Want to subsidize news, newspapers, and journalism? I have an idea I could stand behind. But it’s not this: Nicolas Sarkozy has given France’s newspapers a 600million subsidy over three yearsincluding... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Jan 2009 | 12:10 pm
(TrendHunter.com) There should be a law against this feet-deforming high heel shoes made by Karo Shoes and spotted by Trend de la Creme. The strappy black shoes on display have a minimum vertical height... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Jan 2009 | 11:39 am
Dutch designer Piet Hein Eek specializes in works made from reclaimed wood, like this lovely cupboard. He does floors, too! Piet Hein Eek (via Cribcandy) Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Jan 2009 | 11:32 am
Toronto author and free software activist Robert Boyczuk's short story collection, "Horror Story and Other Horror Stories" has finally been published. Quill and Quire reviewed the 19-story collection,... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Jan 2009 | 11:32 am
Toronto author and free software activist Robert Boyczuk's short story collection, "Horror Story and Other Horror Stories" has finally been published. Quill and Quire reviewed the 19-story collection, crediting Bob with "having a real knack for creepy, Twilight Zone-style atmospherics." The whole manuscript's up for free CC download as well, natch.
(TrendHunter.com) If steampunk space aliens were to pay me a visit, it would be important to have the right accoutrements with which to amuse them. Using a bit of wit and wile, I think I could come up... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Jan 2009 | 11:19 am
(TrendHunter.com) Chargers are great--unless you cant plug them in. Even the best chargers are absolutely useless if there is no wall outlet or car jack to plug in your charger. With the Emergency Charger,... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Jan 2009 | 10:59 am
(TrendHunter.com) The USB Negative Scanner lets you scan and view negatives from your old photos right from your PC. You can edit them just like any other digital image to prepare them for printing,... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Jan 2009 | 10:39 am
(TrendHunter.com) Incoming! Incoming! The MSN USB Webcam Missile Launcher is a fascinating find. It actually lets you view people via webcam before you fire off a single shot. Use it to peek around a... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Jan 2009 | 10:19 am
somanyrobots writes with this excerpt from the Dallas News: "In a major defeat for social conservatives, a sharply divided State Board of Education voted Thursday to abandon a longtime state requirement that high school science teachers cover what some critics consider to be 'weaknesses' in the theory of evolution. Under the science curriculum standards recommended by a panel of science educators and tentatively adopted by the board, biology teachers and biology textbooks would no longer have to cover the 'strengths and weaknesses' of Charles Darwin's theory that man evolved from lower forms of life. Texas is particularly influential to textbook publishers because of the size of its market, so this could have a ripple effect on textbooks used in other states as well."
Tim Jackson has had a colorful career. He is a former journalist (Financial Times, Independent, Economist and Red Herring) and was the managing director of the $700 million Carlyle Internet Partners Europe... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Jan 2009 | 9:44 am
Tim Jackson has had a colorful career. He is a former journalist (Financial Times, Independent, Economist and Red Herring) and was the managing director of the $700 million Carlyle Internet Partners Europe Fund. He founded QXL in 1997, a UK-based eBay-like online auction site that went public in 1999 at a valuation of around $400 million. And he’s also written three books. In other words, he seems to keep busy.
Now he’s on to his next challenge, launching and growing a UK based DVD swapping site called LendAround. The core idea of swapping DVDs isn’t new - services like Peerflix gave in an honest try and eventually gave up. Another service we’ve covered is Swaptree, which is still going and recently raised a fresh round of funding.
LendAround is taking a slightly different approach. First, the site is focusing on loaners, not outright permanent trades. And The goal is to let your friends browse your DVD collection and borrow what they want, and LendAround keeps track of who has what. That removes the issue of people forgetting who borrowed what.
There are 2 billion DVDs in U.S. homes, Jackson says, and 80% of those are watched just twice a year. Jackson envisions people swapping DVDs with neighbors, work colleagues, church members and sports clubs, where people already know and trust each other and for the most part can hand over the DVDs in person, skipping the mail.
Eventually Jackson wants to expand the service to include other items.
LendAround is currently in private beta but you can sign up for it on the home page. Users are given fifty invites each, and we’ll be adding it to inviteshare tomorrow to help users get into the service. I’ve tried it out - it’s still a little rough around the edges but I found it easy to add titles via a title search or bar code. And I can now peruse Jackson’s 234 DVDs (I’ve requested a loaner of Fight Club).
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
According to Microsoft’s latest 10Q “Zune platform revenue decreased $100 million or 54 percent reflecting a decrease in device sales.”
A precipitous decline. And one that stands in stark contrast to the record 22,727,000 iPods Apple (AAPL) shipped during its latest quarter, representing three percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Can’t really blame his one on the economy, can we Microsoft?
MySpace is so five minutes ago. Well, at least that’s the consensus according to a new statistics report from ComScore. The report shows that Facebook receives nearly double the amount of unique worldwide visitors to its site than their competitor MySpace.
The data shows that approximately 222 million people logged on Facebook in December while only 125 million people visited MySpace. Facebook has steadily increased their number of visitors an average of 10 percent each month. It also has about 100 million more registered users than MySpace. However, MySpace still leads in the United States according to page view data and time spent on the website. These statistics indicate though that this year, Facebook may surpass MySpace in the United States as well.
Although Facebook leads on a global level, MySpace is faring financially better. Due to the News Corporation investment, the site has pulled in more revenue than Facebook. Facebook still faces the challenge of developing ways to monopolize on their bigger audience.
zwei2stein writes "I found this question with far-reaching implications in the off-topic section of a forum I frequent: 'My economics teacher is forcing us to give up all of our work for the semester. Every page of notes and paper must be turned over to her to be destroyed to prevent future students from copying it. My binder was in my backpack, and she went into my backpack to take it. Is that legal?' Besides the issue with private property invasion, which was the trigger of that post, there is much more important question: Can a teacher ask a student not to retain knowledge? How does IP law relate to teaching and sharing knowledge? Whose property are those notes?"
Many people want to create a blog (heck it might even be your New Year’s resolution), but being a little tech savvy always makes designing a website a bit easier. In case you want to share your thoughts with the world, you might want to consider getting the MvixBOX WDN2000, which is essentially a server loaded with useful features.
The MvixBOX is LAMP ready, meaning it comes with Linux, Apache, MySQL/SQlife, and PHP software. These software programs are great for hosting personal or business related websites as well as blogs. One of the nice things about this device is that you won’t have to pay hosting costs, which can add up over a period of time. Now, you would also have to configure the device so everything you write goes to the box and is immediately hosted, but MvixGuru has very informative step-by-step instructions about how to do this.
So, if you want to start up your own blog/website, but don’t want to deal with all the hosting headaches, you may want to look at this as another option.
# Stick it to The Man: Black paranoia is usually right in there. There's usually this conspiratorial thing that The Man is plotting your doom. There's a lot of real blaxploitation movies that involve a plot to exterminate black people. It's a constant storyline. In these movies, white people spend 95% of their time coming up with plots against black people.
# White people by the pool: Every one of those ['70s blaxploitation flicks] depicted white people beside a swimming pool. We actually had that scene, but we cut it. A lot of times they were older character actors.
# The exploding car off a cliff: Cars always exploded for no reason.
# Bad physics: When somebody got shot, they would often fall the wrong direction.
# Random theater actors: You had really terrible actors alongside these theater actors trying to be drug dealers, but they'd over-enunciate everything.
FROM GAMERTELL - Blockbuster has announced a partnership with Sonic Solutions Inc. to offer videos for rent and sale on various Broadband connected devices such PCs, phones, Blu-ray players, and Internet connected TVs. Might the company someday offer games this way as well? MORE »
At CES, Palm announced that the new iPhone/BlackBerry/Android KILLA would be out in the first half of this year. This much we know for certain, but rumors of its price and launch date have already been floating around for some time. And now Nicholas Deleon’s favorite person in the world, Sarah Lacy, Twittered earlier today that Sprint employees were already being trained on the Pre.
i honestly tried to bribe sprint employees to give me an unlocked pre. they’re all training on them! i know they have them back there
Does this Twitter from an individual who is more enamored with how much money that Facebook kid makes give validation to a rumor from a forum poster whose informant is right 75 percent of the time? Nope. Wha?!
sprint employees told me the pre doesn’t come out until JUNE! :(
And so the saga continues.
Thanks for sending this in, Katie aka Twitter fiend.
VIEWER WARNING: This episodes contains verbal descriptions of graphic violence. Discretion advised.
Today's episode of Boing Boing video is an excerpt from OUTLAWED, a film produced by WITNESS, in partnership with more than a dozen other human rights groups around the world.
The future of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and of the men held there, has been at the top of the news this week -- President Obama has ordered the facility closed, one released detainee has now become the head of Al Qaeda in Yemen, and some around the world are calling for war crimes tribunals to be held over the torture some prisoners survived during rendition.
The story of what he endured, which included horrific sexual violence during interrogation, was painful for us to watch in the studio, when we were editing this preview piece. But all of us on the BB Video team felt like this was an incredibly important story for the world to hear, and we were grateful for the ability to draw greater attention to the story at this time.
Speaking on my own behalf here: What happens with Guantánamo and the legal process surrounding the men still held there should matter to each person who reads this blog post. The safety of our nation does not require us to abandon universally-recognized principles of human rights. Torture and disappearances do not make America more secure.
Paraphrasing what one person from WITNESS told us in email -- if more Americans realized they live in a nation where, on a street corner in the town where you live, any one of us could be picked up, pushed into an unmarked van, then moved around detention centers all over the world, tortured, without a charge or a word to your family, surely there would be more outcry.
OUTLAWED was produced around the time when the Council of Europe issued a report on the topic of extraordinary rendition and torture involving America's "War on Terror." To document why those issues matter, WITNESS created a coalition with a number of US human rights and social justice 'project partners' such as Amnesty and the ACLU to distribute the video.
(Special appreciation to Boing Boing Video producer Derek Bledsoe. Sincere thanks to Bryan Nunez, Grace Lile, and Yvette J. Alberdingk Thijm from WITNESS. Music in this episode graciously provided by Amon Tobin / Cinematic Orchestra.)
UPDATE, January 23, 2009:
In a declassified note to his lawyers dated Dec. 29, 2008
but only released by US officials this week, Mohamed says:
It has come to my attention through several reliable
sources that my release from Guantanamo to the
UK had been ordered several weeks ago.
It is a cruel tactic of delay to suspend my travel till
the last days of this [Bush] administration
while I should have been home a long time ago."
Mohamed's lawyers said they are concerned for his health.
He has been on a hunger strike over his continued
detention for more than four weeks.
Britain has formally requested Mohammed's release,
The U.S. has so far declined, "due to security concerns.
JobsEnding writes with this quote from IBTimes: "A British court ruled on Friday that a man who hacked into US military computers will be given permission for a judicial review against his extradition to the United States. Hacker Gary McKinnon, 42, who had been diagnosed recently with Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism, has admitted hacking into the military computers. His lawyers had said McKinnon was at risk of suicide if he were extradited." We discussed the granting of McKinnon's extradition in 2006 when it was first granted, as well as a profile of the man more recently.
Today, Microsoft has announced the merger of Office Live and Windows Live. Instead of offering the applications as two different programs, consumers will have the ability to access both sets of services from one web location.
Office Live is a collection of services appealing to small businesses and are designed as additions to the Microsoft Office software program. The current products included with Office Live are Office Live Workspace, Office Live Small Business and Office Live Groove. Windows Live is a set of consumer software programs that provide mail, instant messaging, blogging services and more.
The merger will correspond with Microsoft’s coming Wave 4 release, which is planning to occur towards the end of the year. It seems to be only an organizational development and does not seem to be an effect of the announcement of the company’s poor earnings and upcoming layoffs. Currently, Microsoft has no plans to make adjustments to the current organization leadership of the programs.
Venture capital investments plunged 33 percent in the fourth quarter, falling to the lowest level in nearly four years as the financiers of new business ideas became more reluctant to take... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Jan 2009 | 5:01 am
Venture capital firms tightened their purse strings in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the latest MoneyTree Report released by the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The total dollar amount invested in venture financings was $5.4 billion, down 33 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 (when it was $8.09 billion) and down 26 percent from the third quarter of 2008 (when it was $7.3 billion). For the entire year, the total venture capital invested into startups was $28.3 billion, down 8 percent.
The decline in investing mapped the decrease in exit options, even though VCs are supposed to have a 5 to 7 year investment horizon.
