It's hard to understand why this "beauty mask" from the April, 1933 ish of Modern Mechanix never caught on: A NEW facial harness now on the market lays claim to the ability to improve miladys beauty... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 11:02 am
It's hard to understand why this "beauty mask" from the April, 1933 ish of Modern Mechanix never caught on:
A NEW facial harness now on the market lays claim to the ability to improve milady’s beauty. How the device is worn is illustrated in the photo at the left. Sagging chins are lifted and unbecoming wrinkles are smoothed out around the lips, cheeks and forehead, manufacturers claim. It is worn overnight, removed in morning.
On Sunday night, our family sat down to watch the Oscars. Out of the six of us, four had laptops. Jess was doing her spanish homework. Emily was Facebooking and IM'ing. Josh was playing facebook and miniclips... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 11:01 am
By Evan Ackerman If you demand on the best from your portable sound system, and you don’t mind looking (and sounding) like an absolute tool, you may want to consider blowing $500 on Sony’s... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 10:56 am
Kermit writes "Ars Technica has put together a green DIY system building guide. The idea is to build a PC offering decent energy efficiency as well as solid performance. The 'Green Gaming Box' draws about 125W at full load (not including a monitor); the minimalist 'Extreme Green Box' uses a mini-ITX case and a VIA CPU-motherboard combo for about 30W at typical load. If you want to mix and match components, or modify your current system so that it uses less energy, there are plenty of options for swapping out individual components."
I love to multi task when sitting at my desk. I’ve got four monitors running at any given time, and I think that’s a pretty good setup. However, if you really need a lot of workspace, you might... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 10:36 am
I love my latest digital camera because it takes CompactFlash memory, rather than SD. While that unfortunately meant that I was left with several useless SD cards, I was more than happy to shell out the... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 10:33 am
By Evan Ackerman You can never, ever have enough portable USB storage. Especially if that storage is in the form of upgradeable MicroSD cards, and especially if the storage vehicle performs some other... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 10:17 am
Scott Karp attempted to coin a new term on his Publishing2 blog today: link journalism. "Link journalism is linking to other reporting on the web to enhance, complement, source, or add more context to... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 10:00 am
By Evan Ackerman Don’t get me wrong, I love useless USB accessories just as much as the next guy, assuming the next guy absolutely hates useless USB accessories, and this USB Whack-It is one of the... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 9:38 am
By Andrew Liszewski While it’s technically not magic, Aerogel is still pretty cool. It’s a glass-like substance that’s composed of 99.8% air and uninterestingly enough was the very first... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 9:28 am
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Web search company Google Inc has agreed to build an undersea cable with five telecoms operators that will link the United States to Japan, and provide the capacity to Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:50 am
Real buildings and their inhabitants can be looked after remotely through replicas in virtual worlds like Second Life Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:43 am
Googling Yourself writes "Google announced that they will be part of a six-company consortium that will build a high-bandwidth sub-sea fiber optic cable linking the US and Japan. The new cable system, named Unity, is expected initially to increase Trans-Pacific lit cable capacity by about 20 percent, with the potential to add up to 7.68 Terabits per second of bandwidth across the Pacific. The name Unity was chosen to signify a new type of consortium, born out of potentially competing systems, to emerge as a system within a system, offering ownership and management of individual fiber pairs. Rumors that Google would join the consortium had originally surfaced in September last year but the company had declined to confirm or deny the news."
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistani Internet service providers may have inadvertently blocked the popular YouTube Web site across the world at the weekend when they restricted local access to... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:30 am
South Korean space scientists have perfected an orbit-safe version of kimchee and many other local delicacies:
After millions of dollars and years of research, South Korean scientists successfully engineered kimchi and nine other Korean recipes fit for space travel. When the Russian space authorities this month approved them for Ko's trip, the South Korean food companies that participated in the research took out full-page newspaper ads...
Ordinary kimchi is teeming with microbes, like lactic acid bacteria, which help fermentation. On Earth they are harmless, but scientists fear they could turn dangerous in space if cosmic rays cause them to mutate. Another problem is that kimchi has a short shelf life, especially when temperatures fluctuate rapidly, as they do in space.
