Source: Gizmodo | 24 Feb 2009 | 7:00 am

OLED display coming to Samsung camera

Section: Imaging, Digital Cameras

The Samsung TL320, a 12-megapixel camera, will have an OLED display on is back.  The display will be 3-inches in size and ought to be quite sharp.  Contrast ratios on OLED displays are excellent, so colors pop and blacks look black.  To give you an idea on how dark the blacks get on an OLED screen, Consumer Reports had to purchase new equipment just to determine the contrast ratio on an OLED television because nothing in their vast tool box could accurately read the ratio. 

While it’s great that you’ll be able to see better images, the real benefit to the camera is lower power consumption and the screen offers a better viewing angle. 

Apart from that, the TL320 has the usual array of features seen in point and shoot cameras like detecting blinks, faces, and smiles.  It ought to be available in May and will have a $379 price tag attached.

Read: [TWICE]

Full Story » | Written by Iyaz Akhtar for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 24 Feb 2009 | 6:41 am

Prison ships converted to guestworker housing

As unemployment in Britain spikes, anti-foreign labor sentiment is running high, and multinationals stand accused of violating their labor agreements by shipping in cheap workers from abroad. One employer is housing its guestworkers on a former prison ship that serves as both cheap housing and protection from angry mobs.

They're floating labor camps, seabound slums, theoretically tolerable migrant housing “converted” out of old prison barges.

But, one can only wonder, what “converted” actually means here, and what defines "tolerable." By the sounds of it, perhaps a few locks have been taken off the doors, a few bars removed from the cabin (cell) windows, but essentially, from what I can tell, the rest is what you might still imagine.

All of which naturally conjures wretched images of slave ships from the colonial era swarming the coasts of the frontier, and begs some very basic questions here: what are the regulations around reusing or “converting” prison barges into suitable housing? What are the health standards that apply to such floating migrant camps? What constitutes appropriate compensation for their work? Are they protected by any certain safety guarantees? Is there any political agency to act on their behalf? How are these labor barges governed internationally if they operate as a sea-based entity, perhaps domiciled outside the boundaries of formal juridical sovereignty? I mean, I don't know. What is the oversight for this type of practice, if any?

Subtopia: The Floating Labor Camps of the Now (via Futurismic)

(Image: A Getty image of a former prison ship now used to barrack foreign workers employed at Lindsey Refinery, at Grimsby docks)

Source: Boing Boing | 24 Feb 2009 | 6:04 am

Sita Sings the Blues to air in full on PBS

Nina Paley's brilliant -- and troubled -- animated short "Sita Sings the Blues" will air on PBS. This is the critically acclaimed short film that blends Hindu traditional stories with jazz-era music, whose distribution has been stopped by an unforeseen copyright claim on some of the 1920s music that is integral to the film.

Animated Ramayana to Air on PBS: 'Sita Sings the Blues' (Thanks, KaliMama!)

Source: Boing Boing | 24 Feb 2009 | 5:57 am

Lacey tablecloth made from sweetener packets

Becky Stern sez, "I made this cafe tablecloth using packets of Splenda, Equal, and Sweet'n Low, plus packing tape. I gathered the packets while getting coffees. I still need help coming up with a title for the piece, though."

Artificial Sweetener Tablecloth (Thanks, Becky!)

Source: Boing Boing | 24 Feb 2009 | 5:50 am

Russian Eco-Cult Community in California

Boingboing's current guestblogger Paul Spinrad is a freelance writer/editor with catholic interests. He is currently Projects Editor for MAKE magazine and the author of The VJ Book and The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Wendy. 

If you're looking for a way to get back to the land and enjoy an integrated life while society collapses, The Shambhala-Shasta Anastasia Eco-Settlement Project has 466 acres of land and is looking for settlers. It sounds nice! I've long fantasized about this kind of thing. Maybe now's the time.

The "Anastasia" in their name refers to the heroine of the "Ringing Cedars" series of books by Vladimir Megre, which came out in Russia during the mid-1990's and started being translated into English beginning in 2004. If numerous websites are to be believed, the series has a large following not just in Russia, but around the world. "Ringing Cedars" refers to the books' claim that when a Siberian Pine tree (sometimes translated as "Cedar") reaches 500 years of age, it becomes a sort of cosmic energy-channeling antenna. And so also rings the New Age BS detector, but please stay with me here...

I read and enjoyed Anastasia, the first book in the series, and I hope to read the rest. On one level, the book is a male midlife-crisis fantasy-- a first-person account of a spiritually empty entrepreneur who finds a stunningly beautiful and brilliant native girl in the forest, and she changes his life forever. Anastasia runs naked, communicates telepathically with animals, is clairvoyant, and possesses vast wisdom that has been lost to modern civilization. She's the "noble savage," and she's also a virgin who fell in love with the author/entrepreneur during a chance previous encounter that he doesn't remember, and she wants to start a family with him ASAP.

What interests me most about Anastasia (and I know I need to read more in the series to confirm/deny), is how it combines deep ecology with traditional, even conservative family values. There's no sense of hippie "alternative lifestyle" in its back-to-the-land message. It honors Christianity and connects with its audience through their experience gardening in dachas (modest country houses) on weekends. It's a container for hard-core downshifting that I sense would appeal to solid, traditional, family-oriented folks. Meanwhile, the book also has some wacky, unexpected ideas that I liked-- for example, the Anastasia character suggests that pollution from roadways could be mitigated by requiring active air purifiers on every vehicle's front bumper.

Websites that sell the Ringing Cedars books also sell products derived from the Siberian Pine-- nuts, oil, and polished slices of the tree to be worn as pendants. And perhaps the initial bolt of inspiration that Megre had, as an inland shipping entrepreneur exploring the Siberian forest, was how to concoct a new religion that would maximize the commercial value of this common regional tree. A 5 gram pendant (slice of branch on a string) costs $4 plus shipping.

Furthermore, according to the cult-watching Center For Apologetics Research, Megre was forced to admit in 1998 that he made the Anastasia stories up, whereupon psychic healer Olga Anatolevnya Guz began to claim that she is the real Anastasia.

But people can change, eyes can open, and how one comes to create a belief system doesn't reflect on the value it contains. Buddha abandoned his wife and baby son in order to pursue his own spiritual journey, but he turned the deadbeat-dad guilt that he must have felt (although his family was rich, so less damage done) into a philosophy and practice of non-attachment that countless people, including myself, have found valuable. There are numerous paths to insight. (But I've also talked to single women in San Francisco who are sick of all the passive, "hey, babe-- no attachments" Buddhist guys.)

So, Siberian Pine products aside-- not that I've tried any-- the Anastasians seem to be onto something constructive, and although I don't think I'll be joining them, I am "rooting" for them.

Source: Boing Boing | 24 Feb 2009 | 5:32 am

Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking

Carrie Fisher has always had a great sense of humor, including the Princess Leia-as-alcoholic t-shirts she sold at performances of her one-woman show, and now available online. The book jacket of Fisher's new memoir, Wishful Drinking, keeps the spirit alive. They say not to judge a book by its cover, but this one looks really fun.
Wishful Drinking (Amazon)

Source: Boing Boing | 24 Feb 2009 | 5:31 am

Ingres, Alfresco Debut Open-source SharePoint Rival (PC World)

PC World - Open-source vendors Ingres and Alfresco are teaming up on a software appliance that bundles the Ingres database with Alfresco's content management platform, hoping the combination will prove to be an enticing alternative to Microsoft SharePoint.
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 24 Feb 2009 | 5:20 am

Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street

A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists—even Wall Street quants—have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li's work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut—determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related—and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide.

For five years, Li's formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much money—that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.

Then the model fell apart. Cracks started appearing early on, when financial markets began behaving in ways that users of Li's formula hadn't expected. The cracks became full-fledged canyons in 2008—when ruptures in the financial system's foundation swallowed up trillions of dollars and put the survival of the global banking system in serious peril.

David X. Li, it's safe to say, won't be getting that Nobel anytime soon. One result of the collapse has been the end of financial economics as something to be celebrated rather than feared. And Li's Gaussian copula formula will go down in history as instrumental in causing the unfathomable losses that brought the world financial system to its knees.

How could one formula pack such a devastating punch? The answer lies in the bond market, the multitrillion-dollar system that allows pension funds, insurance companies, and hedge funds to lend trillions of dollars to companies, countries, and home buyers.

A bond, of course, is just an IOU, a promise to pay back money with interest by certain dates. If a company—say, IBM—borrows money by issuing a bond, investors will look very closely over its accounts to make sure it has the wherewithal to repay them. The higher the perceived risk—and there's always some risk—the higher the interest rate the bond must carry.

Bond investors are very comfortable with the concept of probability. If there's a 1 percent chance of default but they get an extra two percentage points in interest, they're ahead of the game overall—like a casino, which is happy to lose big sums every so often in return for profits most of the time.

Bond investors also invest in pools of hundreds or even thousands of mortgages. The potential sums involved are staggering: Americans now owe more than $11 trillion on their homes. But mortgage pools are messier than most bonds. There's no guaranteed interest rate, since the amount of money homeowners collectively pay back every month is a function of how many have refinanced and how many have defaulted. There's certainly no fixed maturity date: Money shows up in irregular chunks as people pay down their mortgages at unpredictable times—for instance, when they decide to sell their house. And most problematic, there's no easy way to assign a single probability to the chance of default.

Wall Street solved many of these problems through a process called tranching, which divides a pool and allows for the creation of safe bonds with a risk-free triple-A credit rating. Investors in the first tranche, or slice, are first in line to be paid off. Those next in line might get only a double-A credit rating on their tranche of bonds but will be able to charge a higher interest rate for bearing the slightly higher chance of default. And so on.

The reason that ratings agencies and investors felt so safe with the triple-A tranches was that they believed there was no way hundreds of homeowners would all default on their loans at the same time. One person might lose his job, another might fall ill. But those are individual calamities that don't affect the mortgage pool much as a whole: Everybody else is still making their payments on time.

But not all calamities are individual, and tranching still hadn't solved all the problems of mortgage-pool risk. Some things, like falling house prices, affect a large number of people at once. If home values in your neighborhood decline and you lose some of your equity, there's a good chance your neighbors will lose theirs as well. If, as a result, you default on your mortgage, there's a higher probability they will default, too. That's called correlation—the degree to which one variable moves in line with another—and measuring it is an important part of determining how risky mortgage bonds are.

Investors like risk, as long as they can price it. What they hate is uncertainty—not knowing how big the risk is. As a result, bond investors and mortgage lenders desperately want to be able to measure, model, and price correlation. Before quantitative models came along, the only time investors were comfortable putting their money in mortgage pools was when there was no risk whatsoever—in other words, when the bonds were guaranteed implicitly by the federal government through Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.

Yet during the '90s, as global markets expanded, there were trillions of new dollars waiting to be put to use lending to borrowers around the world—not just mortgage seekers but also corporations and car buyers and anybody running a balance on their credit card—if only investors could put a number on the correlations between them. The problem is excruciatingly hard, especially when you're talking about thousands of moving parts. Whoever solved it would earn the eternal gratitude of Wall Street and quite possibly the attention of the Nobel committee as well.

To understand the mathematics of correlation better, consider something simple, like a kid in an elementary school: Let's call her Alice. The probability that her parents will get divorced this year is about 5 percent, the risk of her getting head lice is about 5 percent, the chance of her seeing a teacher slip on a banana peel is about 5 percent, and the likelihood of her winning the class spelling bee is about 5 percent. If investors were trading securities based on the chances of those things happening only to Alice, they would all trade at more or less the same price.

