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Top Tech Breakthroughs of 2008As we approach the end of the year it's time once again for the never-ending stream of retrospectives and year-in-review discussions. Wired has their version of the best technology breakthroughs of 2008. From phones to shrinking laptops to flexible displays, there is no shortage of interesting advancements when looking back at this year. What other groundbreaking advancements were made this year, and what do we have to look forward to for 2009?Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Gizmodo | 26 Dec 2008 | 1:12 pm Spreadtrum Communications, Inc. Provides Fourth Quarter 2008 Business UpdateSHANGHAI, China, Dec. 26 /PRNewswire-Asia-FirstCall/ -- Spreadtrum Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq: SPRD), one of China's leading wireless baseband chipset providers,...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 26 Dec 2008 | 1:00 pm CCID Consulting: Review and Forecast of China's DVD Market in 2008BEIJING, Dec. 26 /PRNewswire-Asia/ -- CCID Consulting, China's leading research, consulting and IT outsourcing service provider, and the first Chinese consulting...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 26 Dec 2008 | 1:00 pm iChampagne iphone app for New Year's EveiChampagne is an iPhone/iPod touch celebratory champagne application: shake it up and pop the cork! Keep shake, shake, shaking your iPhoneiPod Touch until the cork pops and the champagne flows! Shake...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 Dec 2008 | 12:58 pm Get more iPhone games out of that iTunes gift card
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 San Francisco Chronicle | Nice work, NORAD ZDNet - Every year, NORAD and Google partner to track Santa Claus online. While the videos they post are a bit cheesy and animated, the service is actually incredibly valuable from an educational perspective. Video: Raw Video: Santa Soars Over Canada NORAD Tracking Santa Claus With Google Maps |
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I was very excited to receive the N64. It wasn’t ours to keep, being the unit from my parents’ office, but it was ours for the rest of Christmas break. With Mario 64 and Wave Race, my brother and I were pretty much set. I believe we were playing the latter, and we were so into it that if it weren’t so late and the volume so low we wouldn’t have heard the screams.
It was my mom’s voice and my brother instantly threw down his controller and ran for the stairs. I did the same, taking one moment (to my everlasting shame) to pause the game. At the top of the stairs we saw blood. Blood on the wall, blood tracked on the floor, blood on the cabinets, and over by the back door there was a nice big pool of, yes, blood. We ran up to my parents’ room where we found them examining our sheepdog Zipper, whose entire front was soaked in blood. He seemed to be in pretty good spirits, however.
We piled into the car and drove up to, if I remember correctly, an emergency vet on 45th north of the University District, and had him patched up. As it turned out, Zipper had a puncture wound on his muzzle consistent with a dog bite, and when we returned home we found the perpetrator, Cody, looking appropriately hangdog, if you’ll allow the expression. They had fought over a scrap of rawhide and Cody nipped Zipper on the nose. Zipper hadn’t seemed to care and walked around the house spurting blood everywhere, then dozed off for a bit and made that pool by the back door before going upstairs to scare the bejesus out of my mother.
My brother and I finished our race. But to this very day, whenever I play Wave Race or Mario 64, I can’t help but think about all that blood.
Anyway, happy holidays to everyone and thanks for reading our little blog. Love to all my family and friends (and readers).
 New York Times | Prince Of Persia Storyline Should Continue With Next Entry PSX Extreme - Okay, so we don't want to spoil the ending for you, so if you haven't finished the game, here's all you have to know: according to the VideoGamesBlogger, Ubisoft plans to continue the story that began in the recently released Prince of Persia, ... Even Escapist Fare Can’t Escape Some Real-World Questions Prince of Persia: development limitations, difficulty, risk, and ... |
 That Happened! | Apple: iPhone farts ok, boobs not TG Daily - By Christian Zibreg Chicago (IL) - Apple is relaxing some App Store rules to make room for a broader range of official applications for the iPhone. Will Apple Allow You To Touch Boobs On Your iPhone? Favorite iPhone apps: Best information tools |
The great Eartha Kitt passed away today. Obituaries: Washington Post, Reuters, New York Times.
The economy may be tanking, but innovation is alive and well.
When it came to products, incremental improvements were the name of the game this year. Phones got faster (iPhone 3G anyone?), notebooks turned into netbooks and pocket cameras went from recording standard-definition video to HD.
