Dell just put out two videos promoting their soon-to-be released Adamo. One video focuses on the actual laptop and the other is much more of a teaser.
The first video shows the Adamo being built by robots while the laptop parts floats in air. It has lots of spinning 360 degree shots with relaxed music playing. You can really get some very good looks at Dell’s Adamo here and we have a photo gallery of screenshots below. The video has the robots cutting out pieces for the keyboard and trackpad out of a case. From the video, it sort of looks like Dell is using the same “unibody” process that Apple uses in its latest notebooks.
The laptop has a glossy screen, what could be either four USB ports (or maybe 3 with a display port?) and an Ethernet port on the back of the case. There is an etched pattern on most of the PC. The video is a bit like a luxury car commercial and that is probably what Dell is intending—a luxury PC.
The second ad shows a model getting getting ready for a shoot then taking photographs with the Adamo. This video is much more of a teaser and you don’t really get a good look at the notebook.
Overall, the Adamo looks slick and it’s nice to see Dell trying to appeal to a different crowd.
Samsung has recently announced two new touchscreen based phones, they are the S5230 and S5600—both of which are expected to come at an affordable price point being targeted at the mid-to-lower tier market.
As for the features, the S5230 has a 3-inch full touchscreen WQVGA display, 3-megapixel camera, built-in FM radio, Bluetooth, USB and 50MB of internal storage with a microSD card slot for expansion. Additionally the S5230 has EDGE and GPRS support. The S5600, which, feature wise is a little more high end as compared to the S5230 has support for HSDPA as well as EDGE and GPRS. Other features of the S5600 include a 2.8-inch full touchscreen QVGA display, 3-megapixel camera, built-in FM radio, Bluetooth, USB and 80MB of internal storage with a microSD card slot for expansion. Both models will also include the TouchWiz user interface that allows for easy customization and personalization.
As for availability, the S5230 and the S5600 will be available in Europe, The S5600 will be in stores beginning in May, while the S5230 as soon as April.
Rejoice! Today is International Day Of Awesomeness. It’s time to celebrate just how awesome you are, and to recognize how awesome everyone else is!
It’s all too easy for us — all of us — to get jaded and tired of yet another cellphone, or just another crazy casemod. But remember, all of these things happen because of the inherent awesomeness inside each of us. That cellphone might not tickle your fancy, but it would never make it to the market without the awesomeness of the industrial designers, technical writers, copy editors, draftsmen, interns, quality assurance folks, human resources professionals, marketing experts, delivery drivers, and security guards.
That guy in his basement slaving away on his casemod is chock full of awesome just waiting to get out. Even if casemods aren’t your thing, take a moment to appreciate the awesomeness it took to think of and make the darned thing.
From all of us here at CrunchGear: be awesome today!
This picture shows, quite astonishingly, a real iPhone. It is one of two prototypes currently for sale on Ebay, although this is the only one that works.
The phone that works is pretty neat to use. It does make calls (with my ATT sim), and I can surf the net. However when I did get to web pages they were the mobile versions, not the regular versions. I can't figure out how to set a ringtone, it is just silent right now. I can receive SMS but not compose my own, other than 5 included test messages. It doesn't sync to itunes. Camera seems to work. It has tons of testing options.
Clearly the version of the OS that this iPhone is running was a very early test version, designed only to make sure that the hardware was working. Curiously, this one has a plastic screen (the broken one has the more familiar glass screen). We're sure that just seeing this in the wild will send Steve Jobs into a purple rage -- the whole UI is so damn ugly that it could be Windows Mobile running on there. Click through to see more pictures and even a video of the iPhone in action.
The current bid is $1,136.11 for the pair, and the auction ends tomorrow.
Reuters - Production company FremantleMedia is launching a new mobile application for fans of its hit reality contest "American Idol." Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Mar 2009 | 12:09 pm
InfoWorld - SpringSource is offering on Tuesday upgrades to the Groovy dynamic language and Grails Web application framework with such features as improved performance and OSGi support. The upgrades include Groovy 1.6 and Grails 1.1, which can be downloaded at this Web site. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Mar 2009 | 12:01 pm
Web startups that plan to make money from advertising are having a rough time raising money. But Web startups that say they’ll do it by charging customers? Still possible.
Today’s example: OMGPOP, the casual gaming site formerly known as iminlikewithyou, which has raised a $5 million round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Previous investors Spark Capital and Ron Conway’s Baseline Ventures re-upped, but not Netscape/Ning/“Project A” investor Marc Andreessen, who took a flier on the company last summer.
The site has raised a little more than $6.5 million to date. A conservative valuation would still make the company worth north of $10 million.
Why is it worth anything? The company, which began life in 2006 as a dating site, has a dedicated user base that logs some 3 hours a month on the site. But it’s still pre-revenue, as they say.
It’s possible that the site will roll out some kind of advertising at some point — Porter says he’s been testing some ad units with Google (GOOG) — but those would be ancillary dollars (or dimes).
Can that work? Maybe. Casual games — free or low-cost Web games that take little time commitment — appear to be doing well so far in the recession, even as traditional video game sales falter. And a lot of people are hopeful that the market for virtual goods — big in Asia, but limited in the U.S. to a handful of games and a few oddities like Facebook’s “gift” items — will finally take off.
Not interested in thinking this one through? Fair enough. Try playing the site’s “Balloono” game, a knock-off of the Nintendo classic Bomberman. I’m waaaaaay older than the site’s core 15-25 demo, but I’ve spent an embarassing amount of time on this one.
Remember the Brush & Rinse? The novel toothbrush first came to our attention back in August of 2007, when a prototype could be had for a rather scary $1750. Now, Scott Amron has them in production at a much more comfortable $1.18 (It will rise to $5).
The Brush & Rinse is a lazy person’s toothbrush. Instead of having to lean down and put your mouth under the faucet just to rinse away the toothpaste, the device lets you lower your head to a position merely near the water. A clever internal tube takes the flowing water and redirects it as a small jet. The video shows it in action.
This is actually a very smart idea. At no cost (merely a modification of the plastic mold) you have a brand new toy to play with at bedtime. Now, if only it could somehow make the water coffee-flavored I could save an extra few minutes before going back to bed in the mornings to start work.
A Lilliputing feature, ostensibly about Microsoft's disinterest in Windows CE, turns into a tribute to the ultraportables that used to run it. They had genuine instant-on capability a decade ago--now, you have to wait 15 seconds for a Slashtop-style "instant on" mode to start, and 45 seconds for the best netbooks to get into Windows XP.
These old proto-netbooks offered stellar battery life and instant on/off capabilities, but ran stripped down operating systems with stripped down apps like web browsers and office suites. Probably the biggest problem is that over the last 10 years more and more of our computing needs have moved online, and older handheld PCs like the HP Jornada and NEC MobilePro line didn’t really keep up. Few handheld PCs came with integrated WiFi or 3G capabilities. And more importantly, they didn’t run modern web browsers like Firefox or Internet Explorer 7.
The reality of using them isn't quite so rosy, because Windows CE was crap, and the category died before wireless connectivity made them useful to consumers. They were also expensive: NEC's MobilePro, pictured, was $1,000. That said, it's hard not to imagine what a well-designed modern equivalent would be like.
On the other hand, that "well-designed modern equivalent" would be Windows Mobile running on a Vaio P, which doesn't sound terribly appetizing. On the other other hand, the grim reality of running WIndows Vista on a Vaio P is hardly lunch at Primanti's, either.
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India is launching its own version of Google Earth for urban planning, officials said, amid worries that it could be misused after the Mumbai attacks probe showed... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Mar 2009 | 11:40 am
AP - Google Inc. said Monday it will block U.K. users from watching music videos on its popular video-sharing site YouTube after negotiations with Britain's music royalty-collecting body broke down. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Mar 2009 | 11:38 am
Users are able to view and rotate virtual objects that are placed “in the box” in three dimensions. The researchers say the 10-cm display is based on Integral Photography technology.
The new gCubik features 3.5-inch touch panels (LCD, 640×480 resolution) on all six sides, triple the brightness of the previous model (it can now be used in dark areas), speakers and 6-axis acceleration sensors, which basically turns the device into an interactive toy.
Its resemblance to certain extremely cheap Nokias notwithstanding, Nr21 Design's design for Vodafone's model 135 is my cup of ultrathin tea.
nr21 DESIGN introduces one of its latest designs, the Vodafone 135. This will be one of the most affordable mobiles on the market. The Vodafone 135 is a classic candy bar phone, designed to make mobile communications affordable in developing markets, thanks to a short two line black and white display suitable for calls and texts. It will be available this summer on prepay tariffs.
BEIJING, March 10 /PRNewswire-Asia-FirstCall/ -- Qiao Xing Mobile Communication Co., Ltd. ("Qiao Xing Mobile" or the "Company") (NYSE: QXM), one of... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Mar 2009 | 11:30 am
At least 100 Greenpeace activists on Tuesday briefly blocked the entrances to the main EU building in Brussels in a surprise demonstration for more effort to fight climate change, AFP... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Mar 2009 | 11:24 am
In San Diego, mobile users pay more than $3 per minute on average. Thats according to a new consumer-advocacy study featured in the LA Times yesterday via The Christian Science Monitor. The Utility Consumers... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Mar 2009 | 11:17 am
Jaspersoft and leading software distributor AsiaSoft partner to meet growing demand for Jaspersoft's professional BI suite SAN FRANCISCO, March 10... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Mar 2009 | 11:10 am
A Dutch car insurer for women recently launched a useful new service. As soon as weather warnings are issued that could make driving hazardous, Onna-onna sends its clients a text message advising them... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Mar 2009 | 11:08 am
Depending on which numbers you source or believe, all reports agree that the blogosphere continues to expand globally. As the leading blog directory and search engine, Technorati maintains a coveted... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Mar 2009 | 11:06 am
March 10 (Reuters) - Drugmaker Forest Laboratories Inc said the patent term for its Alzheimer's treatment, Namenda, has been extended by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the patent will now expire... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Mar 2009 | 11:05 am
LONDON (Reuters) - Teen website Stardoll announced a merger with U.S. publishing site Piczo to help it launch a network that will reach more than 20 million people a month, mainly girls... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Mar 2009 | 11:03 am
LOS ANGELES, March 10 (Reuters) - Hilton Hotels Corp, owned by Blackstone Group LP , launched new luxury hotel brand Denizen on Tuesday, catering to "globally conscious modern travelers of the world."... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Mar 2009 | 11:00 am
Those Apple Web ads — intrusive, hard to ignore, but clever and entertaining — I was admiring yesterday? Get ready for a lot more like that. At least the intrusive and hard to ignore part.
That’s because the Online Publishers Association, one of the Web ad industry’s main trade groups, is rolling out a new series of in-your-face ad units — standardized blocks of space that Web publishers and advertisers favor because they make it easy to mass-produce marketing messages.
The new standards are meant to combat “banner blindess” — our collective, unconscious, and successful efforts to block out and ignore most Web advertising.