But something important happens when we start looking at two kids rather than one—not just Alice but also the girl she sits next to, Britney. If Britney's parents get divorced, what are the chances that Alice's parents will get divorced, too? Still about 5 percent: The correlation there is close to zero. But if Britney gets head lice, the chance that Alice will get head lice is much higher, about 50 percent—which means the correlation is probably up in the 0.5 range. If Britney sees a teacher slip on a banana peel, what is the chance that Alice will see it, too? Very high indeed, since they sit next to each other: It could be as much as 95 percent, which means the correlation is close to 1. And if Britney wins the class spelling bee, the chance of Alice winning it is zero, which means the correlation is negative: -1.

If investors were trading securities based on the chances of these things happening to both Alice and Britney, the prices would be all over the place, because the correlations vary so much.

But it's a very inexact science. Just measuring those initial 5 percent probabilities involves collecting lots of disparate data points and subjecting them to all manner of statistical and error analysis. Trying to assess the conditional probabilities—the chance that Alice will get head lice if Britney gets head lice—is an order of magnitude harder, since those data points are much rarer. As a result of the scarcity of historical data, the errors there are likely to be much greater.

In the world of mortgages, it's harder still. What is the chance that any given home will decline in value? You can look at the past history of housing prices to give you an idea, but surely the nation's macroeconomic situation also plays an important role. And what is the chance that if a home in one state falls in value, a similar home in another state will fall in value as well?

Probability Specifically, this is a joint default probability—the likelihood that any two members of the pool (A and B) will both default. It's what investors are looking for, and the rest of the formula provides the answer.	Survival times The amount of time between now and when A and B can be expected to default. Li took the idea from a concept in actuarial science that charts what happens to someone's life expectancy when their spouse dies.	Equality A dangerously precise concept, since it leaves no room for error. Clean equations help both quants and their managers forget that the real world contains a surprising amount of uncertainty, fuzziness, and precariousness.
Copula This couples (hence the Latinate term copula) the individual probabilities associated with A and B to come up with a single number. Errors here massively increase the risk of the whole equation blowing up.	Distribution functions The probabilities of how long A and B are likely to survive. Since these are not certainties, they can be dangerous: Small miscalculations may leave you facing much more risk than the formula indicates.	Gamma The all-powerful correlation parameter, which reduces correlation to a single constant—something that should be highly improbable, if not impossible. This is the magic number that made Li's copula function irresistible.

Enter Li, a star mathematician who grew up in rural China in the 1960s. He excelled in school and eventually got a master's degree in economics from Nankai University before leaving the country to get an MBA from Laval University in Quebec. That was followed by two more degrees: a master's in actuarial science and a PhD in statistics, both from Ontario's University of Waterloo. In 1997 he landed at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, where his financial career began in earnest; he later moved to Barclays Capital and by 2004 was charged with rebuilding its quantitative analytics team.

Li's trajectory is typical of the quant era, which began in the mid-1980s. Academia could never compete with the enormous salaries that banks and hedge funds were offering. At the same time, legions of math and physics PhDs were required to create, price, and arbitrage Wall Street's ever more complex investment structures.

In 2000, while working at JPMorgan Chase, Li published a paper in The Journal of Fixed Income titled "On Default Correlation: A Copula Function Approach." (In statistics, a copula is used to couple the behavior of two or more variables.) Using some relatively simple math—by Wall Street standards, anyway—Li came up with an ingenious way to model default correlation without even looking at historical default data. Instead, he used market data about the prices of instruments known as credit default swaps.

If you're an investor, you have a choice these days: You can either lend directly to borrowers or sell investors credit default swaps, insurance against those same borrowers defaulting. Either way, you get a regular income stream—interest payments or insurance payments—and either way, if the borrower defaults, you lose a lot of money. The returns on both strategies are nearly identical, but because an unlimited number of credit default swaps can be sold against each borrower, the supply of swaps isn't constrained the way the supply of bonds is, so the CDS market managed to grow extremely rapidly. Though credit default swaps were relatively new when Li's paper came out, they soon became a bigger and more liquid market than the bonds on which they were based.

When the price of a credit default swap goes up, that indicates that default risk has risen. Li's breakthrough was that instead of waiting to assemble enough historical data about actual defaults, which are rare in the real world, he used historical prices from the CDS market. It's hard to build a historical model to predict Alice's or Britney's behavior, but anybody could see whether the price of credit default swaps on Britney tended to move in the same direction as that on Alice. If it did, then there was a strong correlation between Alice's and Britney's default risks, as priced by the market. Li wrote a model that used price rather than real-world default data as a shortcut (making an implicit assumption that financial markets in general, and CDS markets in particular, can price default risk correctly).

It was a brilliant simplification of an intractable problem. And Li didn't just radically dumb down the difficulty of working out correlations; he decided not to even bother trying to map and calculate all the nearly infinite relationships between the various loans that made up a pool. What happens when the number of pool members increases or when you mix negative correlations with positive ones? Never mind all that, he said. The only thing that matters is the final correlation number—one clean, simple, all-sufficient figure that sums up everything.

The effect on the securitization market was electric. Armed with Li's formula, Wall Street's quants saw a new world of possibilities. And the first thing they did was start creating a huge number of brand-new triple-A securities. Using Li's copula approach meant that ratings agencies like Moody's—or anybody wanting to model the risk of a tranche—no longer needed to puzzle over the underlying securities. All they needed was that correlation number, and out would come a rating telling them how safe or risky the tranche was.

As a result, just about anything could be bundled and turned into a triple-A bond—corporate bonds, bank loans, mortgage-backed securities, whatever you liked. The consequent pools were often known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. You could tranche that pool and create a triple-A security even if none of the components were themselves triple-A. You could even take lower-rated tranches of other CDOs, put them in a pool, and tranche them—an instrument known as a CDO-squared, which at that point was so far removed from any actual underlying bond or loan or mortgage that no one really had a clue what it included. But it didn't matter. All you needed was Li's copula function.

The CDS and CDO markets grew together, feeding on each other. At the end of 2001, there was $920 billion in credit default swaps outstanding. By the end of 2007, that number had skyrocketed to more than $62 trillion. The CDO market, which stood at $275 billion in 2000, grew to $4.7 trillion by 2006.

At the heart of it all was Li's formula. When you talk to market participants, they use words like beautiful, simple, and, most commonly, tractable. It could be applied anywhere, for anything, and was quickly adopted not only by banks packaging new bonds but also by traders and hedge funds dreaming up complex trades between those bonds.

"The corporate CDO world relied almost exclusively on this copula-based correlation model," says Darrell Duffie, a Stanford University finance professor who served on Moody's Academic Advisory Research Committee. The Gaussian copula soon became such a universally accepted part of the world's financial vocabulary that brokers started quoting prices for bond tranches based on their correlations. "Correlation trading has spread through the psyche of the financial markets like a highly infectious thought virus," wrote derivatives guru Janet Tavakoli in 2006.

The damage was foreseeable and, in fact, foreseen. In 1998, before Li had even invented his copula function, Paul Wilmott wrote that "the correlations between financial quantities are notoriously unstable." Wilmott, a quantitative-finance consultant and lecturer, argued that no theory should be built on such unpredictable parameters. And he wasn't alone. During the boom years, everybody could reel off reasons why the Gaussian copula function wasn't perfect. Li's approach made no allowance for unpredictability: It assumed that correlation was a constant rather than something mercurial. Investment banks would regularly phone Stanford's Duffie and ask him to come in and talk to them about exactly what Li's copula was. Every time, he would warn them that it was not suitable for use in risk management or valuation.

In hindsight, ignoring those warnings looks foolhardy. But at the time, it was easy. Banks dismissed them, partly because the managers empowered to apply the brakes didn't understand the arguments between various arms of the quant universe. Besides, they were making too much money to stop.

In finance, you can never reduce risk outright; you can only try to set up a market in which people who don't want risk sell it to those who do. But in the CDO market, people used the Gaussian copula model to convince themselves they didn't have any risk at all, when in fact they just didn't have any risk 99 percent of the time. The other 1 percent of the time they blew up. Those explosions may have been rare, but they could destroy all previous gains, and then some.

Li's copula function was used to price hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of CDOs filled with mortgages. And because the copula function used CDS prices to calculate correlation, it was forced to confine itself to looking at the period of time when those credit default swaps had been in existence: less than a decade, a period when house prices soared. Naturally, default correlations were very low in those years. But when the mortgage boom ended abruptly and home values started falling across the country, correlations soared.

Bankers securitizing mortgages knew that their models were highly sensitive to house-price appreciation. If it ever turned negative on a national scale, a lot of bonds that had been rated triple-A, or risk-free, by copula-powered computer models would blow up. But no one was willing to stop the creation of CDOs, and the big investment banks happily kept on building more, drawing their correlation data from a period when real estate only went up.

"Everyone was pinning their hopes on house prices continuing to rise," says Kai Gilkes of the credit research firm CreditSights, who spent 10 years working at ratings agencies. "When they stopped rising, pretty much everyone was caught on the wrong side, because the sensitivity to house prices was huge. And there was just no getting around it. Why didn't rating agencies build in some cushion for this sensitivity to a house-price-depreciation scenario? Because if they had, they would have never rated a single mortgage-backed CDO."

Bankers should have noted that very small changes in their underlying assumptions could result in very large changes in the correlation number. They also should have noticed that the results they were seeing were much less volatile than they should have been—which implied that the risk was being moved elsewhere. Where had the risk gone?

They didn't know, or didn't ask. One reason was that the outputs came from "black box" computer models and were hard to subject to a commonsense smell test. Another was that the quants, who should have been more aware of the copula's weaknesses, weren't the ones making the big asset-allocation decisions. Their managers, who made the actual calls, lacked the math skills to understand what the models were doing or how they worked. They could, however, understand something as simple as a single correlation number. That was the problem.

"The relationship between two assets can never be captured by a single scalar quantity," Wilmott says. For instance, consider the share prices of two sneaker manufacturers: When the market for sneakers is growing, both companies do well and the correlation between them is high. But when one company gets a lot of celebrity endorsements and starts stealing market share from the other, the stock prices diverge and the correlation between them turns negative. And when the nation morphs into a land of flip-flop-wearing couch potatoes, both companies decline and the correlation becomes positive again. It's impossible to sum up such a history in one correlation number, but CDOs were invariably sold on the premise that correlation was more of a constant than a variable.

No one knew all of this better than David X. Li: "Very few people understand the essence of the model," he told The Wall Street Journal way back in fall 2005.

"Li can't be blamed," says Gilkes of CreditSights. After all, he just invented the model. Instead, we should blame the bankers who misinterpreted it. And even then, the real danger was created not because any given trader adopted it but because every trader did. In financial markets, everybody doing the same thing is the classic recipe for a bubble and inevitable bust.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, hedge fund manager and author of The Black Swan, is particularly harsh when it comes to the copula. "People got very excited about the Gaussian copula because of its mathematical elegance, but the thing never worked," he says. "Co-association between securities is not measurable using correlation," because past history can never prepare you for that one day when everything goes south. "Anything that relies on correlation is charlatanism."

Li has been notably absent from the current debate over the causes of the crash. In fact, he is no longer even in the US. Last year, he moved to Beijing to head up the risk-management department of China International Capital Corporation. In a recent conversation, he seemed reluctant to discuss his paper and said he couldn't talk without permission from the PR department. In response to a subsequent request, CICC's press office sent an email saying that Li was no longer doing the kind of work he did in his previous job and, therefore, would not be speaking to the media.