More money continued to flow into later stage deals. And broken down by sector, venture dollars going into Internet deals fell 26 percent quarter over quarter as well to $787 million across 170 deals (a 20 percent decline from the third quarter). Even investments in clean tech startups dipped 14 percent sequentially to $909 million across 62 deals. For the year, Internet financings were pretty much flat at $4.9 billion, while the dollars going into clean tech deals increased 52 percent to $4.1 billion.
The ten largest venture fundings in the quarter were:
Solyndra: $219 million
Pocket Communications: $100 million
Silver Spring Networks: $75 million
Bolex Therapuetics: $60 million
i/o Data Centers: $56 million
Boston-Power: $55 million
Pacira Pharmaceuticals: $55 million
Bayhill Therapeutics: $54.3 million
Kosmos Energy: $53.9 million
Calisolar: $51.8 million
It's not like Microsoft is going to be disappearing any time soon, especially with the success of the Windows 7 beta, but its death grip on the PC industry is being eroded on multiple fronts and it's a good exercise to imagine what it might be like if MS were to take the French leave.
It's important to note that the question of what happens after Microsoft doesn't need to mean "what would happen if Microsoft left the picture entirely." Mostly because that's not going to happen: they'll be a part of the post-Microsoft world too, because "Microsoft" is more than a company, it's a way of thinking about computing.
It’s not like Microsoft is going to be disappearing any time soon, especially with the success of the Windows 7 beta, but its death grip on the PC industry is being eroded on multiple fronts and it’s a good exercise to imagine what it might be like if MS were to take the French leave.
It’s important to note that the question of what happens after Microsoft doesn’t need to mean “what would happen if Microsoft left the picture entirely.” Mostly because that’s not going to happen: they’ll be a part of the post-Microsoft world too. “Microsoft” is more than a company, it’s a way of thinking about computing.
Microsoft has been the champion (that is to say both the winner and head promoter) of the single-unit personal computer since their dominance began. Their solution is wraparound, robust, and in a way, complete. But as the platform of the “personal computer” spreads further and further from the simple “box and monitor” concept — i.e. to phones, tweener devices, and appliances — the OS becomes stretched thin. As much as I like Windows 7, I don’t see it running my fridge.
This an interesting little piece that examines a few options of who would replace Microsoft as the Lord of the Manor. Google would certainly have a finger in that pie, but they’re shrewd enough to simply make themselves compatible with whatever platform took to the fore. Cisco and IBM are not nearly end-user-orientated enough to take over. Apple of course would surge, but the vacuum left by Microsoft would be impossible for them to fill. Linux, as Asay suggests, is on the rise, but despite his enthusiasm the OS not quite ready to assume the mantle.
So there’s no line of succession were Redmond to be sucked into a Wormhole (perish the thought). The Post-Microsoft PC world will have to emerge naturally out of the current one. But how?
There are two paths: fragmentation and modularization.
Fragmentation is what we see now, what we’ve been seeing for some time. Different OSes for different devices, different programs, different code bases, all with allowances for working with one another but not designed for it. We could continue down that path, but the number of devices and the variety of their needs are beginning to multiply more quickly than we can write for them. Viz. the plethora of mobiles and their disparate, semi-related OSes, either obscuring or overstating the capabilities of the hardware.
The point being that one OS won’t stretch far enough, and multiple OSes are too troublesome to maintain.
Modularization it is — if that’s even a word. A more optimistic person might call it “unification,” but realistically it’s not that but a more directed fragmentation. What needs to happen is the stripping down of the OS to its component parts, and the ability to apply them only where necessary. Linux OSes are the leader in this regard, being designed for it from the start, and Apple has demonstrated it somewhat with the quasi-OS X running on the iPhone. Windows has blown it for a while, and although their mobile and embedded solutions are potentially powerful, they are part of a labyrinthine set of dependencies and legacy requirements, caught in the enormous web of the Microsoft software ecosystem.
So you cut the thing to pieces. Modular is the future. Linux was born in pieces, and OS X is ready to be butchered. Microsoft is experimenting, and MinWin may be promising in this regard, but they’re late to the party.
The void left by the Personal Computer with one OS will be filled, as it were, with LEGO-like (or steak-like) building blocks, universally compatible (or at least adaptable) pick-and-choose bits built over a kernel or utterly barebones OS (Unix-like, MinWin, OS X, or other), itself really just a clearinghouse for instructions from the bits. Competition would be among developers for the same “space” in your OS, but competition would extend to the shell, the drivers, the file system, and so on. Sounds a bit like a widget or cloud OS (shudder), but would you call Photoshop and Firefox widgets? Would you load your graphics drivers from the cloud? Web services will increase in popularity and power, but I think well-connected desktop apps enjoy a hybrid vigor that is more essential to this little mix. Of course, the line between web and desktop is already blurry, and it’ll degrade further.
This is not an original idea (modular computing is an ideal pursued for decades), but it is one logical conclusion at this time for what might rush in to fill the void should Windows no longer apply. Making source code open will be essential if the blocks are to fit together, but free is not a necessity (although it would prove popular, as always).
With your permission, I’d like to coin a term for this building-block operating system: LEGOS. Got a ring to it. The original LEGO blocks are capitalized too, so that makes the ambiguous LegOS less of an option. And everybody likes a good portmanteau.
The great variety of OSes these days means the world is a hotbed for innovation, but in the end it is likely that the victor will be the big guy who best cannibalizes the competition. Unfortunately for Microsoft, their paradigm is being challenged (I swore I’d get through this without saying paradagm.. damn) and their OS philosophy is breaking down. Something smaller and more agile will be taking their place if they’re not careful. They may not be prepared to face the future, but we can sure as hell get ready for it.
[Images borrowed and manipulated, pipe up if they're yours]
Futureproofing your gear is always a smart idea. Why pick up a 3G USB modem when you can get a combination 3G and 4G WiMAX modem instead?
Beceem Communications and Franklin Wireless has put together “the world’s first dual-mode 3G CDMA/4G WiMAX USB Modem, the Franklin U300.“ After years of false starts, WiMAX is finally taking off. The modem can support 10 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up over WiMAX. Over EVDO, it can handle 3.1 Mbps down and 1.8 Mbps up. The modem is compatible with Windows 2000 and higher.
If you’re unfamiliar with WiMAX, it’s a fast, wireless Internet connection with a much larger range than Wi-Fi. Plenty of manufacturers are building WiMAX into their machines. If you’ve got an older machine or are looking for a device that lets you connect to multiple machines, a USB solution may be your best bet.
CNET - Microsoft announced Friday night that computer enthusiasts will have a while longer to get their hands on the beta version of Windows 7. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 24 Jan 2009 | 4:21 am
Even though the Windows Team said they were removing the download cap on Windows 7 until Jan. 24, they didn't mean downloads would end on Jan. 24. Windows 7 will be available through Feb. 10.
You... Source: Gizmodo | 24 Jan 2009 | 4:17 am
Somewhere out there someone needs this 360 degree speaker. Sure, JVC and others make off the shelf solution but that’s no fun. This project combines two sets of Ikea Reda bowls and random 4-inch 8 ohm speakers. A little cutting and soldering nets you a great looking speaker that will pump out the tunes at all angles. You could even take the basics from the project and make a sound bar or other design. The trick is making sure the speakers are wired properly.
ShareBrained Technology, makers of the wild and wooly Chronulator clock kit, have released a new version of their product. Chronulator is an electronics kit that lets you build arbitrarily weird electronic clocks, from TokyoFlash-style digital numbers to whacky analogue ones that use dials, wheels or other readouts to display the time. John Park from Make tested the kit by building this handsom little fella inside a Romeo and Julieta cigar box.
On Talking Points Memo, Dan Gillmor makes some stinging points about the media's complicity in manufacturing the financial crisis by unquestioningly promoting reckless bubble spending while pooh-poohing any idea that the bill would come due some day:
When we can predict an inevitable calamity if we continue along the current path, we owe it to the public to do everything we can to encourage a change in that destructive behavior.
In practice, this means activism. It means relentless campaigning to point out what's going wrong, and demanding corrective action from those who can do something about it.
So in Florida, Arizona and California, among other epicenters of the housing bubble, newspapers might have told their readers -- including governmental officials -- the difficult truth. They could have explained, again and again, that the housing bubble would inevitably lead, at least locally, to personal financial disaster for many in their regions, not to mention fiscal woes for local and state governments. How many should have done this, given the media's at least partial reliance on advertising from those who profited from the bubbles? Any that cared to do their jobs.
Some plain-as-day woes don't present any financial conflicts. For example, the threat to New Orleans from hurricane-created flooding was clear long before Katrina, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune did run a series of articles warning of what might happen years before the hurricane struck. What it didn't do was follow up in the relentless kind of way that might have spurred local, state and federal action to prevent or mitigate the inevitable disaster.
Reuters - A U.S. senator has asked Microsoft Corp about its plans to slash up to 5,000 jobs, urging the world's biggest software company to preserve the jobs of Americans ahead of foreigners working on visas.
One of the minor, more handy features of Windows 7 is a new way to resize windows by just dragging them to the edge of the screen in a gesture-based action.
If you drag your window to the top of the... Source: Gizmodo | 24 Jan 2009 | 3:10 am
netizen writes "CircleID is reporting a large-scale DDoS attack affecting all of Network Solutions' name servers for the past 48 hours, potentially affecting millions of websites and emails around the world hosting their domain names on the company's servers. The NANOG mailing list indicates that it is due to a very large-scale UDP/53 DDoS which Network Solutions has also confirmed: 'There is a spike in DNS query volumes that is causing latency for the delay in web sites resolving. This is a result of a DDOS attack. We are taking measures to mitigate the attack and speed up queries.""
Last week, Google announced the cutting of several positions as well as the closing of numerous applications. This week, Yahoo pronounced that it too will need to take major steps in order to get through the worldwide economic crisis.
To start, the Internet giant plans to freeze all employees’ salary raises. Throughout the year, none of their employees will receive a pay raise in hopes that this will help keep the company fiscally sound. This is the first time in its history that Yahoo has taken such measures. Yahoo also had to hand out some pink slips: since December, the company had laid off over 1500 employees. Management hopes that these steps will be enough to keep Yahoo financially stable.
However, the new CEO of the company will not be hurting financially this coming year. Carol Bartz received a 19 million dollar salary package along with the possibility of earning as much as an annual 4 million dollar bonus on top of her base salary. This big pay day certainly didn’t sit well with everyone, especially the employees that were notified of salary freeze.
When you're stressed at work, you might find yourself "goofing off" to ease your frustrations. But when a coworker waltzes in looking for you, what do you do? Quick, hit the Hulk Smash USB button!... Source: Gizmodo | 24 Jan 2009 | 2:40 am
Today on Offworld we saw a pair of pairs of retro-game inspired footwear, possibly the reigning champ of game-cakes, as these are ones you can actually play, explored the possibility that Taito may be returning to the DS for more retro-futuristic Space Invaders love, and saw more of Sega's upcoming Wii title that parodies retro gaming's finest.
We also held a brief service for the death of legendary design house The Designers Republic, best known in the games sphere for their work defining the visual identity of the Wipeout series, saw fantastic new media from Fez creators Polytron on the opening of their new website, and saw the first and likely only set of lesbian artificial intelligence erotica we'll ever see, with a forbidden romance between Portal's GlaDOS and System Shock's Shodan.
Finally, we saw one man's attempt to bring The Wrestler's Randy 'The Ram' Robinson forward from his on-screen 8-bit roots to full next-gen glory, and settled on a game for this weekend's community play: the open beta of London indie Beatnik Games' Plain Sight, a raucous and light-hearted robot arena battle that takes the best bits of Mario Galaxy's spherical worlds and combines it with brutal aerial acrobatics.
Some Halo player imagines what it would look like if Microsoft ever purchased Target. Hah. [Halolz - Thanks Marco!]
Note: Don't take it seriously. It's just a funny image I thought I'd pass along. Source: Gizmodo | 24 Jan 2009 | 2:20 am
Recently, Sanyo announced its new line of Xactis. Sanyo pushed the concept that these products were “Dual Cameras”—devices capable of producing good HD video and good still images. Traditionally, there was a trade off when it came to devices that did both and Sanyo is trying to change that.