ClickZ has the details, but the key point is that the ads are going to be ginormous and gaudy — think monster trucks with sirens and flashing lights. The numbers they’re referring to here are pixels; by way of comparison, the column of text you’re reading now is about 350 pixels wide:
Among the new units being debuted are: the “fixed panel,” a 336 x 860 panel that looks embedded into the page and scrolls to the top and bottom of the page as the user scrolls; the “XXL Box,” which is 468 x 648 and allows users to actually turn “pages” and watch video; and the “pushdown,” which is 970 x 428 which opens to display a nearly full-page ad and then rolls up to the top of the page.
The reasonable thing to point out here is that there’s nothing that prohibits advertisers and publishers from doing interesting and creative stuff with these formats — just like Apple (AAPL). And if you’re really lucky, you’ll find that the ads are even about stuff you’re interested in learning about. That’s the key, remember, to Google’s (GOOG) success (and note how unobtrusive most of Google’s ads are).
But if the ads aren’t interesting, and aren’t relevant to you? It’s the kind of thing that could drive a mild-mannered person to install ad-blocking software.
If you want to see this stuff live, keep your eyes peeled at sites run by ESPN, the New York Times, MTV and Conde Nast Digital, who are among the 24 publishers who’ve agreed to start running at least one of the ad units by July.
Dell's E6400 XFR is a tough, ugly bastard of a laptop. Resistant to heat, vibration and dirt, it has a Core 2 Duo CPU, 256MB Nvidia Quadro NVS 160M graphics and a 14.1" display. At 8.5 pounds, it's lighter than Dell's previous rugged model. It is not lighter on the wallet, however, costing $4,300. [Engadget]
The Guardian newspaper in the UK has today launched a free, open API which will carry all the content the newspaper produces in print and online, going back to 1999. The "Open Platform" will allow allow... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Mar 2009 | 10:53 am
A pair of claimed early iPhone prototypes found thir way to eBay and will fetch more than $1,000. Currently at $940 after 45 bids, the double pack is described as rare and collectible, though only one of the two works.
The phone that works is pretty neat to use. It does make calls(with my ATT sim), and I can surf the net. However when I did get to web pages they were the mobile versions, not the regular versions. I can't figure out how to set a ringtone, it is just silent right now. I can receive SMS but not compose my own, other than 5 included test messages. It doesn't sync to itunes. Camera seems to work. It has tons of testing options.
Such relics normally get me excited, but these don't carry much energy. To me, they just look like broken iPhones running broken software.
(TrendHunter.com) China has assembled a manned submersible that could plunge to the deepest level ever, being built to submerge to 7,000 meters. If the project is successful, it would be a record for... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Mar 2009 | 10:39 am
This week on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's excellent Search Engine podcast, host Jesse Brown has posted part one of a fantastic interview with Ann Cavoukian about the risks associated with RFID-enabled identity cards and other personal objects and devices.
Jesse frames the issue as well as I've heard it ever framed: "They freak me out. Not because I think there's some kind of sinister government conspiracy behind them, but because the idea of every dude walking around with a thirty foot cloud of data emanating from his pants is so tantalizing that it invites sinister conspiracies. It challenges criminals' brains to come up with ways to defraud us. It woos law enforcement to blur or bend or rewrite the rules. That is how filled with FAIL arphid tags are."
This week on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's excellent Search Engine podcast, host Jesse Brown has posted part one of a fantastic interview with Ann Cavoukian about the risks associated with RFID-enabled... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Mar 2009 | 10:30 am
This week on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's excellent Search Engine podcast, host Jesse Brown has posted part one of a fantastic interview with Ann Cavoukian about the risks associated with... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Mar 2009 | 10:30 am
(TrendHunter.com) The jumpsuit is back, and right on time for those not ready to bare their gams in Daisy Dukes a la Jessica Simpson. This one-piece fashion staple of the past made its return on Donna... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Mar 2009 | 10:19 am
Eric Moreau has translated my Locus column Why I Copyfight into French, in honor of the bill in French Parliament that will criminalize copyists and downloaders. Pourquoi accorder tant d'importance ... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Mar 2009 | 10:18 am
Eric Moreau has translated my Locus column Why I Copyfight into French, in honor of the bill in French Parliament that will criminalize copyists and downloaders.
Pourquoi accorder tant d'importance à la question de la réforme du copyright ? Qu'est-ce qui est en jeu ?
Tout.
Jusqu'à une époque récente, le copyright était une réglementation industrielle. Si l'on tombait dans le domaine du copyright, cela signifiait que l'on utilisait quelque prodigieuse machine industrielle – une presse d'imprimerie, une caméra de cinéma, une presse à disques vinyles. Le coût d'un tel équipement étant conséquent, y ajouter deux cents billets pour s'offrir les services d'un bon avocat du droit de la propriété intellectuelle n'avait rien d'un sacrifice. Ces frais n'ajoutaient que quelques points de pourcentage au coût de production.
Lorsque des entités n'appartenant pas une industrie (individus, écoles, congrégations religieuses, etc.) interagissaient avec des œuvres soumises au copyright, l'utilisation qu'elles en avaient n'était pas régie par le droit de la propriété intellectuelle : elles lisaient des livres, écoutaient de la musique, chantaient autour du piano ou allaient au cinéma. Elles discutaient de ces œuvres. Elles les chantaient sous la douche. Les racontaient (avec des variations) aux enfants à l'heure du coucher. Les citaient. Peignaient des fresques inspirées de ces œuvres sur le mur de la chambre des enfants.
Astute social media researcher danah boyd -- now running her own lab at Microsoft Research -- has published the notes from an internal company talk she gave called "Social Media is Here to Stay... Now What?" It's a good condensation of the material in her dissertation, full of punchy insights into how social media evolved and what it's meant to society.
Social network sites became critically important to them because this was where they sat and gossiped, jockeyed for status, and functioned as digital flaneurs. They used these tools to see and be seen. Those using MySpace put great effort into decorating their profile and fleshing out their "About Me" section. The features and functionality of Facebook were fundamentally different, but virtual pets and quizzes served similar self-expression purposes on Facebook.
Teen conversations may appear completely irrational, or pointless at best. "Yo, wazzup?" "Not much, how you?" may not seem like much to an outsider, but this is a form of social grooming. It's a way of checking in, confirming friendships, and negotiating social waters.
Adults have approached Facebook in very different ways. Adults are not hanging out on Facebook. They are more likely to respond to status messages than start a conversation on someone's wall (unless it's their birthday of course). Adults aren't really decorating their profiles or making sure that their About Me's are up-to-date. Adults, far more than teens, are using Facebook for its intended purpose as a social utility. For example, it is a tool for communicating with the past.
Adults may giggle about having run-ins with mates from high school, but underneath it all, many of them are curious. This isn't that different than the school reunion. We all poo-poo the reunion, but secretly, we really want to know what happened to Bobbi Sue. Nowhere is this dynamic more visible than in the recent "25 Things" phenomena. While teens have been filling out personality quizzes since the dawn of social media, most adults only went through this phase once, as a newbie when they felt as though they really needed to forward the chain letter to 10 friends or else. The "25 Things" phenomenon took me by surprise until I started thinking about the intended audience. Teenagers craft quizzes for themselves and their friends. Adults are crafting them to show-off to people from the past and connect the dots between different audiences as a way of coping with the awkwardness of collapsed contexts.
InfoWorld - The noisiest new feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 promises to be live virtual machine migration, as Microsoft seizes the chance to show that Hyper-V is closing the gap with VMware Infrastructure. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Mar 2009 | 10:00 am
Wikipedia says a poltergeist is “an invisible spirit or ghost that manifests itself by moving and influencing objects”. And it’s supposed to scare people. Japan’s Keio University and the Kyoto University of Art & Design, however, didn’t quite understand and developed a very physical poltergeist in their lab, which doesn’t fit all criteria.
Their Sukima Robotto (interspace robot) essentially consists of a pair of eyes and arms that are attached to an ordinary desk and connected to a PC via bluetooth. Human presence sensors make sure that the eyes and arms start moving towards the person approaching the robot.
The scary special effect is provided by a a foliage plant and hairs shaken by artificial wind from a ventilator. If you think that doesn’t sound convincing, you are right (just watch the video below).
Owen Goss writes "Everyone is familiar with the story of the iPhone developer who spends two weeks of spare time making a game that goes on to make them hundreds of thousands of dollars. The reality is that with the App Store now hosting over 25,000 apps, the competition is fierce. While it's true that a few select apps are making developers rich, the reality is that most apps don't make a lot of money. In a blog post I take a hard look at the first 24 days of sales data for the first game, Dapple, from Streaming Colour Studios. The post reflects what is likely the norm for developers just getting into the iPhone development game."
Preserving family memories is easy and economical
SAN DIEGO, March 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Scrapbook enthusiasts are putting away scissors and glue and going online to CropMom to create one-of-a-kind digital scrapbook pages using their treasured family photos.
(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090310/NYFNSM01 )
CropMom at http://www.cropmom.com lets anyone create scrapbook pages, greeting cards and digital art online using designer scrapbook graphics.
Like is the new favorite, which was, at one time, the new bookmark. This small, but important feature will reinforce relationships between friends and followers and those who produce, interact with, and share content.
Made popular by services such as FriendFeed, and now Facebook, the idea of liking an update is much bigger than merely bookmarking or favoriting (yes, it’s a new verb in the social web) updates from friends and contacts for later reference. The act of liking is quickly emerging as a simple, but complimentary gesture of acknowledgment and reciprocation to recognize the contribution of someone whom you follow.
That Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks will increase the size of human social groups is an obvious hypothesis, given that they reduce a lot of the friction and cost involved in keeping in touch with other people. Once you join and gather your “friends” online, you can share in their lives as recorded by photographs, “status updates” and other tidbits, and, with your permission, they can share in yours. Additional friends are free, so why not say the more the merrier?
But perhaps additional friends are not free. Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks “grooming”. In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerization certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom–and why–demands quite a bit of mental computation.
A headline that kicked around the blogosphere this weekend made no sense to me: “Wolfram Alpha Is Coming–and It Could Be as Important as Google.” (GOOG)
The post–written by Nova Spivack, the chief executive of Radar Networks–took a look at a new sort of search engine being cooked up in secret by Stephen Wolfram, a British mathematician.
Wolfram’s search engine, called Wolfram Alpha, is meant to be able to answer specific factual questions in a far more precise way than any search engine before it. For example, it will parse questions like “What is the location of Timbuktu?” or “How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?” to answer the questions rather than simply pull up sites that have the answer on them.
Bear with me as we recap last week’s 100-yard dash of media industry financial woe before breasting the tape of eternal doom. First comes ITV with its 40 percent profit decline, 600 redundancies and regional closures, then Channel Five making one in four people redundant–saving almost as much money as Channel 4 will gain from Kevin Lygo halving his £1m pay package. In print, things are no less unappealing. The ABCs for national newspapers recorded almost universal sales decline, with no sector growing and the Daily Sport (yes, it is still going) withdrawing from the audit altogether. In magazines, Arena closed, and even on the internet Gawker’s founder, Nick Denton, has folded his blogs together, proclaiming that “micropublishing is dead”. Wherever you look, it is clear that the media industry is in dire need of quantitative tightening.
If you’re like most cellphone users, you probably think you’re paying less than 10 cents per minute for calls. Think again.
When you do the math, you find the average cellphone customer actually pays more than $3 per minute, according to a report being issued this week by the Utility Consumers’ Action Network, a San Diego consumer advocacy group.