In the world of finance, too many quants see only the numbers before them and forget about the concrete reality the figures are supposed to represent. They think they can model just a few years' worth of data and come up with probabilities for things that may happen only once every 10,000 years. Then people invest on the basis of those probabilities, without stopping to wonder whether the numbers make any sense at all.

As Li himself said of his own model: "The most dangerous part is when people believe everything coming out of it."

— Felix Salmon (felix@felixsalmon.com) writes the Market Movers financial blog at Portfolio.com.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 24 Feb 2009 | 5:00 am

Road Map for Financial Recovery: Radical Transparency Now!

On the morning of March 29, 1933, dozens of reporters filed into the Oval Office for a press conference with the new president. Franklin Roosevelt had taken office earlier that month amid the greatest economic crisis the US had seen: 5,700 banks had failed, 25 percent of the country was unemployed, and more than half of all mortgages were in default.

Hope for a recovery was dim; the public had lost faith in the entire financial system. The number of American investors had exploded, from a few hundred thousand before 1916 to more than 16 million. Yet few of them understood the investments they held, many of which had proven to be junk. Supposedly sound companies were exposed as pyramid schemes. Of the $50 billion in securities sold in the previous decade, half had become worthless.

And yet, as reporters huddled around his desk, Roosevelt sounded confident. "I have something on the Securities Bill today," he announced. That day, members of his brain trust were on Capitol Hill, submitting a plan that would spark the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission. One overriding concept lay at the center of the legislation: transparency. Louis Brandeis, before becoming a Supreme Court justice, had written an exposé of the financial system for Harper's Weekly, and one passage in particular had lodged in Roosevelt's brain: "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants. Electric lights the most efficient policeman." The proposed bill would require, for the first time, companies to file detailed accounts of their financial health and activity, and bankers would have to report their fees and commissions. As Roosevelt explained it to the reporters around him, the bill "applies the new doctrine of caveat vendor in place of the old doctrine of caveat emptor. In other words, 'Let the seller beware as well as the buyer.' In other words, there is a definite, positive burden on the seller for the first time to tell the truth."

Now, here we are again, 76 years later, facing another crisis of trust that threatens the entire financial system. This time, the issue is no longer a lack of transparency. Since the 1933 Securities Bill, corporate America has been required to disclose a deluge of information in a multitude of ways—10-Ks and 10-Qs, earnings calls and Sarbanes-Oxley-mandated 404s. Between 1996 and 2005 alone, the federal government issued more than 30 major rules requiring new financial disclosure protocols, and the data has piled up. The SEC's public document database, Edgar, now catalogs 200 gigabytes of filings each year—roughly 15 million pages of text—up from 35 gigabytes a decade ago.

But the volume of data obscures more than it reveals; financial reporting has become so transparent as to be invisible. Answering what should be simple questions—how secure is my cash account? How much of my bank's capital is tied up in risky debt obligations?—often seems to require a legal degree, as well as countless hours to dig through thousands of pages of documents. Undoubtedly, the warning signs of our current crisis—and the next one!—lie somewhere in all those filings, but good luck finding them.

Even the regulators can't keep up. A Senate study in 2002 found that the SEC had managed to fully review just 16 percent of the nearly 15,000 annual reports that companies submitted in the previous fiscal year; the recently disgraced Enron hadn't been reviewed in a decade. We shouldn't be surprised. While the SEC is staffed by a relatively small group of poorly compensated financial cops, Wall Street bankers get paid millions to create new and ever more complicated investment products. By the time regulators get a handle on one investment class, a slew of new ones have been created. "This is a cycle that goes on and on—and will continue to get repeated," says Peter Wysocki, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. "You can't just make new regulations about the next innovation in financial misreporting."

That's why it's not enough to simply give the SEC—or any of its sister regulators—more authority; we need to rethink our entire philosophy of regulation. Instead of assigning oversight responsibility to a finite group of bureaucrats, we should enable every investor to act as a citizen-regulator. We should tap into the massive parallel processing power of people around the world by giving everyone the tools to track, analyze, and publicize financial machinations. The result would be a wave of decentralized innovation that can keep pace with Wall Street and allow the market to regulate itself—naturally punishing companies and investments that don't measure up—more efficiently than the regulators ever could.

The revolution will be powered by data, which should be unshackled from the pages of regulatory filings and made more flexible and useful. We must require public companies and all financial firms to report more granular data online—and in real time, not just quarterly—uniformly tagged and exportable into any spreadsheet, database, widget, or Web page. The era of sunlight has to give way to the era of pixelization; only when we give everyone the tools to see each point of data will the picture become clear. Just as epidemiologists crunch massive data sets to predict disease outbreaks, so will investors parse the trove of publicly available financial information to foresee the next economic disasters and opportunities.

The time to act is now. An exhaustive study by the Transparency Policy Project at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government—analyzing disclosure rules for everything from restaurant cleanliness to SUV rollover risk—found that there's a very brief window after any calamity for government to institute changes. (Wait too long and the special interests start regaining their confidence and pushing back.) In the financial world, the old order is still trying to find its new shape. So the window is, briefly, cracked. Caveat vendor.

Philip Moyer, CEO of Edgar Online, walks into his conference room in midtown Manhattan a half hour late, clutching an inch-thick stack of copy paper. He's a broad-shouldered guy with dark brown hair pushed back from his forehead, as if a fan is constantly blowing directly onto his face. He slams the paper down theatrically: "One reason I'm a little bit delayed is that I started printing out a Bear Stearns free writing prospectus," he says. "The assets cover 462 pages. I got about 70 pages through."

Every bank that issues mortgage-backed securities—pools of home loans packaged together and sold as a single entity—is required to file a free writing prospectus, which lists every individual mortgage in each pool. An FWP contains endless columns of pure data, most of which don't even track from page to page. And each FWP is different: The banks have no uniform information that they're required to present in their filing. Even when they do report the same data, they do so using entirely different language. And yet somewhere among all this impenetrable code lie the bugs that destroyed the American economy.

Moyer discovered this in the spring of 2007, when two hedge fund managers independently asked for his help in making sense of some major banks' FWPs. Poring through all that paperwork by hand would take countless hours, and they wanted Moyer to extract and package the data in a way they could easily understand. Moyer, a former Microsoft executive, assigned four engineers to categorize and standardize the FWPs' contents—creating a Rosetta stone that could translate the 600 unique, inconsistent fields into 100 uniform categories. Three months later, he started delivering spreadsheets that clearly spelled out the risks in each of the pools, giving the financiers the ability to evaluate every aspect of the loans: location, proof of income, interest rate, appraisal value, and so on. They could drill down and compare the FWPs in a way that would have been nearly impossible before. And what they saw was a nationwide crisis in the making—as adjustable-rate mortgage rates ballooned, countless home-owners would default on their loans, rending the securities built on them worthless.

Of course, the hedge-funders didn't publicize their findings; they were seeking an informational edge. But imagine if everyone had access to the same data-crunching tools: Risky mortgage-backed securities would have been exposed, and banks, anxious to protect their reputations, would have stopped offering them. With complete information—including much more frequent posting of loan status—the market would likely have self-regulated as risk-fearing investors fled from companies holding or issuing the risky securities.

That's the kind of scenario that has kept Charlie Hoffman motivated for the past decade. A 50-year-old accountant from Tacoma, Washington, Hoffman is the originator of XBRL, a set of tags that standardizes financial information. Hoffman stumbled on the idea while trying to figure out a way to automate the tedious auditing process. ("Basically, I'm lazy," he says.) But while Moyer's team was forced to create complicated algorithms to codify kludgy financial documents after they were filed, Hoffman is agitating for companies to file their data in a standardized format from the very start. Today, nearly 50 companies report their information in XBRL to the SEC, but Hoffman says the protocol's real power will be realized only when every company starts using it—to keep track of their own operations as well as to report their numbers to investors and regulators. If all businesses are required to tag their every move, from each iPhone sold by Apple to every interest payment made by Exxon, they won't be able to engage in the kind of balance-sheet chicanery that kept Enron's investors in the dark. "Financial reporting should work the way that an iPod works," Hoffman says. "It should just be elegant and simple."

A few years ago, when banking regulators started requiring filings in XBRL from its member banks, it found that the time it took auditors to review a bank's quarterly financial information dropped from about 70 days to two. More regulators are catching on: Last December, the SEC announced that by June, every company with a market capitalization over $5 billion will be required to submit all filings using the format. And all publicly traded companies and mutual funds must follow suit by 2011. The result, Hoffman says, is that every investor will soon have the same ability as Moyer's hedge fund managers to export, manipulate, and mash up financial data. "Look how blogs changed news reporting," he says. "Anybody is a reporter. With XBRL, anyone can be an analyst."

Set the data free Today, public companies and financial institutions disclose their activities in endless documents stuffed with figures and stats. Instead, they should be forced to file using universal tags that make the data easy to explore.

Empower all investors Once every company's data carries identical tags, anyone can manipulate the numbers to compare performance. And they can see details of every financial instrument—not just balance sheets and income statements.

Create an army of citizen-regulators By giving everyone access to every piece of data—and making it easy to crunch—we can crowdsource regulation, creating a self-correcting financial system and unlocking new ways of measuring the market's health.

But the government is just playing footsie with the kind of reform that's needed. If future financial crises are to be avoided, XBRL shouldn't be limited to public companies. It should become the lingua franca of every investment bank, hedge fund, pension fund, insurance company, and endowment fund. Today these groups contribute to a multitrillion-dollar shadow banking system of lightly (or not-at-all) regulated financial instruments that move markets and tend to bring outsize riches—until they blow up. Take collateralized debt obligations. These are mortgage-backed securities blended with other assets—say, auto loans or credit card debt—into one asset-backed pie, sliced up according to risk and sold as an investment. It is impossible to track any one loan in a CDO; when it is combined and divided with other loans, it loses its independent identity. When the ratings agencies tried to determine default risks for CDOs, all they saw were vaguely defined pools of assets. They had little idea what was in them, and their models—like David X. Li's ubiquitous copula function (see Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street)—would prove inadequate at evaluating them.

But if those mortgages and loans carried XBRL tags, and everybody who touched them along the way was required to use those tags as well, anyone would have been able to track their circuitous route through the financial industry and judge each CDO based on its actual content. They could have seen which loans were in default and which weren't, which CDO was overweight on Las Vegas real estate and which was in the relatively safe Louisville market. An amateur risk assessor could have separated the junk assets from those worth keeping and either bet against the companies holding the garbage, blogged about it, alerted the Feds—or all of the above. (The very act of disclosure may compel companies to behave better in the first place: When Los Angeles started requiring restaurants to post their hygiene grades in their windows, average cleanliness increased by 5 percent and revenues by 3 percent.)

Tracking Wall Street's complex inventions may be difficult for regulators, but it's a snap given the right software. "I did a lot of work in clinical trials information when I was at Microsoft," says Moyer, who is a big believer in XBRL. "And if you look at the numbers that are involved in genomics, proteomics, and cell-level sequencing, those problems dwarf what we're dealing with here. It's a simple computer problem."

When data is kept under lock and key, as mysterious as a temple secret, only the priests can read and interpret it. But place it in the public domain and suddenly it takes on new life. People start playing with the information, reaching strange new conclusions or raising questions that no one else would think to ask. It is impossible to predict who will become obsessed with the data or why—but someone will.

Last fall, Kevin Bartz was seeking information about the mortgage business. Bartz, a PhD student in statistics at Harvard who had worked for Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, was earning extra money doing consulting work for a mortgage broker in Pasadena, California. The company wanted to pool some of its mortgages and find buyers for the debt. But selling the securities required being able to explain how these assets had performed in the past. Bartz found that most of the information he needed was locked up in proprietary databases. There was no way to know basic information about the loans his employer wanted to hawk—where they had originated, whether they had been paid on time, whether they had defaulted. He was struck by the lack of transparency and broadened his project: Discover a way to assess credit risk and beat the banks at their own game.