But the world's corporate and academic R&D labs were busy laying the foundations of some amazing future technologies in 2008. They produced concepts such as silicon chips you can swallow for personalized medicine from the inside out and a fourth fundamental element in electronic circuitry. And engineers cranked out a few less groundbreaking — but no less important — inventions, like a space-age swimsuit to help Michael Phelps slice through the water faster than a river otter on a jet ski.
Here's our countdown of what rocked our world in 2008 — and what will change yours in 2009 and beyond.
A sliver of the future can soon be tucked into your back pocket. For years, researchers have worked on thin, paperlike displays that can be folded, rolled or sewn into the sleeve of your hoodie. Flexible displays could change the way we interact with the info-universe, creating new kinds of cellphones, portable computers, e-newspapers and electronic books.
This year, the research moved from the realm of science fiction to plausible reality. With help from the U.S. Army, Arizona State University's Flexible Display Center has created a prototype for soldiers, and hopes to have the devices in field trials in the next three years. Startups like Plastic Logic and E-Ink have been developing similar technologies.
Meanwhile, Hewlett Packard announced a manufacturing breakthrough that allows the thin-film transistor arrays to be fabricated on flexible plastic materials, enabling manufacturers to "print" displays on big, newsprintlike rolls. Samsung showed off a mobile phone prototype with a flexible display that folds like a book.
Outlook: A Minority Report-style digital newspaper that you can roll up in your pocket isn't happening before 2010 at the earliest. But to quote science fiction novelist William Gibson: "The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet."
Grandma's pillbox with the days of the week neatly marked is set to go high tech. Tiny edible chips will replace the organizer, tracking when patients take their pills (or don't) and monitoring the effects of the drugs they're taking. Proteus, a Redwood City, California, company, has created tiny chips out of silicon grains that, once swallowed, activate in the stomach. The chips send a signal to an external patch that monitors vital parameters such as heart rate, temperature, state of wakefulness or body angle.
The data is then sent to an online repository or a cellphone for the physician and the patient to track. Proteus says its chips can keep score of how patients are responding to the medication. That may be just the beginning, as the chips could improve drug delivery and even insert other kinds of health monitors inside the body. Now doctors may have a better answer to a common patient complaint — they will know exactly how it feels.
Outlook: If proven in clinical trials, edible chips could let physicians look into a patient's system in a way that could change how medicine is prescribed and how we take the drugs.
Michael Phelps. 2008 Olympics. Enough said. Phelps and others were able to log faster times because of Speedo's LZR swimsuit. It blends new materials and a dose of NASA rocket science to boost the speeds of elite swimmers — legally.
Viscous drag on a swimmer can be as much as 25 percent of the total retarding force. But Speedo's suit, with its ultrasonically bonded seams instead of stitches, low-drag panels and a mix of polyurethane layers, can cut resistance and help swimmers move through the water faster. It also has a rigid, girdle-style structure that helps position the swimmer's body in an optimal position. Did it have anything to do with Michael Phelps' amazing eight Olympic gold medals? Probably not, as nearly every swimmer at the Games was wearing a Speedo suit.
Outlook: We're hoping at least some of the technologies in the LZR will trickle down to the consumer level so we can slice through the water at the Y.
When Apple blessed the iPod with flash memory, it gave new life to a technology that had long played second fiddle to hard disk drives. Now flash memory is a mainstay of most consumer electronics products, from ultralight notebooks to digital cameras and media players.
Next, the who's who of the tech industry — EMC, Sun Microsystems, Intel and Hitachi — are championing flash drives for larger business users.
The advantage? Solid-state flash drives offer faster response times than hard disk drives and they require much less power. The hitch is that they are almost eight times more expensive than hard disk drives. But with the star power behind flash storage, the prices have nowhere to go but down.
Outlook: More data centers are likely to move to flash storage in 2009, which is likely to drive prices down further. If this trend takes off, say goodbye to the hard disk drives in your house. It will be time to flash your drive.
The Global Positioning System is old, old, older than you think. The system has been operational since 1978 and available for commercial use since 1993, but for years its use was relegated to expensive personal navigation devices and the dashboards of high-end cars.
This year, suddenly GPS popped up everywhere else, from the iPhone 3G and the T-Mobile G1 to notebooks such as Fujitsu's LifeBook series.
And devices that couldn't or didn't include true GPS made do with cell-tower triangulation or geolocation based on Wi-Fi hotspots. Now getting lost is no longer an option.
