If there was one site that would change the world for ever, it would be the first ever website, created by internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee.

It went online on 6 August 1991 offering people help with using the brand new 'World Wide Web', rather modestly described as a "wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents". It's now archived at www.tinyurl.com/3apuu.

If Berners-Lee had known what was to come, he might have added: "This is going to be awesome!" READ MORE

This article is part of the ongoing Productivity Tips for Geeks series. cd is one of the most frequently used command during a Unix session. In this article, I’ve provided 6 cd command hacks, which will boost your productivity instantly and make it easier to navigate the directory structure from command line.

Hack #1: Use CDPATH to define the base directory for cd command

If you are frequently doing cd to subdirectories of a specific parent directory, you can set the CDPATH to the parent directory and perform cd to the subdirectories without giving the parent directory path as explained below. READ MORE

A photo of a mysterious notebook leaked on the Internet Wednesday is indeed one taken of Apple's next-generation MacBook Pro casing, AppleInsider can confirm. Meanwhile, some additional photos of a similar, but still unauthenticated 13-inch notebook have since surfaced.

According to people familiar with Apple's upcoming notebook offerings, the photo

(below) is that of a partial prototype of the company's new 15-inch MacBook Pro, revealing the left side of the unit as well as its keyboard and palm rest areas.

The verification adds yet another piece to the puzzle, with AppleInsider having previously authenticated an earlier photo showing the base of the unit as well as its top shell. When combined, the two photos offer a significant window into what consumers can expect Apple's new professional notebooks to look like when they're released to market in the coming weeks. READ MORE

On October 5, 1991, the young man who would one day become the world's most famous programmer - and the brand name and poster boy for the open source software movement - sent a message to a newsgroup announcing the birth of what would become the Linux operating system.

You can read that original message that marks the birth of Linux as an open source project, posted by Linus Benedict Torvalds, on Google's archive of a newsgroup called comp.os.minix .

It is hard to guess how many programmers and system administrators have been educated by the Linux development project, but it forms the core of what so many experts and newbies believe in terms of what an operating system should have in it, how that code is created, and how the systems software stack that rides atop of it is created and maintained. READ MORE

eBay is not going through the happiest of times. Not only has it found it necessary to make 1000 people – 10% of its workforce – redundant, it has had to own up to a serious breach of trust with its Internet telephony program, Skype. As the report from the Citizen Lab, Munk Centre for International Studies, the University of Toronto explained:

Here we have a major software tool used to make telephone calls and send instant messages over the Internet, advertising secure end-to-end encryption, and widely touted by activists and dissidents as a safe way to communicate sensitive information, logging sensitive keywords and uploading entire transcripts of conversations to servers in China, which themselves are insecure. How insecure? READ MORE

While I can't claim to be a great scholar or art critic or movie buff or historian, there's one appeal to credibility that I can make: I've played a ton of video games. On countless systems and across countless genres, I've played pretty much everything there is to play, including some of the serious games that Andrew Webster described

in yesterday's article. But in my lengthy gaming career, the one type of game that I'd never dabbled in was the "terrorist propaganda" genre. I'd long heard stories about evil terrorist games designed to indoctrinate youth with evil terrorist agendas, but I'd never actually played such titles. Indeed, it seems that few game reviewers have. READ MORE

Whether you're one of the legions of hard-core Xbox players or someone who's only played with the game console casually, get ready for an all-new Xbox Live.

Since the first announcement of the new approach to the massively popular service at E3 in July, some longtime fans have fretted that Microsoft is morphing it into a place for purely casual players at the expense of those for whom Xbox Live is nearly as much a home as where they actually live.

Well, based on a demo I got recently of the (not quite finished) new version of Xbox Live, I'd have to say, fret no more. READ MORE

The top two shows in this weeks list, Heroes and Prison break, were both downloaded over a million times in a week. Since both shows are ‘released’ on Tuesday, BitTorrent sites see a significant traffic increase on that day. The rest of the shows in this weeks list are less popular, but still got somewhere between 700.000 and 300.000 downloads. READ MORE

The BlackBerry syncing situation on Macs is, to put it lightly, abysmal (from RIM anyway). But it looks they're finally realizing people who own Blackberrys might just use a Mac too! Boy Genius brings us the first look at their BlackBerry Media Sync for Mac, a clean, appropriately Mactastic version of their standard PC program that'll sync music, photos, videos, and even iTunes playlists to BlackBerry devices.

It's not the final version, so the options are a bit limited, but it's definitely looking good. Here are a couple more screens, but you can see the rest at Boy Genius. Now if Microsoft would just make the Zune compatible, then Macs would finally be just like real computers. READ MORE

A first-person shooter (Commonly called FPS) is an action video game that involves "an avatar, one or more ranged weapons, and a varying number of enemies". FPSs render the game world from the visual perspective of the player character. FPS was one of the first genres to use key technologies such as 3D graphics, online play, and modding. Enhanced realism combined with graphic violence has also made FPS a common topic in ongoing controversies over video games. READ MORE

Reports have emerged indicating that Motorola is hiring developers with Java and Android expertise in preparation for launching a major mobile initiative on top of Google's software platform. This move reflects a new stage n the expansion of Motorola's mobile software strategy, which increasingly emphasizes the open source Linux operating system. READ MORE

Samsung, today announced its new S Series external hard disk drives. The Samsung S Series family consists of a 2.5-inch drive S2 Portable and a 1.8-inch HDD S1 Mini. The new external drives are designed in a sleek high glossy casing with a leather back-cover for a professional look and feel.

“With an explosive 20 percent annual growth in the notebook market, external hard drives have become a popular and rapidly growing data storage medium,” said Tae-Yeop Oh, vice president, storage marketing, Samsung Electronics. “Samsung’s line-up of external drives is tailored for demanding consumers who want the best in capacity, reliability and industrial design.”

Google is testing a new feature on its Maps site that adds geo-tagged video from YouTube to maps in the same way that photos are currently added.

A glimpse at the new service was possible on Wednesday when what appeared to be a Google internal page was made available to some users of Google Maps in Japan. The page appeared only sporadically but its difference to the typical Google Maps page was given away by a line of text along the top of the map that allowed users to "report a bug or send feedback" and to "view external version" of the service. READ MORE

Freeverse today announced the immediate availability of Tranquility for the iPhone and iPod touch. Tranquility offers relaxing, professionally-recorded environmental sounds designed to ease stress and help the user sleep. Beautiful images and gentle sounds calm the nerves, delight the senses and help soothe the savage beast that is our modern lives.

Along with an elegant interface and audio landscapes such as "Gentle Rain", "Ocean Waves", and "Desert Wind", Tranquility is the first iPhone application of its kind to include a full 60-minute relaxation and meditation track, entitled "A Journey Within".