His research led him to LendingClub, a Web site that matches individual lenders with borrowers who need loans. Like other peer-to-peer lending companies, LendingClub asks borrowers to provide personal details—education, employment history, salary—and to write essays explaining why they want a loan and how they plan to pay it back. LendingClub runs its own credit checks, sorts borrowers by default risk, and comes up with interest rates. But LendingClub is unique in that it makes nearly all that information public (aside from data that could lead to privacy concerns), giving lenders the ability to sort through its database. It also tracks and publishes the history of every loan it helps broker.

Bartz downloaded the database of 4,600 loans—every essay, every neighborhood, every late payment—and started searching for patterns. He identified the 300 most common words in borrowers' essays and correlated them with payment histories. Sure enough, certain words seemed linked to late payments. Among the red flags: need, bills, and business. "Those were all words that reflected that the borrower might be in financial difficulty at the moment," Bartz says. Another one was also, which Bartz theorizes meant that the loan was being used for more than one purpose.

Bartz wasn't the only one poking around in the pixels. Besides providing the data on its customers, LendingClub posted to its Web site the formula it uses to measure default risk and determine the interest rates its borrowers had to pay. Most banks keep this information secret—a perfectly honed algorithm can give them a competitive advantage—but LendingClub open-sourced it and asked readers to submit their own tweaks and improvements. After receiving a slew of suggestions, the site's engineers decided to modify the equation, assigning less weight to debt-to-income ratio, for instance. Other LendingClub lenders downloaded the equation and came up with their own proprietary improvements, devising a better formula so they could cherry-pick borrowers who were wrongly categorized as risky and charge them higher interest rates without worrying about defaults. All this innovation benefited not just individual lenders but the entire ecosystem. LendingClub's default rate is a staggeringly low 2.7 percent (versus nearly 5.5 percent for prime credit cards).

If the financial markets were as open as LendingClub, they would reap similar benefits; the combined efforts and innovation of all investors would make the system as a whole more secure. Tim Bray, an inventor of XML who has been an advocate for XBRL reporting standards, points to political blogger Nate Silver as a helpful model of a citizen-analyst. During the 2008 presidential election, Silver, a baseball statistics whiz, pored over polling data to come up with his own—almost always dead-on—analysis of House, Senate, and presidential races. He was an outsider who manipulated huge quantities of data, allowing him to come to conclusions that had escaped the professional political analysts.

Financial data, says Bray, now director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems, should draw in the same kind of passionate people who had previously been passive investors. "People care about money," he says. "There's money in money and substantial personal upside to someone who can mine the data and uncover the truth."

The early January light streams through the slanted glass roof of SEC headquarters in Washington, DC, warming the cold marble that covers nearly every surface. Christopher Cox is in his office on the 10th floor, sitting at a glass-topped conference table. He is in a pensive mood. In just one week, he will step down from his post as head of the SEC, a position he has held for three and a half years. Almost everyone sees his tenure as a failure.

Cox came into office proclaiming his intention to protect investors. But he came to realize that the tools he had been given were no longer sufficient. The SEC was great at forcing companies to share financial details, but not so good at figuring out what to do with them. "The SEC was founded on the legal concept of disclosure and transparency," he says. "It was not a technological concept." He flashes a politician's smile, a quick display of blindingly white teeth—cover while he thinks about what comes next. "Today, we have technology that was unimaginable in the early part of the 20th century, that can reify this idea in ways that are far more expansive and consequential."

As Cox sees it, that massive computational power has primarily been used by financial engineers, who create abstract models of how the market should operate and make bets based on those models. "You know Borges, the writer?" Cox asks. "He wrote those fantastical short stories. He has one called On Exactitude in Science." The parable tells of a kingdom obsessed with creating a perfect map of itself—an essentially useless quest that leads them to draw a map that is the same size as the territory it is supposed to represent. Cox sees the story as a metaphor for the modern financial industry, which is so obsessed with modeling the market that it has lost sight of the data beneath those models. But make more data available and you don't need the perfect map. "To the extent that we can atomize what now are these hopelessly complex forms, dense with legalese, and let people have ready means to pull from actual reality what it is that they need, it's no longer a model. It's real."

Cox is now gone and a new team of regulators are walking the marble floors in DC. The old financial system is still in shambles. But a new one will emerge and, like the last, will need to be protected from its own worst instincts. Keeping the rest of us safe can no longer fall to government regulators alone. But if we enable a system in which everyone is a regulator, there just might be enough eyes, enough checks and balances, enough promising DIY economists out there to make sure the financial world doesn't innovate the real world into depression ever again. Brandeis argued that electric lights were the best police force. Now it's time to give everyone a flashlight.

— Senior writer Daniel Roth (daniel_roth@wired.com) profiled Comcast chief Brian Roberts in issue 17.02.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 24 Feb 2009 | 5:00 am

Feb. 24, 1949: Piercing the Edge of the Final Frontier

1949: The first rocket to reach what can be regarded as "outer space" is launched from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

The rocket, a modified German V-2 ballistic missile, attained the unprecedented altitude of 244 miles, putting it well above the more-or-less arbitrary Kármán line later established by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale as the dividing line between the edge of the Earth's atmosphere and geospace. The Kármán line is 62 miles (100 kilometers) high.

Most of the U.S. ballistic missile and rocket booster programs spouted from the V-2 — developed during World War II and christened Vergeltungswaffe zwei, or Vengeance Weapon 2, by the Germans.

Late in the war, the Germans used the V-2 to attack long-distance targets, especially London. While the rocket's trajectory took it close to the edge of space, none were known to have actually cleared the atmospheric ceiling.

As the American armies advanced into a collapsing Nazi Germany, scores of V-2 rockets fell into their hands. Following Germany's surrender, these rockets were shipped back to the United States and eventually wound up at White Sands, where the nation's first ballistic testing ground was established.

With the rockets came a number of the German specialists who had developed them, and they helped form the nucleus of America's nascent ballistic-missile program. Among them was the biggest catch of all, Wernher von Braun.

The rockets did not arrive intact but rather as component parts, which were then assembled and modified as needed — under von Braun's supervision — for various experiments. The White Sands project stood second only to atomic research on the nation's defense-priority list.

The V-2 stands as the direct ancestor to every early American rocket, including the Redstone, Nike and Atlas.

The first White Sands V-2 was static-fired in March 1946, and a full launch followed a month later. By the end of June 1951, 67 V-2 rockets had been launched at White Sands. Among them, though, the rocket sent up Feb. 24, 1949, stands out for its milestone achievement.

Source: NASA, White Sands Missile Range

Source: Wired Top Stories | 24 Feb 2009 | 5:00 am

EU Says MS Must Offer Other Browsers; Now What?

Glyn Moody writes "So the European Commission is going to require Microsoft to offer competitors' browsers with Windows. '...Microsoft will be obliged to design Windows in a way that allows users "to choose which competing web browser(s) instead of, or in addition to, Internet Explorer they want to install and which one they want to have as default..." [Microsoft] now has until mid-March to respond to the Commission, and might also ask for a hearing. Brussels will not adopt a final decision until it has received Microsoft's official reply.' But having the option to install Firefox, say, is useless unless people know what it is. The implication is that we need some kind of campaign to ensure that people understand the choices they will have. How can open source best exploit this latest EU decision?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 24 Feb 2009 | 4:37 am

Why iPhone Service Prices Probably Won't Budge (PC World)

PC World - There's no shortage of buzz over predictions that iPhone service costs are about to drop, but I wish to respectfully disagree with that expectation.
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 24 Feb 2009 | 4:27 am

Even more books on your phone, Safari gets in the game

Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile, Gadgets / Other, Lifestyle, Web, Downloads, Websites

In case you don’t own a Kindle, or a different e-book reader, but would still like to read on the go, Safari Books might be just the service for you.  Safari Books Online is already a prominent digital literature source, but today they announced the creation of a mobile site that comes with the same core components.  Their service can be used on devices such as Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, RIM’s BlackBerry, Win-Mo phones, and Nokia phones.  Essentially, any phone that has an Internet connection with an Internet browser can use this service.

Safari Books Online compiled a survey in which they found 81% of their users use their cell phones and other mobile devices to read reference books.  That was one of the reasons Safari Books Online wanted to create a mobile service. Their normal online service boasts 40,000 individual users and 1,500 corporate and government users.  I can only imagine their popularity to remain relatively the same on the mobile service.  Users still have the option of downloading PDF versions of the book they want and then syncing it to their device, but now they can search on the website itself and find what they want to read. 

Here’s what John Chodacki, Director of Consumer Market at Safari Books Online, had to say about their mobile site:

“Safari Books Online is continually evolving to meet the needs of our enterprise and individual subscribers, helping them to stay competitive and improve productivity. Since many of our subscribers already use these devices on a regular basis, m.safaribooksonline.com opens the door to fast, easy access to the vast array of materials in our library no matter where they may be.”

Read [Safari Books Online Press Release] Check it out [Safari Books Online Mobile Site]

Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 24 Feb 2009 | 4:05 am

Hack an extra core into your Phenom II

It’s an improvement worthy of the greatest trick of all time, the 9800 Pro pencil mod — and probably just as boneheaded of an idea to try. This little hack enables the latent fourth core on certain Phenom processors, assuming you’ve got a certain type of Biostar mobo. Of course, there’s probably a little more to it than that, so I’d hold off on this unless you’re feeling really adventurous.

Essentially, you just need a motherboard with the “Advanced Clock Calibration” option in the BIOS setup screen, which you set to “auto,” and like magic it detects and starts using that fourth core. Apparently it gets detected and used by Windows, though there’s no telling what mischief may come of this kind of behavior.

[via Tom's Hardware]

Source: CrunchGear | 24 Feb 2009 | 3:20 am

Crazy Underground Storage Unit in Japan Retrieves Bikes in Seconds

Maximizing space in overcrowded cities is a key value in construction projects nowadays.

The Giken Company from Japan has figured out an ingenious way to apply this principle to storage facilities, by literally turning building-making upside down with fully-automated underground garages for bikes (and even cars).

Giken's 'Eco-park' parking structures are secure, simple, and useful. They're also quite cool. Unmanned by attendants, they are defined by a small garage outpost coming out of the ground that would be mistaken for aerodynamic ATMs if you didn't know anything about them.

In order to use it, you're supposed to find an open hub and place the wheels on the aluminum runway. Then, in an adjacent slot, you have to swipe your membership card, for which you pay a monthly fee. Once the machine IDs your account, the doors of the garage open, and a locking base comes out in order to dock the bike. Then – whoosh! The bike is sucked into the hub quick and the doors close dramatically.

Within 10-25 seconds, your bike has descended into the deep machinery abyss underground. But don't worry, it's safe and sound. The locking base is switched underground and suspended in place in its own railway. Each garage includes 144 railways for bikes, which must abide by a certain length, height, and tire size (at 28-inches). Still, it's definitely a space saver.

Check out the video below to see how the process looks like.

So far, I haven't heard of machine complications that would crush bikes or make them fly off their railway. In fact, Giken is confident about the structure's ability to handle potential structural damage.

According to its website, Eco-parks are made with prefabricated structural cylinder piles that are 'pressed-in' to the ground with large piling machines that minimize vibration and noise. It takes fifty working days to build the structure from start to finish. Apparently, Giken is one of the leading construction businesses using this tech and has been used before to build tidal/flood defense systems.