Outlook: With widespread GPS capabilities throughout the gadget world, services that make use of geographic data, like Loopt and Yahoo's Firebird, will be able to build critical mass.
It's not often that a fundamental tech breakthrough has the potential to change how we compute. Nearly 37 years after it was first described in a series of mathematical equations, researchers at HP Labs proved that the fourth fundamental element of electronic circuitry is for real. The "memristor," or memory transistor, now joins the three other widely known elements: the capacitor, the resistor and the inductor.
The discovery will make it possible to develop computer systems that remember what's stored in memory when they are turned off. That means computers that don't need to be booted up and systems that are far more energy efficient than the current crop. Researchers also hope the memristor can help develop a new kind of computer memory that can supplement or ultimately replace dynamic random access memory, or DRAM — the type of memory used in personal computers.
Outlook: Memristors are still primarily confined to the lab, so don't expect commercial products based on this kind of circuitry for at least five years.
For years, high-end single-lens reflex cameras have been unable to do what even $100 pocket cams can do: Shoot video. That's because of the type of imaging chip used by SLRs.
This year, the camera industry overcame that limitation. Two new cameras, the Nikon D90 and the Canon 5D Mark II capture top-notch still images, but let the photographer to shoot high-definition video. No longer do SLR users have to stand by, while friends mock them for their expensive camera's inability to shoot video.
Outlook: Shooting high-def videos with an SLR is cheap compared to using professional video equipment — and it gives photographers access to a wide range of lenses. In 2009, we predict this will lead to an explosion in arty, high-def videos shot by professional still photographers.
Fasten your seatbelts. The data-transfer freeway is set to turn into an autobahn. The Universal Serial Bus, or USB, a popular standard for transferring files to your PC or charging your iPhone, got its first major update in eight years. USB 3.0 will be 10 times faster than the current USB 2.0 standard, and will increase the amount of electrical current that can be delivered through a USB cable.
Users need the increased speed — 4.8 gigabits per second, to be precise. Digital cameras and pocket-size HD video recorders generate a torrent of bits, all of which need to be transferred quickly to computers, so they can be uploaded to YouTube, adding to the internet video that only a handful of people will ever watch.
And as consumers carry around more devices, charging them off a PC using a USB cable will be much easier than carrying multiple chargers. With the USB 3.0 specifications nailed down this year, the standard will bump up the power output to 900 milliamps from 100 milliamps, allowing more devices to be charged faster.
Outlook: We expect the earliest USB 3.0 products in mid-2009.
There were many reasons to dislike the T-Mobile HTC G1 phone: its color, poor battery life and a touchscreen that isn't super-responsive. And the numbers reflect that. Only about 1.5 million units of the G1 have been sold since its October 2008 launch. Compare that to the 3 million iPhones that sold when it debuted.
But the G1 scores with its operating system. It runs Android, the free mobile operating system from Google. It's the first mobile OS to make its debut in years and the G1 is just the first of what will be many phones that use it. With its open source base, growing developer community and dozens of cellphone manufacturers pledging to make Android phones, Android has the potential to reshape the wireless industry in significant ways.
Outlook: At least half a dozen manufacturers are likely to release Android phones in 2009, increasing the pressure on other smartphone operating systems. The iPhone is likely to remain the top-selling smartphone through the end of the year, however.
Until this year, mobile app developers lacked an easy way to get their software into the hands of consumers, forcing them to make deals with finicky and power-hungry carriers if they wanted to get any distribution at all. Apple's App Store changed all that. It made creating and distributing mobile applications for cellphone users easy — jumpstarting the mobile-app development market and creating clones such as the Android Market. It even forced Research in Motion to offer a BlackBerry Application Storefront. For thousands of programmers, the cellphone is the new PC.
Outlook: App stores have changed forever the way we use our phones, turning them into personalized devices filled with utilities, handy tools and copies of Tap Tap Revenge.
The economy may be tanking, but innovation is alive and well.
When it came to products, incremental improvements were the name of the game this year. Phones got faster (iPhone 3G anyone?), notebooks turned into netbooks and pocket cameras went from recording standard-definition video to HD.
But the world's corporate and academic R&D labs were busy laying the foundations of some amazing future technologies in 2008. They produced concepts such as silicon chips you can swallow for personalized medicine from the inside out and a fourth fundamental element in electronic circuitry. And engineers cranked out a few less groundbreaking — but no less important — inventions, like a space-age swimsuit to help Michael Phelps slice through the water faster than a river otter on a jet ski.
