Dr. Eggman writes "Ars Technica heralds the coming of the creature editor for the highly anticipated Spore. A previously promised downloadable demo of the creature editor from the September 7th due game, will be available June 17th. Furthermore, a full version of the creature editor will appear as a standalone product at the same time for $10. According to EA 'The demo lets players shape, paint and play with an unlimited number of creatures, using 25 percent of the creature-making parts from Spore. Gamers can then share these creations with their friends, including seamless uploads to YouTube.'"
toomin writes "Reviews of the latest Ubuntu version, 8.04 Hardy Heron, are everywhere, but most of them are undertaken by geeks familiar with Linux. This guy sits his girlfriend down at a brand-new Ubuntu installation and asks her to perform some basic tasks. Some of them are surprisingly easy, others frustrate and annoy. There are lots of little usability tweaks he stumbles upon just by seeing the desktop experience from the point of view of the mainstream user."
Japanese electronics maker Matsushita's profit more than doubled in the January-March quarter, buoyed by strong sales of cell phones, flat-panel TVs and DVD players, the company said... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 11:10 am
Think that just because you've set your Facebook profile to private that your personal details are safe and sound? If you are like most social networkers who add "applications" to your page -- think again. Without realizing it you've given the developers the right to scrape anything s/he can. Source: Wired Top Stories | 28 Apr 2008 | 11:10 am
Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c90112) has announced the addition of "The 4G Era: IEEE 802.16e -Assessment Markets and Technologies" to their offering. This report researches the IEEE 802.16e technology and markets. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 28 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By Jennifer Maloney, Newsday, Melville, N.Y. Apr. 28--Nassau and Suffolk counties have won a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to regain more than $1 million in cut funding for HIV/AIDS services. The case, decided Friday in the U.S. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 28 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By Pat Burson, Newsday, Melville, N.Y. Apr. 28--From the time they're babies, kids have a ball splashing around in water -- be it bathing in the tub with a rubber duckie or frolicking with their parents in the backyard pool. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 28 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
Text of report by Caribbean Media Corporation news agency website MIAMI, CMC - In a rare decision, United States immigration authorities have temporarily spared the deportation of a pregnant Haitian woman in Miami on humanitarian grounds. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 28 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By Bill Graham, The Kansas City Star, Mo. Apr. 28--The Missouri Ozarks possess everything cougars need, except for an easy way to find a mate, according to a recently completed two-year study. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 28 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
Lenovo and LANDesk today announced Lenovo will offer LANDesk technology as the core of the new Lenovo ThinkManagement Console. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 28 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By John Markoff Researchers at Google say they have developed a software technology intended to do for digital images on the Web what the company's original PageRank software did for searches of Web pages. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 28 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By Nicholas D. Kristof Douglas McMeekin was a failed businessman in Kentucky, and Juan Kunchikuy was a hunter in a remote nook of the Amazon rain forest who killed monkeys, deer and wild pigs with a blowgun and poison darts. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 28 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By Micheline Maynard United Airlines and Continental Airlines are getting closer to a merger agreement and would like to wrap up a deal by the end of the week, according to people with direct knowledge of the discussions. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 28 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By Will Buss, Belleville News-Democrat, Ill. Apr. 28--Joe Tantillo is having a good year, and it's not over yet. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 28 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
Vois Inc. (http://www.vois.com) (pronounced "Voice") (OTCBB: VOIS) (OTCBB: VOISW), one of the faster growing, global social commerce, social networking communities for people ages 25 to 50, announced today that it has broken into the top 5,000 websites worldwide as per Alexa.com. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 28 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By Doreen Carvajal When Alicia Navarro began casting about for a memorable name for her new company, she confronted a brutal reality. All her brilliant ideas for an Internet domain name were taken. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 28 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By Bob Tedeschi If the Internet can make anyone a star, why can't it turn Barnes & Noble into one, too? The bookseller has taken another step away from its traditional business and into the online publishing world, rolling out Quamut.com, a site that teaches readers everything from the basics of football to how to build a Web site. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 28 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan has detected a strain of bird flu in four wild swans after stepping up checks following major outbreaks of the disease in neighboring South Korea, local and... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 10:58 am
