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In July of 1861 (Watkins) went to Yosemite--with a dozen mules to carry his mammoth plate camera, which uses 18 by 22 inch glass plate negatives; a stereoscopic camera; tripods; glass plates; chemicals; other supplies and a tent for a darkroom. The trails into and through the valley were spectacularly scenic, but also treacherous.Carleton Watkins (Smithsonian)
Watkins returned from Yosemite with 30 mammoth plate and 100 stereoscopic negatives. They were quickly revered as images of superb technical and artistic quality. Watkins explained that he was just able to select the spot which "would give the best view." He was also a patient and precise camera and developing process technician. One reviewer admired Watkins' photographs for their "clearness, strength and softness of tone." In part because of Watkins' Yosemite pictures, in 1864 Congress passed and President Lincoln signed legislation preserving Yosemite Valley. The law was an important first step in the creation of the National Park Service in 1916. In 1865, Mount Watkins in Yosemite was named after Carleton Watkins.
Reuters - Yahoo Inc on Monday sought to rally
shareholder support for its board of directors and management
amid a proxy battle with billionaire Carl Icahn, saying the
investor had outlined an "ill-defined plan" for the future of
the Internet company.
 The Tech Herald | Sprint on an upswing? FierceWireless - By Sue Marek Competitors are starting to notice an upswing in Sprint's business. The Wall Street Journal reports that Verizon President Denny Strigl told investors that Sprint's performance has improved over the past 30 days. Sprint Nextel Turning Around? One of the Biggest Selling Points of the iPhone is the Mobile Apps |
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 PhysOrg.com | Microsoft Stops Selling Windows XP WJTV - By Alana Jackson Today is the last day Microsoft will sell Windows XP operating system to retailers and major computer makers. As a result some PC users protesting that they don’t want to be forced into using XP’s successor, Vista. XP is dead: No more dodging the Vista bullet? Microsoft to stop selling Windows XP on Monday |
 Product Reviews | PlayStation3 Firmware v2.4 Details Revealed Techtree.com - We have some good news for PlayStation 3 fans: details on firmware update v2.4 have just been released and the changes read like a PS3 fan's wish-list come true. Sony Announces PS3 Firmware 2.40 Sony To Release PS3 Firmware 2.40 Wednesday, In-Game XMB |
Air India on Thursday said a plane had overshot its Mumbai destination on June 4 but furiously denied it was because the pilots were sleeping, putting the glitch down to a brief communications breakdown.Sleeping pilots? (AFP, via Fortean Times)
"The report is absolutely incorrect, devoid of facts, misleading and irresponsible. It is a figment of imagination," Air India spokesman Jitender Bhargava told AFP by telephone from Mumbai.
"We have gone through the flight reports of the last 30 days. A plane did cross Mumbai for 15 kilometres because it had lost contact for a few moments. At those speeds 15 kilometres is covered in a very short time."
Pre-Columbian sounds (Associated Press)The Aztecs sounded the low, foghorn hum of conch shells at the start of ceremonies and possibly during wars to communicate strategies. Hunters likely used animal-shaped ocarinas to produce throaty grunts that lured deer.
The modern-day archaeologists who came up with the term Whistles of Death believe they were meant to help the deceased journey into the underworld, while tribes are said to have emitted terrifying sounds to fend off enemies, much like high-tech crowd-control devices available today.
Experts also believe pre-Columbian tribes used some of the instruments to send the human brain into a dream state and treat certain illnesses. The ancient whistles could guide research into how rhythmic sounds alter heart rates and states of consciousness.
 Canada.com | VARs Less Hyper About Microsoft Virtualization Launch CRN - By Joseph F. Kovar, ChannelWeb Solution providers say there's little chance that Microsoft's imminent release of its Hyper-V server virtualization technology will pose a challenge to VMware and other server virtualization vendors for the next couple of ... Microsoft Raises Its Game Against VMWare Microsoft fires shot across VMware bow with Hyper-V release |
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 China Daily | iPhone Roundup: China Mobile Clears Hurdle; Canadians Want Cheaper ... Washington Post - China Mobile-iPhone "Hurdle" Cleared: The on again, off again talks to bring iPhone to the world's largest mobile market is on again. Apple to Invade China China Mobile’s iPhone negotiations enter endgame |
 Siliconrepublic.com | Rhapsody To Sell MP3s via Web, iLike, MTV and Yahoo Wired News - As of today, you no longer have to use the Rhapsody application to purchase music from the company, and all of the single song downloads in its store are available as unprotected MP3s. Five Great Songs You Still Can't Buy On iTunes (AAPL) Rhapsody, Verizon Wireless now have a mobile music subscription ... |
Back when Amazon bought Audible, they claimed that they would drop DRM if there was enough public outcry and now they claim that something may be in the works, but no one has seen any DRM-free audiobooks from Audible, and no one at Audible is available to do a deal for DRM-free books.