Here's our countdown of what rocked our world in 2008 — and what will change yours in 2009 and beyond.
A sliver of the future can soon be tucked into your back pocket. For years, researchers have worked on thin, paperlike displays that can be folded, rolled or sewn into the sleeve of your hoodie. Flexible displays could change the way we interact with the info-universe, creating new kinds of cellphones, portable computers, e-newspapers and electronic books.
This year, the research moved from the realm of science fiction to plausible reality. With help from the U.S. Army, Arizona State University's Flexible Display Center has created a prototype for soldiers, and hopes to have the devices in field trials in the next three years. Startups like Plastic Logic and E-Ink have been developing similar technologies.
Meanwhile, Hewlett Packard announced a manufacturing breakthrough that allows the thin-film transistor arrays to be fabricated on flexible plastic materials, enabling manufacturers to "print" displays on big, newsprintlike rolls. Samsung showed off a mobile phone prototype with a flexible display that folds like a book.
Outlook: A Minority Report-style digital newspaper that you can roll up in your pocket isn't happening before 2010 at the earliest. But to quote science fiction novelist William Gibson: "The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet."
Grandma's pillbox with the days of the week neatly marked is set to go high tech. Tiny edible chips will replace the organizer, tracking when patients take their pills (or don't) and monitoring the effects of the drugs they're taking. Proteus, a Redwood City, California, company, has created tiny chips out of silicon grains that, once swallowed, activate in the stomach. The chips send a signal to an external patch that monitors vital parameters such as heart rate, temperature, state of wakefulness or body angle.
The data is then sent to an online repository or a cellphone for the physician and the patient to track. Proteus says its chips can keep score of how patients are responding to the medication. That may be just the beginning, as the chips could improve drug delivery and even insert other kinds of health monitors inside the body. Now doctors may have a better answer to a common patient complaint — they will know exactly how it feels.
Outlook: If proven in clinical trials, edible chips could let physicians look into a patient's system in a way that could change how medicine is prescribed and how we take the drugs.
Michael Phelps. 2008 Olympics. Enough said. Phelps and others were able to log faster times because of Speedo's LZR swimsuit. It blends new materials and a dose of NASA rocket science to boost the speeds of elite swimmers — legally.
Viscous drag on a swimmer can be as much as 25 percent of the total retarding force. But Speedo's suit, with its ultrasonically bonded seams instead of stitches, low-drag panels and a mix of polyurethane layers, can cut resistance and help swimmers move through the water faster. It also has a rigid, girdle-style structure that helps position the swimmer's body in an optimal position. Did it have anything to do with Michael Phelps' amazing eight Olympic gold medals? Probably not, as nearly every swimmer at the Games was wearing a Speedo suit.
Outlook: We're hoping at least some of the technologies in the LZR will trickle down to the consumer level so we can slice through the water at the Y.
When Apple blessed the iPod with flash memory, it gave new life to a technology that had long played second fiddle to hard disk drives. Now flash memory is a mainstay of most consumer electronics products, from ultralight notebooks to digital cameras and media players.
Next, the who's who of the tech industry — EMC, Sun Microsystems, Intel and Hitachi — are championing flash drives for larger business users.
The advantage? Solid-state flash drives offer faster response times than hard disk drives and they require much less power. The hitch is that they are almost eight times more expensive than hard disk drives. But with the star power behind flash storage, the prices have nowhere to go but down.
Outlook: More data centers are likely to move to flash storage in 2009, which is likely to drive prices down further. If this trend takes off, say goodbye to the hard disk drives in your house. It will be time to flash your drive.
The Global Positioning System is old, old, older than you think. The system has been operational since 1978 and available for commercial use since 1993, but for years its use was relegated to expensive personal navigation devices and the dashboards of high-end cars.
This year, suddenly GPS popped up everywhere else, from the iPhone 3G and the T-Mobile G1 to notebooks such as Fujitsu's LifeBook series.
And devices that couldn't or didn't include true GPS made do with cell-tower triangulation or geolocation based on Wi-Fi hotspots. Now getting lost is no longer an option.
Outlook: With widespread GPS capabilities throughout the gadget world, services that make use of geographic data, like Loopt and Yahoo's Firebird, will be able to build critical mass.