Last week trendy micro-blogging service Twitter launched officially in Japan, after the company had "noticed a significant percent of Twitter usage consistently originating from Japan". At the time of... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 10:54 am
“If we have not concluded an agreement within the next three weeks, we will be compelled to take our case directly to your shareholders, including the initiation of a proxy contest to elect an alternative... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 10:46 am
By Andrew Liszewski I'm really enjoying this trend of lightweight, easy-to-fly RC planes and helicopters. Not only can they be enjoyed indoors where you don't have to deal with the wind, but they can easily... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 10:17 am
By Andrew Liszewski At one point panoramic photos and interactive viewers like Quicktime VR were pretty popular online, but over the years they've kind of disappeared like so many other internet fads... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 9:45 am
By Andrew Liszewski I wasn't exactly thrilled when I discovered there was a device that allowed people to use the same annoying ringtones they have on their cellphones, for their land line phones. But... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 9:32 am
HELSINKI (Reuters) - Nokia , the world's top cell phone maker, unveiled three new phone models on Monday, targeting the highly competitive market for mid-priced phones. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 9:20 am
eatonwood writes "Who is behind the RIAA's collections efforts? This comment at CallFerret says it is a company called PSC and lists a bunch of websites and contact information for them, but the connection to RIAA is still not completely clear (aside from the presence of a couple of clearly RIAA sites on the same server as PSC's). Anyone know anything more about who is doing RIAA's dirty work?"
We are in the early stages of a major phase transition. Whatever you call it, something new is brewing, and that nasty R word has a lot do with it. It is not the semantic web. That is a part of it, a big... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 8:45 am
By Johnson, Frances After years of low water due to drought and scanty snow melt, the level of Lake Powell, located at the border of Utah and Arizona in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, should rise 50 feet this season, opening up previously closed shortcuts and drawing more visitors to the lake this summer. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 28 Apr 2008 | 8:00 am
By Ali, Ann LANSING - A new property development is sprouting between the New River National River boundary and Mill Creek with input from the National Park Service and a partnership with Class VI River Runners. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 28 Apr 2008 | 8:00 am
By Anonymous Hailing what he termed a "perfect example of strong partnerships in action" Department of Conservation and Natural Resources Secretary Michael DiBerardinis applauded acquisition of a 34-acre tract that expands the adjoining Lackawanna State Park in Lackawanna County. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 28 Apr 2008 | 8:00 am
By Anonymous Development is underway for Keystone Commons, a new Class A professional office complex, which will sit on 8.3 acres in the East Mountain Corporate Center. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 28 Apr 2008 | 8:00 am
South Korea's first astronaut says she will do her best to help her country develop its own space technology. The 29-year-old bioengineer Yi So-yeon told a news conference Monday after Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 7:54 am
LANHAM, Md., April 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Integral Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: ISYS) ("Company") today reported financial results for the second quarter of... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 7:50 am
FORT LEE, N.J., April 28 /PRNewswire/ -- MyRegistry.com, the leader in online gift registry technology, announced today the official release of its new Facebook... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 7:45 am
With a string of hits to its name, Sony's London studio has become known for innovation. Steve Boxer found out what makes it special Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 7:35 am
HOUSTON, April 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Over sixteen Academic and Business women throughout Houston will be honored at the upcoming Association for Women in Computing 10th... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 7:30 am
SAN JOSE, Calif., April 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- CEVA, Inc. (Nasdaq: CEVA); (LSE: CVA) will announce results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2008 on April 29,... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 7:30 am
BEIJING, April 28 /Xinhua-PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- China Shen Zhou Mining & Resources, Inc. (Amex: SHZ) ("China Shen Zhou", or "the Company"), a... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 7:26 am