I got a sneak peek at the report the other day.
Researchers arrived at the average $3.02 per-minute charge by comparing the average number of minutes charged in more than 700 San Diego consumers’ telecom bills and dividing by the average number of actual minutes used.
“We knew it was a myth that wireless costs were going down,” said Michael Shames, UCAN’s executive director. “But we were blown away by the actual costs.”
Read the rest of this post
NEW YORK, March 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Telnic today announced that it had
achieved a milestone in the delivery of a new internet service, with tens of
thousands of .tel domains going 'live' today, creating the world's first
global directory.
The registry operator for the new .tel domains, which provide individuals
and businesses with a unique way of sharing all types of contact information
with any device connected to the internet, successfully launched its new
service.
"This is a momentous day for the company as eight years of development
has come to fruition," said Henri Asseily, CTO and Chief Strategist at
Telnic. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 10 Mar 2009 | 8:00 am
ANN ARBOR, Mich., March 10 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Social computing is making inroads into business, and decision makers who want to get ahead of the competition are tackling enterprise-wide projects that harness the information and connections of their employees.
The University of Michigan School of Information Executive Education program (si.umich.edu/executive), in collaboration with social computing company NewsGator, is offering "Making Social Computing Work in Your Enterprise," a course for the business community. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 10 Mar 2009 | 8:00 am
If you want to create a 3D image shrine to your loved ones while creeping out everyone else in the process, there's a perfect online service out there for it.
Shapeways' Photoshaper prints physical 3D plates made of resin material out of digital pictures submitted by customers. The goal is to be able to own a lively multi-dimensional image, but the end result is ghostly and bizarre.
In order to make the 3D plate, the Photoshaper machine converts a photo into a black and white contrast image. Its software then defines dark tones in a picture as 'thicker' and lighter ones as thinner, so that when the super-thin layers of resin are piled on top of each other, the detail between contrasts is distinguishable. In order for the 3D effect to work, it needs to be held up to a background light to highlight the layers of resin (this is also why the material is white) .
But just like framing a negative of a loved one would be weird, the Photoshaper's final image practically forces you to have a constant light or candle behind it. Without it, it looks like a snowy positive-contrast cemetery tablet. But as seen in the picture to the right, the candles add a religious, worshipful tone to the pictures.
I think this is fine if you want to create interesting 3D artwork for your local church, but it's creepy if you use it for your own children, who are hopefully alive and bouncy, and don't need to be represented in a ghostly, grave presentation.
Fashion Retailer Selects Industry-Specific End-to-End Solution for Midsize Companies from SAP to Streamline and Integrate Business Processes, Gain Transparency and Fuel Future Growth
WALLDORF, Germany, March 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) announced that ORSAY Gmbh, a midsize women's fashion retailer, has selected the SAP(R) Business All-In-One for Retail solution to streamline and integrate its entire supply chain and centralize business operations. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 10 Mar 2009 | 7:00 am
ColdWetDog writes "It's not Sigourney Weaver tossing aliens about, but The Register has an interesting blurb about a real human-capable exoskeleton that looks pretty cool (Lockheed-Martin press release). Runs for three hours at 3 mph on internal batteries; max speed is 7 mph. Of course, no price is listed but I suppose if you have to ask you can't afford it. Team this up with a Big Dog and you've got the ultimate high-tech cross-country team. Bring your own batteries. Or just wait for your jetpack to arrive."
Over on Offworld, our Brandon's got a post on the art of Christopher Locke, whose modern fossils series creates fossilized versions of our iconic manufactured goods from a notional future in which our middens are excavated by tomorrow's archaeologists.
In a special process, these items are reproduced in a proprietary blend of concrete and other secret ingredients, giving them the look and feel of real stone fossils. Each fossil is made one at a time, by hand, in an individual mold. Because of the hand-made nature of the item, there will be variations in pigmentation, and small imperfections in the surface. While you can choose a general color range, please keep in mind that each fossil is unique, and color variations are inevitable.
Each "species" of modern fossil has a Latin name marked on the bottom or back, and can be shipped straight to your door.
A study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences discusses the brain's God-center, the region that seems to be responsible for feelings of the numinous and the sanctified -- why would evolution create a God-lobe? Is religion the by-product of biology?
Grafman started by interviewing 26 people of varying religious sentiments, breaking down their beliefs into three psychological categories: God's perceived level of involvement in the world, God's perceived emotions, and religious knowledge gained through doctrine or experience. Then they submitted statements based on these categories to 40 people hooked to fMRI machines.
Statements based on God's involvement — such as "God protects one's life" or "Life has no higher purpose" — provoked activity in brain regions associated with understanding intent. Statements of God's emotions — such as "God is forgiving" or "the afterlife will be punishing" — stimulated regions responsible for classifying emotions and relating observed actions to oneself. Knowledge-based statements, such as "a source of creation exists" or "religions provide moral guidance," activated linguistic processing centers.
Taken together, the neurological states evoked by the questions are known to cognitive scientists as the Theory of Mind: They underlie our understanding that other people have minds, thoughts and feelings.
The advantages of a Theory of Mind are clear. People who lack one are considered developmentally challenged, even disabled. Anthropologist Scott Atran, a proponent of the byproduct hypothesis, has suggested that it let our ancestors quickly distinguish between friends and enemies. And once humans were able to imagine someone who wasn't physically present, supernatural beliefs soon followed.
Here's a leaked, 125-page transcript of the brainstorming session that begat Raiders of the Lost Arc, a sit-down in 1978 with Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan. Spielberg and Lucas veritably fizz with ideas.
G — What can he chase them with? What if he jumps on a camel?
S — I love it. It's a great idea. There's never been a camel chase before.
L — Is this camel going to chase a car?
S — You know how fast a camel can run? Not only that, he can jump over vegetable carts and things. It could be a funny chase that ends in tragedy. You're laughing your head off and suddenly, "My God, she's dead..."
S — We still have the big fight in the moving truck to do. And now we have a camel chase.
Casual games may see a vast amount of traffic, but monetizing them can be more than a little tricky due to issues relating to Flash-based game files and the needs of various publishers. Israeli startup TicTacTi is looking to make monetizing casual games more efficient, by using image recognition to insert ads into casual gaming widgets.
The biggest obstacle in providing In-Game Advertising (IGA) typically involves getting the actual ad into the game. Games, which are typically in Flash SWF format, require distribution by a publisher, which can be anything from an Oberon, to a HeyZap, to an online edition of a newspaper. Each publisher has its own quirks and demands when it comes to monetization—one wants to advertise pre-game, the other post, and the third between levels. And this is where the crux of the problem lies—all of these quirks require alternate versions of the game source for the various publishers and advertisers.
TicTacTi realizes that requiring developers to integrate with multiple SDK’s to facilitate the embedding of ads is not scalable, so it developed a semi-manual method that at least takes the SDK integration out of the equation.
Each game has to be set up by TicTacTi, a process the company estimates at about one to two hours per game. The actual game source code is not required which means that games can by encrypted—an important point for game developers. It’s here that TicTacTi “marks” events in games where ads could be placed. For example, a game could be marked in such a way that when the “Loading” prompt is visible, it would initiate a pre-roll ad marker, and when the “Game Over” prompt is visible, it would initiate a post-roll marker.
TicTacTi’s image recognition engine seeks these visual events in order to trigger the ad insertion. If the game source already includes TicTacTi’s IGA logo marker (see right), the game preparation stage can be skipped altogether because the image recognition engine will identify it automatically.
The image recognition is performed entirely client-side with ActionScript. The patent-pending technology involves a mechanism that combines image recognition throttling and emulation. This means that it is activated for small segments of time so as not to impose a cost on the user’s CPU. TicTacTi’s own testing revealed CPU usage remains the same for the entire game duration.
In order to embed the game, the publisher would call TicTacTi’s wrapper, which would in return load the game, along with additional elements. These include the ones that drive the image recognition, the ad insertion component and the reporting to the backend.
Standard ad units and tags are supported so ads inserted into the Flash games can originate from ad exchanges such as Right Media, Double Click, or the publisher’s own ad server. TicTacTi will charge a varied commission for the service.
Embedded below are a widget utilizing TicTacTi’s technology and a video demo of the service.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
To think that the humble anal bead began life as a quack 1930s back massager! From the Aug, 1930 ish of Physical Culture (which magazine, I'm reliably assured by Ben "Bad Science" Goldacre is a kind of ground zero for quack medical adverts.
The UK government's reps in the European Union are pushing to gut the right of Internet users to access and contribute to networked services, replacing it with the "right" to abide by EULAs:
'Amendments to the Telecoms Package circulated in Brussels by the UK government, seek to cross out users' rights to access and distribute Internet content and services. And they want to replace it with a "principle" that users can be told not only the conditions for access, but also the conditions for the use of applications and services. The amendments, if carried, would reverse the principle of end-to-end connectivity which has underpinned not only the Internet, but also European telecommunications policy, to date.' To add to the irony, an accompanying text cuts and pastes from Wikipedia, without attribution.
New Crystal Reports(R) Offering and Rapidly Expanding Community Provide Additional Value to Business Software Developer Community Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 10 Mar 2009 | 6:00 am
Alan sez, "Volunteers in Hampshire, England, discovered a Dalek head while cleaning trash from the bottom of a local pond!" They're keeping the pond's location a secret, because, "The last thing we want are sci-fi fans descending on the pond frantically seraching for other Dalek parts."
Sales executive Marc Oakland was pushing a rake around the bed of the shallow pool when he found the object with its distinctive eye stalk.
The 42-year-old said: "I'd just shifted a tree branch with my foot when I noticed something dark and round slowly coming up to the surface.
"I got the shock of my life when a Dalek head bobbed up right in front of me.
"It must have been down there for some time because it was covered in mould and water weed, and had quite a bit of damage.
"One of the dome lights was smashed, but the eye-stalk was intact and the head and neck stayed in one piece as I carefully lifted it out."
No, I did not confuse RIM with Apple. After many years of a successful partnership between Apple and U2, U2 and RIM were able to agree to a partnership.
As you may remember, U2 helped launch a few iPods, such as the red ones for AIDS awareness in Africa, but they will be most remembered for their special edition iPods. For U2’s 360 Tour, Research In Motion and their lineup of BlackBerry smartphones are going to be the major sponsor of the tour. U2 is a very famous alternative rock band, and naturally, RIM is hoping their phones become more popular. Manager of U2, Paul McGuinness, hopes that their partnership “leads to new and innovative ways to enhance the mobile music experience on the BlackBerry platform for U2 fans.“
Now, the tour consists of visiting 14 European cities, and starting off in North America by playing at Soldier Field, which is home to the Chicago Bears. U2 didn’t really specify why they “broke up” with Apple, but it says something about U2. They obviously want to partner with a company who has products they like. Maybe U2 got tired of the Apple products, and wanted to go with RIM’s BlackBerry’s. Also, Steve Jobs is out of the picture until at least June, so maybe U2 feels safer about partnering with RIM.
Whether RIM announces any special BlackBerry phones for U2, like Apple did with the iPod, will remain to be seen.