In the meantime, I was lucky enough to meet the Naxos folks at Book Expo America in LA last month and they were absolutely charming. I asked them if they'd be willing to post some MP3s of their stuff for the benefit of Boing Boing readers and they were only too happy to -- so now you can download a free Sherlock Holmes story (the gloriously titled "Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle") and the first chapter of Tom Sawyer (including Twain's inspiring introduction).
I love having the chance and the choice to support audiobook companies that respect readers' rights and the author's right to decide whether DRM should be larded onto his books. Naxos's MP3 store works great and is filled with wonderful titles for your delectation.
Link
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I'm completely bored of this rhetoric of endless insane change at a ludicrous rate, and cannot actually believe that people are taking it seriously. We've had iPods and digital media players for what - five years now? We've had Tivo for a similar amount of time, computers that can play DVDs for longer, music and video held in digital form since the eighties, an internet that members of the public have been building and creating upon for almost fifteen years. TV only got colour forty odd years ago, but somehow we're expected to think that it's built up a tradition and way of operating that's unable to deal with technological shifts that happen over decades!? This is too fast for TV!? That's ridiculous! This isn't traditional media versus a rebellious newcomer, this is a fairly reasonable and incremental technology change that anyone involved in it could have seen coming from miles away. And it's not even like anyone expects television or radio to change enormously radically over the next couple of decades! I mean, we're swtiching to digital broadcasting in the UK in a few years, which gives people a few more channels. Radio's not going to be fully digital for decades. Broadcast is still going to be a dominant form of content distribution in ten and maybe twenty years time, it just won't be the only one. And five years from now there will clearly be more bottom-up media, just as there are more weblogs now than five years ago, but I'd be surprised if it had really eradicated any major media outlets. These changes are happening, they're definitely happening, but they're happening at a reasonable, comprehendible pace. There are opportunities, of course, and you have to be fast to be the first mover, but you don't die if you're not the first mover - you only die if you don't adapt.Link (via Beyond the Beyond)My sense of these media organisations that use this argument of incredibly rapid technology change is that they're screaming that they're being pursued by a snail and yet they cannot get away! 'The snail! The snail!', they cry. 'How can we possibly escape!?. The problem being that the snail's been moving closer for the last twenty years one way or another and they just weren't paying attention. Because if we're honest, if you don't want or need to be first and you don't need to own the platform, it can't be hard to see roughly where this environment is going. Media will be, must be, transportable in bits and delivered to TV screens and various other players. And there will be enormous archives available that need to be explorable and searchable. And people will create content online and distribute it between themselves and find new ways to express themselves. Changes in the mechanics of those distributions and explorations will happen all the time, but really the major shift is not such a surprise, surely? I mean, how can it be!? Most of it has been happening in an unevenly distributed way for years anyway. And it's not like it's enormously hard to see what you've got to do to prepare for this - find a way to digitise the content, get as much information as possible about the content, work out how to throw it around the world, look for business models and watch the bubble-up communities for ideas. That's it. Come on, guys! There's hard work to be done, but it's not in observing the trends or trying to work out what to do, it's in just getting on with the work of sorting out rights and data and digitisation and keeping in touch with ideas from the ground. This should be the minimum a media organisation should do, not some terrifying new world of fear!
I guess it really is true, what they say: Working for Google means never having to say you're sari.
Link
(Thanks, Dave!)
Link (via Schneier)
U.S. Patent 6844817, Aircraft anti-terrorism security system, by Wolfgang Gleine. Issued Jan 18, 2005.Problem: Terrorists want to hijack a plane by trying to break down the cockpit door.
Solution: After hardening the cockpit door, airlines should add the next logical step: airplane trap door that springs open to entrap terrorists below deck.
Bonus: Great prank to pull on the co-pilot going on a bathroom break.
Improvement Suggestion: Add an alligator pit to the trap door ...