Gadgetell spoke to a Sanyo representative about this concept. The idea is simple, carry one device that can do more. They’ve placed serious still camera technology into their Xacti handheld camcorder line. The company believes that more and more camcorders are going to build in powerful photography elements. They do not think that regular cameras will branch out into HD video as much. Any one else remember the backlash when the first DSLR included HD video capture? Maybe Sanyo’s right about this.
What is the future for Sanyo’s camcorders? Sanyo does not have any plans to introduce a point-and-shoot camera-style camcorder. The Xactis have a very distinct upright form factor and that is where Sanyo will spend most of its efforts (even though they also branched out with their first horizontal-style camcorder). Sanyo hopes to differentiate itself in the crowded market by upping all its camcorders to HD resolution.
They do not have any plans to add in a touch screen interface to their devices, but are looking into it. Don’t expect a line of prosumer cameras to challenge the likes of Canon or Sony, either. Sanyo is firmly entrenched in going after the “regular” consumer. This “Dual Camera” strategy may pay off in the long run. I know plenty of people who don’t want to lug around both a camcorder and a still camera. Sanyo’s move to make their cameras smaller and smaller could easily make them a viable choice to consumers.
As an art form, the USB port isn’t necessarily the first thing that comes to mind, at least to me. Apparently this is not the case for the dialog05 group. They created an entire exhibition based off the technology of the USB connector. It’s actually quite neat, they’ve combined regular items with the USB plug in technology. Personally, I like the bra and the datalock.
Call me old-timey, but I prefer my lunar rovers on the moon or—barring that—on some sort of rocky facsimile, not rolling up Pennsylvania Avenue. Only thing worse? Dudes wearing spacesuits... Source: Gizmodo | 24 Jan 2009 | 2:11 am
Despite the continuous stream of layoffs, CrunchBoard this week has the most diverse job listings I’ve seen yet. There’s both a range of job types–from marketing to technical–and a wide variety of job locations, from New York to Dallas to San Francisco to Portland, OR.
Finally, we saw one man's attempt to bring The Wrestler's Randy 'The Ram' Robinson forward from his on-screen 8-bit roots to full next-gen glory, and settled on a game for this weekend's community play: the open beta of London indie Beatnik Games' Plain Sight, a raucous and light-hearted robot arena battle that takes the best bits of Mario Galaxy's spherical worlds and combines it with brutal aerial acrobatics.
You may want to hand your keys over after a pint of Ben and Jerry's, because in Australia, a man's car breathalyzer refused to start his engine after he ate an Ice Cream Bar.
UPI reports that the... Source: Gizmodo | 24 Jan 2009 | 2:00 am
We're sorry to learn that our new friend Intel chairman Craig Barrett plans to retire this summer after 35 years revolutionizing the microchip and PC industries. He could not be leaving at a worse... Source: Gizmodo | 24 Jan 2009 | 1:47 am
PC World - Details are scarce, unless Russian is your language of choice, but CNews is reporting that Russia plans to develop its own national operating system. The move is designed to reduce Russia's need to rely on foreign software and licensing agreements. And the alleged "open code" solution, likely a Linux/GNU derivative, will give Russia a greater degree of customization, as well as increased control over how the potentially free OS is used and accessed. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 24 Jan 2009 | 1:43 am
TORONTO - InterTAN Canada, which operates 765 The Source by Circuit City stores across Canada, said it has received "a number of formal proposals" regarding the sale of its Canadian... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Jan 2009 | 1:40 am
If you are one of the many trying out the Windows 7 beta, you may be interested in downloading SetteMaster as a one stop shop for common performance tweaks.
It isn't much, but it will save time for... Source: Gizmodo | 24 Jan 2009 | 1:40 am
Doubles is a unique new instrument that really brings out the “performance” in performance art. It reacts to acceleration and centrifugal force to create sound. I wouldn’t call this “music” exactly, but the premise looks pretty cool. Beads on the surface are spun using what look like air hockey paddles. The relative speed of the beads influences the sound that is produced. As you can see in the video below, this instrument can be played by multiple people, leading to some unique sound creations. Watching the video, I feel like I’m missing something, since all the sounds are pretty much the same. Maybe it’s being played by an inexperienced player?
This work applied the philosophy from “tai chi”: “It is neither existing nor not existing.” The interactive factors and feedback answer the philosophy aptly. It is based on the simple principle that the rolling of a bead will lead to reduction in friction. When the player makes the physical objects move a sliding effect of acceleration and centrifugal force is created to compute the audio and visual effect in the installation.
Ars has the scoop on Microsoft's sick Resident Evil 5 Xbox 360 bundle: Red Xbox 360 and controller, Resident Evil 5, theme AND free download of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. Hot. [Ars] Source: Gizmodo | 24 Jan 2009 | 1:20 am
FROM APPLETELL - This week brought a veritable cornucopia of great apps to the App Store. Many of them are, oddly enough, tilt-based puzzle games, which are great for wasting time. MORE »
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Intel Corp Chairman Craig Barrett, the courtly former academic credited with building the company into the world's foremost chip maker, will retire in May after 35 Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Jan 2009 | 1:13 am
PC World - VeriSign said it plans to buy Certicom, just three days after Research In Motion's hostile bid for the security company unraveled. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 24 Jan 2009 | 1:10 am
erickhill writes with word that scientists from the University of Maryland have successfully transferred information from one charged atom to another without having it cross the intervening space of about one meter. The academic paper is available in the journal Science, though it requires a subscription to see more than the abstract. Scientists have previously teleported unmolested qubits between photons of light, and between photons and clouds of atoms. But researchers have long sought to teleport qubits between distant atoms. Light's high speed of travel makes photons good transporters of information, but for storing quantum information, atoms are a much better choice because they're easier to hold on to. 'This is a big deal,' comments Myungshik Kim, a quantum physicist at Queen's University Belfast in the United Kingdom. 'To store information as it is in quantum form, you have to have a teleportation scheme available between two stationary qubits. Then you can store them and manipulate them later on.'"
To most of us, comfort is sitting on a soft cushion.To others, comfort is sitting on a sheet of molded plastic that rides up one's butt crack.
The Chaise Him and Her chairs are the brainchild of... Source: Gizmodo | 24 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 23 (Reuters) - Brazil's state-run energy company Petrobras announced on Friday it would raise its five-year investment plan by 55 percent at a time when large raw materials companies... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Jan 2009 | 12:48 am
AP - Google Inc. is showing its love for its employees by giving them a second chance to profit from their wilting stock options. But the move irked shareholders still stuck with agonizing losses on their investments.
(Petrobras officially corrected investments in exploration and production to $104.6 billion in paragraph five) Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Jan 2009 | 12:17 am
employees by giving them a second chance to profit from their wilting stock options. But the move irked shareholders still stuck with agonizing losses on their investments. ... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Jan 2009 | 12:09 am
New york, Jan. 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Business Intelligence Associates, Inc. (BIA), experts in information compliance and data management, announced the completed expansion of its... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Jan 2009 | 12:06 am
jcatcw writes "Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that CAPTCHA cracking isn't that difficult these days. It has even become a business. For example, DeCaptcher.com will solve CAPTCHAs for your spamming needs at a rate of $2 per 1,000 successfully cracked CAPTCHAs. In response, newer systems are in development. Both Carnegie Mellon and Penn State (is there something about the water in PA?) are working on image-based systems. ESP-PIX and SQ-PIX both require the viewer to interpret pictures. Imagination CAPTCHA from Penn has the user find the center of an image. The idea is that humans are better at image recognition that computers, but humans can legitimately disagree on their interpretations and some humans are color blind. Problems remain. For now, sites would be well advised to look at reCAPTCHA — the system that works with Google Books and the Internet Archive to digitize printed texts — which comes with a wide variety of application and programming plug-ins and an open API."
Ah, the January doldrums, that quirky time between CES gadget-explosion and the spring cell phone shows. Everyone gets a bit goofy, hoping for a splash of publicity after the big guns have come out or are being prepped. Here is what bugged me this week:
-Sony’s nose dive
-Calm Grandma down, DTV transition isn’t happening
-You’ve got Mail (and an STD -Sorry)
-Microsoft kills off Windows Mobile staff
-So Belkin isn’t going to pay me any more?
Sony, Sony, Sony
I am not a huge Sony-lover. I loved them back in the day of bright yellow SPORTS walkman and for some reason, can’t move past that. I’ve got a TV 10 feet away from me that is a Sony Wega that got tossed down to our Wii Arena while another brand of shiny, thin, black rectangles sits in my family room. The company posted their first loss in 14 years. That puts us back to 1995.
Sony sees iPods, Wii, and the economy as their biggest issues and are making cuts and restructuring the big company. No doubt the company can make a comeback, they’ve got the tech, the talent and even Tom Hanks (wink, wink) on board. But it is time to drop the Walkman brand.
Everyone that loves Sony disagrees with me and that is cool. It is time to move past it and put some sizzle in arguably what look to be cool media players.
Quit freaking everyone out, the analog drop off isn’t going to happen for some time.
I know it. Obama knows it and now the Senate knows it. This transition isn’t going to happen. One big reason: the economy.
The last thing Obama wants to do is force a single mom in Atlanta to choose between a converter box and dinner for her kids. It is as easy as that. The coupon deal was hit with snafus and well, see the first sentence. Expect some distance between now and the transition folks. Sorry.
You’ve got Mail (and an STD - sorry)
Just the thing for your mySpace, Facebook, eharmony initiated hook up. A gentle way to let someone know you gave them just a little bit more than a night of passion. This site lets you break the news gently, via e-mail, anonymously if you like. Yes, the pranksters should outweigh the factual by a good 12933 to 1 but hey, its all good. Best thing I’ve seen today. Bunch of crackheads.
Umm, aim over there please?
Microsoft announced it will be sending pinkslips to 5,000 employees and perhaps many deserve it. Vista really didn’t go their way and Zune, well…you don’t need me to tell you about Zune. But Windows Mobile is getting a disproportionate amount of them? Come on, Ballmer just said you guys beat the iPhone in Q4 shipments! Their is still confetti in the air, WTF?
Windows Mobile 6.5 looks absolutely attrocious so you are going to need these people if WinMo is going to make the jump. Lots of folk are lining up to do away with you like Apple and now Palm and Google. And you are taking wood out of the fire? What gives? Are you launching the SurfacePhone?
My job ends with Belkin
Just kidding! I don’t have the time to get this to the editor on time, much less meaningless dribble how much I love Belkin stuff. Don’t be fooled into thinking they are the only ones out there doing this. Word of mouth is priceless and if a company can spend a few bucks to get some, they are going to jump at it. Belkin got caught paying people for fake positive reviews of their products.
There is a dark side of marketing. Some say this dark side is more powerful than the light. And if Star Wars taught us anything, it is throw a woman in a metal bikini and you can make any story line make sense.
What did you see this week that suggests rehab might be in order? Let us know in the comments.
Macworld.com - Cast your mind back to the golden yesteryear of 2005. George W. Bush had started his second term; Million Dollar Baby had come away with the Academy Award for Best Picture; and the English cricket team won the Ashes. Oh, right, and Apple introduced a brand new kind of iPod, the iPod nano, to replace its previous best-selling model, the iPod mini. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 24 Jan 2009 | 12:00 am
The bad news just won't end for Microsoft's Zune media player. After the rather inauspicious start to the New Year when thousands of Zunes froze due to a glitch in the software, comes the report that Zune platform revenue showed a 54% revenue decrease in the last quarter.
The $100 million revenue decline "reflects a decrease in device sales," said Microsoft in its quarterly filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
But this is one thing that Microsoft will have trouble blaming on the economy. Earlier this week Apple said it sold 22.7 million iPods during the previous quarter, a three percent growth from the year before.
For years Zune has been an also-ran device lagging far, far behind the iPod. And incidents such as the Zune bug on New Year's Eve that resulted from the inability of the device clock to handle the extra day in a leap year that was 2008 hasn't endeared it to users.
Now with its declining revenue Zune increasingly seems like a vanity play for Microsoft--unless it rolls it into the larger Xbox brand. Any bets on how long that will take?
I build stuff (DIY Hoverboard, Bluetooth Phone Glove, HUD for my car). I play too many video games. I own robots. And I blog and socially network my socks off! But is there a hero that reflects all that? This was the question that started my year-long journey into becoming a children’s fiction writer. The result: Dot Robot, a techno-thriller for the dis-connected generation.