1. What does the word "apex" refer to: the highest point, the lowest point, or the exact middle of something? 2. Who was the longest-reigning king or queen of Britain? 3. Which Asian country produced the warriors known as the Samurai? 4. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
Councillors will rule soon on plans for a new north-east hotel and pub development which could create more than 50 jobs. The deadline for any objections to Fife-based Hermiston Securities' plans to build a 45-bedroom hotel on the outskirts of Peterhead is just two weeks away. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Suzanne Perez Tobias, The Wichita Eagle, Kan. Feb. 26--The Wichita school board voted unanimously Monday to hire a director of equity and accountability to help guide the district's transition away from mandated busing for integration. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
The strandline of a popular beach has been scattered with dozens of ceramic toilet bowls as part of a campaign to make people think more carefully about what they flush away. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
Notice is hereby given of seizure of ONE THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED AND ELEVEN DOLLARS ($1,711.00) UNITED STATES on JANUARY 11, 2008 at 377 SAND PIT ROAD, COLUMBIA COUNTY, HARLEM GEORGIA 30814 by members of the COLUMBIA COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Cramer, John MILLTOWN - One hundred years after producing their first power, Milltown's hydroelectric works - and the dam that made them possible - are being dismantled. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
Thousands of pounds are being spent to provide a focal point for the Mid Argyll community - in the centre of a forest. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Marcia Castle Rejected plans for a sewage treatment works at Boscastle will go before Cornwall's planners again on Thursday. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Reid Magney, La Crosse Tribune, Wis. Feb. 26--New federal floodplain maps drew a small crowd Monday as homeowners checked out the status of their properties. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Murphy, Kevin MADISON - A $250,000 state grant approved Wednesday by the State Building Commission brings organizers of the La Crosse Hmong Cultural and Community Center within $350,000 of their $2.1 million fundraising goal. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
Transitive(R) Corporation, the leading provider of cross-platform virtualization software that enables transportability of applications across processor and operating system pairs, announced at the VMworld Europe 2008 conference today that its QuickTransit(R) for Solaris(TM)/SPARC(R)-to-Linux(R)/x86-64 Virtual Appliance has been certified by VMware's Virtual Appliance Lab, and will be listed in VMware's popular Virtual Appliance Marketplace. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
It would be wonderful if this review of the newest cyber-torture-stalker-thriller could begin with the words "Untraceable is unwatchable," but sadly that would be a lie. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
SUSPICIOUS spouses can check out their husband or wife's deleted texts with a new gadget. The pounds 76 device can get all the data off a mobile telephone's sim card - including messages and numbers that have been deleted. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
By Anne Jungen, La Crosse Tribune, Wis. Feb. 26--A child pornography charge was filed Monday against a Western Technical College instructor accused of e-mailing sexually graphic materials of children to lure online users to private chatrooms. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
CANNES, France, Feb. 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- VMware, Inc. the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, has set a record in system capacity and resource utilization for running Microsoft Exchange. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
CANNES, France, Feb. 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- VMware and HP today announced VMware's ultra-thin hypervisor software, VMware ESX 3i, is expected to be broadly integrated and available beginning March 31, 2008, on 10 models of HP ProLiant servers. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
MUNICH, Germany and CANNES, France, Feb. 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Fujitsu Siemens Computers and VMware Inc. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
RadiSys Corporation (NASDAQ:RSYS), a leading global provider of advanced embedded solutions, announced today the introduction of a COM Express module that targets value-priced industrial automation, gaming, and test & measurement applications. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
Federal regulators on Monday approved a long-pending deal allowing News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch to swap his controlling interest in satellite broadcaster DirecTV Group Inc. for a larger stake in... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
Federal regulators said Monday that they were prepared to discipline Internet service providers that secretly favored certain types of data traffic, like Web surfing, over others, like file sharing. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
Shares of Asyst Technologies Inc. rose 14% on Monday after private-equity firm Gores Group revealed it had offered to acquire the semiconductor-equipment maker for $298 million. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 8:00 am
Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels over the years, this shot of a Star Wars-esque coin-op toilet in the Clerkenwell Road near my office in London. Love the Comic Sans!
Link
Quake Live is an in-browser, multi-player version of Quake III, supported by ads.
"...QUAKE LIVE offers game players of all skill levels a totally free and easily accessible multiplayer gaming experience and community through a single website at quakelive.com.
"Every element of the experience, including friends lists and communication, sponsored events and tournaments, matchmaking, stats tracking, and even the game itself is accessed and delivered free of charge through the web browser."
Fred sez, "Those who rent videos from iTunes to play back on their Apple TV units may discover that they can't watch them unless their displays support HDCP -- the DRM technology that infects most Hollywood digital video these days."
When I attempted to watch the movie, however, the Apple TV displayed an error message: "This content requires HDCP for playback." HDCP (High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) is a form of digital rights management (DRM) that prevents you from playing video over
DVI and HDMI connections (in my case) if you don't own compatible hardware that can decode the signal properly. (In other words, HDCP is more crap DRM that does nothing but irritate legitimate
customers.)