It's not often that a fundamental tech breakthrough has the potential to change how we compute. Nearly 37 years after it was first described in a series of mathematical equations, researchers at HP Labs proved that the fourth fundamental element of electronic circuitry is for real. The "memristor," or memory transistor, now joins the three other widely known elements: the capacitor, the resistor and the inductor.
The discovery will make it possible to develop computer systems that remember what's stored in memory when they are turned off. That means computers that don't need to be booted up and systems that are far more energy efficient than the current crop. Researchers also hope the memristor can help develop a new kind of computer memory that can supplement or ultimately replace dynamic random access memory, or DRAM — the type of memory used in personal computers.
Outlook: Memristors are still primarily confined to the lab, so don't expect commercial products based on this kind of circuitry for at least five years.
For years, high-end single-lens reflex cameras have been unable to do what even $100 pocket cams can do: Shoot video. That's because of the type of imaging chip used by SLRs.
This year, the camera industry overcame that limitation. Two new cameras, the Nikon D90 and the Canon 5D Mark II capture top-notch still images, but let the photographer to shoot high-definition video. No longer do SLR users have to stand by, while friends mock them for their expensive camera's inability to shoot video.
Outlook: Shooting high-def videos with an SLR is cheap compared to using professional video equipment — and it gives photographers access to a wide range of lenses. In 2009, we predict this will lead to an explosion in arty, high-def videos shot by professional still photographers.
Fasten your seatbelts. The data-transfer freeway is set to turn into an autobahn. The Universal Serial Bus, or USB, a popular standard for transferring files to your PC or charging your iPhone, got its first major update in eight years. USB 3.0 will be 10 times faster than the current USB 2.0 standard, and will increase the amount of electrical current that can be delivered through a USB cable.
Users need the increased speed — 4.8 gigabits per second, to be precise. Digital cameras and pocket-size HD video recorders generate a torrent of bits, all of which need to be transferred quickly to computers, so they can be uploaded to YouTube, adding to the internet video that only a handful of people will ever watch.
And as consumers carry around more devices, charging them off a PC using a USB cable will be much easier than carrying multiple chargers. With the USB 3.0 specifications nailed down this year, the standard will bump up the power output to 900 milliamps from 100 milliamps, allowing more devices to be charged faster.
Outlook: We expect the earliest USB 3.0 products in mid-2009.
There were many reasons to dislike the T-Mobile HTC G1 phone: its color, poor battery life and a touchscreen that isn't super-responsive. And the numbers reflect that. Only about 1.5 million units of the G1 have been sold since its October 2008 launch. Compare that to the 3 million iPhones that sold when it debuted.
But the G1 scores with its operating system. It runs Android, the free mobile operating system from Google. It's the first mobile OS to make its debut in years and the G1 is just the first of what will be many phones that use it. With its open source base, growing developer community and dozens of cellphone manufacturers pledging to make Android phones, Android has the potential to reshape the wireless industry in significant ways.
Outlook: At least half a dozen manufacturers are likely to release Android phones in 2009, increasing the pressure on other smartphone operating systems. The iPhone is likely to remain the top-selling smartphone through the end of the year, however.
Until this year, mobile app developers lacked an easy way to get their software into the hands of consumers, forcing them to make deals with finicky and power-hungry carriers if they wanted to get any distribution at all. Apple's App Store changed all that. It made creating and distributing mobile applications for cellphone users easy — jumpstarting the mobile-app development market and creating clones such as the Android Market. It even forced Research in Motion to offer a BlackBerry Application Storefront. For thousands of programmers, the cellphone is the new PC.
Outlook: App stores have changed forever the way we use our phones, turning them into personalized devices filled with utilities, handy tools and copies of Tap Tap Revenge.
Great news for people who a) own an iPhone or iPod Touch and b) never know what kind of topping to get when eating Sushi: Tokyo-based Shogakukan, known outside Japan for its extensive offerings of manga (Ichi The Killer, Ranma 1/2, Crying Freeman etc). is releasing a virtual sushi guide for these devices.
 AFP | Let music lead the way Los Angeles Times - Playlist services could be an enormous boon to record labels, if they could figure out how to use them in their business. It's been a roller-coaster month for Project Playlist, a popular local start-up that lets users create playlists of songs ... Facebook Puts Coal in Project Playlist's Stocking Daily Tidbits: Facebook bans Project Playlist |
The mysterious UMPC Sony has been advertising through a short “mystery campaign” over the last days doesn’t seem as overwhelming as Sony suggested, at least if you look at the the first details of the device that seem to have leaked on Christmas day (Sony took the page off a few hours ago).