Secret codes, billionaire dot-comers, flying robots, crazy-cool gadgets and hardware overclocked to within an inch of its life. Into this digital mix comes a new kind of hero. A geeks’ geek: Jackson Farley. Jackson is a young mathematics genius and computer gaming virtuoso from Peckham, London. He is joined by American Brooke English, an MIT grad who can build just about anything and the Japanese Kojima twins, two nine-year olds who have earned enough through professional gaming to have identical Ferraris and their own private road to drive them on.
Can Jackson rise to the challenge? Is he boy-enough to lead a band of intrepid roboteers into battle against some seriously malevolent (cool) dot robots? Or will he and his kooky gang of misfits be consumed by the evil that surrounds them?
And yes, given my science fiction fan-boy status, the first thing I did when I got a publishing deal (there’s a trilogy on the way from Puffin) is ask for some money to get one of the dot robots from the book made! See Brooke’s creation, Punk made real by my friend and model maker Mike Strick.
Thanko, the Japanese purveyor of oddities such as USB powered mittens and USB necktie have come up with yet another doozy. This one is only mildly useless though: a USB powered lunch bag. It is just a plain old lunch bag, but with the added benefit of embedded heating coils that are powered by the attached USB connector. I’m sure there’s no risk of fire at all.
It’s available now in Japan for around $20. No word about stateside availability.
Following comments in Apple's recent earnings call, gadget bloggers and reporters are speculating that Apple could be preparing to sue Palm for copying the iPhone's touchscreen.
"Don't want to talk about any specific company, just making a general statement," Apple chief operating officer (and acting CEO) Tim Cook said in response to a reporter's question about the Palm Pre, Palm's yet-to-be-released handset. "We are ready to suit up and go against anyone. However, we will not stand for having our [intellectual property] ripped off and will use whatever weapons we have at our disposal."
Palm announced the Pre during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The handset features a multi-touchscreen and a slide-out keyboard. Given the multi-touch interface, it's possible that the Pre has similarities to Apple's patented, multi-touch iPhone interface.
Also, Palm hired former Apple engineer Jon Rubinstein as CEO prior to the Pre's launch. Rubinstein was instrumental to the launch of the iPod—which could explain why the Pre evokes Apple's design ethos.
Together, those facts are leading some bloggers to believe Cook's statement suggests Palm will be the target of a lawsuit filed by Apple to protect the intellectual property of the iPhone.
And it's not just bloggers who think that: Palm took the suggestion seriously enough to respond to it publicly.
Palm said it has a "robust product portfolio" to back its long history of innovation.
“If faced with legal action, we are confident that we have the tools necessary to defend ourselves," a Palm spokeswoman told All Things Digital.
That said, several other companies -- including HTC, Hewlett-Packard, RIM, and others -- have released multi-touch-enabled devices in the past year, and none so far have run afoul of Apple's patent lawyers.
Whether the Pre becomes fodder for Apple's notoriously aggressive IP legal team will be hard to answer until later this year, when Palm lets people actually get their hands on the phone. Until then, all we have is speculation.
Jim Flora Art LLC kicks off 2009 with a limited-edition, archival-quality
fine art print of a 1947 Jim Flora Columbia Records album cover, Kid Ory and
His Creole Jazz Band.
Kid Ory and His Creole Jazz Band was released in 1947 as a 78 rpm four-disc
set, as part of Columbia's Hot Jazz series. Trombonist Edward "Kid" Ory
(1886-1973) was a legendary pioneer in the development of New Orleans jazz
stylings of the early 20th century. As a bandleader he hired a number of
players who later achieved great prominence, including Louis Armstrong,
Sidney Bechet, and King Oliver.
Does the Flora caricature on the cover resemble Ory? No way. "I could never
do likeness," Flora once admitted. The cover figure looks like … something
Jim Flora would do.
Only twenty (20) prints of Kid Ory were produced for this edition. Prices
will increase for subsequent prints as the edition depletes.
Produced by Flora archivist Barbara Economon, the oversized print (larger
then the album cover) was meticulously and painstakingly crafted from a
mint-condition artist's proof sheet of the Ory cover in the Flora
collection. It is the seventh iconic Flora cover to be issued as a limited
edition fine art print.
NEW YORK, Jan 23 (Reuters) - Cablevision Systems Corp said on Friday it has settled with U.S. regulators in connection with accounting practices at its Rainbow Media programming unit. Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 23 Jan 2009 | 11:27 pm
Search giant Google is ceasing development on Notebook, its free web app for clipping and saving text, images and other bits of info found of the web. Thankfully, several competing web apps like Zoho, Evernote and Diigo make it easy for Notebook users to import all of their data and keep their cloud-based workflow humming. Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 Jan 2009 | 11:18 pm
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "After the lower court adjourned the hearing scheduled to be televised in SONY BMG Music v. Tenenbaum, in order to give the appeals court time to determine the RIAA's petition for a writ of 'mandamus or prohibition', the appeals court set a briefing schedule. Apparently expecting amicus curiae briefs to be submitted, the appellate court set January 29th as a deadline for filing of amicus briefs. One commentator opines that 'the last thing Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG RIAA attack lawyers want is for people to see them live and in full, glorious color', while another noted Judge Gertner's observation that the arguments raised by the RIAA in the appeals court, relating to the manner of administering the broadcast, had never been raised in the lower court."
Norman Rockwell is considered by many to be the Great American illustrator. He's pretty great, but I would give the title to another Norman -- Norman Saunders (1907 - 1989) -- because he set the standard for so many different genre illustrations over the decades that it's hard to believe one person could do so much.
A new coffee table art book from the Illustrated Press about Norman Saunders (written by his son David Saunders) just came out and I've been devouring its 368 technicolor pages, filled with examples of his work from the 1920s to the 1980s. The illustrations are arranged chronologically, and the book feels like a history of popular print media. Saunders was a prominent illustrator for Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, Modern Mechanics, pulp detective, western, war, and science fiction magazines, men's adventure magazines, and bubblegum cards and stickers, including Wacky Packages and Mars Attacks. Anyone interested in 20th century magazine illustration pretty much has to have this book in his or her library.
NORMAN SAUNDERS (1907–1989) was the legendary illustrator of Mars Attacks, Wacky Packages, Batman, Pre-Code Comics, Men’s Adventure, Paperbacks, Pulp Magazines, and Sci-Fi. His unique artistic vision influenced the visual language of American pop culture throughout a century of changing fashions, and continues to inspire today’s important visionaries. Savvy collectors have long dreamt of a book on the entire lifework of Norman Saunders, and that dream has finally come true with the world’s first book to present his finest paintings in radiant reproductions, to savor the extraordinary artistry behind so many iconic images, familiar from timeworn vintage collectibles.
The artist’s son has written an insightful biography, seasoned with quotes from the artist and his associates, chronicling the frontier childhood and training of an illustrator who rose to the top of his profession, and then spent WWII in China painting travel sketches. When Saunders defied the corporate forces of conformity during McCarthyism he was relegated to underground world of subculture publishing, where he continued his remarkable career by painting countless icons for Pre-Code Comics, Men’s Adventure magazines and Bubble Gum Trading Cards, until his happy rediscovery by fandom in his twilight years.
This is the consummate reference book on the entire lifework of Norman Saunders, with over 880 illustrations, of which more than 300 are from original art, including 30 working drawings, and 30 reference photos as well as 30 historic family photos, and checklists of all published works. 368 pages, 9”x12”, full-color, hardbound with dust jacket.
Fat consumed by women serves a good purpose because it helps them survive starvation, a University of Pittsburgh study indicated.
Neurons from female rats and mice better survive starvation than those of males because they consume fat instead of protein, Pitt research published in Friday's Journal of Biological Chemistry.
The researchers said the discovery could help doctors nourish critically ill patients, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported Friday.
Within 24 hours, neurons from males were dying off because they initiated a self-eating process called autophagy, said Robert Clark, associate professor of critical care medicine at Pitt and attached to Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Jan 2009 | 11:01 pm
Hordes of caterpillars are destroying crops and vegetation in northern Liberia, posing a threat to food security, the United Nations said.
The situation in Liberia is a national emergency and likely will escalate into a regional crisis involving Guinea, Sierra Leone and Cote d'Ivoire, Winfred Hammon, the U.N. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Jan 2009 | 10:58 pm
AP - With the clock ticking toward the Feb. 17 deadline for TV broadcasters to shut off their analog signals and go entirely digital, analysts say more than 6.5 million households are not ready. Now Congress appears poised to postpone the transition to June but a delay could bring its own problems. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 Jan 2009 | 10:51 pm
FROM APPLETELL - The folks at Skyworks Interactive, who recently brought Arcade Hoops to the iPhone, have now moved to the other back corner of the arcade to bring us Arcade Bowling. And again, they’ve done a fantastic job. MORE »
Was Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration a big day for Web video? Yes. Was it a record day? No one knows.
Credit NewTeeVee’s Liz Gannes for trying to get her arms around the size of the audience that watched Tuesday’s proceeding on the Web. She was able to tally 70 million views, and notes that U.S. TV outlets totaled about 37.8 million viewers.
So was the Web audience watching Obama twice as big as the TV one? Who knows?
That’s because as impressive as those numbers are, it’s unclear what they actually mean. Gannes herself notes that her data are weighed down with several asterisks.
For one thing, she doesn’t have numbers from sources like the New York Times (NYT), which says its Web site served up a record number of views but won’t actually say how many that means. On the flip side, the video numbers she does have come from throughout the day, while TV numbers only cover 11 a.m. through 2 p.m. EST. Etc.
But the biggest issue here is that it’s impossible to equate a Web video view with a television viewer. If you had to reload your Web browser because the video you were watching crashed or stalled, you generated an extra Web video view. Every time you did that. Same thing applies if you switched to a different site to watch its feed.
So given the well-documented troubles most Web sites had serving up video on Tuesday, it’s entirely possible that each Web user generated more than one video view. Say, a couple on Time Warner’s (TWX) CNN.com, and then a few more at GE’s (GE) MSNBC.com.
Which means the real question is: How many video views did the average viewer account for?
The Web sites that have reported traffic numbers could clear this up by explaining how many individual IP addresses they served during the inauguration. But for whatever reason, they’re not.
So we’re back to guesswork when it comes to figuring out the size of Tuesday’s Web audience. Ironic, given that the Web is supposed to offer a precision that old media just can’t match when it comes to this stuff. Maybe one day.
A lethal condition that has been killing bats in New York for two years has spread into New Jersey and Pennsylvania, wildlife authorities said Friday.
The discovery of hundreds of dead bats and the expansion of white-nose syndrome has left people with a kind of helpless feeling, Mick Valent, a zoologist with the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife, told the Newark Star-Ledger. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Jan 2009 | 10:33 pm
Richard Waters writes in the FT about how far Sony has fallen. Back in the day, a Sony product meant something - the only real analog to what they once were might be Apple (good products at premium prices that actually sold remarkably well). Buying Sony was like buying from Cuisinart: you were guaranteed something that not everyone had and that you would definitely enjoy. They had brand loyalty, charisma, and high tech wrapped up. Remember Auto Focus? All Sony gear.
Sony is living in a commodified world. All of the things that they were once good at - TVs, video cameras, portable audio - are all either taken over by other brands or are simply commodity items in a crowded marketplace. The sheer fact that a company like Vizio could make and sell a cheap plasma TV and, more importantly, succeed, is a testament to this situation. People are happy to spend less on what they now know is essentially the same hardware, be it a monitor or a blender. Sony can’t quite crack the modern fixation on status brands like the iPod and probably never will.
Will we be living in a post-Sony society? No. Samsung turned itself around as did LG. It will take a while, but Sony needs to stop thinking Sony can run the market and instead run with the market by churning out consistently good products that people want to buy at prices that they would have scoffed at a few years ago.
How does 1,000 horsepower, 208 mph and a 10-minute recharge time sound? Yeah, we're skeptical too, but we're clearing space in the fantasy garage just the same. Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 Jan 2009 | 10:30 pm
PC World - For the best broadband, head northwest. That's the word from Forbes, which has chosen Seattle as the nation's most-wired city. The publication's annual list of top tech towns picks the 30 best U.S. cities for broadband access. The Emerald City earned high marks for its high-speed Internet access and plentiful Wi-Fi hot spots. The fact that it's home base for tech giants such as Amazon and Microsoft didn't hurt either. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 Jan 2009 | 10:30 pm
How bad is the economy? In an effort to raise money for his rent, one man named Victor is trying to sell his Digg account on Craigslist for $650. It’s not because Victor is a power user on Digg. The name of the account is “youtube” His post on Craigslist reads:
Hello Craigslist community, my name is Victor and I’m a freelance web designer. Due to the current economic crisis I’m facing a lot of financial problems, bills are piling up and I don’t have enough work to cover them.