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 E Canada Now | Blizzard announces Diablo III Macworld - by Peter Cohen, Macworld.com The rumors were true: Blizzard Entertainment has announced Diablo III. The game is currently in development for Mac OS X and Windows. Another day, another billion-dollar Blizzard franchise Diablo 2 Digital Download Added To Blizzard Accounts |
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Reuters - The national assembly in newly
democratic Bhutan has stopped lawmakers from bringing laptop
computers into the house for fear they might spend their time
playing computer games.
 BBC News | RPT-NEWSMAKER-Ballmer becomes lone voice at Microsoft's helm Reuters - By Daisuke Wakabayashi SEATTLE, June 29 (Reuters) - Steve Ballmer has been CEO at Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) for eight years, but he will finally get to move into the corner office vacated by Bill Gates, the college friend who ... Post-Gates: How Apple and OSS Are Making For a Better Microsoft Bye-bye Bill |
AP - Cell phones are becoming more useful devices for listening to music. Verizon Wireless is introducing Rhapsody's subscription music service Monday, allowing its customers to download as much music as they want to their phones for $15 per month.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 eFluxMedia | Microsoft To Acquire Search Engine Maker Powerset? eFluxMedia - By Alice Turner The rumored pending acquisition of search engine maker Powerset by Microsoft is still not officially confirmed. The news was first leaked by VentureBeat on June 26. Update: Forget Jeeves, ask Powerset Holy Desperation: Microsoft Itches to Buy Powerset |
 OverTheLimit.info | Gates rules out Yahoo acquisition VNUNet.com - An acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft is looking less likely than ever following confirmation from the software company's outgoing chairman that he does not think the deal will go ahead. InfoWorld Daily Podcast Week in review: Heat returns to Yahoo |
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1908: A fireball streaking across the sky and a massive explosion in the Siberian hinterlands marks the largest recorded collision ever between Earth and an object from space.
The Tunguska event flattened 80 million trees covering 830 square miles of sparsely populated (but not unpopulated) Russian outback in the region of the Tunguska River northwest of Lake Baikal.
Whatever it was -- an exploding fragment from a disintegrating meteorite seems the likeliest explanation -- scientists concluded there was no actual impact. The explosion appears to have been caused by an air burst similar to that of an artillery round detonating in midair, rather than on impact with the ground. In this case, the fragment, which is believed to have measured perhaps 100 feet across (although new research suggests it may have been even smaller), was probably traveling at around 21,000 miles per hour when it exploded anywhere from four to six miles above the Earth's surface.
Based on later assessments of the damage, the force of the blast was estimated to be between 10 and 15 megatons of TNT, roughly a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
The remoteness of the blast and the chaotic conditions prevailing inside Russia at the time prevented a thorough examination of the area until 1927, when an expedition from the Soviet Academy of Sciences finally arrived on the scene. Ironically, a lot of the data wouldn't be clearly understood until the Soviet Union began conducting its own Cold War experiments with atomic-blast impacts during the 1950s and '60s.
Soil samples revealed high levels of nickel and iridium, which are commonly found in meteorites, and the pattern of the forest devastation was consistent with a strong central detonation followed by shock waves emanating outward from ground zero.
Based on eyewitness accounts at Tunguska, a bluish fireball appeared in the sky at around 7:15 a.m. Ten minutes later, there was a flash, followed by a deafening explosion that was heard 300 miles away. The ground began shaking as in an earthquake, and a hot wind blew across the land, singeing crops and shattering windows.
While contemporary accounts refer to many people in the vicinity becoming covered with boils and dying as a result of the blast, that may be better explained by a smallpox epidemic that was occurring at the same time.
The fear, of course, is that the Earth is vulnerable to these meteor strikes. Flying objects enter the atmosphere every day, but the vast majority burn up before posing any real threat. Some meteorites do get through, however, and there have been events similar to -- if smaller than -- Tunguska recorded in the past century.
Here's something to consider: In its 1966 edition, the Guinness Book of Records concluded that, based on the Earth's rotation, had the Tunguska meteorite struck 4 hours, 47 minutes later, it would have obliterated St. Petersburg, then the capital of imperial Russia. Given the events that would shortly torment that nation -- and all of Europe -- for the better part of the 20th century, one is left to wonder how history might have changed in those circumstances.
Sounds like the premise for a pretty good alternative-history novel.