The Sony Vaio Pocket features a 1.33GHz Intel processor, a 1600×768 ultra-widescreen 8-inch display, a 60GB hard drive or 128GB SSD and uses Windows Vista as the OS. It wil be available in three different colors: Crimson Red, Champagne Gold, and Black Silk.
As always, information obtained through leaks has to be taken with a grain of salt. The picture Sony shows on the Sony Syle online shop website is apparently a placeholder (it doesn’t show the actual product) and the company hasn’t officially confirmed anything yet, for example the price of the Pocket.
Via Sony Insider
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Great news for people who a) own an iPhone or iPod Touch and b) never know what kind of topping to get when eating Sushi: Tokyo-based Shogakukan, known outside Japan for its extensive offerings of manga (Ichi The Killer, Ranma 1/2, Crying Freeman etc). is releasing a virtual sushi guide for these devices.
The sushi neta zukan (illustrated sushi encyclopedia) will become available in Japanese within this month but on the product website [JP], Shogakukan promises foreigners will enjoy the app, too, as it will have an English appendix. It’s going to cost $5.
The guide will contain pictures and descriptions of 82 different kinds of sushi, ideal for frequent travelers to Japan like John Biggs, for example (”Serkan, this topping looks like baby poo!”).
Shogakukan is already offering a special iPhone guide for Japanese mushrooms (covering 50 different kinds), but that encyclopedia is Japanese only.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Happy holidays from Boing Boing tv! Continuing in our retrospective of favorite episodes from our first year:
Each year, David Silverman (director of the Simpsons Movie, and longtime director of the TV show) illustrates holiday cards for friends and family. Xeni visits him in his home studio for a re-enactment of the craziest years in holiday cheer, complete with tuba carols.( Flash embed above, and here's a direct MP4 download link. )
One More Go: RanaramaPart of my work this year has been helping with the launch of the UK’s National Videogame Archive, and it’s meant having a lot of interesting conversations with interesting people about what a game museum might look like. My favourite suggestion so far was that we recreate a childhood Christmas - that childhood Christmas, when whatever it was that changed your life arrived.
So you’d book your ticket, and pay your money, and there when you arrived - alongside the Big Trak or the Tracy Island or whatever it was your sister wanted - there’d be a box with your name on it, wrapped in that papery paper you don’t seem to get any more - and you’d be allowed to rip it open and turn it over and over and over and look at the pictures of Rygar or Pole Position or whatever it was, before taking a deep breath and letting rip on the flaps. At which point a security guard would probably escort you from the premises.
As an idea for a museum exhibit, I admit, it needs a little work, but I’d still love to do it. My big box - my big boxes - would have an ST and a monitor in them, and the tiny, shiny screenshot that I’d pour over would be of Ranarama...
Yesterday, I shared some scanned hand-drawn Christmas cards from children (and their parents) in a K'iche' Maya village in Guatemala -- people who participate in the work of an international nonprofit I volunteer with there, along with family and friends.
This year, we included two additional elders in the foundation's Christmas festivities in the Guatemalan highlands, which brings the total number of participating elders in our Ancianos de Honor program to 22. Two of the most recently honored ancianos are blind. You can see them in the photograph below. They both completed their hundredth birthdays this month. They were brought to our foundation's center by some very caring young people.
Above, the elders receive their gifts from our local director in Sololá, Don Victoriano. It's the first time in the lives of these two new elders that they have received a gift or been honored in this way.
Upon receiving his gift, centenarian Don Juan expressed thanks to Ajaw (the Mayan creator god) and to the givers of the gift who had "the good conscience to remember the forgotten elders."
The Christmas gift baskets they are receiving typically include bread, dried pasta and rice, chocolate and candies, corn flour for making tortillas or tamales, dried beans, fruit, and household necessities. The local project directors, who are from the community themselves, make those arrangements and include things that are customary, and part of the local diet.
These elders are among the most at-risk and neglected members of the community, and often suffer malnutrition and health problems related to a lack of food, water, and protection from the elements.
They live literally on the fringes of the village, and fall through the cracks -- they become invisible.
Our foundation works to reach out to them, document their existence and their needs, and provide basic support, bringing them back into the center of the community where they belong, with honor and respect.