SOUTHPOINTE, Pa., April 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- ANSYS, Inc. (Nasdaq: ANSS), a global innovator of simulation software and technologies designed to optimize product... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 7:25 am
In between sessions of last February's Metaverse U, Henrik "Augmentationist versus Immersionist" Bennetsen and his team of Stanford grads descended on the panelists and speakers, getting their thoughts... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 7:20 am
In a recent survey, proportionally fewer cellphone users than in 2006 cited signal quality as their main reason for having switched to their current carrier, according to comScore, a research firm. And... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 7:10 am
A wheelchair user is praised for protecting the torch in Paris, and a student is vilified online after landing in the middle of a debate over Tibet. ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 7:00 am
Treatments have helped increase light sensitivity and improve vision for patients with Leber's, a rare form of visual impairment. ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 7:00 am
The game, to be released Tuesday, may force EA to increase its $2-billion offer. It's the video game that launched... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 7:00 am
The controversial technique could eventually help people with blindness caused by such vision disorders as macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 7:00 am
With every year that passes, the proportion of the population who grew up happily playing videogames increases Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 6:45 am
Two Google scientists presented a paper (pdf embedded below) at the World Wide Web Conference in Beijing last week that outlines their vision for the future of image search. Notably, the new image search... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 6:28 am
Bend, OR-based Azteria is making the rounds to make its first outside investment. Founded four years ago, Azteria has launched a Web-based platform to match hospital demands for nurses with nurses by their... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 6:23 am
Deviant writes "Speaking as an IT consultant, the one big gap in the Linux stack is in messaging / collaboration. MS Outlook with Exchange is a fine product on which many businesses truly rely, and it is almost impossible to match on Linux — server or desktop. The one competitor to MS in this space has been IBM's Lotus Notes / Domino, which has always had the general reputation of being expensive, bloated, and unfriendly. I certainly wouldn't have considered it for the small businesses that we usually sell on MS's SBS server product. That is why I was truly surprised to hear about the new Domino Express Licensing and Notes 8. This is a product that has native server and client versions for both Mac and Linux. Notes 8, now written in Eclipse, also includes an integrated office suite, Lotus Symphony. This could conceivably let a user do all of their work in one application. And you can now license the server and client components together for as low as $100/user. It's packaged for companies of 1,000 seats or fewer. Is this the silver bullet to take out the entire MS stack — server, client, and Office? Or will IBM drop the ball yet again?"
Mudpuppy's Magnetic Monster figures tin is a great gift for the monster-loving kid in your life -- it's a set of lovely illustrated magnetic monster body-parts to mix and match into your own gruesome creations. Comes with four reversible backgrounds for enacting monstrous dramas of your choosing -- and the tin is just the right size to stick the backgrounds on and build monsters upon -- great for car trips and the like. I found mine at the wonderful, friendly kid store Hello Sunshine in Toronto, but they don't seem to have it in their webstore, so here's a US retailer that'll sell you one over the web, for those of you not local to the shop.
Link
earthforce_1 writes "The vested interests of restrictive copyright are stacking the deck in Canada. The Public Policy Forum Symposium on intellectual property reform has bowed to pressure from certain interests and dis-invited noted copyright scholar Howard Knopf. The forum's stated mandate is '...to strive for excellence in government — to serve as a neutral, independent forum for open dialogue on public policy, and to encourage reform in public sector management.' For some reason, the US Ambassador to Canada and the former head of the Canadian Motion Picture Industry Association have been invited — apparently they are perceived to have a more neutral view of what Canadian copyright laws should be? More information at Howard Knopf's blog."
Avid Technology reported a $21 million quarterly loss; Teradyne shares gained on the company's first-quarter profit and second-quarter outlook. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 4:00 am
A fight between two robotics companies (one the maker of the Roomba) over plans for military battle bots involves a disgruntled former employee who starts his own company.
CAMBRIDGE - A coterie of A-list geeks, known not by face or name but by nom de blog and Web address, descended on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus this weekend for the Woodstock of the... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 28 Apr 2008 | 4:00 am
Nearly twenty years ago, people who had met online began to meet in person at the WELL office in Sausalito. These interviews from a WELL party, circa 1989, include me, Stewart Brand, Flash Gordon, M.D., Hank Roberts, Janey Fritsche, the late Tina Loney (the woman with the bird) and the late Bob Bickford. Party material courtesy of and copyright by InCA productions.