Of course, people who use the Pirate Bay to get the same videos for free have no such problems. Hollywood only punishes paying customers. Smooth.
Link
Marilyn sends us "Photos of the only road from the west into La Paz, Bolivia, only 5 feet wide in parts, with 400 m drop over the edge."
Commonly referred to as “Death Road”, the only route western route into La Paz, Bolivia, the road gets its name from its extreme nature. Narrowing to only five or six feet in certain areas with a total elevation drop of 3000m in only 80km, Death Road has certainly earned its reputation. Fatalities can exceed over 100 annually. The road is frighteningly tight, slippery and extremely bumpy thanks to a scattering of rocks on its surface. Despite all of the danger, the scenery is breathtaking. The beautiful waterfalls easily draw the driver’s attention away from the 400m drops over the edge. Surprisingly, the majority of the traffic fatalities are a result of head-on collisions rather than falls. At the height of its infamy, Death Road averaged 400 deaths per year.
Barak OBollywood is a Hindi-film-style music video starring remixed footage of Barak Obama, cleverly cut so that he appears to be singing along. I dont know if the lyrics are political at all -- that would be extra credit, for sure.
Link
(via Neatorama)
TSA Gangstaz is a sophomoric and extremely funny gangsta rap videos about airport security -- "Belt buckle money clip coins keys wallet purse/put some cheese on it run it through."
Link
(Thanks, Yad!)
Wired's editor-in-chief Chris Anderson is working on a new book, to be published next year, about the idea of "free" in the old and new economies. Wired is running a long excerpt from the book and some sidebars about the economics of giving away, e.g., CDs and directory assistance. Techdirt has a few quibbles about Anderson's ideas — mostly areas in which he may be shading the argument to sell more books — but mostly buys that the equations of economics continue to work when zeros are plugged in in judicious places.
TOKYO (Reuters) - Sony Corp and Sharp Corp , the world's second- and third-largest liquid crystal display TV makers, said they would set up a joint venture to make and sell large LCD... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 6:05 am
TOKYO - A group of six international companies, including Google, is building a $300-million underwater fibre optic cable linking the United States and Japan. The trans-Pacific... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 6:02 am
China's heavily-polluting and energy-intensive companies will be forced to make full disclosures of their environmental impact, state media reported Tuesday. All companies,... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 5:45 am
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Texas Instruments Inc unveiled new application chips on Tuesday that can be used in everything from music players to medical equipment, with an aim of expanding its... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 5:20 am
IBM Corp. rolls out a new mainframe computer Tuesday boasting a 50 percent performance boost and dramatically lower energy costs than its predecessor. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 5:05 am
IBM Corp. rolls out a new mainframe computer Tuesday boasting a 50 percent performance boost and dramatically lower energy costs than its predecessor. The new System z10, with a... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 5:01 am
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) and the Cleantech Group announced today the official launch of a Web-based tool to... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 5:00 am
TEL AVIV, Israel, February 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Ceragon Networks Ltd. (NASDAQ: CRNT) (TASE: CRNT), a leading provider of high-capacity Ethernet and TDM wireless... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 26 Feb 2008 | 5:00 am
The FCC held its hearing on network neutrality and Comcast today at Harvard. One commentator not afraid to predict what will come of it is O'Reilly's Andy Orem, who writes: "The mere announcement of an FCC hearing on 'broadband network management practices' was a notch in the gun of network neutrality advocates. Yet to a large extent, the panelists and speakers were like petitioners who are denied access to the king and can only bring their complaints to the gardeners who decorate the paths outside his gate. What we'll end up getting is a formal endorsement of non-discrimination as a policy that Internet providers must follow, leading to continual FCC review of current practices by telecom and cable companies."
S.O.S. When a massive freighter packed with a $103 million cargo tilts onto its side in the North Pacific, a team of deep-sea cowboys gets the call. Inside the epic struggle to save the Cougar Ace.
morrison writes "The 2008 Google Summer of Code is on. We have discussed this four-year-old tradition before (2005, 2006, 2007). Google will once again be hosting a program that gives computer science students a $4,500 stipend to work on open source software projects. Last year, Google funded over 900 students' projects in more than 90 countries. As noted in the program FAQ, this year they hope to do even more. The #gsoc IRC channel on Freenode is already buzzing with activity."
British air ministers are sufficiently impressed by a demonstration of the new technology to install radar stations along the coast. Five years later, radar swings the balance in the Battle of Britain.
