Steve Ballmer to retire in 10 years from Microsoft?

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Alright, you’ve got me – any excuse to post this picture of Steve Ballmer I spotted over at the Fake Steve Ballmer blog. Still, Bill Gates’s retirement is already big news in the industry, and he’s not even received his gold watch yet!

Originally his late date of work was meant to be June the 27th (22 days left of peace and quiet, Melinda), however he’s still going to be working one day a week, and remain as the chairman of the board. Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft is understandably irritated by Gates’s lack of willingness to hand the reins over to him, commenting recently “I’m not going to need him for anything. That’s the principle. Use him, yes, need him, no”…

YouTube adds annotations to list of features, unfortunately it's incredibly annoying

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Noticed anything different about YouTube? Something…kind of annoying? In the last 24 hours they’ve rolled out a new feature, ‘video annotations’, that allows the uploader of a video to place text over the clip, similar to that of Hiroyuki Nishimura’s Nico Nico Douga video site, which Wired wrote about recently.

However, the chat bubbles and links can only be added by the account-holder, meaning your videos thankfully aren’t in danger of disappearing due to huge amounts of annoying text littering the screen. The links embedded within the video hot-link to other YouTube videos, creating memes. Embedded videos on other sites, like we often do here at Tech Digest, won’t display the text, and unfortunately when you do click on a link, the video stops and starts, halting your viewing of small dogs dressed in tutus…

Catch up on latest Lost episodes on your iPhone with VLC media player support

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Playing ill-gotten video files on your jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch just got easier, with Zottd porting the VLC media player to the devices, allowing easy drag and drop of MPEG/MPG, AVI and MP3 formats.

At the moment, support for the codecs VCD, DivX, WMA, WMV, FLAC and OGG is still being tinkered on, but he thinks he’ll have that figured out soon enough. Don’t all rush towards Bittorrent at once, folks…

Newman's COOL MAN MP3 player is the world's dorkiest yet

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It’s a fairly ugly and nondescript MP3 player, so why are we showing it to you, you ask? Check out the back of the player – it has a safety pin clip, so you can pin it to your lapel amongst the numerous musical buttons you’re rocking, reaffirming your indie cred. Or is that dork cred?

I’m thinking the latter, particularly because Newman has named this player the COOL MAN, complete with capitalised letters. The rest of the…

A few years too late, Sidekick collaborates with Tony Hawk for skater-friendly LX mobile

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Boy Genius Report has got the scoop on Sidekick’s collaboration with skating legend Tony Hawk for the LX handset, which is supposedly going to be confirmed tomorrow by the company, to the glee of all baggy-trousered men.

Whilst it may not make our shores for a good few more months, BGR claims it will go on sale in the US in mid-July, following an intensive advertising campaign. Decorated in urban blue designs, it will be video-heavy with the ability to capture footage plus ‘play and share’, no doubt via Bluetooth,…

Integrated iPod docking speaker system with a difference – Voix's slim MPX set-up

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Voix – no, not the social networking site – has announced an upgrade to their set of glossy black speakers with integrated iPod dock, the MPX 2.1 system, which we first saw early 2007.

With two twiggy speakers measuring a metre tall, they’ll accompany your flat-screen TV perfectly, pumping 72 watts through each unit, which both contain integrated subwoofers within the base delivering 36 watts each. The dock can take most…

Show your CMS preference with the blogger's guide to gang-signs

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Over the weekend Gizmodo ran a feature, showing ‘geek culture’ gang-signs which included Windows, Ubuntu, Linux and Apple signs. But what about gang-signs showing your preferred Content Management System?

Thankfully someone’s put together the blogger’s guide to gang-signs, so when you’re at the next TechCrunch or London Bloggers’ meet-ups, you can throw your hands in the air and align yourself with the Wordpress, Movable Type or Blogtron crew.

Click on the image above…