NVIDIA is known primarily for their PC graphics cards, but they've been in the news recently both for the expansion of their CUDA and PhysX initiatives as well as (allegedly) developing a CPU to challenge Intel and AMD. They've been proponents of parallel processing for quite a while, naturally, and have made some investments in companies like MotionDSP and Elemental Technologies, both of which are developing software that really leverages the GPU.
The success of these investments is difficult to measure (NVIDIA's been hit as hard as the other semiconductor-related companies, losing 50% of its revenue), but it's hard to argue with the fact that parallel computing is where practically the entire industry is heading. In light of this, NVIDIA has started what they're calling the GPU Ventures Program, by which they hope to "identify, support and invest" in companies that are working on GPU-based computing applications.
PC World - Sony Ericsson is calling on a superhero to help it enter the tough South Korean market. On Tuesday the company launched its brand with a version of the Xperia X1 cell phone that comes with the full Spiderman 3 movie loaded onto every handset. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Mar 2009 | 4:10 am
Company Set to Launch the World's First Massively Accelerated Raytracing Solution
SAN FRANCISCO, March 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Caustic Graphics(R), a new 3D computer graphics company, launches today with a fundamental breakthrough in raytracing acceleration that is set to define a new era in professional 3D production and interactive consumer graphics. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 10 Mar 2009 | 4:01 am
MIAMI, March 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Ashwin Kamlani, CEO of AboutAnywhere.com,
operator of the world's only free online distribution network for the hotel
industry, has been selected to participate in PhoCusWright's prestigious
Travel Innovation Summit in Orlando, FL on November 17, 2009. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 10 Mar 2009 | 4:01 am
Music is an aural art form. But the packaging for the recordings—the album cover—has a distinct aesthetic, one that has evolved along with distribution technologies and formats.
In the 1960s, the cardboard record jacket came into its own as a canvas for graphic artists, who used its ample dimensions to spin elaborate visual and conceptual fantasias. Album covers became generational touchstones, with iconic images like the "family portrait" of famous people rendered as cardboard cutouts and waxworks on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Day-Glo colors and trippy starburst ornamentation on Cream's Disraeli Gears, and the extravagantly Gothic lettering on the Grateful Dead's Aoxomoxoa.
In the late '80s and '90s, when the CD replaced vinyl as the format of choice, the new 5.5- by 5.5-inch Jewel case was a far less luscious canvas. Many images from LP jackets, like the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St. and Jimi Hendrix's Axis: Bold as Love, suffered in translation, their intricate details shrunk into obscurity. Others, like Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, with its simple portrait of the artist, did fine in the smaller size. Eventually psychedelia and its complexity waned and was replaced by cleaner, more forthright designs.
The constraint:Develop memorable images for thumbnail canvases.
The solution:Get simple, graphic... and clever.
Vinyl LP cover:153.1 square inches
CD case:22.6 square inches
iPod Nano Cover Flow icon:0.4 square inch
When the MP3 gained popularity in the late '90s, it seemed that the album—and its cover—would join the moldering 45s, 78s, and 8-tracks in the format graveyard. The first incarnation of Napster made no accommodation for album art at all, and iTunes shrank covers into dispiriting splotches. "If the best a designer can hope for is a 240-pixel square image, it'll be a depressing time for the music-packaging industry," says Stephen Doyle, creator of such venerated covers as Pat Metheny Group's The Way Up and David Byrne's Look Into the Eyeball.
Since then, some designers have embraced the thumbnail and crafted logolike images that serve as mnemonics for the band. The tiny JPEGs displayed on iPod screens demand simplicity, bold color, stark imagery, and unadorned type. The sneering smiley face on Bon Jovi's Have a Nice Day is an aptly minimalist rendering. No Age's Nouns, on the other hand, is at once simple and complex, readable and abstract; the sculptural letterforms jump off the screen. Happily, technologies like Cover Flow, the visual navigation interface Apple dropped into iTunes in late 2006—not to mention the iPhone and iPod Touch screens—have given album art some renewed prominence. Innovations in packaging digital visuals along with the music are coming, like the special material for the Enemy's We'll Live and Die in These Towns proposed by design firm Big Active. Drawing on clackety railway departure boards, the concept was that each time a new track began, the display on the album icon would flip to its title.
The space allotted to album art may be a fraction of what it once was, but that just sets the bar higher. If musicians can continue to innovate in the digital age, then designers must take up the challenge of the minimalist thumbnail.
—Steven Heller (sheller@sva.edu) is cochair of the MFA Designer as Author program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. His Web site is at hellerbooks.com.
When General Motors unveiled the Chevrolet Volt concept car in 2007, the response was near fanatical. The company had a potential hit on its hands. Which created a problem.
The Volt was radical, a bona fide technological leap forward for the stodgy Detroit company with a rep for being stuck in the 1970s. The primarily electric vehicle would go 40 miles on a wall charge, then a gasoline engine would kick in to recharge the lithium-ion batteries, eliminating the range anxiety that makes EVs such a tough sell in our sprawling home of the brave. Unlike most other electrics, it was a looker, too.
1 // Front and Hood
The concept's elongated hood looked slick but wasn't. Designer Bob Boniface and his team were able to shorten the Volt's prominent nose after engineers compressed the layout of the engine and electric motor.
2 // Curved Roof
Chevy had to raise the roof to make the interior usable; it added a curve so that the additional height wouldn't create too much drag.
3 // Tail
Sharpening the rounded edges encouraged air to flow more cleanly over the production version.
Unfortunately, it was about as aerodynamic as a split-level ranch. "It would've done better in the wind tunnel if we'd rolled it in backward," GM vice chair Bob Lutz quipped at the time.
The constraint:Redesign a car to be aerodynamic without sacrificing its crowd-pleasing shape.
The solution:1,000 hours in a wind tunnel.
In production:Late 2010
Top speed:100 MPH
Charge time:8 hours (120-volt outlet)
An aerodynamic shape was essential for maximum efficiency: It requires less energy to propel a streamlined car. But the Volt was designed to wow crowds, not slice through the air; there was no guarantee that it would ever see production. "Aerodynamics was not a consideration," GM design chief Bob Boniface says. The Volt generated so much buzz, though, that GM knew it had to make the auto work—without sacrificing the distinctive look fans loved. Boniface knew some things would have to change. He insisted, however, on preserving the wide stance that gives the sedan its aggressive bearing, the aquiline headlamps and taillights, and the distinctive crease—designers call it a character line—along the side. "Those were nonnegotiable," he says.
Boniface and his team replaced the flat roof with a higher, curved one that added more headroom without screwing up aerodynamics. They smoothed the front end so it slipped through the air instead of slapping it like a battering ram, and they shortened the hood by compacting the layout of the engine and electric motor to reduce drag. The round edges of the concept's tail were sharpened to prevent air currents from swirling into efficiency-robbing vortices. Smaller modifications—a higher rear spoiler with a lip, a vertical blade at either end of the rear bumper, and a tweak to the way the mirrors attach to the doors—all added up to big improvements.
Every alteration meant a trip to the wind tunnel, where the Volt spent more than 1,000 hours. "We took three times longer on this car than any other" in GM's 100-year history, says aerodynamics performance engineer Nina Tortosa. The production model, unveiled last September, improves upon the aerodynamics of the concept without losing its look—it's the slipperiest production car the company has ever designed.
Aerodynamics, Enzo Ferrari once said, is for people who can't build engines.
Il Commendatore may have had a point when he said that in 1957, a time when engines were big, gas was cheap and "carbon footprint" meant you'd stepped in motor oil. But aerodynamics is paramount today as automakers scramble to increase fuel efficiency and reduce emissions without building cars only a circus clown could love.
Maximizing aerodynamic efficiency will only grow more important, particularly as hybrids and electric cars become increasingly common, because a car that slices the wind cleanly requires less energy to propel it. For that reason, automakers have been trying to cheat the wind since the earliest days of the automobile.
Here's a look at Wired's favorite aerodynamic cars.
Left: One of the most aerodynamic cars ever built wasn't designed by engineers at an auto company, but by students at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. It's called Luna, it's a solar race car and it's got a supersleek drag coefficient, or Cd, of just 0.07. This particular car won the World Solar Challenge in 2007, marking the school's fourth consecutive win.
:
The 1952 Fiat Turbina was the first European car powered by a turbine, and it was for 30 years one of the most aerodynamic cars ever built. Yeah, it was a concept car and so it never saw production, but that didn't make its Cd of 0.14 any less impressive — even if it looks like something Evel Knievel would have driven.
:
Maximizing aerodynamic efficiency was the first, second and third priorities Aptera Motors had for the 2e. The three-wheeled, electric two-seater has a shot at winning the Progressive Automotive X-Prize race to build the first production car to exceed 100 mpg. With a Cd of 0.15, the 2e will be the most aerodynamic production car on the road when it starts rolling off an assembly line in October.
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VW designed the bullet-shaped One-Liter concept, unveiled in 2002, for maximum fuel economy, so aerodynamic efficiency was paramount. The car slices the wind like a scalpel thanks to a Cd of 0.159. It's also supermodel light, weighing just 660 pounds. One-Liter goes 100 kilometers on a liter of gas, hence the name. That translates to 235 mpg.
:
The EV1 was revolutionary in almost every regard, from its electric drivetrain to the amount of time it spent in the wind tunnel. Its wind-cheating shape — its Cd was just 0.195 — was essential to maximizing battery range. GM unceremoniously killed EV1 in 2003, but it lives on in the Chevrolet Volt and remains the most aerodynamic production car yet built.
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Everything about the Tatra T77a was cool, from its flowing lines to the V8 engine mounted way out in back. It was built in Prague, and it had a Cd of 0.212 — amazing even today but phenomenal when the car was built in 1936. All these years later it still looks better than anything in Chrysler's lineup.
:
Toyota's iconic Toyota Prius got a little sleeker for 2010. It's more wedgelike, with underbody panels, sharper corners and a longer spoiler bringing the Cd down to .25. The revisions make the Prius the most aerodynamic production vehicle currently available, and help boost the official EPA fuel economy figure to an average of 50 mpg. It still looks like a jellybean, though.
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The 1952 Alfa Romeo Disco Volante was a concept car built by the famed Italian automaker with help from the coachbuilder Touring. It was meant to be a race car, and though it didn't attain much success, it's still a gorgeous automobile. Disco Volante is Italian for "flying saucer," a suitable name given its shape and sleek Cd of .26.
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The Mercedes Benz S-Class cars always look like they're carved from a solid block of metal. They're also remarkably aerodynamic, with a Cd of .27 (for the 2000 to 2006 models, like this S320), proving aerodynamic cars don't have to look like jellybeans.
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Never let it be said Swedes can't build sports cars. The 1970 Sonnet III, also known as the 97, was a nimble little — and we mean little — car. It wasn't very quick, needing almost 13 seconds to hit 60 mph, but it looked great and had a Cd of just .31. We love it, if only because more cars should have V4 engines.
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Go ahead and laugh. We'll wait. Finished? The AMC Pacer was the laughingstock of Detroit's malaise-era cars, but it was pretty slick in the wind tunnel. It's got a Cd of 0.32, making it more aerodynamic than the Lamborghini Murcielago, Ferrari F430 and the Aston Martin DB9. Of course, the designers of those cars sacrificed aerodynamic efficiency to minimize lift, a tradeoff you don't have to make with a Pacer.