My rent is due and I don’t have the money to pay for it so I decided to put my Digg account for sale and see if I can make my rent money that way…
The account is somewhat valuable because it’s named YouTube and all of you know what YouTube is.
. . . My rent is $650 per month, hence the asking price.
use as a Digg User ID a name subject to any rights of a person other than you without appropriate authorization, . . . attempt to impersonate another user or person; sell or otherwise transfer your profile.
So I wouldn’t buy that Digg account, but if anyone is looking for a Web designer Victror’s services are available.
Update: Unfortunately, Digg has canceled Victor’s account. But I’ve set up a TipJoy account for him below. Give him a dollar to help him with his rent, if you’ve got the spare change. All proceeds will go to Victor.
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Death rates among trees have more than doubled in recent decades largely because of global warming, Northern Arizona University research indicates.
The study offers data to show that there is a problem with tree mortality in the West and that climate is an important element in the problem, Pete Fule, NAU School of Forestry associate professor and research co-author, said in a news release.
The research was published Friday in Science journal
Eleven scientists provided long-term data sets taken from trees across the Pacific Northwest, California, Idaho, Colorado and Arizona, Fule said. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Jan 2009 | 10:24 pm
bradgoodman writes to tell us that tomorrow will mark the 25th anniversary of the first Macintosh, debuting just 2 days after the famous Super Bowl XVIII commercial. "'The Macintosh demonstrated that it was possible and profitable to create a machine to be used by millions and millions of people,' said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, research director for the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, California, think tank, and chief force behind 'Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley,' an online historical exhibit. 'The gold standard now for personal electronics is, "Is it easy enough for my grandmother to use it?" People on the Macintosh project were the first people to talk about a product in that way.'"
The first greenhouse gas monitoring satellite was launched into space Friday from the space center on the Japanese island of Tanegashima.
Aboard the H2A rocket was Ibuki, the world's first greenhouse-gas monitoring satellite, and seven baby satellites, The China Post reported.
The Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Jan 2009 | 10:22 pm
Even the landline phone is set to go touchscreen. Verizon Wireless has launched Hub, a new touchscreen based Voice-over-IP based home phone system.
The Verizon Hub will have a 7-inch touchscreen and visual voicemail among other things. Though a Verizon product it will work with any broadband connection.
Verizon cellphone users can expect additional features such as text message calendar alerts and
turn-by-turn directions delivered to their phones from the Hub.
Other fun things to do with the Hub include the ability to check local traffic and weather, update calendar remotely and preview movie trailers and purchase tickets using the phone.
The Hub will cost $200 after a $50 mail-in rebate and will require a
$35 per month subscription, says PhoneScoop, for unlimited national
calling and text messaging. It's more expensive than Vonage but then it is also a better looking phone that the ugly black cordless box in your home right now.
Whoa, whoa, whoa… what is going on at CompUSA.com lately? That’s two aggressively priced 22-inch monitor deals in two days. This one from yesterday looked like a downright steal at $140 after a $50 mail-in rebate, but this one today looks even better.
First, it’s $150 out the door — none of the mail-in rebate hassle. Second, it’s got built-in speakers and an HDMI connection, which the one from yesterday doesn’t. The actual monitor is a Hanns-G HG-216DPB with a 21.6-inch viewable area, 1680×1050 resolution, 1000:1 contrast ratio, 300 cd/m2 brightness, 5ms response time, HDMI and VGA connections, and the built-in speakers.
Sure, it’s $10 more but, come on, HDMI and speakers! And no rebates!
Prior to his
inauguration, Barack Obama was, without a doubt, eagerly anticipating
taking his seat in the Oval Office. What he likely wasn't looking
forward to was time-traveling backward into a workplace riddled with
obsolete technology.
Any tech geek recognizes that modern
technology is far more than a means to an end: Whether we own iPods,
Zunes, MacBooks, iPhones or BlackBerry smartphones, our gadgets have
become intimately integrated into our lifestyles. So you have to feel
the pain of Obama and his team, who drove the most tech-savvy
presidential campaign in history, for having to cope with the White
House's bureaucratic IT swamp.
"It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of the White House's outdated tech.
Here,
we run down a list of what's known about tech in the White House, with our classic "Wired or Tired" rating method. This time, we'll start with the Tired stuff first.
TIRED
Windows XP The White House's computers are running 6-year-old versions of Microsoft software, reports The Washington Post. Supposedly, the White House's reasoning for
stalling on upgrades is to maintain security and preserve documents
held under the Presidential Records Act.
Can anyone say "virus infection"? While it's true the White House dodged
a widespread internet virus in 2007, there's no guarantee a more
vicious virus won't eventually infiltrate the White House. There are at
least 3,000 new Windows viruses emerging each day, after all, according
to Symantec.
Why not transition to the Mac? The virus
"threatscape" is virtually nonexistent on the Mac; security experts
agree the Mac operating system is architecturally more secure than
Windows out of the box. Run some security software on the Mac and
you've easily got a far more secure computer setup in the White House
than if they were running Windows.
As for the documents
preserved by the President Records Act — how difficult can it be to
create backups and transfer everything over? Documents and messages
copy over easily to a Mac system.
But
if the U.S. military gets all the cool tech first, the White House can,
too, right? This would be a good opportunity to test out Boston University's Wi-Fi transmitting light bulbs.
The tech involves LED bulbs, which flicker at imperceptible speeds to
communicate with Wi-Fi enabled devices. This way, a hacker would have
to be inside the White House in order to hack into its network, and he
or she would be made visible under the light.
No Instant Messaging Allowed White House staff are banned (.pdf, page 11) from communicating by instant messaging, according to Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of the blog TechPresident. That's for the sake of preventing casual talk from leaking out of the White House and onto the web.
That's
understandable, but some chat clients, such as Adium, offer the option
to encrypt chats, turning your chat logs into unintelligible characters
and numbers if accessed without authorization. Plus, the Obama team has
already proven with the president's Twitter account that it's pretty good at handling its own PR, right? No Screwing Around on Websites, Either Remember
George W. Bush? When he was prez, the White House IT department banned
sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, according to Slate. There's no word on whether the new regime will reverse those bans, but for now, it's a fair bet that you won't be able to friend anyone in the West Wing.
WIRED
iPods Former President Bush is known to have had an iPod. But there were some restrictions on accessing new music. During
Bush's tenure, only two people had access to the iTunes Store: The
president's personal aide, who downloaded tunes onto George W.'s iPod,
and David Almacy, Bush's director for internet and e-communications,
who uploaded the president's speeches to iTunes. (I wonder what was in
Bush's Top 25 Most Played? Creed, perhaps?)
Flatscreen Monitors and TVs Theresa Payton, White House chief information officer from 2006, told FoxNews that big, flat displays are widely used in the White House. Can't see why not — so long as they're not watching Paris Hilton's My New BFF during work hours.
E-Mail It's
widely known that Bill Clinton sent only two e-mails during his
presidential term. That's because under the Presidential Records Act,
all correspondence must be archived and eventually made public, so Clinton sensibly kept his more ... personal ... communications offline. (Of
course, Bush's political advisers demonstrated there are ways to circumvent the policy.)
Regardless of the rules, it was simple enough for the press office,
with approval from the White House Counsel, to set up personal Gmail
accounts as alternative e-mail addresses, according to The Washington Post.
BlackBerry
The president this week achieved a personal victory when he entered the White House cradling his BlackBerry, which many speculated he would have to give up. How
did he pull off keeping it? Protecting it with some sort of supersecure encryption, according to reports. Just what exactly that
encryption is, no one will say — for obvious reasons.
White House staffers are entitled to BlackBerry smartphones as well, according to FoxNews.
NewsFactor - Popular news-collection and social-networking Web site Digg.com is cutting back its workforce in hopes of achieving profitability. The San Francisco, Calif.-based company will reduce its staff of 75 people by 10 percent, according to founder Jay Adelson. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 Jan 2009 | 9:53 pm
Unlike with the upstart HTC G1 or the Apple 3G iPhone, news that Nokia has sold a million of one of its latest phones shouldn't surprise industry watchers.
But the 5800 XpressMusic device from Nokia is no ordinary phone. The phone is the company's first "mass-market" touchscreen device, says Nokia.
Nicknamed the Nokia Tube it is also bundled with the company's 'Comes With Music' subscription service that offers one year of
unlimited access to the company's music store catalog.
The 5800 XpressMusic has been closely watched because of its potential to rival Apple's iTunes in popularity, especially in Europe.
The phone, which sports a 3.2-inch screen, a 3.2 megapixel camera and supports
Flash-based browsing for the web went on sale in October 2008 in just a few countries including Russia and Hong Kong. The 5800 XpressMusic is went on sale in UK a few days ago and is available in the US only as an unsubsidized and unlocked phone.
Maybe this could spur a US telecom carrier to pick up this device for its network.
The European Space Agency is set to launch a beautiful new satellite to take detailed measurements of Earth's gravity in order to better understand the structure of the Earth's interior, and more precisely calibrate the heights of the tallest mountains. Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 Jan 2009 | 9:45 pm
Right now if you run a Google search for “palm pre” from a mobile phone, you’ll be shown that there are 0 pages related to Palm’s upcoming smartphone, which will soon faceoff with Google’s Android, Blackberry, and the iPhone in the battle for touch-screen supremacy.
In fact, a number of searches with the world “Palm” in it are turning up zero results (even “palm tree”), though many searches still work just fine. The bug seems to have existed for at least the last two days according to recent tweets.
The issue seems to only be affecting Google’s mobile site, which is used for both the iPhone and the G1 (as well as a number of other phones).
thefickler writes to tell us that YouTube plans on raising revenue by allowing major media players to run their own ads on the video site for, not only their own content, but illegally uploaded content by other users. "The site says CBS is already on board for the scheme, with other giants expected to join. The scheme will allow TV, movie and music companies to upload content and then sell advertising themselves, for example through images or animations which are overlaid on suitable sections of the clips. YouTube will then take a cut of this advertising revenue."
An anonymous programmer made something called the Sound Grenade for the App Store and gave it away free. It took him all of an hour to write - it’s just a button you press to make an annoying sound - and put it up for all and sundry. How he’s seen 100,000 downloads and is basically making $200 an hour using an in-app advertising system.
“I really enjoy the App Store, I think it is amazing,” the New Zealand-based programmer said. “If you know what you’re looking for, you can find an app and download it either paid or free in a very minimal amount of time from almost anywhere in the world.”
“The problem for the ‘quality’ app developers is they want to make theatrical films, and they can only premiere them at the same place as everybody else in the world,” he continued. “Let’s call it the YouTube of software.”
That’s right: lowest common denominator wins the day in the App Store, something I bet no other online store in the world - besides maybe iTunes - has seen. Has anyone seen stuff like this skyrocket so quickly on BlackBerry or WinMo?
BROOMFIELD, Colo., Jan. 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ --Level 3 Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq: LVLT) announced that a jury returned a verdict today finding that Limelight Networks, Inc. did not infringe two of the content delivery patents held by Level 3. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Jan 2009 | 9:17 pm
Youtube has officially enabled High Quality in embedded videos. The new embedded player sports a little HQ button in the expandable menu, which is strangely absent from Youtube's on-site player.
One can only assume that they decided they were ready for the blast of traffic that will certainly result from the huge amount of embedded high-quality videos to come. Doubtless the stream pipe has to be a lot fatter for the HQ videos, but advances in compression efficacy have ensured that doubling the image quality doesn't double the size of the video.
The Texas Board of Education rejected efforts to continue to require children to study pros and cons of scientific theories, including evolution.
Lawrence Allen Jr., who voted against including the strengths and weaknesses language, called for the board to do better at representing everybody in the process and not just our individual ideologies, the Austin American-Statesman reported Friday.
The board was considering draft language crafted by a committee of teachers and education experts who recommended replacing the strengths and weaknesses phrase with a requirement to analyze and evaluate scientific explanations, the newspaper said. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Jan 2009 | 9:10 pm
The day after Barack Obama's inauguration, the Food and Drug Administration approves the first clinical trial of a treatment derived from embryonic stem cells, a major boost for a biotech industry that languished under Bush administration regulations. Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 Jan 2009 | 9:10 pm
It's been a good, long while since anyone has written a gadget blog post about a desktop phone, short of being in the crimson hue and classic shape of the 1966 Batphone. Still, Verizon's Hub/One looks impressive: a widgeted phone that hooks up to your DSL line and allows you to do casual browsing, email and info grabbing through an attractive and wide touchscreen. Remote management of your apps and widgets is a touted feature, allowing you to change a calendar appointment from the office, or remotely delete an incriminating voicemail from a lover before the wife gets home.