Appropriately for this area of the world, the cylinder's wall structure (only about 23 ft. in diameter) is also designed to handle strong earthquakes.

Not surprisingly, Giken has also implemented the system for car garages. For that, the company needs about 63 feet in diameter to fit an underground cylinder storing fifty cars.

But what if the bike (or car) inevitably gets stuck or the city needs to make a repair? For that, there's a cubbyhole that allows a designated engineer to go under and fix it.

Currently, it costs about $30 (in Yen) for a monthly ticket and students pay half that amount.

What do you guys think? Should we try to get these in some of our most crowded cities? Would you trust the machine to take care of your car or bike for hours at a time? Let us know in the comments below.

If you've found more of these machines in Japan or elsewhere, let me know at jferm80@gmail.com.

Photo: olemiswebs/flickr, Giken

Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 24 Feb 2009 | 3:13 am

Hitatchi buys Fabrik web sharing service

Fabrik.com offers cloud storage for a number of hard drive manufacturers including a few we’ve reviewed in the past. They’ve just been bought by Hitachi who is adding the service as well as Fabrik’s own hard drives to their mix of goodies.

As a 20 year storage veteran, Mike Cordano, Fabrik CEO and co-founder, will join Hitachi GST as a key member of the executive management team. Mr. Cordano has an extensive background in the data storage industry, having previously served as executive vice president of Worldwide Sales and Marketing for Maxtor Corporation. While there, he was instrumental in building the Branded Products Group, which successfully launched the industry’s first “OneTouch” external storage and backup solution, which ultimately defined the category and broke the technology barrier for mass consumer adoption.

HITACHI GST STRATEGICALLY EXPANDS INTO EXTERNAL STORAGE;
TO ACQUIRE FABRIK, INC.

Leading Hard Drive Supplier Gains Immediate Access to Innovative Storage Solutions
for the Consumer, Small Business and Professional Mac and PC Markets

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Feb. 23, 2009 – Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced that it has agreed to acquire Fabrik, Inc., a privately-held supplier of personal and professional storage solutions. Fabrik, whose leading storage brands include G-Technology and SimpleTech, strategically positions Hitachi in the fast-growing external storage business.

Industry analyst firm IDC expects worldwide personal storage device shipments to grow from approximately 52 million in 2008 to 123 million in 20121. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. Closing of the acquisition, which is subject to customary conditions, is expected to occur early in the second quarter of 2009.

Fabrik’s business will continue intact and form the core of Hitachi GST’s newly-formed external storage business. Hitachi GST will fully support the G-Technology and SimpleTech product lines, building upon their success and differentiation in the market. The combined company will also leverage operational, technical and product development resources, distribution channels and global reach to accelerate delivery of a full portfolio of traditional hard drives, solid state drives and branded personal and professional storage products.

“The Fabrik acquisition becomes the cornerstone for the next phase of our business transformation. It strategically expands our market presence, strengthens our product portfolio, and increases our customer base,” said Steve Milligan, President of Hitachi GST. “Fabrik is a key component of our growth and profit strategy going forward and will enable us to deliver a differentiated set of products across a broad range of end-user market segments.”

As a 20 year storage veteran, Mike Cordano, Fabrik CEO and co-founder, will join Hitachi GST as a key member of the executive management team. Mr. Cordano has an extensive background in the data storage industry, having previously served as executive vice president of Worldwide Sales and Marketing for Maxtor Corporation. While there, he was instrumental in building the Branded Products Group, which successfully launched the industry’s first “OneTouch” external storage and backup solution, which ultimately defined the category and broke the technology barrier for mass consumer adoption.

“Hitachi GST provides Fabrik and its customers all the benefits of a vertically integrated company. We gain economies of scale, financial stability, association with a strong brand and a worldwide footprint to accelerate our business growth,” said Mike Cordano, Fabrik CEO and co-founder. “We are pleased that Hitachi is building upon our vision and enabling end-users everywhere to enjoy powerful storage solutions that are unequalled when it comes to performance, style, reliability and innovation.”

Fabrik’s leading storage brands include G-Technology, offering premium external storage solutions for the Mac, content creation and professional A/V markets; and SimpleTech, an innovative leader in PC-based external storage and backup solutions. Both brands have clearly differentiated product lines that complement and build upon the existing Hitachi GST hard drive portfolio.

Source: CrunchGear | 24 Feb 2009 | 3:10 am

Microsoft Quells Severance Firestorm, Lets Ex-Employees Keep Their Cash

On Saturday we published a letter sent out to some recently laid-off Microsoft employees explaining that they had been overpaid in severance - and that Microsoft wanted some of its money back. Something had clearly gone wrong during Microsoft’s first mass layoffs, as we began to receive more reports that ex-employees had gotten similar letters, and that some had actually been underpaid. One original tipster has detailed how he felt when he initially got the notice:

Right away I was angry because when I got my severance check, I immediately created a budget to stretch this out as long as possible. I know we’re in a recession now and I don’t know how long I’ll be unemployed. And now here comes this letter totally destroying the budget and on top of that, there’s no detailed information on how the error occurred, no details breaking down the severance pay.

Microsoft initially refused to provide any details on the incident, instead stating that it was a “private matter between the company and the affected people”. And then the news began to spread.

Since Saturday, well over 300 news outlets have covered the story. Many of them have deemed this to be a huge PR misstep, but it’s likely that Microsoft PR never even knew about the letter in the first place, and were only alerted to it after the fact. In any case, it’s clear that nobody ever considered how people would react if the letter leaked to the public.

Today Microsoft has announced that it will allow the former employees to keep any overcompensation they were sent (with overpayments averaging around $4,500), and that those who were under-compensated would be paid in full immediately:

Last week, 25 former Microsoft employees were informed that they were overpaid as a part of their severance payments from the company. This was a mistake on our part. We should have handled this situation in a more thoughtful manner. We are reaching out to those impacted to relay that we will not seek any payment from those individuals.

While there was some speculation that the issue could have been widespread (perhaps extending to many of the 1,400 employees laid off on January 22nd) only around forty five people in total (including 20 who were underpaid) were affected by the billing issue. Each of them is being personally contacted by Microsoft HR chief Lisa Brummel.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch | 24 Feb 2009 | 3:02 am

Nvidia pulling dirty tricks on the press?

Nvidia, not known for being forthcoming (but perhaps no more than any other tech company), is apparently doing a few sites pretty dirty in relation to its upcoming line of graphics cards. Evidence has been published that shows Nvidia is rebranding some seriously old cards for new sales, which is pretty disingenuous. Unfortunately, sites who have made a stink about it are finding themselves SOL for getting review units.

Not only that, but sites that are getting review units are getting special pieces of hardware direct from NVIDIA, and not retail or OEM versions of the cards manufacturers will be putting on the market. The Inquirer seems to be somewhat bitter about the whole thing, but I can’t really blame them. If Sony or Apple were passing us last year’s tech with new names (any more than usual, anyway), we’d be pissed as well.

More weight to our continuing endorsement of AMD’s graphics cards at this time, then! The latest Radeons are speedy, feature-rich, and cheaper than GeForces. Plus, you’re helping AMD get its wind back. Consider it an act of charity and defiance.

Source: CrunchGear | 24 Feb 2009 | 2:55 am

First Evidence of Supernovae Found In Ice Cores

KentuckyFC writes "Supernovae in our part of the Milky Way ought to have a significant impact on the atmosphere. In particular, the intense gamma-ray burst would ionize oxygen and nitrogen in the mid to upper atmosphere, increasing the levels of nitrogen oxide there by an order of magnitude or so. Now a team of Japanese researchers has found the first evidence of a supernova's impact on the atmosphere in an ice core taken from Dome Fuji in Antarctica. The team examined ice that was laid down in the 11th century and found three nitrogen oxide spikes, two of which correspond to well known supernovae: one event in 1006 AD and another in 1054 AD, which was the birth of the Crab Nebula (abstract). Both were widely reported by Chinese and Arabic astronomers at the time. The third spike is unexplained, but the team suggests it may have been caused by a supernova visible only from the southern hemisphere or one that was obscured by interstellar dust."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 24 Feb 2009 | 2:44 am

Cameras and mics inside DTV converters? Sorry, no

Update: It’s been admitted it was a hoax, but that’s not reflected everywhere yet. If you saw it elsewhere, now you know for sure.

There’s a bit of a flurry going on about a DTV converter box that supposedly has a camera and microphone hidden inside it. The usual conspiracy theories have come up, which probably should come up if a camera is found in something like this — but a hot truth injection should quiet things down. Like if, for instance, the camera isn’t a camera and the mic isn’t a mic.

Here’s the video:

First, let’s give a hand to the cameraman. Nice and blurry. No stills. He doesn’t attempt to investigate the “camera” at all, so aside from its resemblance to spy cameras (round piece of plastic) we’ve got nothing to go on. Secondly, the “microphone” looks like a capacitor. It is, after all, a PCB in there. Third, even if we grant that there is a camera, what is it connected to? Where is the signal going? How is it powered? Remember, this box is connected to rabbit ears, which last I checked weren’t capable of transmitting a live video stream.

A forum member found a picture of the PCB on another forum, and here it is:

There is a capacitor where the microphone is, and the PCB layout doesn’t seem to allow for a spy camera to be installed there.

Now let’s be clear: if someone had legit photos and video of this sort of thing, we’d be jumping on it and demanding answers. But this looks like a confused consumer mistaking components for spy gear.

Source: CrunchGear | 24 Feb 2009 | 2:40 am

The Government Is Not Spying On You Through Your DTV Box… Yet

There's a bit of a flurry going on about a DTV converter box that supposedly has a camera and microphone hidden inside it. The usual conspiracy theories have come up, which probably should come up if a camera is found in something like this — but a hot truth injection should quiet things down. Like if, for instance, the camera isn't a camera and the mic isn't a mic. As you will see.

Source: TechCrunch | 24 Feb 2009 | 2:40 am

Don’t want a Pre? How about a Palm Pro instead?

Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile

Personally, the Palm PRO seems like it should have gone away.  While there are still some Palm fans around, I see most of them waiting for the Pre.  Otherwise the casual Palm users, those who just want a smartphone will most likely end up with something cheaper such as the Centro.  If nothing else I see this release just adding some confusion for customers waiting for the Pre.  Palm Pre and Palm PRO, they are a bit to similar in name to not have an issue.

Despite the numerous delays surrounding the Palm PRO, it has once again surfaced with what appears to be an actual availability time frame.  According to a March circular for Best Buy Mobile it looks like those waiting will be able to make a purchase beginning as early as February 22.

Keep in mind, the Palm PRO is heading to Sprint, so be prepared to sign a two-year agreement.  As far as the pricing, new customers can grab the PRO for $249.99 and current customers that are eligible for an upgrade will have to shell out $269.99.

Via [Engadget Mobile]

 

Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 24 Feb 2009 | 2:34 am

Creative X-Fi appearing in car audio

It’s about time; we’ve had Creative sound cards in our PCs for decades. It was only natural they should move to cars. JC Hyun Systems has developed the RUNZ CI-700, the first automobile infotainment system to use Creative’s X-Fi technology. The RUNZ CI-7100 features a MMSP2 MPEG video hardware engine, SiRF III GPS chipset, and Creative’s X-Fi audio processor, all which are operated by an Intel Dual-core 360/300 MHz processor. The system also features a 7-inch digital LCD touch screen (800×480 resolution), two AV in/out ports, USB 2.0, SD memory card interfaces and Bluetooth 2.0 EDR support. Audio quality is digitally restored and improved using both Creative X-Fi Crystalizer and Creative X-Fi CMSS-3D processing.