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Yes, it's an SUV. Yes, it's ugly. And, yes, the 2004 Dodge Durango may not be quick, either. But it's pretty slick. With a Cd of 0.39, it slices the wind more efficiently than a Lamborghini Countach or a Dodge Viper. But even scissor doors and V10 engine couldn't make the Durango cool.
March 10: It's the anniversary of significant scientific and technical accomplishments by two of the greatest U.S. presidents. Thomas Jefferson read a scientific paper in 1797 that's considered the first American contribution to vertebrate paleontology. Fifty-two years later, Abraham Lincoln filed for a patent, starting a process that would make him the only U.S. president to patent an invention.
1797: Much like W.C. Fields in a later century, Jefferson did not want to be in Philadelphia. After serving as the first secretary of state under President George Washington, he had returned to Monticello in 1793. But when Washington declined to run for a third term in 1796, the Republican (later Democratic-Republican) Party drafted him to run against Federalist John Adams. Jefferson came in second and — under the system then in place — became vice president.
So Jefferson made the difficult 10-day journey to the capital — then in Philadelphia — to be sworn in on March 4 and preside over the Senate. Philadelphia, however, had a silver lining. Jefferson's book, Notes on the State of Virginia had won him the admiration of American scholars, and they had elected him president of the American Philosophical Society, a distinguished association founded by Ben Franklin and others in 1745.
For his presidential address to the group on March 10, the new vice president of the United States read a paper, "A Memoir on the Discovery of Certain Bones of a Quadruped of the Clawed Kind in the Western Parts of Virginia." The bones belonged to an extinct, ox-sized, clawed sloth of the genus Megalonyx.
Jefferson's paper was published in 1799 in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society Held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge, Vol. IV. A French naturalist in 1822 assigned the sloth the name Megalonyx jeffersoni.
Jefferson remained as president of the Philosophical Society until 1815, during which time he served one term as vice president of the United States and, oh yeah, two terms as president. When President Jefferson enlisted Lewis and Clark in 1803 to explore the Louisiana Purchase, he made sure their Corps of Discovery was trained and equipped to make scientific observations.
The Sage of Monticello was also an architect and inventor. He designed his home at Monticello and the original campus of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville and also supervised design of the Virginia state capitol at Richmond. As a talented inventor, he came up with a wheel-shaped mechanical cypher-decypher machine, automatic double doors, and improvements to plows, sundials, clocks, beds, bookstands and several devices that copied writing.
Despite all this, and despite his position on the board that oversaw the first U.S. patent law, Jefferson held no patents himself. He was an open source kind of guy and believed it necessary for inventors to be rewarded, but distrusted a system that could be abused to keep needed innovations from reaching public use.
President John F. Kennedy paid tribute to his predecessor in 1962 when he held a White House dinner honoring all 49 living U.S. Nobel Prize recipients. He told the august assemblage, "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House — with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
Jefferson's own selection of just three things to list on his tomb reflect his core values. Notably omitting his presidency, they concentrate on liberty and learning:
Author of the Declaration of American Independence
Of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom
And Father of the University of Virginia.
1849: Abraham Lincoln was born and raised in what was then America's West. And he didn't have Jefferson's education or the privileges of a landed slaveholder. You might expect, therefore, that his tech contribution would be of a more mechanical, practical nature.
Mechanical, certainly. Practical, not quite.
Lincoln was known to be adept as a boatman who once engineered a stranded flatboat off a mill dam by shifting cargo and drilling a temporary hole to let out bilge water. As a boat passenger on another occasion, he observed a captain use planks and empty barrels to lift his stranded vessel off a river sandbar.
Lincoln's first political platform — as a candidate for the Illinois legislature in 1832 — paid considerable attention to river navigation. He lost that election but eventually served a term in the U.S. Congress from 1847 to 1849. It was during that term that he was inspired by watching the talented captain use flotation to free his stranded boat.
Lincoln set to work to design a system of inflatable india-rubber cloth bags that, theoretically, could be built into or added to any boat. It was a complex arrangement of ropes, pulleys, spars and bags. His patent application called it
a new and improved manner of combining adjustable buoyant air chambers with a steamboat or other vessel for the purpose of enabling their draught of water to be readily lessened to enable them to pass over bars, or through shallow water, without discharging their cargoes.
Lincoln filed for the patent March 10, 1849, a week after completing his term as congressman.
Patent 6,469, which the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office says is the only one held by an American president, was issued to
Lincoln on May 22, 1849. He built a scale model with the help of a local mechanic, but Lincoln's law partner William Herndon said, "The invention was never applied to any vessel, so far as I ever learned."
Nonetheless, a dozen years later, inventor Lincoln would be steering the nation through treacherous shoals.
...A 16-by 10.875-inch rectangle containing precisely 174 square inches of possibility, made from two sheets of paper glued and bound together. Legendary magazine art director and Pentagram partner D. J. Stout calls the science of filling this box with artful compositions of type and images "variations on a rectangle." That is, in any given issue of a magazine—this one, for example—subjects and stories will change, but as a designer, you're still dealing with the same ol' blank white box.
At Wired, our design team sees this constraint as our daily bread. On every editorial page, we use words and pictures to overcome the particular restrictions of paper and ink: We can't animate the infographics (yet). We can't embed video or voice-over (yet). We can't add sound effects or music (yet). But for all that we can't do in this static medium, we find enlightenment and wonder in its possibilities. This is a belief most designers share. In fact, the worst thing a designer can hear is an offhand "Just do whatever you want." That's because designers understand the power of limits. Constraint offers an unparalleled opportunity for growth and innovation.
Think of a young tree, a sapling. With water and sunshine, it can grow tall and strong. But include some careful pruning early in its development—removing low-hanging branches—and the tree will grow taller, stronger, faster. It won't waste precious resources on growth that doesn't serve its ultimate purpose. The same principle applies to design. Given fewer resources, you have to make better decisions.
For proof, just consider these cultural and technological high points of the last century: Piet Mondrian helped usher in modernism by limiting himself to 90-degree angles and primary colors. Miles Davis conceived Kind of Blue without the use of a single chord. More recently, the very iPhone on which you listen to Davis' landmark album is a one-buttoned example of restraint in pursuit of an ideal, while the sublimely simple Google homepage is forever limited to 28 words.
The idea of operating within constraints—of making more with less—is especially relevant these days. From Wall Street to Detroit to Washington, the lack of limits has proven to be a false freedom. With all the economic gloom, you might not be blamed for feeling that the boundless American frontier seems a little less expansive. But design teaches us that this is our hour of opportunity. In the following pages, we explore a few of our favorite constraints. In each case, the imposition of limits doesn't stifle creativity—it enables it.
NVIDIA is known primarily for their PC graphics cards, but they’ve been in the news recently both for the expansion of their CUDA and PhysX initiatives as well as (allegedly) developing a CPU to challenge Intel and AMD. They’ve been proponents of parallel processing for quite a while, naturally, and have made some investments in companies like MotionDSP and Elemental Technologies, both of which are developing software that really leverages the GPU.
The success of these investments is difficult to measure (NVIDIA’s been hit as hard as the other semiconductor-related companies, losing 50% of its revenue), but it’s hard to argue with the fact that parallel computing is where practically the entire industry is heading. In light of this, NVIDIA has started what they’re calling the GPU Ventures Program, by which they hope to “identify, support and invest” in companies that are working on GPU-based computing applications. A ton of GPU-accelerated (or simply parallel-ready) applications can be found here at the Cuda website, including image manipulation, physics simulation, and advanced computation.
They’re hoping to draw some of the best startups and the minds within to NVIDIA as a sort of parallel processing father figure. A couple million here, maybe a peek at the new hardware there, and they’ve got themselves a pretty solid partner. I talked with Jeff Herbst, VP of business development there, who outlined the idea of it. It’s very much an investment thing and not some sort of “GPU App Store.” They’re hoping that VCs might like to get in early on what NVIDIA thinks is the next phase of computing. Personally, I was already convinced by the kind of interesting work being done by their partners already, but Mr. Herbst has been talking with many more companies and is planning on expanding their Emerging Companies Summit this fall.
The site is just launching today (any moment now…), and hopefully it’ll be populated with the kinds of hot young startups that tech investors love to just run their hands over.
Global mobile payments network Paymo and social network hi5 have partnered to let members in 24 countries use their mobile phones to purchase hi5 Coins, hi5’s virtual currency. Countries where Paymo will be made available to hi5 users include the U.S., Canada, France, Hong Kong, Thailand, Russia and Colombia.
Paymo’s mobile payment system doesn’t require users to have a credit card or bank account. Users enter their cell phone number on the site, reply to a Paymo text message and then all virtual charges on hi5 are automatically charged to the user’s monthly cell phone bill. It’s pretty easy and similar to UK mobile payments service, Zong. Paymo says that over 75 percent of the online community worldwide does not have a credit card but 3 billion consumers own a mobile phone. With that in mind, the company is hoping their system, which avoids credit cards or bank accounts, will take off.
Unlike some of its competitors, such as Zong and Mobillcash, whose systems are limited to certain regional areas, Paymo can be accessed in 45 markets around the globe, enabling mobile payments in Europe, North and South America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Paymo recently expanded service in the U.S. after striking deals with mobile carriers AT&T, T-Mobile and Virgin Mobile to allow users to make online purchases using their phone.
Mobile payment systems are gaining traction from social networks, but the issue of costly fees charged by mobile carriers to the payment systems (which are then passed on to the consumer) remains a serious problem. Paymo says that it typically charges users a transaction fee of 10% of the purchase price. The company adds that different cell phone carriers charge varying fees but most are in a range of 20% to 40% of the purchase price, which is a pretty large amount in transaction fees. As we said in our earlier analysis, this could pose a significant roadblock to these types of services, which channel user payments through mobile carriers. It appears that it would be hard to sustain these fees in the long term when transaction charges could be drastically decreased if payment networks accepted credit card or bank account payments. Still, with such a vast coverage area of the world, Paymo appears to be ahead of some of the more regional services. Paymo says that Facebook, which has a widespread international following, would be the next partner it hopes to land in the social network space.
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Wristwatch cell phones, for whatever reason, seem really difficult to do correctly. Between problems with the interface, functionality, or just plain design, phone watches just don’t seem to blow. Despite this fact (or maybe because of it) Hyundai has decided to try again with their latest, the provocatively named MB-910.
It’s actually not bad. It’s a tri-band GSM/GPRS phone with about a 3 hour talk time, and Bluetooth. You can’t make video calls on it, but the screen will display SMS and MMS, and do video playback. It’s not going to be available in the US at first, only in the UK and will cost roughly $275 when it’s released sometime in the month of Q2bruary.
David Gerard writes "The Microsoft Certified Partner model is: an MCP buys contracts from Microsoft and sells them to businesses as a three-year timed contract, payable in annual installments. Iceland's economy has collapsed, so 1500 businesses have gone bankrupt and aren't paying the fees any more. But Microsoft has told the MCPs: 'Our deal was with you, not them. Pay up.' The MCPs that don't go bankrupt in turn are moving headlong to Free Software, taking most of the country with them. (Warning: link contains strong language and vivid imagery.)"