We are working toward establishing the same ongoing support system within the community for these elders that we are providing for the children of the village.
- Happy holidays to all of you from the people in our communities in Guatemala and Nima Mam Ajq'ij, Dr. M. X. Quetzalkanbalam, international executive director, and our international staff of directors: Anamaria de To and David To Quiñones, Guatemala; Jolon Bankey, Costa Rica; and Xeni Jardin, Mike Outmesguine, and Mar Doré, USA.
(Photos: Top and bottom, courtesy Don Victoriano; center thumbnails, Xeni Jardin).
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Smartphones, Features, Contests
Want a ruby red Palm Centro for absolutely $0? Normally, this Centro goes for $79.99 with a two year contract. Here, at Gadgetell, we’re in a giving mood. We’d like to give a thanks to our friends at Palm providing us with this great phone to give to you. Here’s what Palm has to say about the Palm Centro:
Life starts after five o’clock. That’s why there’s the Palm Centro smartphone. Palm Centro gives you voice, text, IM, email and web, all in a phone that’s a lot smaller than you think. Touch the screen to make a call. Use the keyboard to send a text. Even keep up with friends using Facebook for Palm. Carry names and numbers, shoot photos and video. Centro. Let’s go.
What do you have to do to win? It’s all very simple. Just post a comment to this article. Please provide a real e-mail address because that is how we will contact you. Comment period closes on December 31st, 2008 at 11:59PM Eastern.
Read: [Full contest rules]
Read: [Palm Centro specs]
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Yo dawg - Rogers heard you liked smartphones, so they put smartphones in your smartphone so you can smartphone while you smartphone.
But seriously, if you’re a smartphone fan on Rogers/Fido, your brain might just melt in 2009. HoFo-goer clearskies08 managed to sneak spy shots throughout the entirety of the recent employee-only roadmap presentation, bringing back just shy of 30 shots for all to see. Your super spy achievement certificate is waiting for you at the front desk, clearskies08.
So, what’s in store for 2009?
Yo dawg - Rogers heard you liked smartphones, so they put smartphones in your smartphone so you can smartphone while you smartphone.
But seriously, if you’re a smartphone fan on Rogers/Fido, your brain might just melt in 2009. HoFo-goer clearskies08 managed to sneak spy shots throughout the entirety of the recent employee-only roadmap presentation, bringing back just shy of 30 shots for all to see. Your super spy achievement certificate is waiting for you at the front desk, clearskies08.
So, what’s in store for 2009?
[via clearskies08 at HowardForums]
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Details of Sony's not-a-netbook went live today, apparently by accident.
It's price is $NaN.00, which means the price isn't in the database yet ("Not a Number"), but it has a 1.33GHz Intel processor, Windows Vista, a 1600x768 ultra-widescreen 8-inch display, and a 60GB hard drive or 128GB SSD.
In the unfinished ad, it weighs "x.xx" pounds and has an "x-hour" battery. The picture is apparently a placeholder: it looks exactly like a Vaio TT, which doesn't match the teaser ad or the FCC images.
Assuming it has a clamshell form-factor, Sony's returned to the netbook's own roots, producing an old-fashioned subnotebook with the benefit of new technology. The original Picturebooks suffered from poor performance and battery life, due to Transmeta's disappointing chipsets: Intel's Atom represents the successful execution of that (part) of Transmeta's late-1990s plans. The clock speed's usual for an Atom machine, though: the Core Solos in the UX ran at 1.33 GHz.
Let's see that price.
Sonystyle store [Sony]
You know those engineer elves at Google like to do things their own way. That build-it-better ethic also applies to Christmas toys. If you click on the Christmas Doodle on Google’s main search page, you will see the five images below, which shows what I can only assume is one of Google’s older engineers in his workshop with his son. He is putting together a contraption with wooden gears and tubes that create toys (and explosions too!). Those must be Internet tubes.
(Yahoo and Live Search are also celebrating today).
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News Flash: More people get their news from the Net than from newspapers. While this will hardly count as news to most of our readers, the Pew Research Center seems surprised by the shift. In a survey of 1,489 adults in the U.S. conducted in early December, 40 percent said they get most of their national and international news from the Internet, compared to 35 percent from newspapers. The percentage of newspaper readers has been pretty steady since 2005. What’s changed is the number of people admitting they get their news from the Internet as well, up from 24 percent the last time the Pew Center asked this question in September, 2007.