Anyway, it looks good, if you can still get a throbber from a phone that sits on your desk and never moves... a paralyzed smartphone. Verizon's claiming it'll be $199 with a $35 a month fee, which makes that analogy particularly apt.
YouTube has officially enabled High Quality in embedded videos. The new embedded player sports a little HQ button in the expanded menu, which is strangely absent from YouTube’s on-site player. Hacking the code is no longer necessary; if you listen closely, you can hear the sound of hundreds of FAQs around the world crying out in horror as they are rendered obsolete.
One can only assume that they decided they were ready for the blast of traffic that will certainly result from the huge amount of embedded high-quality videos to come. Doubtless the stream pipe has to be a lot fatter for the HQ videos, but advances in compression efficacy have ensured that doubling the image quality doesn’t double the size of the video. The downloadable version whether you’re watching HD or SD is the same — that is to say, it’s the HD version no matter what. For Obama’s inauguration, it’s 95MB, which at 21 minutes long is about 600kb/s if my rough calculations are correct, just fine for streaming.
Test it out in the player below. You have to hit play before the HQ button shows. The shaky camera is not a function of the HD, just a very cold cameraman.
Unfortunately, there’s still no button that makes the comments high quality.
nerdyH writes "As early as last quarter, Microsoft admitted that Linux and netbooks were eating into its fat profits. Recently, it came home, with the software giant announcing its first-ever layoffs. LinuxDevices interviewed Linux Foundation Director Jim Zemlin on Linux's role in Microsoft's misfortunes. Zemlin sums it up pretty well: 'Companies can offer their own branded software platform based on Linux. If Microsoft is getting 75 percent margins, you would like some of that high-margin business, too.'"
Samsung Electronics posted its first-ever quarterly loss on Friday as its memory chip and display units were hit with plunging prices and waning consumer demand amid a global economic slump.The Suwon, South Korea-based company said it lost 14.4 million in the three months ended Dec. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Jan 2009 | 8:46 pm
DailyFill, a gossip site in the same vein as TMZ and Perez Hilton, is off to an impressive start. Less than two months after launch, Quantcast is already reporting 1.7 million unique visitors - a figure on par with PopSugar’s traffic numbers (though we should note that the Sugar network as a whole sees much more traffic).
The site first grabbed attention because it was created by Slingshot Labs, a startup incubator owned by News Corp. The incubator also has ties to MySpace (also a News Corp property), though it is a separate company. At launch many wrote off DailyFill for being yet another gossip site destined to flounder in the shadow of the likes of TMZ and Yahoo’s OMG, which generate huge volumes of traffic and have devout followings. DailyFill still trails these by a large margin, but it clearly isn’t bombing.
It’s still too early to tell if the site will be successful in the long term - much of the traffic may be coming from curious gossip fans looking to check out the newest kid on the block. But for now, News Corp and MySpace’s experiment with its new startup incubator seems to be paying off.
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It’s a watershed moment for the Internet. Digital research outfit comScore reports that total global Internet audience topped one billion for the first time in December. The Asia-Pacific region accounted for 41 percent of that number, followed by Europe with 28 percent, North America with 18 percent and the remainder spread across Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.
“[This is] a monument to the increasingly unified global community in which we live and reminds us that the world truly is becoming more flat,” comScore (SCOR) CEO Magid Abraham said in a statement. “The second billion will be online before we know it, and the third billion will arrive even faster than that.”
And the majority of them will use Google (GOOG) above all others, apparently. With a reach of 77 percent of total world-wide Internet audience, the search behemoth dominated comScore’s list of Top 15 Worldwide Properties. Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) followed with 64.2 percent and 55.8 percent, respectively.
If you know a boy between 6 and 12 who likes cars, check out the beta for a new virtual world designed by Ridemakerz, the build-your-own-car toy store. We have invites here.
The toy store commissioned the Electric Sheep Co. to build a browser-based virtual world for boys based on its Webflock platform. When I wrote about Ridemakerz back in December, here is how I described the project:
The virtual world is a combination of a social network, video games, and a complex inventory system. Boys can design their own virtual cars online just like they can in the store. . . . Depending on what parts a boy picks, it will affect the performance of his ride.
Alternatively, a child who buys a car at a store can enter the unique Ridez Identification Number (RIN) number printed on each one at checkout and he will get a virtual replica of that exact design. So he can play with the same car at home and online.
Inside the virtual world, each child’s avatar is his car. He can drive around and see the cars of other members who are online. There is no text chatting (for child safety reasons), but each car has different “Zmotes” that get cooler the more points that are acquired. The Zmotes start with things like puffs and smiley faces and graduate to explosions and lightening bolts. The roads in the virtual world lead to different activities, including a junkyard crane video game and a pitstop crew game that teaches time management.
A lot of readers were excited about actually checking it out. Just remember, this is for kids (so don’t take an invite if you are not going to share it with someone under 12). And here’s a hint: use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move around.
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Since the G1’s launch way back in October, the only folks who could walk into a T-Mobile retail store and walk out with Android in their pocket were those who lived in an area covered by T-Mo’s (still fairly limited) 3G network. Sure, you could order them at any store - but for the most part, that meant having a store employee walk you through the same online process you could have done at home.
Fortunately, word just came down that that’s all about to change; beginning tomorrow, January 24th, the G1 will be available in all T-Mobile Retail spots and Retail Partner locations. If you’re in a 3G-less area, are clamoring for a G1, and just can’t do without that feeling of handing your cash over to a living, breathing person (or have a deathly fear of delivery men), your day has finally come.
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Wildlife officials said that more than 40 sperm whales have died after a pod of about 50 became stranded off southern Australia. Rescuers have been trying to keep the surviving whales alive by pouring water over them.The whales are trapped on a sandbar about 500 feet offshore from Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Jan 2009 | 7:45 pm
By Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal, Digits
It appears that President Barack Obama gets to keep his BlackBerry after all, but some experts are questioning whether the Research In Motion (RIMM) device will provide enough security for the president.
At a press conference Thursday, a White House spokesman said the president will keep his BlackBerry “to stay in touch with senior staff and a small group of personal friends in a way that use will be limited and that the security is enhanced.”
Microsoft (MSFT), however, has questioned the wisdom of the president relying on a device whose maker is based in Canada. “You would be sending your data outside the country,” says Randy Siegel, a Microsoft enterprise mobile strategist who works on federal government projects. “We wouldn’t want the casual musings or official communications of the most important person in the world being intercepted by others.”
Read the rest of this post
RepairPal, which hit the App Store yesterday, is the iPhone front-end for repairpal.com, a site aimed at helping its users determine reasonable prices for car repairs and providing them with locations of reputable repair shops in their areas. I recently had new tires put on my 2001 Accord and paid $75 for an alignment, so I thought I’d use RepairPal to see if those double-talking weasels at Firestone had pulled a fast one on me. (NOTE: Everyone at Firestone was very helpful and I would go back to them in a heartbeat. However, for the sake of this review, we’ll assume that they’re low-down dirty rats who’ll do anything to milk me for every cent I’ve got.) RepairPal greeted me with a couple of slick drop-down menus to select my car and the type of service to be performed, and, after locating me via GPS, determined that I should reasonably expect to pay $73-$93 for the service, complete with a little graph telling me that the upper 10% or so of that price bracket would probably only be found at the Honda dealership. So thanks, Firestone!
RepairPal also includes a list of shops within a user-specified radius, complete with Google Maps integration, as well as user reviews for each shop. However, there wasn’t a single shop in my area that had been reviewed yet. According to their site, the RepairPal service has been around for a couple of years, so it’s not exactly encouraging to find that in all that time not a single person in my area has used the service, but if you live in a more highly-populated area you might have better luck. The app can also compile a list of towing and roadside assistance services based on your location, which could be especially handy when traveling. It also lists the helpline numbers for most major auto manufacturers, though Honda was noticeably absent from that list.
All in all, RepairPal is probably not something you’d use every day. However, if and when you find yourself in a situation where its services would be useful, it does its job incredibly well, and since it’s free, why not go ahead and try it out?
The NSA combined information from wholesale telephone wiretaps with data mined from credit card and other financial records, according to a former intelligence worker. The result? Tens of thousands of U.S. citizens are now in digital databases warehoused at the spy agency. Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 Jan 2009 | 7:30 pm
We believe that we’re on the face of the Earth to make great products, and that’s not changing. We’re constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple, not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.
We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot.
And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we’re wrong and the courage to change.”
– Apple COO Tim Cook on the company’s philosophy 25 years after the first Macintosh
It’s a thought we’ve all had at one point or another: “Instead of having to decide between handsets with QWERTY and those without, why not just make the keyboard detachable?” Unfortunately, the majority of us aren’t major handset manufacturers with the power to make such things happen, so the idea slipped back into the “Things I wish other people would make” bank, along with lightsabers and practical jetpacks. This morning, when Snap315 posted images of the LG VX9600 Versa to HowardForums, this oft-dreamed about concept took its first big step toward becoming a reality.
Word is, the detachable fun won’t stop at QWERTY keyboards. Rumors of gamepads, stereo speakers, and other plug-and-play packages of fun are abound, though we’ll have to see how many of these make their way out of LG’s think tanks.
Straight out of the original poster’s mouth: “This is an outstanding phone. It has all of the features the Voyager or Dare has with the flexibility of having either a QWERTY keypad or just the touchscreen.” Sounds great, but we’re a bit worried by the OS we’re seeing on the screen. We’ve never been too impressed with the flexibility offered by the OS on LG/Verizon phones - we’re just hoping the final software is as versatile as the hardware it runs on.
A team of University of Hertfordshire philosophers lead by Professor Paul Coates and Dr Sam Coleman is conducting a three-year research project to explore conscious experiences that contemporary science still cannot explain.Funded with £380,000 ($494,000 USD) from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and involving the collaboration of some of the world’s leading philosophers and cognitive scientists, the project will attempt to answer the mystery of consciousness.Professor Coates explains: “When we see a sunset or hear a symphony our sense organs, brains and bodies are moved in ways that are well understood by the physical and biological sciences. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Jan 2009 | 7:22 pm
The House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday approved an economic recovery package that includes several provisions including one for open access in wireless service on the Internet. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Jan 2009 | 7:10 pm
By that time, Finnair says, we'll fly on giant algae-burning airplanes and enjoy everything from pre-flight yoga to personal flight attendants. Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 Jan 2009 | 7:08 pm
The popular music-centric social network has released a new application for Google's Android mobile operating system. Unlike the Last.fm app for the iPhone, the Android version lets you stream music from the site in the background while you perform other tasks on your phone. Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 Jan 2009 | 6:55 pm
By Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron’s, Tech Trader Daily
Now that we’re experiencing Q4 earnings reports in all their glory, the time has come to shift focus to Q1. That’s what Needham chip analyst N. Quinn Bolton did this morning. And the picture is not pretty.
Bolton says he now expects Q1 revenues for most of the companies he covers to be down 15-20 percent sequentially, with Q2 sequentially flat. (His previous theory was that Q1 would be down about 10 percent.) He says that currently depressed orders have been depressed by supply chain-wide inventory reductions, but that “visibility into a snapback in orders remains uncertain.” His current theory: Slash estimates to the bone, and hope the companies can start to beat them in the second half.
Long known only by its internal “Frances” moniker, the official model name of this not-yet-announced Sony Ericsson handset has been whispered into the wrong ear and has since found its way to SEMC Blog; from here on out, the Frances is now the Sony Ericsson C903.
And, as we always love to see, this leak comes in pairs - tucked along in the note containing the final name was this render of the C903, the first image of it we’ve seen thus far. Look familiar? It takes a whole lot of design cues from its bigger, badder brother, the C905. As long as it takes a few cues on the software/image quality ends as well, that’s perfectly okay with us.
Oh, and bonus detail: All signs point to it being announced at Mobile World Congress in February.
Known specs after the jump.