If you’re an Android dev freak, it’s time to update that sucker “1.0″ nonsense you’re rolling with. Girls flip when they see you rock the 1.1, I’m telling you. It’s got the voice search support, fixes a bunch of bugs, and now you can even see paid apps in the Marketplace! Player! That is off the hook for rook!
Seriously though, it’s an important update for anybody doing work with Android. Imagine making a sweet app, testing it on your dev phone, and then not being able to see it in the Marketplace. You can still buy a Dev Phone if you’re into that, and if you’ve already got one you probably know your way around the thing enough to install it.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
If you’re an Android dev freak, it’s time to update that sucker “1.0″ nonsense you’re rolling with. Girls flip when they see you rock the 1.1, I’m telling you. It’s got the voice search support, fixes a bunch of bugs, and now you can even see paid apps in the Marketplace! Player! That is off the hook for rook!
Seriously though, it’s an important update for anybody doing work with Android. Imagine making a sweet app, testing it on your dev phone, and then not being able to see it in the Marketplace. You can still buy a Dev Phone if you’re into that, and if you’ve already got one you probably know your way around the thing enough to install it.
AFP - Google has confirmed that a software bug exposed documents thought to be privately stored in the Internet giant's online Docs application service.
We want you to send us pictures of your coolest case mod, your most creative lighting job, your best water cooling set up, or whatever else. Send it in and we’ll try to select at least one each week to do a write-up about and interview the creator.
I’m a big fan of case modding, and I’d love to see more of what you creative people can do. I’d love to find the next “BenHeck” modder out there. And who knows, maybe this will help you to find a sponsor. So if you’d like to be featured on CrunchGear, drop an email to casemod@crunchgear.com and we’ll take a look at what you’ve got.
Healthcare providers in South Florida say people are putting off trips to the doctor's office as the recession deepens.
The Miami Herald said anecdotal evidence from dozens of healthcare providers suggests even people who still have jobs are thinking twice about elective procedures and copays.
''Patients are spending less, no question about it,'' primary care doctor Bernd Wollschlaeger told the newspaper. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 10 Mar 2009 | 2:12 am
Google chief Eric Schmidt said this weekend in a interview with Charlie Rose that his company is not interested in buying Twitter, which he described as a “poor man’s email system,”claiming the price is too high.
I shouldn’t talk about specific acquisitions. We’re unlikely to buy anything in the short term, partly because I think prices are still high. And it’s unfortunate I think we’re in the middle of a cycle. Google is generating a lot of cash. And so we keep that cash in extremely secure banks.
Not everyone is buying it however. Schmidt professed the same sentiment back in 2006 when asked if Google was going to buy YouTube, then turned around and bought the popular video service for $1.65 billion. However it doesn’t appear that Twitter particularly wants to be bought. They recently turned down a $500 million offer from Facebook.
It does beg the question what would Google do with Twitter anyway? Would they integrate Google Ads in your tweets, finally giving Twitter a true business plan? Then again, if they did buy the service, they might not make any major changes like when they bought YouTube. We’ll keep an eye out and let you know more as it happens.
Is it coming to this? Are touchscreen phones going to be the new default, the way clamshells have been for years and candybars were before that? If the specs and pricing get much lower, it’ll be easier to get Grandma some low-end Touchmaster than a basic Moto flip phone. In any case, Samsung’s newest touchscreen offerings are pretty much what you’d expect.
Both phones sport Samsung’s TouchWiz interface, and both have a couple drops of internal memories and MicroSD up to 8GB. They’ll play back videos of various formats, but the screens aren’t so hot and you’d burn through your battery. They also both have a 3-megapixel camera with smile recognition, and built-in Shazam support for their music player. Both are quadband and support Bluetooth 2.1. “Full Internet browsing support” is in the same sentence as “mobile Internet experiences,” so I can’t tell you whether it’s got a real browser or not. With a touchscreen phone I should hope so.
The S5600 is the slightly higher-end model in this case. It supports HSPDA, has a little more internal memory (80MB vs 50MB). Its screen is slightly smaller, though, at 2.8″ and 240×320 vs. the S5230’s 3″ 240×400. Pricing isn’t available yet, nor carrier information.
They also both have a feature I haven’t heard about called “Gesture Lock,” which allows you to wake the phone and go directly to a menu or other item depending on the gesture you draw. Sounds like a great idea to me, I wish I had it on my G1.
Is it coming to this? Are touchscreen phones going to be the new default, the way clamshells have been for years and candybars were before that? If the specs and pricing get much lower, it’ll be easier to get Grandma some low-end Touchmaster than a basic Moto flip phone. In any case, Samsung’s newest touchscreen offerings are pretty much what you’d expect.
Both phones sport Samsung’s TouchWiz interface, and both have a couple drops of internal memories and MicroSD up to 8GB. They’ll play back videos of various formats, but the screens aren’t so hot and you’d burn through your battery. They also both have a 3-megapixel camera with smile recognition, and built-in Shazam support for their music player. Both are quadband and support Bluetooth 2.1. “Full Internet browsing support” is in the same sentence as “mobile Internet experiences,” so I can’t tell you whether it’s got a real browser or not. With a touchscreen phone I should hope so.
The S5600 is the slightly higher-end model in this case. It supports HSPDA, has a little more internal memory (80MB vs 50MB). Its screen is slightly smaller, though, at 2.8″ and 240×320 vs. the S5230’s 3″ 240×400. Pricing isn’t available yet, nor carrier information.
They also both have a feature I haven’t heard about called “Gesture Lock,” which allows you to wake the phone and go directly to a menu or other item depending on the gesture you draw. Sounds like a great idea to me, I wish I had it on my G1.
Crunch Network: TechCrunchobsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
Image Caption: A colony of embryonic stem cells, from the H9 cell line (NIH code: WA09). Viewed at 10X with Carl Zeiss Axiovert scope. Courtesy Wikipedia Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 10 Mar 2009 | 2:00 am
China is working on plans to send a manned submersible to what it says would be an unprecedented depth of 23,000 feet below the ocean's surface, officials say.
Sun Zhihui, director of the State Oceanic Administration, said Monday the deep-sea vehicle was built last year and testing would begin this year, Xinhua reported. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 10 Mar 2009 | 1:56 am
Glyn Moody writes "Not content with snooping on all Internet activity, the UK government now wants to introduce changes to the contentious EU Telecoms Package, which will kill net neutrality in the EU: 'Amendments to the Telecoms Package circulated in Brussels by the UK government, seek to cross out users' rights to access and distribute Internet content and services. And they want to replace it with a "principle" that users can be told not only the conditions for access, but also the conditions for the use of applications and services. The amendments, if carried, would reverse the principle of end-to-end connectivity which has underpinned not only the Internet, but also European telecommunications policy, to date.' To add to the irony, an accompanying text cuts and pastes from Wikipedia, without attribution."
There’s something wrong with CBS Radio’s press release announcing the launch, complete with silly “countdown,” of 92.3 Now FM in New York City, a contemporary hit radio station that will replace K-Rock on Wednesday, March 11, at 5:00pm. (Contemporary hit radio, in plain English, means garbage pop songs, distinguished by their use of auto-tune and use of lowest-common-denominator song-writing.) CBS Radio Senior Vice-President of Something or Other, Don Bouloukos, is quoted in the release as saying, “Our assets in the country’s No. 1 market include among them the best known brands in the business. From the most listened to news and sports stations in the country, to the classic sounds of WCBS FM and the adult contemporary styling of Fresh 102.7, CBS RADIO offers something for everyone in the market – including young adults who are using the radio to discover today’s most popular music as featured on 92.3 NOW FM.” [Emphasis added, obviously.] And that, friends, is why the radio business, as we know it, is truly doomed. No, Mr. Bouloukos, young people are not turning on their radio to discover new music; they’re certainly not sticking around through the commercials to listen to new music on a radio station. No, sir, that’s why the Internet is for, and that’s why your business has no future.
Some background information is needed here. For only one more day, 92.3 FM in New York City will be known as K-Rock, a typical rock station that you can find in any city in the U.S. If you can think of a rock song from the past 20 years, odds are, the station will play it. Twenty times per day. The latest ratings put the station at 21st place, one spot higher than a gospel station—there’s people who listen to gospel music in New York City?—and right behind a Univision-owned Latin Rhythm station. K-Rock, as a whole, isn’t doing too well. In fact, it’s doing so poorly that CBS Radio decided it was necessary to completely flip formats. Out with the Green Day and in with the Beyoncé! Opie and Anthony, a show I’ve enjoyed for several years now, was let go, according to Opie’s Twitter. It, apparently, doesn’t fit in with the station’s new direction. Fair enough, it’s for CBS Radio to decide if the show is relevant to the demographics it’s now targeting.
So CBS Radio in particular, and commercial radio in general, besieged by scary new technologies—your Imeems, Pandoras, iTunes(es?), YouTube, BitTorrents, iPhones, etc.—decides that rock doesn’t cut it anymore, and that a switch to CHR was in order. (There’s already another CHR station in New York, a fact CBS Radio decided to spin by saying that New Yorkers now, for the first time, have a choice of which frequency they wish to hear that Taylor Swift song. (As if people care what station they’re listening to a song on, provided they’re tuning in at all.) The thinking here, one can only assume, is that radio companies feel that station formats like rock, classic rock and whatever else—radio formats with large back catalogues—don’t work in an iPod world. Why pay a DJ to spin Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for the millionth time when a good chunk of your potential audience already has the song on their iPhone (or other music-playing cellphone) or iPod (or other portable media player)? Better to program a music station with NEW! HIT! music. That way there’s less of a chance of your audience having the song on their iPod, and there’s less of a chance of your audience saying, “Good God, again they’re playing [this song]! Time to listen to something else!”
We now turn to Mr. Bouloukos’ comment, that young people—most of you guys are young people, I would guess!—are “using the radio to discover today’s most popular music.” First off, that wording is just wrong. If a song is already popular—remember, 92.3 Now will only only play “hit music”—then the odds are that people have already heard it before; in other words, hit music is already popular! A song becomes popular when a lot of people know it, and enjoy it. If a song is popular, then people aren’t, by definition, “discovering” it! (Amateur Hour at CBS Radio, apparently.) Even giving Mr. Bouloukos the benefit of the doubt, that what he meant to say is that people are using radio to discover new music… well, good luck bro. I’d like to find the last 17-year-old in America who is using commercial radio as his primary source of new music. I mean, it’s not like these kids are using THE INTERNET to find new music, right? MySpace Music, music blogs like Hype Machine, sites like Imeem and YouTube, etc. (Then these kids turn around and buy said music either directly from the band’s Web site, or use iTunes or, yes, download it “from BitTorrent.” (BitTorrent is an Internet protocol; you don’t download things “from it.”)
You wanna know how I “discovered” Buraka Som Sistema, this ridiculous electronic group from Portugal? (Yes, I readily admit that my tastes in music are a little on the unusual side, at least by American standards.) On What.cd, a popular BitTorrent site, I was reading the profile of M.I.A., the girl who sings all those songs in Slumdog Millionaire. There’s a little related artists diagram, and one link leads to Buraka Som Sistem. I grab their latest album and say to myself, “holy smokes this is amazing.” (My favorite song of theirs happens to be “Yah! (The Count and Sinden Remix)”.) These guys are coming to New York in May, so barring some sort of catastrophe, I will be there and I will enjoy every last minute of it.