Source: Various
This week we implore you to deliver a visual feast to our emaciated eyes. We seek gastronomical oddities and excesses, your grossest and most appetizing photos of food.
Use the Reddit widget below to submit your best food photo and vote for your favorite among the other submissions. The 10 highest-ranked photos will appear in a gallery on the Wired.com homepage. We know this is asking a lot, but please keep your restaurant ads to yourself. Instead, show us unexplored galaxies of grapes shot through with comets of roasting marshmallows. Take us down chewed-up trash shoots and climbing up slimy compost mountains. This is well-trodden territory, so you'll have to go the extra mile to catch eyes and votes.
The photo must be your own, and by submitting it you are giving us permission to use it on Wired.com and in Wired magazine. Please submit images that are relatively large, the ideal size being 800 to 1200 pixels or larger on the longest side. Please include a description of your photo, which may include exposure information, equipment used, etc.
We don't host the photos, so you'll have to upload it somewhere else and submit a link to it. If you're using Flickr, Picasa or another photo-sharing site to host your image, please provide a link to the image directly and not just to the photo page where it's displayed. If your photo doesn't show up, it's because the URL you have entered is incorrect. Check it and make sure it ends with the image file name (XXXXXX.jpg).
Please bookmark this page and check back periodically over the next two weeks to vote on new submissions!
Also, check out the winner's galleries from our previous contests: Holga, Red, Self-Portrait, Night, Macro, Transportation and Black and White.
Show entries that are: hot | new | top-rated. Submit your food photo.
(No more than one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.)
: If our readers are anything like us, they've probably had the word "square" hurled at them a few times. Fortunately, kick-ass photos are an excellent salve for this particular brand of nerd sting. These 10 readers exercised these demons in our square photo contest, and were voted the top contenders by their peers. Neil Bruder took home the gold with his photo "Office Life" at left. Mr. Bruder will be receiving a subscription to Wired magazine and a digital picture frame for his desk.
Since we had so many great photos that we thought should've received more votes, we've also compiled a Wired.com Editor's Choice Square Photo Gallery.
Our next biweekly photo contest is food. Now's your chance to give us a bib and cram your greasy photos down our gullet. Check out the contest page for more information.
Left:
Office life
Submitted by Neil Bruder
Photographer's comment:
"Late-afternoon shadows on an office building in Vancouver."
: MAM
Submitted by Evan Stremke
Photographer's comment:
Main atrium (looking up) of the Milwaukee Art Museum."
: Windows
Submitted by Andrew Brooks
Photographer's comment:
"Taken in Berlin, 2006."
: Blocks
Submitted by Jamei Carl
Photographer's comment:
"Taken on the roof of Parliament House in Canberra, Australia."
: It wasn't me!
Submitted by Shawn Isaac
Photographer's comment:
"I swear ;-)."
: Waiting
Submitted by Eric Cabahug
Photographer's comment:
"Waiting is the hardest thing. Especially if you're in the dark."
: OCAD
Submitted by Steven Kamenar
Photographer's comment:
"Ontario College of Art and Design."
: Rox
Submitted by Christiaan d'Arnaud
Photographer's comment:
"Scheveningen, Netherlands"
: Rolling Hill's Guest House
Submitted by Greg
Photographer's comment:
"Hyundai's guest house near their R&D facility in Korea."
: fred & ginger
Submitted by Anonymous
Photographer's comment:
"praha."
: Though Wired.com readers selected 10 excellent photos in our square photo contest, we here at the Photo Department like to fight for the underdog. Here are our 10 favorite submissions that we think deserved more attention.
Our next biweekly photo contest is food. Now's your chance to give us a bib and cram your greasy photos down our gullet. Check out the contest page for more information.
Left:
La quadrature du cercle
Submitted by Alain Tougas
Photographer's comment:
"Not everyone wants to be a square."
: Butterflies
Submitted by Peter
Photographer's comment:
"Butterflies at the Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe in Seattle."
: Old Barn Window
Submitted by John A. B.
Photographer's comment:
"The old barn window on Uncle Harold's farm."
: Neighbourhood
Submitted by Ronan Farrell
Photographer's comment:
"Sighisoara, Romania."
: Jealousy Windows
Submitted by Hana
Photographer's comment:
"Designed so that you can see the world but the world can't see you."
: Tai Chi Squares
Submitted by Matt Kaune
Photographer's comment:
"Man doing tai chi in Denver's Civic Center Park."