Sony Ericsson Frances:
2.4-inch QVGA display
5 megapixel camera with auto-focus
aGPS
Image stabilization
Photo and video light
Slider form factor
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A philosopher at the University of Hertfordshire is leading a two-year project to investigate how people present themselves online, in virtual environments.Funded with over £165,000 ($215,000 USD) from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, this research, entitled ‘The Construction of Personal Identities Online’, will explore how people reinvent themselves in virtual environments.“Personal identities online can be created and developed to enrich our experiences; expand, improve or even help to repair relationships; or enable us to spend time in someone else’s shoes, which may foster tolerance,” said Professor Luciano Floridi, who will lead the research. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Jan 2009 | 6:42 pm
Guest reviewer Dean Putney takes the AccuNAS AN2L for a trip around the platters.
The AccuNAS AN2L puts you on easy street for working with a network storage solution. With very little setup, and all of the controls in a neat web interface, you gain a lot of control over all of the device's features very quickly. Compared to the work I've been doing setting up a web server, the AN2L provided a lot of the services I'm working on with just a fraction of the effort.
Setup
Setting up the AccuNAS ANL2 is a quick process. Connect your drives, power and ethernet access and you're ready to run the setup software on your computer.
The provided software automatically recognizes the NAS boxes on your network and allows them to be set up. You choose a name, assign a password and determine what RAID configuration you want to use. The ANL2 supports RAID 0, RAID1 and Single configurations for complete control over the two drive space. Total setup time took me about twenty minutes.
Features
What makes the easy setup procedure so awesome is the capabilities it unleashes. You never have to fiddle with the basic settings or the setup software again. All settings and processes are controlled through web interfaces, and you can very easily connect the drive to your computer to use it as a local disk.
The ANL2's web interface gives you lots of possibilities. Since the AN2L works very similarly to a web server, you can host websites, or just put your photos into a folder on the drive to share in a gallery. With thousands of photos in my library, the dedicated storage combined with the ANL2's gallery was a perfect match. Streamlining the processing and uploading of a large photo library to a web server is usually a complex task, but the ANL2 made it as easy as dragging and dropping.
My favorite feature, however, is not the gallery set up. With limited bandwidth for each computer where I live, I found myself using the BitTorrent and web download feature most often. The ability to set up a download on a dedicated device was paramount to the value of the ANL2. I found it very convenient to set up a download of the iPhone SDK or to start BitTorrenting a file and to be able to come back to it when it was finished. It's a basic BitTorrent interface, but the inherent benefit of downloading large files with the ANL2 is that they're already backed up. If you ever need that file again, you can very easily go back to the drive and retrieve it without having to remember to back it up or download it again.
High Expectations
While the features the ANL2 provides are everything you would want from this kind of product, there are some things that I had expected that were either slightly different or not officially supported.
Connecting to the ANL2 as a mounted network drive is a snap, and great for moving files back and forth between systems. I was also able to put songs from my iTunes library on the system and stream them to my computer, playing them directly without copying them to my computer. I had expected that, since everything worked so well with music, videos would at least stand a chance.
If you don't have a gig speed network, you cannot play video files directly from the ANL2. I don't think this is so much a flaw with the system as it is my high expectations though. I tried this with my Airport Extreme at home, and was able to watch bits of videos with occasional glitches. Once I transferred to a gig speed network, this issue went away and I was able to play movies without copying them to my computer quite easily.
Time Machine
I run a strictly Mac-only shop, and unfortunately Time Machine is not officially supported by Sans Digital or Apple to run on third party NAS devices. I did, however, find this tutorial suggesting an advanced solution to this problem. The only trouble is that in order to make the sparsebundle image of the machine you want to back up, you need enough space to completely duplicate all of the files on that machine.
Despite fighting with this hack for several weeks, I was ultimately unable to get Time Machine to work with this NAS system. I was able to have my computer recognize the ANL2 as a Time Machine drive, to connect to it and to begin the backup. This process would never complete, and I would receive warning errors that the sparsebundle could not be created. I believe that backing up your system to a NAS box like the ANL2 can be done if you have enough space to create the initial sparsebundle, or that Apple will eventually support 3rd party NAS drives. Unless you have a spare drive to create that bundle on, or until Apple releases that support, I would not expect the AN2L or really any other NAS device to work properly with Time Machine.
Verdict
The name of the game with the AccuNAS AN2L is ease of use. I found the box to be quite versatile, with straightforward setup procedures and lots of user-friendly functionality. If you're looking for a network storage solution you can plunk down, get running, and start using in an afternoon the AN2L is your man.
The number of people on the Internet surpassed one billion in December, according to comScore. The actual number is probably higher than that (Internet World Stats counted nearly 1.5 billion Web surfers worldwide as of June 30, 2008). In any case, only between 15 and 22 percent of the world’s population is on the Internet. We have a long way to go.
Using the comScore numbers, here is the breakdown by country and region (in unique visitors as of December, 2008; some of the numbers are rounded):
Tingalin is an interesting little app in the ever-growing category of “instruments for a tiny touchscreen” apps that allows you to recreate the smooth stylings of the ҫifteli, an ancient two-stringed Albanian instrument with a funky sound that would fit right in on an LSD-infused Beatles track. If you’re like me and you’ve never heard of the thing before in your life, enjoy this video of Smail Puraj, a ҫifteli player (ҫiftelist?) who, if incomprehensible YouTube comments are any sort of metric, is a master of the craft.
Tingalin takes a unique approach to playing an instrument on your iPhone. Instead of trying to cram your fingers awkwardly onto the screen, you are instead presented with a virtual fretboard and a window which records each note you pluck in sequence. Once you’re done creating your song, you can play it back by holding your iPhone (very tightly, mind you) and slinging it back and forth in a strumming motion. Each swing plays a note of your song, and the tempo is determined by the ferocity of your strumming. Your virtual ҫifteli can be tuned on the fly, and if you’re not happy with a particular run, you can backspace through your song and try again. Be careful, though: the “delete one note” and “delete all notes” buttons are right next to each other, and I ended up clearing about five minutes worth of work on accident. My biggest gripe is that the strum detection can be pretty iffy: I’ve found that the best way to get a consistent strum pattern out of Tingalin is to play it between your knee and hand like an instrument much more familiar to those of us south of the Mason-Dixon: the spoons.
We may not have been all that impressed with the 5800 XpressMusic when it launched back in October, but it looks like at least half a million other people were. During Nokia’s Q4 earnings call, CEO Olli Pekka Kallasvuo disclosed that over 500,000 5800’s have shipped in the last 30 days of the quarter alone. Then again, of course, he did say shipped, not sold.
Now, before you go comparing this to the 4.4 million handsets that other touchscreen phone maker managed to push, remember: the Nokia 5800 was only available in a handful of markets last quarter. Today marks its debut in the UK, which ought to make this quarter’s numbers all the more beastly.
Update: Just hours later, they’ve released a second number to let folks know that 500,000 in 30 days wasn’t their only landmark - all in all, they’ve shipped 1 million of them.
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i-Hacked offers this handy tip for the next time you find yourself rummaging in the bowels of a Addco roadside sign:
Should it will ask you for a password. Try “DOTS”, the default password.
In all likelihood, the crew will not have changed it. However if they did, never fear. Hold “Control” and “Shift” and while holding, enter “DIPY”. This will reset the sign and reset the password to “DOTS” in the process. You’re in!
The deal, with W. P. Carey & Company, has yet to close, and the Times isn’t talking about the details, including the most crucial one: What kind of price is the Times getting for its portion of the Renzo Piano-designed building?
At one point, the Times thought the property was worth $850 million to $1 billion. But that was several collapsed banks ago–and bear in mind that it just had to agree to pay Slim 14 percent on his loan. So what kind of deal can it get for its real estate now?
Here’s one way to tell, via a clever MediaMemo reader: Check the stock price of Forest City Enterprises Inc. (FCE-A), the real estate developer that owns the rest of the building the Times is selling. The logic: If the New York Times Company (NYT) is forced to let go of its real estate at fire sale prices, it will devalue Forest City’s property, too.
One thing to look at might be where Forest City trades, since they’re theoretically impacted by the pricing. Granted, they’re a real estate company and so don’t have to mark real estate assets to market unless they’re held for sale (real estate is an operating asset for a real estate company), but the stock market will make some bets on the implications. If FCEA is up in a down market or vice versa, that’ll tell something.”
Interesting. So, for what it’s worth: As I type this, Forest City is up about six percent; the Dow is down 1.5 percent. Maybe the Times got some bang for its buck here after all.
Rumors ’bout the Verizon Hub/One (concept pictured) have been circulating the Internet for ages now but Verizon just made it official with what seems to be a February 1st, 2009 launch date. Specific hardware details are skecty, along with pricing, however, Verizon says they will fill in the blanks shortly. It seems that the Hub is designed to replace the computer for casual info gathering. The device will be fully connected to the internet via broadband (doesn’t have to be Verizon) and allows for remote management of the apps which means you can create a calander event from work and it will update at the Hub. Hopefully more details will drop ’cause Verzion seems to have an innovated product on their hands. Full press release after the jump.
FEBRUARY 1: VERIZON WIRELESS REIMAGINES THE HOME PHONE
Innovative Verizon Hub Helps Manage Busy Lives and Helps Users Stay Connected to Family and Community
BASKING RIDGE, N.J. – In a dynamic move sure to rattle devotees of plain old home phones, Verizon Wireless will introduce the new Verizon Hub on Feb. 1. Only Verizon Wireless can launch a new touch screen home phone system designed to replace old-style home phones with a souped-up home communications system, bridging wireline and wireless connectivity in one simple service, that runs on any broadband connection – whether supplied by Verizon FiOS Internet or DSL or any other high-speed service provider.
Families with active lifestyles and virtually anyone who wants to stay current and connected need a tool that helps manage their communications, contacts and calendars simply and smartly – all from one easy screen. The Verizon Hub is poised to help pave the way for people to stay in touch and up to date with the information they need to navigate their increasingly busy days and nights.
“The Verizon Hub reinvents the home phone system that’s been centered on your kitchen counter for years. We’re bringing huge new functionality to a common household device that will unlock its true potential. And in the process, Verizon Wireless is updating the tools busy families can use to manage their lives,” said Mike Lanman, vice president and chief marketing officer at Verizon Wireless. “The Verizon Hub is going to change the way you think about what you want and need your home phone to do. Whether you’re thinking about getting rid of your home phone or can’t live without it, now is the time to try out the Verizon Hub.”
The Verizon Hub uses your existing broadband connection, and it’s quick to get it up and running. It will work with any open broadband connection from virtually any broadband provider – telecommunications or cable – anywhere in the United States.
Out of the box, the Verizon Hub will have all the calling features users expect from the most advanced home phones, plus visual voicemail and robust contact list management. Verizon Wireless has also added exciting messaging options, including text message calendar alerts and audible turn-by-turn directions delivered to Verizon Wireless phones from the Verizon Hub – with just a few simple taps on the screen.
Information will be at a family’s fingertips, literally from an easy-to-navigate touch screen with clear icons on the Verizon Hub. Families will start and end their days with nuggets of customized information from the Verizon Hub:
·Check local traffic and weather in the morning before leaving the house
·Update your calendar and automatically receive a text when an appointment changes or as a reminder not to be late
·Get directions to the new site when the location for soccer practice is moved
·Find the number of the new pizza parlor to order a pie
·Preview the trailers from an upcoming movie that you might want to take the family to over the weekend, then purchase tickets using the Verizon Hub
Families on the go can access all the information and functionality of the Verizon Hub remotely from a companion Web site, even adding calendar entries for family members and inputting new contacts from the Web site. The home-based Verizon Hub is instantly updated.
Verizon Wireless customers who bring the Verizon Hub into their homes can connect to popular applications including VZ NavigatorSMand Chaperone®, as well as incorporate their wireless devices through text, picture and video messaging between wireless phones and the Verizon Hub. New and exciting V CAST content will also be available on the Verizon Hub, and when not in use, the Verizon Hub doubles as a digital picture frame displaying all of your favorite photos.
More details on the Verizon Hub, including pricing and service plans, will be available in the coming days. For more information on Verizon Wireless products and services, please visit www.verizonwireless.com.
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Excuse the quality, but surreptitiously snapped on my iPhone while sneaking out of her apartment at dawn, the sticker-slathered backside of a PowerBook G4 belonging to a sassy Jersey Girl bartender I'm seeing. If you can tell the quality of a woman by the mad chromatic zoo of glittery Japanese chan characters she sticks on her laptop cover, I think I might have found something of a keeper. This, right here, was my day brightener.
