to track the exact location of a number of bus lines through its CTA Bus Tracker website thanks to GPS. This, in turn, allows you to determine exactly where the closest bus is and when it will be arriving at your stop (since the busses are susceptible to traffic, they almost never arrive according to the predetermined schedule).

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A new report by the Ponemon Institute in conjunction with Intel claims that the average cost to the enterprise of a stolen or lost laptop is $49,246, once you factor in not just replacement but intellectual property loss, lost productivity, forensics, and other downsides.

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Richard Bookstaber, one of the original MIT math geeks gone bad (a.k.a. “quants”) and the guy who literally wrote the book on how to destroy Wall St. with computers, has been tracking what he calls the “arms race” in high-frequency, computer-automated trading. If he’s correct with his recently floated hypothesis that “the days for high frequency trading are numbered,” then this would be pretty bad news for Intel, AMD/ATI, and NVIDIA.

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AdMob has released its monthly Mobile Metrics Report for March, and to no one’s surprise, the iPhone and iPod touch are still hot devices for surfing the web on the go. Both are also hot devices for using mobile apps, too, as AdMob says that over half of the requests for ads from iPhones now come from third-party apps.

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It doesn’t pay to get excited about big-name titles being released for the iPhone. Sure, they sound like a good idea on paper, but the presentation is rarely up to snuff. I just spent $6 on SIlent Scope for the iPhone. Use context clues to work out how happy I am with that purchase.

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Knowing of my love of classic hardware, my editor sent me a link for brand new Dreamcast systems, in the box, selling at Thinkgeek for $99.99. That’s right, brand-spanking new. Never before played.

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I was a bit surprised the other day when an e-mail popped up from Chris Liscio of SuperMegaUltraGroovy Software. The surprising part wasn’t that he contacted me–we have looked at his software in the past and liked it. It turns out that not everyone has jumped ship for the iPhone express, and there is still quality Mac software being developed.

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AMD announced its first quarter earnings today, and, as expected, the company’s losses continue to widen. AMD posted a net loss of $0.66 per share, or $416 million, which is worse than the $0.60 per share net loss from the same quarter a year ago.

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The Snow Leopard beta process has been underway for a while now. In recent months, Apple has been releasing new test builds of the upcoming OS roughly four to six weeks apart. The schedule now appears to be changing a bit; Apple is preparing to release a new beta build of Snow Leopard at some point this week, according to AppleInsider, although it’s unclear exactly how significant the new build will be.

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The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which builds low-cost mobile computing devices for students in developing countries, has announced plans to update its XO laptop. The new model, which has been dubbed XO generation 1.5, will include a VIA processor instead of the aging AMD Geode processor that is included in the current XO model.

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