oxford

After RIM's big PlayBook announcement two weeks ago, Google and Microsoft knocked out several Android and Windows Phone 7 devices of their own at CTIA and at Microsoft's recent Windows Phone 7 event, drowning out RIM just a tad. But it looks like the company is ready to fight back, or at least that's what this leaked Sprint ad from Boy Genius tells us. It looks like RIM is planning on a new handheld dubbed the BlackBerry Oxford, and it's slated to be a Sprint exclusive at launch.

Formerly known as the BlackBerry Style, the Oxford … Read more

A slew of geeky slang terms have made it into the the new third edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English.

Among the new entries are Interweb, defriend, hater, and tweetup, the definitions of which you can check out for yourself by clicking on those links.

We personally think this shows great progress, (except for "tweetup;" gawd that word sets our teeth on edge) but if you're a curmudgeonly, crusty old member of the grammar police you might want to hold on a minute before grabbing your truncheons.

Read more of "Interweb, defriend and tweetup make it into the dictionary&… Read more

Perhaps in a sign of how the plague of social media has numbed us all to the value of legitimate human connections, the New Oxford American Dictionary has picked the verb "unfriend," or "to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook," as its 2009 Word of the Year.

At the very least, it's a testament to the ubiquity of Facebook, which now has well over 300 million members around the world.

Facebook itself takes the process of "friending" and "unfriending" very seriously. It once sent warning notes to players of a third-party game called PackRat … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--As Google closes in on a November 9 deadline to submit a revised settlement in the Google Books case, it continues to pull out all the stops to reassure the world it has the best of intentions.

The controversy over Google's settlement with groups representing book authors and publishers rages on, almost a year after it was first reached. After Google was sued in 2005 for digitizing books without explicit permission, it reached a proposed settlement in October 2008 that would give it unique rights to scan out-of-print yet copyright-protected books, exciting some librarians but raising the ire of many … Read more

Remember that cute little Mini Coupe concept that was announced a few days ago? Neither do I, but perhaps you should take a second look because according to Chairman of the Board of Management, BMW AG, Dr. Norbert Reithofer, will be putting the Cooper Coupe into production at the Mini Plant in Oxford, alongside one other new model.

Specifically, the two new models will be based on the Mini Coupe concept and a concept that will be unveiled at the Frankfurt auto show.Details of the second model have not yet been announced.

Place your bets on whether the second … Read more

There are those who believe that computer games cause trauma rather than soothe it.

Scientists from Oxford University would like to spank that theory with a shovel, throw it to the ground, and kick it till it's unconscious.

In a piece of research that would not seem out of place on an episode of House, Oxford psychologists believe they have taken the first steps in showing that a concerted finger-waggle of your Tetris could help you forget the maniac who plowed straight into you at 60 miles an hour, the contorted features of the insane lover who just smashed … Read more

A group of academic publishers filed a lawsuit against Georgia State University officials on Tuesday, alleging a systematic abuse of copyrighted works in the online distribution of coursework reading materials.

Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Sage Publications allege the university "facilitated, enabled, encouraged, and induced" professors to upload the copyrighted materials to its online system for students to download, without first obtaining the necessary permissions or paying licensing fees.

The lawsuit, filed in a U.S. District Court in Georgia, may mark the first time publishers have challenged universities over the electronic distribution of written copyrighted … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Restrictive tools and rash approaches to security challenges are endangering the health of the online ecosystem, an Oxford University researcher warned Wednesday.

Jonathan Zittrain, who has written a book due out in April called The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It, gave a public talk on the issue Wednesday night at CNET's offices here. News.com hosted the talk--a first for our newsroom. The event, which drew 120 people, was sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

You can call Zittrain's theme the AOL-ization of technology. Instead of personal computers being able to run any … Read more

Gspell is a great little add-on for Mac users to add system-wide spelling recommendations from Google search results. For 10.4 users, Tiger's had spell-checking from the New Oxford American Dictionary built in, but even that has its limits when it comes to brand-new words and company names. Gspell's solution is to search Google to find spelling recommendations based on top results. This comes in handy when typing in people's last names, or site names that are slight variations of real words, such as Digg, Yelp, and CNET.

Gspell does have a few limitations. For one, it … Read more