Never mind that commercial radio in New York City will never play Buraka Som Sistem!
Let’s try another example of how people discover new music in the year 2009. Opie, from the aforementioned Opie and Anthony show, had tweeted—there’s this thing called Twitter, CBS Radio, that I’m sure you’ll try to use before the year is out—a picture of a couple of CDs he had in his car. One of them was MGMT, an indie rock band that I had never heard of till then. Before you know it, hey, I’m now a fan of MGMT. What introduced me to this band? Nope, not crusty old commercial radio, but Twitter, a largely rubbish Web 2.0 site that, for all its faults, lets people talk nonsense rather effectively. One Tweet later, I now have another band to see when they swing by New York City.
CBS Radio, that is how people are “discovering” new music in the year 2009. They’re not listening to the radio, sitting through commercials, waiting for the marble-mouthed DJ to say, “Hey, here’s [Cool New Band].” Yes, we know. We heard about [Cool New Band] two weeks ago via Twitter/Facebook/MySpace Music/whatever. Thanks for trying to remain relevant, though!
Now, I still think radio, as a medium, isn’t dead yet. Plenty of people listen to talk radio, whether it’s of the comedy variety à la Opie and Anthony, of the political variety à la Hannity or Rush, or of the sports variety. (My God does sports radio delve into minutia!) Radio is great for news, too: nothing wrong with listening to the headlines while you’re stuck in traffic on the BQE. But this idea that CBS Radio, and others, cling to, that commercial music radio has a future, that people still seek out commercial radio to listen to new music, is laughably outdated.
I’d like to tell you that some awesome camera manufacturer has made a point-and-shoot type camera with a replaceable lens element. But that wouldn’t just be a lie, it’d a damned lie. If you ask, Canon or Pentax would probably say it’s impossible. Still, hackerish types around the world won’t let something like that get in their way! One such character found himself in possession of a busted Canon SD750, and figured he might as well take a shot at replacing the lens if he was going to have to chuck it anyway.
I feel I should say that to do this is essentially to point a loaded gun at your camera and pull the trigger. You should be prepared to utterly destroy it from the moment you pick up the screwdriver.
Klipsch makes some pretty good audio equipment. Only thing is, you needed a loan akin to home mortgage just to get some of these sonically sweet suckers. Not anymore. Klipsch is feeling the credit crunch/ economic freefall/ end of times too. And it's doing something about it. The audio company's newest home theater in a box, the HD 500, actually delivers decent surround sound despite costing a mere six Benjo-s. Just make sure you enjoy your tunes in a small room. From reviwer Rachel Cericola:
After an easy setup, we cranked up tunes ranging from punk rock to
classical jazz. Virtually every genre of music we tossed at the system
had clear tonal balance, distinct separation, and plenty of window
rattling bass. However, it was when we started screening films that
these noisemakers really shined.
During the Mark II test sequence in Iron Man, it literally sounded like
Robert Downy Jr. was jetting around the living room. An agonizing
screening of Beverly Hills Chihuahua yielded yelps from onscreen
pooches that actually scared the crap out of my dog. Special shout out:
the center-channel speaker. While the rest of the room was shaking
during Transporter 3, this boom box's dual woofers delivered
crystal-clear sound -- even when we didn't necessarily want to hear
Jason Statham awkwardly deliver his dialogue.
A chimpanzee in a Swedish zoo has been found to fashion concrete discs and calmly stockpile them for later assaults on visitors, astounding animal experts.
New Scientist reported Monday that while there have been previous claims of animals looking ahead, what sets Santino, a 30-year-old chimp at Zuruvik zoo, apart is his demeanor.
The chimp has, without exception, been calm during gathering or manufacture of the ammunition, in contrast to the typically aroused state (when he throws the rocks), Mathias Osvath of the University in Lund said.
Santino, it seems, goes about his stockpiling in a deliberate manner, not in an emotional state as previously noted in other apes.
Nothing like it has as yet been reported from the wild, nor from any captive chimpanzees, Thomas Suddendorf of the University of Queensland in Australia said. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 10 Mar 2009 | 1:02 am
Last month I wrote about a lawsuit filed by major record label EMI against Seeqpod, the questionably-legal free streaming music site. The suit isn’t Seeqpod’s first (Warner sued them last year), but it is notable for taking the music industry’s war against the web to a new low. Beyond naming a number of Seeqpod executives as part of the suit, EMI also decided to sue a hapless third party developer named Ryan Sit, who happened to use the Seeqpod API in one of his projects. Now Sit is being forced to shut down one of his projects - a lifestreaming service dubbed Swurl that launched last summer.
I’ll leave the legality of Seeqpod for the courts to decide (the site doesn’t actually host any music files - it finds them scattered on pages across the web and streams them into its media player). But as I wrote last month, its case against Ryan Sit is ridiculous. Sit is a prolific developer who uses many APIs from different web services, and used Seeqpod’s API just as dozens of similar sites have before him. Suing him sets a precedent that could make developers weary of using any API, for fear that the service they’re tapping into could be doing something potentially illegal.
Swurl allowed users to generate their own personal blogs using data imported from other web-based services. Sit acknowledges that the site, which he cofounded with Jonathan Neddenriep, didn’t receive as much traction as they’d hoped. But the more immediate reason for the shutdown is the lawsuit. Pet projects tend to become less fun when you’ve got a rabid team of lawyers gunning for you.
Here’s the notice that now greets users on Swurl:
Hello Swurlers,
We built Swurl as two guys doing something we love in our spare time.
Unfortunately, due to the pressures of our day jobs and other
distractions, we can no longer support or maintain the service at the
level that we think our users deserve.
Building Swurl has been a great experience for us. We want to thank
all of the folks that used Swurl as a way to document their lives
online and share with their friends and families. Thanks a bunch to
those users that gave us lots of valuable feedback and encouragement.
Thanks,
Ryan & Jonathan
PS You can also check out our other work at: http://picclick.com
http://www.optinnow.org
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Facebook has temporarily lost millions of photos hosted on the wildly popular social networking site. Many users logged on today to find many of their photos replaced with a question mark. Facebook estimated that about 10 to 15 percent of all photos were affected by the outage. It turns out to be a storage problem and Facebook is quickly working on the restoration of the lost pics. They assure users that the outage is only temporarily and the photos are not permenantly lost. The problem seemed to occur after the company ran a routine software upgrade over the weekend. Several of Facebook’s hard drives that house the photos failed at the same time.
You can check the blog section of Facebook to stay up to date on the status of the problem or simply recheck your missing photos to see if they have been restored. As a precaution, you should always keep another copy on file of any photos that you post on Facebook.
supermehra writes "How do you move 300 desktops, locked down with Windows ADS Group Policies (GPO), over to Ubuntu desktop? We have tried Centrify, Likewise, Gnome Gconf, and the like. Of course, we evaluated SuSe Desktop Enterprise and RedHat Desktop. Samba 4.0 promises the server side, however nothing for desktop lockdown. And while gnome gconf does offer promise, no real tools for remotely managing 300 desktops running gnome + gconf exist. All the options listed above are expensive, in fact so expensive that it's cheaper to leave M$ on! So while we've figured out the Office suite, email client, browser, VPN, drawing tools, and pretty much everything else, there seems to be no reasonable, open source alternative to locking down Linux terminals to comply with company policies. We're not looking for kiosk mode — we're looking for IT policy enforcement across the enterprise. Any ideas ladies & gentlemen?"
FROM APPLETELL - Want to win a Podium Stand or an Xbox 360? Listen to this week’s Appletellcast to find out how. While you’re listening, you’ll also learn about GPS on the iPhone, and can help us figure out where the free iPhone apps have gone. MORE »
Barack Obama issued a wide-ranging memorandum today calling for a new era of "scientific integrity" in the federal government, another sign that he's serious about making science-based decisions. But it might not be always be easy to follow the scientific line on hot-button topics.
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- A new language from MIT's Media Lab makes it easy for kids to develop programs that interact with things in the real world: Pencils, paper, water, and even vegetables.
Called Scratch, it's not so much a procedural language as an environment for creating interactive animations, annotated stories, slideshows, prototypes and games. It's designed to be as simple to use as possible, so kids as young as 8 can get started building their own animations with minimal preparation.
"Our design philosophy is, don't design something for kids that you don't also find engaging and interesting," says Jay Silver, one of the researchers who created Scratch. Silver works in the Media Lab's "Lifelong Kindergarten" group. So it's not surprising that the environment is fun for adults, too. At the Emerging Technology conference here Monday, a roomful of grownups were playing with the program, creating bouncing kitties and a simple golf game.
To create programs in Scratch, you simply drop "sprites" onto a canvas. You can then attach actions to the sprites in sequence, making them move, change color, bounce off other objects on the canvas, and make sounds. The software has been available since mid-2007, although the MIT crew released a new version, 1.3.1, in February 2009.
Scratch now comes preloaded on all XO laptops sold by the One Laptop per Child project.
Scratch comes ready to interoperate with an external sensor kit called a PicoBoard. This $50 circuit board includes a microcontroller, a button, a slider, a light sensor, a microphone, and four ports for measuring the resistance of circuits. It connects to a computer using a serial-to-USB cable, and immediately starts delivering data that can be used by Scratch programs.
For instance, a sprite can be made to grow or shrink based on the electrical resistance of a circuit connected to one of the PicoBoard's ports. Silver demonstrated the kit by attaching one lead to a pushpin stuck into a #2 pencil, and the other lead to a line he scribbled on a piece of hotel note paper. Because graphite is somewhat conductive, touching the tip of the pencil to the line completed a circuit. The Scratch software was able to read the resistance of that circuit and make a cartoon cat grow or shrink in proportion, depending on where on the line Silver placed the pencil.
Total programming time: About 20 seconds.
Other attendees at the Scratch session used the PicoBoard to control the behavior of a golf game, adjusting the power of the stroke based on what vegetable was used to complete the circuit between two alligator clips. A scallion was approximately equivalent to a 9-wood, one of the project members quipped.
Silver is also the instigator of Drawdio, a $20 kit that makes different musical tones based on the resistance of a circuit, enabling kids (or adults) to make music by touching conductive objects, water or each other.
The idea is to get kids to explore with the real world by translating one property (such as resistance) into another (sound) in a way that encourages fun and experimentation, says Silver.
"My projects are about exploring the urban environment and trusting yourself as a scientist," says Silver.
In addition to programming, Scratch also lets kids upload and share their projects through an online community at the Scratch website. The hope is that children will use the language to learn and interact with one another, forming clubs and learning the techniques of programming, mathematics and logic.
Scratch is available for Mac OS X and Windows, and can be downloaded for free at scratch.mit.edu.
This past weekend, a report from David Weinberger, the Harvard Law School fellow and sometimes Wired contributor, warned against a potentially shady customer service move from Verizon Wireless.
Apparently, the company was sending its customers long-winded, vague letters allowing them to 'opt out' of a personal data sharing agreement within forty five days. The plan was quickly seen as an aggressive Verizon move to share customer's personal information including 'services purchased (including specific calls you make and receive), billing info, technical info and location info,' with 'affiliates, agents and parent companies.'