TV still beats both as a news source, with 70 percent, but give it a couple more years and the Internet should overtake that as well. Among younger adults, those under 30, the Internet already ties TV as a news source at 59 percent for both. (Last year, TV beat the Internet among this age group, 68 percent to 34 percent, to give you a sense of how fast things can switch).
Have people’s reading habits really changed so much in just a year, or are Pew surveys a lagging indicator of reality?
And if the numbers are accurate, is this just another nail in the coffin of newspapers? Not exactly. What isn’t clear from the survey is how much of that Internet news comes from Websites run by newspapers.
The New York Times alone, for instance, operates the 16th most popular set of properties on the Web, although that does not seem to be helping much in the online advertising department. Even if newspapers grab a large share of the Internet news pie, that pie is just not as filling as a pie filled with more lucrative print ads. But as long as newspapers keep producing journalism worth reading (and adjust their business models accordingly), people will keep going to them for a portion of their news. It is just that they will read their news in their browsers instead of on paper.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 stv.tv | Notebook Sales Outpace Desktop Sales Slashdot - mikesd81 writes "Eweek reports that notebook sales have surpassed desktop sales for the first time in history. 'In the third quarter of 2008, notebook PC shipments rose almost 40 percent compared with the same period of 2007 to reach 38.6 million units ... Notebooks Top Desktop Sales ... A First: Notebooks Outnumber Desktops |
I got a Rebel XSi ( a few weeks ago, but it counted for Christmas), a watch-winder, and was woken up by my two-week old (another present) crying and a kick in the guts from my three-year old. What did you guys get?
BlackBerry Storm brings the tools to challenge iPhone Oakland Press - By Matt Myftiu With the Storm, Blackberry and Verizon are hoping to take on the big boys (namely the iPhone) in the relatively new realm of touch-screen phone technology. Apple iPhone vs. RIM BlackBerry Storm BlackBerry Storm Review (Verdict: Fixable) |
Britain's strict ad-standards regulators offered a Christmas gift to Apple yesterday: it ruled that ads claiming Windows is less stable than OSX--and more vulnerable to infection-- were truthful.
Despite a history of correcting Apple's hyperbolic marketing, it did not uphold a round of complaints filed against the "I'm a Mac" campaign.
We considered that people would understand [the ad] to mean viruses that infected Windows based PCs would not infect Macs and that Macs were less likely to be infected by viruses than those PCs; not that Macs would never be infected by viruses and did not require virus protection. ... We concluded therefore that the ad was not irresponsible or likely to mislead.
The Brits' version of the familiar TV and web slots feature comedy duo Mitchell and Webb. Complaints were directed against an ad that had the "PC" character declare that he always crashes and was riddled with viruses; another where he sneezed due to said infections; and another where he would stop talking in mid-sentence to "reboot."
Some of the complaints asserted this gave a misleading impression that all PCs were unstable, while other claimed that computers running Apple's operating system were also vulnerable to virus infection. Another of the complainants said that PCs running Linux were just as unlikely to be infected with malware as Macs
The Advertising Standards Authority, in not upholding the complaints, took the view that consumers were generally aware of the distinction between operating system and hardware.
We considered that those people, who were aware of other PC operating systems, would also understand that viruses attacked software and operating systems, not hardware, and would therefore understand that the ad referred to PCs that ran Microsoft Windows rather than another platform, for example, Linux. We concluded that, because people who saw them would understand they referred to PCs that ran on Microsoft Windows and any operational difficulties that might be associated with them, the ads did not misleadingly imply all PCs, regardless of software or system, were vulnerable to crashing and viruses.
The authority also ruled that Macs were less likely to be infected:
the claim did not imply Macs would never be infected by viruses and did not require virus protection. We understood that the type of viruses that infected PCs with Microsoft Windows, could not infect Macs that did not run Microsoft Windows. We also understood that Macs, which did not operate on Microsoft Windows, were less likely to be infected by viruses than PCs. We concluded therefore that the claim was not irresponsible or likely to mislead.
Finally, it determined that OSX is more generally stable than Windows, due to the latter's likelihood of malware infection:
Macs that did not run Microsoft Windows were less likely to crash than PCs that ran Microsoft Windows
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It’s always fun to hear what Google employees call various projects when they think no one is listening. In 2007 they called the upstart Hulu joint venture 
Forget using 