The RUNZ CI-7100 is currently available in Singapore for $1,999, roughly US $1,300. No word yet on if it will even appear in the US, but for that price, I’ll decorate my home with X-Fi products first.

Source: CrunchGear | 24 Feb 2009 | 2:30 am

“I Am Rich” clone comes to Android - at last!

It was only a matter of time. The controversial, and idiotic, iPhone app now has a brother from another mother on Android. That is to say, from a different developer looking for a little notoriety. The "I am Richer" app is now available, with a more reasonable price tag (a paltry $200) and a slightly Zelda-ish blue crystal.

Source: MobileCrunch | 24 Feb 2009 | 1:34 am

Alexander Girard by House Industries

"House Industries presents the oeuvre of Alexander Girard with a suite of fonts and objects. Sunny faces beam from a set of childrens’ blocks; hand-made dolls speak volumes about relationships among designers; wise men preach tolerance in a nativity set; snakes, fish and foxes form a puzzling menagerie; an illustrative legacy challenges the intellect with a 72-piece memory game."

Source: Boing Boing | 24 Feb 2009 | 1:33 am

Mardi Gras, about 70 years ago, New Orleans LA.

Amateur (silent) film from the Prelinger Archives: New Orleans Carnival Week, February 22, 1941. Mardi Gras this year is tomorrow, Tuesday February 24, 2009.

Source: Boing Boing | 24 Feb 2009 | 1:18 am

HTC Touch Pro2 release confirmed for North America

Section: Communications, Cellphones, Smartphones, Mobile

HTC has gone on record, well actually on Twitter, and confirmed that the Touch Pro2 will be coming to North America.

“And to answer the big question on everyone’s minds, the Touch Pro2 will be broadly available in all major markets, including North America.“

Unfortunately, I guess due to the fact this was a Twitter message and not an official press release, we are still missing some important information such as the pricing and a release date.  Of course, rumor has it being available in Europe this summer and the US in the fall.

As far as features, the Touch Pro2 will include a 3.6-inch display with an 800 x 480 resolution, a 3.2-megapixel camera with auto-focus, microSD card slot and will be running Windows Mobile 6.1 with the TouchFLO interface.  Additionally, the Touch Pro2 will have a slide-out QWERTY keyboard with a display that tilts up when opened.  Another item that was not mentioned is whether it will include support for 3G here in the US.  Of course, we all hope the answer to that is yes.

[Twitter via unwired view]

Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 24 Feb 2009 | 1:13 am

Fun video game t-shirts

Over at Boing Boing Offworld, Brandon has the lowdown on some cool vidgame t-shirts, including the Experimental Jetset-esque games tees (above left) and also the fantastic "Simple Plan" t-shirt (above right.)

Source: Boing Boing | 24 Feb 2009 | 1:04 am

Homemade PDF Patch Beats Adobe By Two Weeks

CWmike writes "Sourcefire security researcher Lurene Grenier has published a home-brewed patch for the critical Adobe Reader vulnerability that hackers are exploiting in the wild using malicious PDF files, beating Adobe Systems Inc. to the punch by more than two weeks. Grenier posted the patch on Sunday with the caveats that it applies only to the Windows version of Adobe Reader 9.0 and comes with no guarantees. Also, PhishLabs has created a batch file that resets a Windows registry key to de-fang the hack by disabling JavaScript in Adobe Reader 9.0, giving administrators a way to automate the process."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 24 Feb 2009 | 12:54 am

Lovely Steampunk-esque Science Teaching Instruments.

Boing Boing reader Theodore Gray wrote in to say,

Much as I hate the term steampunk, I love the style, and I notice a lot of it on boingboing, so I though you might appreciate this company, Teachspin.

I saw their booth at a trade show recently and their instruments are absolutely beautiful, exactly what you'd expect of 19th century fine machining and woodworking, except they are sophisticated modern devices like NMR machines, rubidium time oscillators, and torsion balances, and you can actually buy them. I particularly like the two earth field NMR machines, "Earth's Field Nuclear Magnetic Resonance" and "Earth's Field NMR Gradient/Field Coil System." Here's the optical pump, and the torsion oscillator (which looks much better in person that in that photo.)

Above, the Optical Pumping of Rubidium Gas device.

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 24 Feb 2009 | 12:47 am

Online layoff tracker captures economy's carnage (AP)

AP - In a sour economy like this, entrepreneurs inevitably dream up new ways to turn lemons into lemonade.
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 24 Feb 2009 | 12:08 am

With Chernin Out At News Corp, What Happens To FIM?

Peter Chernin, the long-time president and COO of News Corp, is leaving the company after protracted negotiations over his contract could not be resolved. Chernin’s salary was $28.8 million in the last fiscal year, which was $1.3 million more than even Rupert Murdoch’s take-home pay. Chernin helped Murdoch build and oversee his vast media empire over the past 20 years, and his departure no doubt will raise all sorts of questions about the future of the company. He will be leaving when his current contract expires on June 30.

For instance, what will happen to Fox Interactive Media (FIM)? This particular corner of the Murdoch empire is where News Corp keeps all of its Web businesses: MySpace, Photobucket, IGN, Scout, Chernin was its biggest supporter and internal sponsor. Peter Levinshon, the leader of FIM, was considered to be within Chernin’s camp. Although Chernin and Murdoch worked hand-in-hand, they are also very much opposites and a competitive rivalry always existed between the two. News Corp executives often identify with one boss or the other. MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe, for instance, is considered a Murdoch guy.

With Chernin gone, perhaps this is as good a time as any to take another look at FIM and what purpose it serves. Its original purpose was almost as an internal M&A fund for Internet startups. But now those businesses have grown up. Other than MySpace, which contributes the vast majority of FIM’s revenues and profits, it is not really clear what the point of FIM is. Photobucket could just as easily be part of MySpace. And some of the other businesses could be integrated into other operating units, or sold off. The overhead of running FIM with all of those expensive lieutenants could be reduced as well. Investors would certainly like to see MySpace broken out as a separate business, instead of having to back out estimates of its performance based on FIM numbers as a whole.

Complicating matters is that the employment contracts for MySpace founders DeWolfe and Tom Anderson are up for renewal later this year (each one reportedly makes $15 million a year). Would DeWolfe want to broaden his control to new fiefdoms within News Corp, or would he try to avoid taking on what appear to be deadweight businesses? Or maybe FIM just remains as it is: an anachronism within News Corp.

(Photo by What Counts).

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch | 24 Feb 2009 | 12:04 am

Steps Toward a Universal Flu Vaccine

Plasmoid writes "The NYTimes is reporting that scientists have starting developing what could turn out to be a 'universal' flu vaccine. They created antibody proteins that can neutralize different strains of the influenza virus, including the deadly H5N1 bird flu, the virus behind the 1918 epidemic, and common seasonal strains. These new antibodies target part of the virus that is shared between different strains and thus appear to be broadly effective. However, some experts question whether a universal vaccine of this kind is even possible, since the human body has been unable to come up with an antibody solution. An article on nature.com describes the work further."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 23 Feb 2009 | 11:59 pm

Park Let Saves UK Renters Precious Pence

Now this is something that I'd like to see in the US, considering that so many of us are paying ridiculous prices for our parking spaces. Park Let, the UK's largest parking space letting agent, launched an online parking space price-guide tool today. It is the first real-time, location-specific tool available in the UK. The tool is based on both current contracts and advertised spaces. Landlords can use this to get an estimate of the value of their parking spaces and tenants will be able to calculate the true market value of how much parking spaces and garages are renting for today in their area.

Source: TechCrunch | 23 Feb 2009 | 11:41 pm

Try as you might, you can’t escape Netflix

Section: Business News, Video, Content, Web, Websites

Resistance is futile, Netflix will be everywhere.  Their “Watch Instantly” feature is on many systems including the Xbox 360, some Blu-ray players, and even on LG televisions.  Now, Netflix has added some new partners, the New York Times and Rotten Tomatoes. 

Here is how this works: you visit a movie review on either the New York Times or Rotten Tomatoes.  Each site now has an “Add to Netflix” button.  Rotten Tomatoes has placed the button beneath its review box complete with a button that looks like it came from Netflix.com.  The New York Times has gone with a more subtle approach by placing its Netflix buttons on the left pane of the page, but their buttons are in the NYT’s color scheme. 

Personally, I like the Times’ approach a little better since it is right under the movie trailer information.  Additionally, they have placed a “Watch Now” button if the movie is available in that particular format.  Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t display a “Watch Now” button on their page.

Netflix has withstood a lot of competition over the years and is still growing.  This latest partnership with two incredibly popular movie review sites is another example of how they have managed to be successful. 

Read: [The Official Netflix Blog]

Full Story » | Written by Iyaz Akhtar for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 23 Feb 2009 | 11:40 pm

Microsoft: Laid-off can keep extra pay after all (AP)

AP - A few weeks after launching the first wide-scale layoffs in its history, Microsoft Corp. admits it screwed up a key part of the plan.
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 Feb 2009 | 11:33 pm

Review: 'Puzzle Quest: Galactrix' Blasts Fun Into Space

The odd mix of gem-matching mini-games and RPG questing gets a welcome intergalactic twist. Gravity may be gone, but the gameplay remains an addictive time-suck.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 Feb 2009 | 11:30 pm

Sony Vaio P Netbook + Capoeira Fighter = BFFs 4 Life?

Remember the Sony Vaio P Series Lifestyle PC? You know, the famous "notbook" (i.e., miniature notebook that's not a netbook)? We weren't big fans of it, but the video above demonstrates that maybe there is a customer audience for it after all (albeit a very small one).

Via Boing Boing Gadgets

Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 23 Feb 2009 | 11:18 pm

Combining BitTorrent With Darknets For P2P Privacy

CSEMike writes "Currently popular peer-to-peer networks suffer from a lack of privacy. For applications like BitTorrent or Gnutella, sharing a file means exposing your behavior to anyone interested in monitoring it. OneSwarm is a new file sharing application developed by researchers at the University of Washington that improves privacy in peer-to-peer networks. Instead of communicating directly, sharing in OneSwarm is friend-to-friend; senders and receivers exchange data using multiple intermediaries in an overlay mesh. OneSwarm is built on (and backwards compatible with) BitTorrent, but includes numerous extensions to improve privacy while providing good performance: point-to-point encryption using SSL, source-address rewriting, and multi-path and multi-source downloading. Clients and source are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 23 Feb 2009 | 11:05 pm

Judge Nixes McCain's 'Completely Unaware' Copyright Defense

Sen. John McCain says he was an unwitting dupe when the Republican National Committee used Jackson Browne's "Running on Empty" in a presidential campaign commercial. The Arizona Republican is defending himself in a copyright-infringement lawsuit.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 Feb 2009 | 10:30 pm

Amazon ships Kindle 2 a day earlier than planned (AP)

AP - Amazon.com Inc. says it is shipping the new version of its Kindle electronic reading device a day earlier than it initially planned.
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 Feb 2009 | 10:10 pm

Beauty Affects Men's and Women's Brains Differently

Men and women have different neurological responses to beauty, which may be the result of evolutionary pressures on our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 Feb 2009 | 10:00 pm

What's in the bag?

I know what you are thinking: Why is there a Jack Spade manbag on this gadget blog; what do manbags have to do with gadgets? Or perhaps: This guest blogger stinks like an old fishshack full of dead woodchucks, when will he go away?*

I wrote a story on location awareness in the February issue of Wired. I've been writing about GPS for about nine years (I think my first piece was for Macworld in 2000) and I haven't gotten bored with it yet for one simple reason: it's hella fun. Location awareness can do all sorts of neat things for you—help you find your way home, locate your friends, find traffic cameras, get you a taxi get you laid—but at its heart it's just about adding location data to things that are already familiar to make them more useful. Which brings us back to the photo above.