The web's "media business model" requires a whole new approach to building your brand. Offer your own strategies for making money within the culture of Free on Wired.com's How-To Wiki.
The 24th annual TED conference will gather 1,100 luminaries in the fields of technology, entertainment and design to discuss "big questions," including a unified theory of everything and an explanation of where evil comes from.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "We all know that false or misleading science headlines are all too common these days and that misleading media combined with an apathetic and undereducated public lead to widespread ignorance. But the real question is, how can this trend be reversed? At a session at the recent AAAS meeting, a studies was discussed indicating that what matters most is how the information is portrayed. While people are willing to defer to experts on matters of low concern, for things that affect them directly, such as breast cancer or childhood diseases, expertise only counts for as much as giving off a 'sense of honesty and openness,' and that it matters far less than creating a sense of empathy in deciding who people will listen to. In other words, it's not enough to merely report on it as an expert. You need to make sure your report exudes a sense of honesty, openness, empathy, and maybe even a hint of humor."
edremy writes "Blackboard, the dominant learning management system (LMS) maker, has won its initial suit against Desire2Learn. Blackboard gets $3.1 million and can demand that Desire2Learn stop US sales. (We discussed Blackboard when the patent was issued in 2006) This blog provides background on the suit. Blackboard has been granted a patent that covers a single person having multiple roles in an LMS: for example, a TA might be a student in one class and an instructor in another. You wouldn't think something this obvious could even be patented, but so far it's been a very effective weapon for Blackboard, badly hurting Desire2Learn and generating a huge amount of worry for the few remaining commercial LMSs that Blackboard has not already bought, and open source solutions such as Moodle (Blackboard's pledge not to attack such providers notwithstanding)."
stinkymountain writes to tell us that NetworkWorld got their hands on Microsoft's latest addition to the server OS market and had a chance to poke around inside Windows Server 2008. It seems that the new release is a vast improvement over older versions in both security and performance but still lacking in several key areas. "There's even a minimalist installation called Windows Server Core that can run various server roles (such as DNS, DHCP, Active Directory components) but not applications (like SQL Server or IIS dynamic pages). It's otherwise a scripted host system for headless operations. There's no GUI front end to a Windows Server Core box, but it is managed by a command line interface (CLI), scripts, remotely via System Manager or other management applications that support Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), or by Remote Terminal Services. It's also a potential resource-slimmed substrate for Hyper-V and virtualization architectures."
After briefly flirting with the idea of running for a congressional seat left empty by the death of Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif, Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig says that he won't after all.
Mac developers, like their PC counterparts, now have the chance to tap the parallel processing power of GPUs thanks to a new CUDA toolkit and SDK from Nvidia.
The family of a 15-year-old girl who killed herself after having sex with an adult she met online is suing MySpace for allegedly facilitating their communication -- though court records show the two didn't meet over the social networking site.
Mac developers, like their PC counterparts, now have the chance to tap the parallel processing power of GPUs thanks to a new CUDA toolkit and SDK from Nvidia.
As the monsters of moviemakers' imaginations increase in size and power, we speculate on the kinds of advanced real-life weaponry it would take to wipe them out.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "A federal judge in Connecticut has rejected the RIAA's 'making available' theory, which is the basis of all of the RIAA's peer to peer file sharing cases. In Atlantic v. Brennan, in a 9-page opinion [PDF], Judge Janet Bond Arterton held that the RIAA needs to prove 'actual distribution of copies', and cannot rely — as it was permitted to do in Capitol v. Thomas — upon the mere fact that there are song files on the defendant's computer and that they were 'available'. This is the same issue that has been the subject of extensive briefing in two contested cases in New York, Elektra v. Barker and Warner v. Cassin. Judge Arterton also held that the defendant had other possible defenses, such as the unconstitutionality of the RIAA's damages theory and possible copyright misuse flowing from the record companies' anticompetitive behavior."
Croakyvoice writes "Fans of Homebrew on the Nintendo Wii can celebrate with an explosion of releases today, in just a few hours there has been a release of a proof of concept version of Linux for the Wii, an MP3 Player, the Super Nintendo emulator Snes9X has been ported and a converter that converts Gamecube Dol files into Elf for usage on the Wii (Which opens up a multitude of emulators and homebrew games and applications). A tutorial on how to get homebrew working with the Twilight Hack will help those interested."
If a photograph seems to good to be true, maybe it is. Photoshopping has made photo manipulation so easy that photojournalism is suffering a credibility crisis.