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One of Big Media's most controversial executives is back after a period of quasi-forced retirement.

Stephen Chao was fired from a top position at News Corp. after, in separate incidents, he hired a male stripper to disrobe at a company meeting and nearly drowned Rupert Murdoch's dog at a party.

Now he is forming a Web video company that he hopes to build into an educational alternative to YouTube.

The site, WonderHowTo.com, aggregates how-to videos, from the mundane, (like "how to tie a tie" and "how to market your lawn-care business in the winter") to the strange ("how to do Criss Angel's vanishing toothpick trick") and the off-color ("how to train your cat to use the toilet") and beyond.

Chao says the business melds his two primary interests: a fascination with the bizarre -- he worked as a National Enquirer reporter after graduating from Harvard -- and the media frontier.

"I'm a video freak and I love turning over rocks and finding stuff," he said by telephone in advance of a formal announcement Wednesday. "What I started to notice is that there is a lot of how- to information out there that is fabulous but kind of hard to find. We set out to make it easy."

Chao's resume includes his high-profile stint at the News Corp., where he helped create "America's Most Wanted" and "Cops" for Fox, as well as time at media companies run by Barry Diller. But Chao, 52, is perhaps best known for one of corporate America's most spectacular flame-outs.

In 1992, Murdoch fired Chao, considered a gifted but quirky executive, after Chao engaged a man to remove all of his clothes during a speech being delivered at a company management retreat.

The purpose was to drive home a point about decency, but Murdoch, seated in the audience next to Dick Cheney, then the U.S. secretary of defense, was not amused.

Now, after spending the better part of the last decade doing consulting work and surfing near...

Sit down, plug yourself in, look at the screen. The virtual doctor will see you now.

The future face of healthcare was unveiled yesterday, a virtual- reality doctor's office in a box -- a dramatic breakthrough in telemedicine, currently being trialled in a Scottish hospital, which is set to revolutionize the delivery of healthcare.

Within the next few years the diagnostic booth could be fully functioning and serving Scotland's remotest communities, transforming the way that patients in the country's most isolated areas can be assessed by both doctors and specialist consultants without ever seeing each other face to face.

Using the latest advances in computer and medical technology, doctors will be able to examine and diagnose the conditions of patients living hundreds of miles away -- monitoring a patient's heartbeat, their temperature, blood pressure, and carrying out a number of detailed medical examinations without having to leave their surgeries.

And eventually it is hoped that the virtual-reality surgeries could be housed in dedicated booths available for use by the public in community hospitals, community centers, and even supermarkets - improving the triage assessments currently being made by the out-of- hours NHS 24 service.

The system, known as "Health Presence", has been developed by the leading American technology company Cisco and is being assessed in a series of world-first patient trials at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary in partnership with the Scottish Center for Telehealth and NHS Scotland.

Currently the system is being tested in a small room within the accident and emergency center at the Royal Infirmary with the "virtual-reality" doctor in a separate room only a few yards away.

The first fully fitted booth is expected to go on trial at a more remote location later this year -- probably within a dedicated medical facility in Aberdeen -- but eventually it is hoped that hundreds of virtual-reality GP pods could be used to cover the country .

Mr James Ferguson, an emergency consultant and a leading specialist in telehealth,...

Gateway has two new quad-core computers -- and one of them features a dual HD/Blu-ray optical drive and a terabyte drive.

The GM5664 and GT5662 will bring AMD's Phenom processor, as well as DirectX 10 Technology, to the company's GM and GT series. Just as the high-definition DVD format war may be winding down, the GM5664 offers what the company calls a Hybrid-SuperMulti drive so users can enjoy either Blu-ray or high-definition (HD) DVDs. It also can write any kind of DVD or CD.

Entertainment Hubs

Glenn Jystad, Gateway's senior manager for consumer desktops, said the new quad-core machines marry "high-performance with affordability." The new models are designed as entertainment hubs for watching live TV and offer heightened realism for video games. Both machines feature the ATI Radeon HD 2400XT graphics card with HDMI high-definition output, and both ship with the Windows Vista Home Premium operating system.

The GM5664 is being touted by Gateway as an entertainment powerhouse for extreme gaming, digital photo and video editing, watching TV or movies, and storing media assets. Sporting an AMD Phenom 9600 Processor at 2.3 GHz, 3GB of memory and a 2MB L3 cache, it also contains an integrated TV tuner with remote control and HD capability. It can act as a TV or digital video recorder with viewing, pausing and recording.

A standard one-terabyte hard drive gives even the biggest collector a lot of space to fill up, and a SmartCopy button enables easy photo filing and transfers.

Commonplace Terabyte Drives?

The GT5662 isn't exactly a slouch, either. It has an AMD Phenom 9500 at 2.2 GHz, 3GB of memory a 2 MB L3 cache and a half-terabyte SATA II hard drive running at 7200 RPM. Both Phenom processors are part of the AMD LIVE series designed for entertainment.

With the GT5662 retailing at about $750 and the...