Link. The video is lacking only one thing: IDs for the people on the screen, as they talk. Anyone want to take a stab at that in the comments here?
timholman writes "After a series of burglaries and auto break-ins in my neighborhood, I'm thinking about adding some video security cameras to my home. To me, the object isn't just deterrence — if someone tries to break into my house or my car (parked on the street in front of my house), I'd like to provide a high-quality image of the perpetrator to the police. Inexpensive video surveillance systems, with their atrocious image quality, are nearly useless. The problem is being able to get good image quality at an affordable price. After some research, I've decided that using network cameras to FTP images to a central server over a HomePlug network is the best solution. However, good megapixel network cameras (e.g. Stardot or Axis cameras) can easily cost more than $1,000 each. Has any of you dealt with a similar situation? Is there any way to get reasonable quality (preferably open source) daytime and nighttime video surveillance equipment for home use without paying an arm and a leg? Is it better to go with a couple of expensive cameras, or a multitude of inexpensive cameras? Is paying two to three thousand dollars simply unavoidable if I want to monitor my front and back yards?"
Internet service providers are beginning to roll out the second wave of U.S. broadband services, which are 25 times faster than current broadband offerings.
Alice Marwick, Saturday's keynote speaker at ROFLCon, says the internet is a positive alternative to mainstream media culture, but it's important to turn a critical eye on online communities, which can be sexist, homophobic and racist.
Newscloud brings us news of a startup called E-Fuel promising to ship a home-brew ethanol plant, the size of a washer-dryer, for under $10,000 by the end of this year. We've had plenty of discussions about $1/gal. fuel — these guys want to let you make it at home. The company says it plans to develop a NAFTA-enabled distribution network for inedible sugar from Mexico at 1/8th the cost of trade-protected sugar, to use as raw material for making ethanol. A renewable energy expert from UC Berkeley is quoted: "There's a lot of hurdles you have to overcome. It's entirely possible that they've done it, but skepticism is a virtue."
TeknoFin notes a piece in the NYTimes on the fight RIM finds itself in as the smartphone market shifts to a consumer focus, impelled by the iPhone. For the last 10 years RIM has dominated a smartphone market consisting mainly of email-obsessed corporate professionals. Analysts wonder if RIM can hold on to their lead as their strengths — such as cozy relations with cell carriers worldwide — are diluted by new entrants Apple and Google, who are "vocally trying to dislodge the carriers from the nexus of the North American wireless market." One of RIM's strengths in the corporate market has been their security. Yet Apple executives have said that one-third of Fortune 500 companies were interested in giving iPhones — with all their known and potential security holes — to their employees.
Mariam writes "Free software developers from the non-profit NeoSmart Technologies have published a report detailing their experience with coding around Windows Vista's UAC limitations, including the steps they took to make their software perform system actions without requiring admin approval or UAC elevation. Their conclusion? That Windows Vista's improved security model is nothing more than a series of obstacles that in reality only make it more difficult for honest ISVs to publish working code and not actually providing any true protection from malware authors. Quoting from the post: 'Perhaps most importantly though, is the fact that Windows Vista's newly-implemented security limitations are artificial at best, easy to code around, and only there to give the impression of security. Any program that UAC blocks from starting up "for good security reasons" can be coded to work around these limitations with (relative) ease. The "architectural redesign" of Vista's security framework isn't so much a rebuilt system as much as it is a makeover, intended to give the false impression of a more secure OS.'"
Scientists use gene replacement therapy for the first time to dramatically improve sight in people with a rare form of blindness. The breakthrough, reported Sunday by the New England Journal of Medicine, has the potential to reverse blindness from other kinds of inherited eye diseases as well.
A month after ordinary Cubans won the right to own computers, the government is still keeping a rigid grip on Internet access. But thousands are finding their way online, and a daring few are posting blogs about life in the communist-run country.
Ian Lamont writes "For years, I've been frustrated by Blogger's relatively limited functionality and other problems. For instance, we've heard about Blogger's security flaws since the beginning of this decade. Blogger's latest problem, which lets bots bypass CAPTCHAs in order to set up spam blogs, is not just a sign of Google's disregard for security — it's symptomatic of Google's neglect of its Blogger service. For instance, Blogger is just now rolling out a feature that lets writers publish in the future, years after similar functionality was released in Wordpress and Moveable Type. Is Blogger destined to be a sideshow as long as Google keeps acquiring and building more high-profile services, such as Google Maps and YouTube?"
Clay Shirky's posted a transcript of a recent talk he gave on "cognitive surplus" -- the idea that automation gave us an enormous amount of free time to think and cogitate, and that sitcoms and other light entertainment from the past century were a way of absorbing that surplus, something we're just shaking off now:
[S]he shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.
The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because there's so much complexity.
[S]he shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."