I know, I know. The mad cap plastering of brightly colored stickers on an Apple notebook as if it was a teenage girl's Trapper Keeper might be looked upon by some as a profane desecration of Apple's clean, pure design, but I don't find myself in that camp at all. I have always liked slapping stickers on my laptops, making them dynamic, brightly-colored, multi-layered expressions of self... or, at least, any parts of self they make a sticker for. That Apple's laptops are so imminently uncustomizable and that its customers can be so cultishly slavish to Cupertino design makes it all the more important to do something, anything to differentiate my Mac from all the others out there.
What about you? Maybe you have just slapped some stickers on your laptop, or maybe you've fractally laser etched a design in, or maybe you've graffitied your chassis. If so, we'd love to see your laptop art. Just add a photograph of your laptop to the Boing Boing Gadgets Flickr pool, tag it "bbglaptopart" and we'll pick out some of our favorites to show off.
We have gone through a very difficult time, reacted quickly and decisively, and we are on our way to really have, I believe, a phenomenal transition year in 2008.”
“The fourth quarter of 2008 is going to be remembered for the severe stresses placed on the global economy and on our industry,” AMD CEO Dirk Meyer told analysts. “The global economic environment led to a softening in end-customer demand for PCs and servers in what is usually the year’s strongest quarter. The reality of today’s global economy require that we redouble our focus on cash management and cash flow control, and we will do so while protecting assets.”
Suffice to say, AMD did not offer a specific forecast for its current quarter, saying only that it expects sales to continue to trend lower “in light of the current macroeconomic conditions, very limited visibility and continued corrections in the supply chain.” Shares in the company, which have lost more than 50 percent of their value since the start of the fourth quarter, closed down nearly 10 percent on the news, although they seem to be recovering today.
Oh, Mimobots. You're so good at what you do. Hydrocephalia + geek reference + 1GB USB flash drives = $30. This coneheaded C3P0 Mimobot had me at hello.
Coincidentally -- or not -- with the change in administrations, the federal government clears the way for the first-ever study of spinal cord injury treatment using embryonic stem cells. Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 Jan 2009 | 4:03 pm
There was a little confusion yesterday about Tim Cook's remarks about pursuing lawsuits against competitors who rip off Apple's IP.
Based on the question being responded to, it seemed pretty obvious Apple was specifically warning Palm about their upcoming multi-touch capable Pre smartphone, but others have speculated that he was simply addressing the Chinese knock-off market (good luck suing those guys, Tim).
Either way, Palm seems to be pretty sure Cook was talking about them, and have released a rather swaggering statement through spokesperson Lynn Fox in return: bring it on.
Palm has a long history of innovation that is reflected in our products and robust patent portfolio (31 pages of patents in Google Patent Search), and we have long been recognized for our fundamental patents in the mobile space. If faced with legal action, we are confident that we have the tools necessary to defend ourselves.”
Miss Fox then picked up the chair she was sitting on, walked across the room and smashed it across the back of Tim Cook's head. Steve Wilkos rushed to the stage to establish order, but it was already too late. From the crowd, stunned silence, one shrill "Oh no she didn't!" and then the sudden protrusion of an ocean off wildly rotating fists, accompanied by the insistent, jackal-like chant: "PALM PRE! PALM PRE! PALM PRE!"
We knew that the Blackberry 8900 was ’bout to make a T-Mobile debut and now pics showing an unboxing shows that the phone is finally ready to hit customers hands despite what T-Mobile’s site says. Officially, the phone is still labeled as “Coming Soon” with a release date scheduled in the middle of February but these pics show some folks have already gotten their hands on the sexy Javelin. Unboxing pics after the jump.
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For some reason, incremental revisions of easily overlooked kitchen tech always gets me gobsmacked with admiration. The latest evolution: the common ice cube tray, now fitted with bright green tabs allowing for the easy expulsion of individual crystalline cubes ... without taking out the contents of the entire tray in a frigid freezer conglomeration of geometric shapes which must be broken apart by a hammer before their dispersal into whiskey sours.
The organic cellular design encoded in nature remains a popular theme in futuristic design. Oobject's gallery of buildings, chairs and inexplicable thingies suggests two things: firstly, that our childrens' spaces will have lots of links, bubbles and compartments.
The T-Mobile G1 has an update in the works. When the firmware will be available to owners is the main question after most of the details leaked out of the kitchen. Cupcake, as it’s been dubbed, should improve the look and the feel of the OS. The buttons should pop a bit more, there is a new transition when opening and closing apps, but most importantly is the new virtual keyboard. That particular new feature doesn’t seem to provide much function in the physical keyboard-equipped G1, but hopefully the G2 or the upcoming Huawei handset will take full advantage of it. Early screenshots after the jump.
Four-eyes. A taunt I heard almost daily in school, although curiously it never bothered me. I think I was so relived to be able to see after years of blind squinting at the class blackboard that I just found the name-calling rather sad and pathetic.
Four Eyes is also the name of this USB bookmark. In the manner of our rather disastrous how-to video on hacking novelty USB drives, the folks at IMM stuffed a thumb-stick into these specs in the hope of gleaning some geek-chic. The spex can also be slid betwixt the pages of a real life paper book to save your place, a rather old fashioned notion.
In fact, these glasses leave us rather confused. It's as if the designer, Willie Tsang, took a whole bag of concepts, shook them up like Scrabble tiles and pulled out this rather dyslexic design. Still, while they might be "conceptual", they're not a mere concept. These spectacles, USB stick, bookmark, or whatever it might be, can be had. 2GB and unlimited place-marking for $30.
The latest development build of the Google Android OS, named Cupcake, shows a variety of tweaks and new functions (new notepad app, list of running applications) but the one we're interested is the virtual keyboard, pictured above.
Google has to get this right. The iPhone only works because of its excellent predictive text and error correction. The UI also helps let you know you got things right, with its pop-out letters. The only current Googlephone – the T-Mobile G1 – has a real physical keyboard, but if Google wants to expand Android into a proper range, it needs to make its virtual input perfect.
So, how does it do? Arron La, Android developer, gave it a go:
Because the phone does not auto-rotate (an option exists but it doesn’t work), it’s very hard to type on it. The sample keyboard also does not provide auto-corrections.
Not too good. This is, though, a development version, so things will doubtless improve. Remember: the Android OS itself went from a demo to finished product in less than a year.
These sweet-looking half pint glasses are from a company called Innermost. A set of two will cost you $32. They come in a gift box.
The real reason for this post, though, is to complain about a few things. One, these double-walled glasses are billed as keeping hot drinks hot and cold ones cool. But will they? Glass is already a great insulator, so will the extra layer of air make a difference? This reminds me of an old boss of mine, back when I worked in a country pub.
His name was Charlie, too, but he was an idiot. He would drink his Guinness from what he called a "Lady's Glass" -- a stemmed half pint glass. He claimed that this minimized contact with the bar and kept his drink cold. The wooden, non conductive bar. The bar which was at room temperature, the same as the air around it. Like I said -- and idiot.
The other complaint pertains to the North American saying "a pint's a pound the world around". It isn't. In the US, with its pathetic 16 ounce pint, this may be the case, but in the UK, which also still sells beer in old-fashioned Imperial measurements, a pint is 20 ounces. Just saying, is all.
The first thing you do when you move into a new home is throw out the junk and start over. And that's just what the Obama administration is going to have to do. According to the Washington Post, the new team moved in and found legacy hardware and systems so old fashioned that it prompted spokesman Bill Burton to say "It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari."
Ouch! And remember, that's the official line. We imagine the behind the scenes muttering is much worse. So, what's the problem? Well, the Mac-loving, Crackberry-toting prez found old Windows hardware running "six-year-old versions of Microsoft software" and a curious lack of notebook computers.
The systems are also rather arcane -- no email accessible from outside, no IM and – horror – no Facebook. The tech savvy team soon worked around this, though, and set up their own email accounts using the geek's choice, Gmail. Nice.
Anti-virus maker Intego has issued a warning about a Mac trojan that is both in the wild and actually malicious, unlike anything seen before. The distribution system is BitTorrent -- specifically a pirated version of the iWork 09 suite just released by Apple.
What does this mysterious trojan do? It drops an application named iWorkServices into the system startup folder (/System/Library/StartupItems). Intego:
The malicious software connects to a remote server over the Internet; this means that a malicious user will be alerted that this Trojan horse is installed on different Macs, and will have the ability to connect to them and perform various actions remotely. The Trojan horse may also download additional components to an infected Mac.[emphasis added]
It sounds a little woolly, doesn't it? "Various actions remotely" sounds threatening but is really too non-specific. Better is the recommendation from Intego: Install its VirusBarrier X4 and X5 software. Surprise!
This might well be the first real security threat that OS X has seen. Or it may be a rather cynical cash-in on a harmless trojan. It could even be a complete set up. One thing we do know, though, is that you'd have to be a complete moron to download iWork 09 via BitTorrent -- there is a free, one month trial version available from Apple's own site. Also, Intego: way to write a headline -- take a look at the link below, copied verbatim. It reads like a telegram.
Dutch designer Piet Hein Eek specializes in works made from reclaimed wood, like this lovely cupboard. He does floors, too!
Toronto author and free software activist Robert Boyczuk's short story collection, "Horror Story and Other Horror Stories" has finally been published. Quill and Quire reviewed the 19-story collection, crediting Bob with "having a real knack for creepy, Twilight Zone-style atmospherics." The whole manuscript's up for free CC download as well, natch.
It's not like Microsoft is going to be disappearing any time soon, especially with the success of the Windows 7 beta, but its death grip on the PC industry is being eroded on multiple fronts and it's a good exercise to imagine what it might be like if MS were to take the French leave.
It's important to note that the question of what happens after Microsoft doesn't need to mean "what would happen if Microsoft left the picture entirely." Mostly because that's not going to happen: they'll be a part of the post-Microsoft world too, because "Microsoft" is more than a company, it's a way of thinking about computing.
Today on Offworld we saw a pair of pairs of retro-game inspired footwear, possibly the reigning champ of game-cakes, as these are ones you can actually play, explored the possibility that Taito may be returning to the DS for more retro-futuristic Space Invaders love, and saw more of Sega's upcoming Wii title that parodies retro gaming's finest.
We also held a brief service for the death of legendary design house The Designers Republic, best known in the games sphere for their work defining the visual identity of the Wipeout series, saw fantastic new media from Fez creators Polytron on the opening of their new website, and saw the first and likely only set of lesbian artificial intelligence erotica we'll ever see, with a forbidden romance between Portal's GlaDOS and System Shock's Shodan.
Finally, we saw one man's attempt to bring The Wrestler's Randy 'The Ram' Robinson forward from his on-screen 8-bit roots to full next-gen glory, and settled on a game for this weekend's community play: the open beta of London indie Beatnik Games' Plain Sight, a raucous and light-hearted robot arena battle that takes the best bits of Mario Galaxy's spherical worlds and combines it with brutal aerial acrobatics. 
There are 2 billion DVDs in U.S. homes, Jackson says, and 80% of those are watched just twice a year. Jackson envisions people swapping DVDs with neighbors, work colleagues, church members and sports clubs, where people already know and trust each other and for the most part can hand over the DVDs in person, skipping the mail.
MySpace is so five minutes ago. Well, at least that’s the consensus according to a new statistics report from ComScore. The report shows that Facebook receives nearly double the amount of unique worldwide visitors to its site than their competitor MySpace.
In this Boing Boing video episode, we are introduced to 
Today, Microsoft has announced the merger of Office Live and Windows Live. Instead of offering the applications as two different programs, consumers will have the ability to access both sets of services from one web location. 
Futureproofing your gear is always a smart idea. Why pick up a 3G USB modem when you can get a combination 3G and 4G WiMAX modem instead? 
Last week, Google announced the cutting of several positions as well as the closing of numerous applications. This week, Yahoo pronounced that it too will need to take major steps in order to get through the worldwide economic crisis.
As an art form, the USB port isn’t necessarily the first thing that comes to mind, at least to me. Apparently this is not the case for the 
Ah, the January doldrums, that quirky time between CES gadget-explosion and the spring cell phone shows. Everyone gets a bit goofy, hoping for a splash of publicity after the big guns have come out or are being prepped. Here is what bugged me this week:
Youtube has officially enabled High Quality in embedded videos. The new embedded player sports a little HQ button in the expandable menu, which is strangely absent from Youtube's 
It’s a watershed moment for the Internet. Digital research outfit comScore reports that total 