: Chicago Squares
Submitted by Maurice
Photographer's comment:
"Would you expect anything less interesting from the great architects that have made Chicago famous?"
: Squared Circles?
Submitted by Jon
Photographer's comment:
"Polaroid Land Cameras glued to the "Camera Van." Shot at the Maker Faire 2007."
: slow worship day
Submitted by axaxaxas mlö
Photographer's comment:
"Temple Mount, Jerusalem, March 2006. Nikon Coolpix L2."
: Bricks
Submitted by Maziar H
Photographer's comment:
"Sidewalk bricks, Vancouver, BC."
This is slightly embarrassing to admit, but I'm addicted to ... Space Invaders.
Not the 1978-issue game, mind you. No, I'm talking about Space Invaders Extreme -- a re-visioning of the original game, released this week for the Nintendo DS and PSP by Square Enix (which now owns Taito, creator of the original thud-thud-thudding arcade classic). The game is enormously fun, gorgeously rendered and -- other than the horrid use of extreme in the title -- a loving tribute to the Precambrian title that birthed the entire videogame industry.
But here's the really interesting thing. I think the new Space Invaders is the first "reissue" of a videogame that is completely successful.
This really has never been done before. This subgenre of gaming -- the classic remake -- is littered with failure. Defender, Asteroids, Galaga: You name the old-school game, and it's been ruined by some designer's misbegotten attempt to improve it. It's like a form of cultural taxidermy: They take a wonderful old game, surgically drain it of all joy, then leave the mounted corpse on your mantelpiece to glare at you with its creepy, glassy eyes.
But why? Why is it so hard to update a cool old game?
Usually because the designers get too fancy. They assume modern gamers will only play a game if it's 3-D, so they go to painful lengths to transform 2-D titles into full, "immersive" reality. Among other things, this inevitably screws up the control system. The playfully unmanageable chaos of the old-school Robotron 2084, for example, becomes the grindingly unmanageable chaos of the 1996 remake on the Nintendo 64.
Worse, by moving into 3-D, these games abandon the chunky, low-fi graphics that made those 1980s titles so vibrant and Jungian in their symbolic heft. In the original Battlezone, the world was rendered in green, rasterized geometric shapes. It was a perfect evocation of the ghostly quality of "surgical" Cold War combat: We fight amongst Platonic solids!
Then Atari redesigned the game in 2006 for the PSP -- transforming it into the sort of brown/beige 3-D sludge so omnipresent in today's gaming, with sundry powerups that promise "complexity" but only serve to ruin the Zen-like simplicity of the original.
This is what's so refreshing about the new Space Invaders. It avoids all these pitfalls. First off, it remains resolutely 2-D. Indeed, the aliens look precisely as they did in 1978 -- chunky, pixelated blots of Otherness dread. They still crawl across the screen, slowly at first and then faster as you eliminate their ranks. And as before, you can only zip back and forth along the ground and fire upward.
Yet Square Enix has also managed to insert clever new bits of gameplay. Some of the aliens carry shields that deflect missiles back toward you; others, once wounded, stagger downward in kamikaze attacks. Every once in a while, one of those mystery ships at the top of the screen will pause, fizz and unleash a searing, laserlike blast for a few seconds. Meanwhile, you've got new powerups: multiple missiles, cluster shots and a penetrating laser.
The upshot is that the game remains neatly balanced. The aliens have their new tricks, but so do you. In fact, as a whole, the game advances with the same sort of logarithmic difficulty: Around 10 minutes in, you'll feel precisely the same oh-shit-oh-shit loss of control you experienced in the original arcade game. It's quite eerie.
What I'm trying to argue, ultimately, is that Square Enix has captured the spirit of the original game. The funky weapons, the zigzaggy attacks -- sure, they're new. But they also seem like part of the Space Invaders canon. In essence, Space Invaders Extreme feels like a game that Taito's designers would have wanted to produce if they'd had just slightly more processing power.
Square Enix's designers have deftly channeled the limitations that Taito's designers faced. And this, really, is the secret to their success -- because it's your choice of limitations, not freedoms, that makes for superb game design.
So yeah: It's 1978 again. Except, somehow, slightly better. Welcome back!
- - -
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.
AP - Microsoft Corp. is scheduled to stop selling its Windows XP operating system to retailers and major computer makers Monday, despite protests from a slice of PC users who don't want to be forced into using XP's successor, Vista.
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