What's interesting about this picture isn't the bag itself; it's what's in the bag. And moreover, it's what's in the photo, which reveals where the bag is. You've likely heard of geocaching, but if not, think of it as a sport (in the broadest sense of the word) where nerds leave things for other nerds to find them, using only coordinates. The photo above has GPS data embedded in it, because I took it with an iPhone. What's in the bag is a prize. It's not a great prize, but it's a prize that some people might really like. The prize is wrapped in an American Apparel bag (to keep it from getting wet) and has one of my cards stuck down inside it, so you know you found the right thing. What's it worth? I have no idea. It's a collectible, given to me as a gift (thanks Mom!), but it was something I did not particularly want. Yes, it has been opened and re-sealed, which may thwart its eBay value, but really, if that's a concern you're being too pedantic. It's a prize, dude! A major award!

To find the prize, click on the photo above to download the man-sized version. Since it has GPS data embedded within, you can use that to figure out where I stashed said prize (which, as we've established, is in an American Apparel bag). And you'd better hurry because if you don't get it, the homeless army that lives closeby will. Make sense? Go find it.

Oh, and in case you need a hint, you can find one here.

UPDATE: Some people are finding the bag in the water close to North Korea. It is not close to North Korea. If it appears to be in North Korea, you need to be more negative (hint-hint).

*Friday.

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 23 Feb 2009 | 9:45 pm

Genes From GM Corn Found In Mexican Crops

Research from scientists in the United States, Mexico and the Netherlands has identified genes from genetically-engineered corn in conventional crop strains in Mexico.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Feb 2009 | 9:40 pm

Mossberg reviews the Vaio P

Vista kills it, writes Walt Mossberg in the WSJ: "A beautiful device that’s just ahead of its time ... I’d advise waiting for the version with Windows 7." Of course, it's easy enough to install Windows 7 or XP yourself... One interesting pullout: Sony's developed a special lean cut of Vista specifically for this machine, to be released in the interim.

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 23 Feb 2009 | 9:38 pm

OSX on Vaio P

An enterprising Vaio P user, "DaHarder," seems to have gotten Leopard running on it, though not everything works. This creates a Mac that weighs 1.4 pounds, has a full-size keyboard, and fits in a (large) pocket.

Unfortunately, it's referenced only obliquely, from another thread. DaHarder, if you're reading, tell us how you did it!

Source [Pocketables Forums]

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 23 Feb 2009 | 9:27 pm

New technologies make ultra compact DVD storage possible

Section: Video, DVD/DVR/Blu-ray, Portable Video

Scientists at UC Berkeley and the University of Massachusetts Amherst are working on a developing technology that can dramatically change the way that electronic media is stored.  The science behind it will involve the ability to let microscopic nanoscale elements precisely amass themselves over a large surface.  When all is said and done, the researchers on the project claim that the contents of 250 DVDs would be able to fit into a space about the same size as a quarter.

Researchers have attempted to perform this feat before with little success by using the method where molecules in the thin film of block copolymers arrange themselves into a rigid and central pattern when spread out on a surface.  They have run into a problem when the area increased and the pattern would not maintain itself.

The Berkley and Amherst scientists think they have solved this problem by layering the copolymers on the surface of a sapphire crystal.  The method is both environmentally friendly and will have low production costs if successful.

Read: [NBC Bay Area]

Full Story » | Written by Heather Wood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 23 Feb 2009 | 9:16 pm

Aqua Moto: It’s Like Wave Race For Your iPhone

It’s no secret that the iPhone is one of gaming’s hottest new platforms, and while many of the games on the App Store leave something to be desired, every once in awhile we stumble across a game sporting very high production values that rival dedicated videogame systems. This weekend, Resolution Interactive unveiled a new game called Aqua Moto that is strongly reminiscent of Nintendo’s classic game Wave Race 64, allowing gamers to race Jet Skis through a variety of 3D environments. You can grab a free ‘Lite’ version of the game here, but at only $3 the full version (which includes far more tracks) is a bargain.

Beyond its impressive graphics, Aqua Moto shines because its controls are perfectly suited for the iPhone. As gamers tilt their iPhone from side to side their character swerves left or right, and tilting the phone forward or backward controls the acceleration. This isn’t the first game to employ this kind of control scheme - dozens of similar racing games have been released on the App Store since its launch last July. But most of those games are car-based, which means that the controls are often much more ‘twitchy’ and tough to control. Aqua Moto favors broader motions as the vehicles are water-based, which makes the gameplay feel much more natural (and is also a bit more forgiving).

My biggest gripe is that the game fails to tap into the iPhone’s network effect - it would be great if the game supported multiplayer, even if only across a Wi-Fi network. That said, its championship mode seems to be long enough to satisfy most gamers, and is certainly worth the $3 price of admission.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch | 23 Feb 2009 | 9:15 pm

AT&T douses the Quickfire

Photo on screen by Emrank

We didn’t like the AT&T Quickfire when we first saw it, and we didn’t really like it once we’d given it a full review, either. Turns out, AT&T doesn’t like it too much, either. We’re not sure if some horrible flaw was discovered or if they’re just not selling well enough, but AT&T has killed the product indefinitely citing failure to meet “performance expectations”. With dealers being told to “quarantine all existing inventory” and customers requiring exchanges being offered alternative products, we’re guessing it’s the first one.

Check out the full email sent to AT&T internalites after the jump.

Full email, via Engadget:

Product Advisory: PCD Quickfire GTX75 Stop Ship / Stop Sell
START AND END DATE: February 22, 2009
——————————
——————————————————————————————————–
OVERVIEW: AT&T has received reports that the Quickfire GTX75 is not meeting AT&T’s minimum performance expectations and all sales should be immediately suspended.

The affected SKUs are:
· 64941 Quickfire Silver
· 64940 Quickfire Orange
· 64942 Quickfire Green
————————————————————————————————————————————————
CRITICAL, MUST KNOW/MUST DO:
Customer / Embedded Base: Standard under 30 day and over 30 day return and exchange policies apply. Customers requiring an exchange should be offered a comparable substitution.

Existing Product: Stop shipping and stop selling all existing inventory of the Quickfire GTX75.

New Product: TBD

Distribution Center: Stop shipping and quarantine all existing inventory.
———————————————————————————————————————————————–
CHANNEL INSTRUCTIONS: All Channels should stop selling the Quickfire GTX75 immediately and quarantine all existing inventory pending additional updates. This quarantine includes demo units. Do not return unsold inventory to the AT&T Returns Center until instruction is provided.

Dealer: Stop selling the Quickfire GTX75 immediately and quarantine all existing inventory.

Customer Returns and Exchanges: Standard under 30 day and over 30 day return and exchange policies apply. Customers requiring an exchange should be offered a comparable substitution.
———————————————————————————————————————————————-
TRAINING
Please read the entire Product Advisory to ensure a proper understanding of the issue.
———————————————————————————————————————————————-
ACCOUNTABILITY/RESPONSIBILITY:
Distribution Centers: Stop shipping and quarantine all existing inventory.

Channels/Markets: All Direct Channels and the Dealer Channel should stop selling the Quickfire GTX75 immediately and quarantine all existing inventory, pending additional updates.

Returns Processing Center: Adhere to Standard Returns Processes.

*

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Source: MobileCrunch | 23 Feb 2009 | 8:50 pm

Amazon's Kindle 2 Available Now

Amazon's new e-book reader, the Kindle 2, is now in stock at Amazon for $360. If you order it by 3:30 Pacific time, you can have one tomorrow, and be reading novels (and even the Gadget Lab) on what looks to be one of the slimmest, most usable e-book readers yet.

Wired.com will have a review of the Kindle 2 just as soon as possible, so watch this space for updates.

See also: Amazon's Kindle 2 Slims Down, Adds Audio

Photo: Amazon.com

Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 23 Feb 2009 | 8:30 pm

HTC uses Twitter to confirm Touch Pro2 coming to North America

Last time HTC used Twitter to confirm something, it was to let everyone know that the HTC Touch HD wouldn’t be coming stateside. This time, they bring good news!

We were already pretty sure that the Touch Pro2 was headed for North America when the official press release outright said “global availability”, but HTC has since confirmed it to their followers. They’re not saying when or which carrier (if any) will get it, but it’s good to know - for sure this time - that it’s on the way.

The related tweets:

# And to answer the big question on everyone’s minds, the Touch Pro2 will be broadly available in all major markets, including North America. 11:07 AM Feb 20th from web

# All, we have not announced a launch date for the Touch Pro2 in any country yet. But we did announce we will start to roll it out late Q2. 11:14 AM Feb 20th from web

# orry, can’t answer questions about specific carriers anywhere in the world. Please talk to them about if or when they’ll carry something. 11:30 AM Feb 20th from web

[Via phonescoop]

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: MobileCrunch | 23 Feb 2009 | 8:24 pm

Behold! The Sigma DP2

Thanks to its giant DSLR sensor, Sigma's DP1 takes better pictures than other point-and-shoots. It's also incredibly sexy, an unvarnished design relic from another era. Everything else about it, however, is such a pain that it's impossible to recommend: it's slow, expensive and has a weird user interface. Pictured here is the follow-up, the DP2, which aims to fix its father's flaws.

Sigma User's Richard Kilpatrick played around with a prototype at a British trade show:

I am happy to say that currently the menu structure is visibly improved and more comprehensive, the QS button works well, the manual focus wheel has been nicely firmed up and the shot-to-shot speed on single mode was definitely snappier - my opinion, not scientific or tested impression, is that the DP2 feels about 20% faster with this unfinished firmware. Card speeds weren't appropriate for testing since the camera isn't at production status; even if I were allowed to test it I wouldn't report the results.

Certainly even at this early stage I feel anyone who is comfortable with the DP1 and looking forward to the new focal length will be very happy with the DP2.

Sigma UK at Focus On Imaging - and DP2 news [Sigma User]

Sigma DP2 pre-production model at Focus on Imaging [1001noisycameras via Engadget]

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 23 Feb 2009 | 8:22 pm

Citrix Offers Management for XenServer and Hyper-V (NewsFactor)

NewsFactor - Citrix Systems is working with Microsoft in the enterprise virtualization market with Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V.
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 Feb 2009 | 8:14 pm

Casio Cachalot solar watch reviewed. Verdict: "Great vacation watch."

CrunchGear's John Biggs reviews Casio's $900 Ocanus Cachalot, a watch for people who know exactly what they want.

I’ve seen a few Casios in my day and they’ve finally nailed it on this version. The outer timing bezel clicks with a satisfying majesty and the face is readable - except in certain situations, which I’ll describe below. This model is also made of titanium making it the lightest man-watch I’ve seen in a while. It’s water resistant to 20 BAR and features 5 band radio auto-setting, solar powered batteries, world time settings, as well as a countdown timer and stopwatch.

Review: Casio Oceanus Cachalot OCW-P500TDJ-1A1JF solar radio watch [CrunchGear]

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 23 Feb 2009 | 8:13 pm

Ritz camera files for bankruptcy

It owes Nikon $26.6m. Also owed to Nikon: $15m from Circuit City. [Nikon Rumors]

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 23 Feb 2009 | 8:07 pm

GM Crop Genes Contaminate Mexican Corn

Genetically engineered corn genes are found to have spread to crops in Mexico.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 23 Feb 2009 | 8:00 pm

Concept video shows iPhone App sorting done right

We love the iPhone’s ultra simple homescreen user interface - as long as we’re not trying to change anything. Once we get tired of the old arrangement of icons, moving them all around to match our new mood is like eating rice with a tool big enough for only one grain at a time. After about 5 grains, you decide you weren’t hungry in the first place. Want to organize 5 pages of apps alphabetically? Hah! See you next week.

Proving that the ultimate concept artist trifecta (User experience knowledge, Video editing knowledge, churns out good content for free) does exist, Youtube user svdomer09 has crafted up a video on how iPhone App sorting should be done. No more dragging crap around icon by icon, screen by screen - just a super simple, super slick interface in iTunes. Move multiple apps around at once, sort alphabetically with a single button click - it does everything we’d want it to do.

Pretty please, Apple?

[Via ElectronicPulp]

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: MobileCrunch | 23 Feb 2009 | 7:52 pm

YouTube Hoax Taps Hidden Camera Conspiracy Fears

Conspiracy buffs go ga-ga over a hot YouTube video purporting to reveal a hidden camera and microphone in a digital TV converter box. The creator explains how he put together the hoax in about five minutes using a hot glue gun and parts from an old cellphone.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 Feb 2009 | 7:40 pm

Report: Circuit City liquidator Great American Group boxing and selling broken gear

A couple, from Boston, bought a "television" for $1,100, but it turned out to be a box of shattered glass. They did not realize they were being sold this, because they were told not to open it until they got home. Investigators from a local news channel found that the store won't allow customers to check merchandise.

A spokesman for the liquidation group, Great American Group said, “We have signs posted indicating all sales are final,” and “Consumers are protected by the manufacturers warranty.”

But Samsung wouldn’t help Gina and Emilio, saying their TV was damaged, not defective, and not their concern.

“No one’s there to help us … we’re out $1,100,” Gina said.

Gina has appealed to her credit card company but so far Citizens Bank has not said whether it will help.

Under federal bankruptcy law, all sales are final even if you are not given what you paid for. On the other hand, this is exactly what chargebacks are for.

Customers Burned In Circuit City Closeout Sale [Boston Channel]

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 23 Feb 2009 | 7:36 pm

Balkan Lynx Poached to Brink of Extinction

With no natural enemy but man, the Balkan lynx could soon disappear from the wild.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 23 Feb 2009 | 7:35 pm

Tip of mammoth tusk unearthed in Canada

A Canadian museum curator says he plans to look for additional pieces of an ancient mammoth tusk found in the Saanich Peninsula. Grant Keddie, curator of archaeology at the Royal B.C.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Feb 2009 | 7:25 pm

Deep Sea Fish Mystery Solved

Image 1: The barreleye (Macropinna microstoma) has extremely light-sensitive eyes that can rotate within a transparent, fluid-filled shield on its head. The fish's tubular eyes are capped by bright green lenses. The eyes point upward (as shown here) when the fish is looking for food overhead. They point forward when the fish is feeding. The two spots above the fish's mouth are olfactory organs called nares, which are analogous to human nostrils. Image: © 2004 MBARI  Image 2: In this image, you can see that, although the barreleye is facing downward, its eyes are still looking straight up. This close-up "frame grab" from video shows a barreleye that is about 140 cm (six inches) long. Image: © 2004 MBARIImage 3: This face-on view of a barreleye shows it's transparent shield lit up by the lights of MBARI's remotely operated vehicle Tiburon. As in the other photos, the two spots above the fish's mouth are olfactory organs called nares, which are analogous to human nostrils. Image: © 2006 MBARIImage 4: MBARI researchers speculate that Macropinna microstoma may eat animals that have been captured in the tentacles of jellies, such as this siphonophore in the genus Apolemia. The "head" of the siphonophore (at right) pulls the animal through the water, its stinging tentacles streaming out like a living drift net. Image: © 2001 MBARI
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Feb 2009 | 7:10 pm

New Light Shed On Marine Luminescence

Image 1: This is the silver hatchetfish (Argyropelecus olfersii). Credit: Jenny Kronstrom, University of GothenburgImage 2: These are "light-switch" muscles of the luminescent krill. Credit: Jenny Kronstrom
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Feb 2009 | 7:01 pm

Much fabled Kogan Agora Android phone prototype gets hands-on’d

Back in December, the Kogan Agora was revealed and caused all kinds of excitement amongst mobile geeks. Not only was it going to be dirt cheap (around $250 bucks, unsubsidized), and not only was it being pushed out by what was about as close as you can get to a mom-and-pop electronics manufacturer, but it looked like they were going to beat just about everyone besides HTC to getting an Android product on the shelf. Then it got canned.

Cries of vaporware rang through the halls, many believing it never truly existed. It did exist, however, and the proof is now out there; in an experience I would assume was akin to petting a unicorn whilst having a skype chat with bigfoot, Gizmodo Australia got to poke and prod at a real life working prototype - and they liked it!

Ruslan Kogan’s still staying keeping mum on why the Agora won’t see the light of day, but reaffirms that Kogan’s not done with Android yet. To quote Giz:

The final release model will almost certainly ditch the qwerty keypad for a 3.8-inch, iPhone like touchscreen which will take advantage of the cupcake update’s onscreen keypad.

Ugh - that’s too bad. The Agora’s physical QWERTY keyboard was one of the primary reasons we wanted it.

Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies

Source: MobileCrunch | 23 Feb 2009 | 6:58 pm

Antibodies Neutralize Bird Flu, Other Strains

Antibodies could protect against various strains of influenza, including the deadly H5N1.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 23 Feb 2009 | 6:45 pm

Review: Nokia 7510 for T-Mobile

I found a new phone for my Mom. It’s the Nokia 7510, a basic flip phone with just enough features to be dangerous yet it’s basic enough for even my sainted mother to use to dial us on the daily.

The 7510 is a phone for the ladies, plain and simple. That’s not to disparage the ladies - it’s just that I haven’t seen a simple, stylish phone that’s not too expensive yet still packs lots of features into a slim package.

It’s clad in brushed steel and chrome and has removable front and back faceplates - it comes with brown, blue, and red in the box. I was particularly enamored of the front monochrome LCD that shows the current time along with pertinent notifications.

Nokia 7510

On T-Mobile the phone also has IM and email support using T-Mo’s own software deck. The keypad is large and shiny but you’re still going to be hunting and pecking if you really want to do some heavy duty emailing. The device is also UMA/HotSpot@Home and My Faves compatible.

Other than those basic features, you’re pretty much dealing with a standard flip phone with 2 megapixel camera, music player, and FM radio. You get up to three hours of talk time with 12 days of standby and it works internationally. The best thing? It costs $49 after rebate, which is just right for Mom.

There is some discussion out there on durabilty and the plastic faceplates might be a weak under an onslaught of use. However, if you’re keeping this in a pocket or bag and making a few phone calls - that means you, Mom - you really can’t go wrong. After all, my Mom still has her RAZR in pristine condition and it’s probably five years old now.

Bottom Line: A cheap, thin flip phone with enough features to warrant a second look.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Source: MobileCrunch | 23 Feb 2009 | 6:33 pm

CrunchDeals: $5 off BeejiveIM for BlackBerry

Beejive has announced a $5 discount off its popular BeejiveIM for BlackBerry app (regularly $19.95) in an effort to thank its “loyal BlackBerry community.” The sale starts tonight at midnight and lasts until midnight (PST) on Sunday, March 1.

They’re also lopping 5 bucks off the device-independent license, if you’re the type to carry around a backpack full of handsets:

In addition to the BeejiveIM for BlackBerry device license being available at a $5.00 discount, the user license will also be available for only $24.95, down from $29.95. The user license is for use on one BlackBerry device at a time but can be transferred to other BlackBerrys for free, allowing users to bring their license with them as they change models.

BeejiveIM for BlackBerry supports AIM®/iChat®/MobileMe®, MSN®/Windows Live®, Yahoo!®, MySpace, GoogleTalk®, SameTime®, ICQ®, and Jabber instant messaging services. We’re hearing that a notable update to the BlackBerry client is on the horizon, and that it won’t cost current owners a penny - so if you were considering buying your way in with the next release, might as well get it at a discount.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: MobileCrunch | 23 Feb 2009 | 6:13 pm

Ever wanted to swing your iPhone around in a way you probably shouldn’t? Danglet!

I don’t care if the pins that hold the Danglet lanyard/wriststrap thing into the iPhone are made of friggin’ Adamantium - if you swing your GLASS SCREENED device worth hundreds of dollars around like the chumps in this video do, it’s going to get broken. And you probably deserve it, too.

As the iPhone lacks the little itty-bitty threading tunnel required for slipping a standard lanyard or strap onto the device, the Danglet is pretty much your only option if you’re looking to sport your iPhone like some freaky futuristic Flava Flav/Mr.T hybrid. Whoever thought of the core idea is clever, but whoever thought of showing off a group of people swinging their iPhones around like it was the latest piece of medieval weaponry in the promo video should have their video-making license taken away.

$14.99 gets you a handstrap, a lanyard, and, depending on how you use it, a small dip in our opinion of you.

[Via TUAW]

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: MobileCrunch | 23 Feb 2009 | 5:45 pm

Verizon Wireless drops CDM8975 Push to Talk handset, business world yawns

Verizon Wireless launched its creatively named CDM8975 Push to Talk handset today.  This new business-meets-multimedia walkie-talkie mobile phone was developed by Personal Communications Devices and comes dressed to impress, er, ready for the job site as it’s wrapped in an “industrial clamshell.”

The CDM8975 will be available beginning March 9th, online and in good ol’ fashion meatspace, for $99.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate and a new two-year customer agreement.

Can’t you just feel the excitement building?! Specs after the jump…

The Verizon Wireless CDM8975 features include:

· Dedicated Push to Talk and speakerphone button

· Internal antenna “intenna”

· Bluetooth technology – headset, hands free (car kits), dial-up networking, stereo, phonebook access, basic printing, basic imaging, object push for vCard, and file transfer

· Media Center-capable – downloadable games, ringtones, wallpapers, location-based services and more

· V CAST Music with Rhapsody-capable – download music directly to the phone from a library of more than 5 million songs and get the master copy of the song on a PC free of digital rights management software that restricts how and where music can be played. Customers can also sync favorite tracks, albums and playlists from a PC.

· V CAST Video – download or stream video from the best names in news, sports, entertainment and more

· Text messaging

· Enhanced Message Service

· Multimedia Message Service

· T9 Predictive Text

· Phonebook with up to 500 entries with multiple contacts

· Push to Talk phonebook with up to 500 individual contacts and up to 100 group contacts with up to 50 members per group

· Expandable memory on an optional microSD™ memory card up to 8 GB (card not included)

· Web browser: WAP

· Customizable wallpaper

· TTY/TDD-capable

· Bilingual interface for English and Spanish

· Dimensions: 3.7″ (h) x 1.9″ (w) x 0.8″ (d)

· Weight: 3.2 ounces

Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies

Source: MobileCrunch | 23 Feb 2009 | 5:27 pm

Child Trauma Weakens Gene Response to Stress

Childhood abuse can change the expression of a gene important for stress response.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 23 Feb 2009 | 4:55 pm

Ocean's Vital Plankton Sheets Form by 'Mishap'

Plankton sheets and red tides form in the ocean as accidents of circulation.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 23 Feb 2009 | 3:10 pm

Dark Energy to Erase Big Bang's Fading Signal

Dark energy is expected tear out evidence of the universe from the fabric of time.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 23 Feb 2009 | 2:32 pm

Kepler Telescope to Scout for Alien Worlds

NASA's Kepler mission will look for Earth-like worlds around other stars. Could it also find life?
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 23 Feb 2009 | 2:11 pm