To many, this was Verizon's quick move to make money off of selling people's personal data to outside companies. But in a statement over the weekend, the company noted that this data sharing was 'designed for intra-carrier communication only,' between Verizon and Vodafone (the owners of Verizon Wireless), and wouldn't be shared with outside partners, like Microsoft.
That makes the issue a bit more clear and less Big Brother-y but it is no less inflammatory. The main problem is that Verizon failed to offer customers an easy-to-find, clear avenue to either accept or deny that request.
And for people who don't receive paper mail, this proved to be even harder: It turns out many people logged into their Verizon account online to find a direct link to the agreement, but had to go through several different channels to find the correct one. When the link was finally found, labeled 'Customer Proprietary Network Information Notice,' it was 'not available' and therefore useless.
Verizon followed up with Weinberger and told him to follow this protocol: Go to go the My Profile tab in the My Verizon account, then click on Phone Controls, and that's where the correct link is located where the customer can opt-out (or not).
We recommend people follow Dr. Weinberger's lead and opt out of this agreement, unless you want to receive the vague-sounding 'bundles that provide home and wireless services' that Verizon mentions in its blog.
Perhaps next time, companies like Verizon will be a bit more clear about their intent (and the specific steps involved) before sending out a company-wide opt-out clause.
Several sources are reporting that in spite of LHC hype, Fermilab's Tevatron has produced another feat for scientific discovery. Currently the world's most powerful operating particle accelerator, the Tevatron has allowed researchers to observe a rare single Top Quark. "Previously, top quarks had only been observed when produced by the strong nuclear force. That interaction leads to the production of pairs of top quarks. The production of single top quarks, which involves the weak nuclear force and is harder to identify experimentally, has now been observed, almost 14 years to the day of the top quark discovery in 1995."
U2 and the ultra-cool, geek favorite Bono are all over the airwaves with the release of the band's latest album, No Line On The Horizon.
As the group gets ready to go on tour comes the news that the band may also be giving up on its long relationship with Apple. U2 has chosen BlackBerry maker Research in Motion as the main sponsor for its tour, says CNBC.
Apple and U2's relationship go back more than five years. Bono shared the stage with Apple CEO Steve Jobs in 2004 when the company introduced a special U2 branded edition of the iPod that included engraved autographs of each member of the band. U2, Universal Music Group (UMG) and Apple have also worked together to make the band's songs available on iTunes.
But now it looks like U2 is ready to move on. Bono is a partner in venture capital firm Elevation Partners, which has made a hefty investment in Palm. U2's latest tour is expected to start at about the same time that Palm launches its much anticipated new phone, the Palm Pre. And that probably could have dimmed U2's enthusiasm for Apple.
For RIM though, the partnership is a coup. It will lend a sheen of cool to the company's products and should improve the brand's visibility among a younger set of consumers. BlackBerry people, are you ready to get on your boots?
Oh dear, one endless, screwed-up global airline ride without Internet connectivity and when I finally manage to get online (looking right at the Spanish Steps in Rome–sweeeeet!), BoomTown finds that a new round o’ MicroHoo is apparently on again.
(In the immortal words of Michael Corleone–see video below–in the otherwise awful “Godfather: Part III”: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”)
Except, judging from exactly how loud the loudmouthed chatter from a trio of Microsoft execs has become–the latest being COO Kevin Turner–it’s actually not.
Because if there were real and substantial talks going on right now between Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) about a new deal to partner, of course, you likely would not hear a peep from them.
Nonetheless, Turner is the third exec from the software giant to mention that Microsoft would love to play let’s-make-a-deal with Yahoo–not to necessarily go back and swallow it whole, a deal that Yahoo would now do in a New York minute, but related to its search assets.
“We’ve certainly made her aware and the Yahoo! board aware that if they are ever interested in an opportunity to partner with them on search, we’d like to sit down and at least have the conversation. It has to make economic sense to both parties.”
Turner’s words come after similar sentiments were recently expressed by both Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell and the very-on-the-topic CEO Steve Ballmer.
We’ve seen this pubic tactic before, of course–actually, ever since Ballmer’s ill-fated attempt to take over Yahoo ended badly. Since then, he and others at Microsoft have not failed to either insult Yahoo’s prospects or say how very much it would like to do a deal with Yahoo.
The recent carrot approach, of course, is because Microsoft is now facing three important challenges.
Second, for all its efforts at hiring top search guns, spending heavily and generally declaring war on market leader Google (GOOG), Microsoft’s share has remained puny and static.
And third, it is facing a much different kind of Yahoo leader, who–while not necessarily as Web savvy as she should be–is not someone who is likely to be rolled or rattled as easily as former CEO Jerry Yang.
Because, as Bartz recently quipped–this woman likes to throw out the biz bromides more than Warren Buffett–at the Morgan Stanley Technology conference:
“I said this to Mr. Ballmer, I will not negotiate with you and 30,000 of my closest friends. I will negotiate privately….If something happens, you will know about it then.”
Still, despite Bartz’s cool demeanor, she and Ballmer will surely soon–if they have not already, that is–be meeting in some “secret” airplane hangar or other remote place dealmakers like to reconnoiter.
(Here’s a we-have-a-lot-in-common opening chit-chat topic: How snarky/rude/pushy you both think bloggers like me are!)
Because in order to get some traction on Google in the search arena, Microsoft has little choice–except perhaps making a big, sloppy bid for Facebook or Twitter–but to find a way to partner with Yahoo.
Yahoo too. As much as Bartz has been bragging that she has tons of leverage (she both does and she doesn’t), she also needs a powerful and rich friend in the years ahead in the search game, which will get uglier and more expensive as growth slows and massive innovation is needed.
Already, reports of that slowdown–spurred by the economic crisis–are here. It is in these down times that doing a deal, to get ready for the inevitable revival, seem most fortuitous.
That is, if everyone can stop talking and start, well, talking.
Until then, here’s the great Al Pacino, delivering the classic line:
Whatever does not kill us will make us stronger. That’s the view of IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, who says the recession will not do to Big Blue what it is doing to so many others. In an exuberant letter to shareholders today, Palmisano wrote that IBM (IBM) will not cower before the current economic turmoil. “Many companies are reacting to the current global downturn by drastically curtailing spending and investment, even in areas that are important to their future,” he said. “We are taking a different approach. Of course, we must continue to improve our competitiveness. But while we maintain discipline and prudence in the near term, we also maintain the discipline to plan for the future. We’re not looking back, we’re looking ahead. We’re continuing to invest in R&D, in strategic acquisitions, in growth initiatives–and most importantly, during these difficult times, in our people. In other words, we will not simply ride out the storm. Rather, we will take a long-term view, and go on offense.”
Ignoring for a moment the irony of a company that’s laid off 4,600 employees in the past few months professing to invest in its people, Palmisano’s remarks are quite interesting. Certainly, they’re anomalous to much of what we’ve been hearing lately. No gloom and doom from ol’ Sam, only contrarian bluster. Perhaps just enough to justify that 14 percent pay increase he accepted in 2008….
The concept of building a Digg for music has been tried before (see Contrastream or iJigg), but a music streaming site called thesixtyone is the closest I’ve seen so far to getting the formula right. It features only about 50,000 tracks self-uploaded by indie artists and music labels, but visitors can listen to the full stream of each track and vote their favorites up the rankings by hitting the “heart” button. The results are highly listenable playlists by genre, tag, or just what’s hot right now.
The key to making the site work, however, is not simply the Digg-like voting system. By now, that is becoming a pretty common feature (even the Hype Machine uses hearts) and is fairly easy to manipulate. The voting on thesixtyone is combined with some concepts learned from video games. Listeners cannot just indiscriminately heart up any song they want. They are given a limited number of heart points on a daily basis. More points can be earned for identifying good music early or recruiting friends to the service. Songs can only be given positive heart points, however. They can’t be demoted for being really bad. But the fact that the number of points are limited means in theory that only the most deserving songs will get enough to make it to the home page or the top of any given category.
Members also earn reputation points, and can level up as their reputation grows. The higher level a member achieves, the more hearts he or she can distribute. Reputation points are earned by hearting a song early before it becomes popular. Members also receive a portion of the reputation points earned by their friends. This rewards people with good taste in both music and friends. So when you sign up, say that erickschonfeld sent you.
Besides the game play elements, every song can be commented on or shared, and you can see who else liked the song. There are listening and leaderboards, showing the members with the highest reputations and their playlists of hearted songs. Artists can be subscribed to so that you can be alerted when they upload new songs to the site. As you are listening to a song, it keeps playing no matter where else you jump to on the site.
The site also makes it easy share music elsewhere on the Web by posting individual songs to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or the Global Grind. You can email a song link or embed the entire stream on another page. (Although, it is not easy to find these options. You have to click on the tiny “comments” link to open them up). For instance, I’ve embedded “Repetition Kills” by the Black Ghosts below. It would be better if you could embed entire playlists.
Thesixtyone is a Y Combinator startup that launched a year ago. It is now attracting about 100,000 unique visitors per month and 10 million pageviews, say the founders. That suggests a high level of engagement. The average session is 40 minutes, and registered users typically spend 2 hours a day on the site (although much of that is no doubt is simply listening to it with a browser tab open while doing other things). Still, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham says the service is “ramen profitable” from ads and Amazon affiliate links.
California State Senator Joe Simitian has introduced new legislation designed to tighten data breach notification requirements, forcing businesses to provide more information about any data that has been leaked in addition to notifying state authorities. What was not included in the legislation was imposed compensation requirements for data breach victims, and according to Simitian are not likely to be for quite some time. "Instead, the next focus of legislation, he said, would likely be on who should bear the cost of sending out notifications to consumers. For example, should a credit card processing company that experiences a breach be responsible for the cost of notifying bank customers? When retailer TJX discovered in 2006 that hackers had accessed credit and debit card numbers passing through its network, banks were left notifying the customers, then had to sue TJX to get compensation for those costs. Heartland Payment Systems, which experienced a breach of credit and debit card numbers in January, has recently been sued by banks to recover their breach notification costs."
Looking to make a splash at the Indian defense ministry's annual airshow, an Israeli arms-maker produces a Bollywood-esque video featuring bare-midriff girls, flower-draped missiles and the catch phrase "dinga dinga dee." Slumdog Millionaire it ain't. But it is the latest in Danger Room's "Iron Eagles" — our celebration of the awesomely bad videos of the military-industrial complex.
As I talked about recently, we all know that Facebook, along with most social networking sites in general, is growing in popularity in a major way as of late. And with an increase in users comes an increase in the interest of those wanting to target those users maliciously. So what do you have as a result? Just like in nursery school when you have all the little kiddies blowing their nose into their hands and then running those germy little hands all over the tables and toys to share the wealth—you have a spread of viruses. And in this case, worms.
One of the latest in the launched threats against Facebook (as well as other social networking sites including the popular MySpace, Bebo, and Friendster) is an updated variant of the worm known as “Koobface.“ Yep, this one was around last summer, and it’s back.
Freddy35.exe
McAfee’s site gave an updated description and “threat” announcement regarding the worm just days ago. According to their site, a new variant of Koobface.worm has been seen spreading. It creates a copy of itself in the Windows directory as: * freddy35.exe.
Facebook states that most of its users are in the age demographics of over thirty years old, and some of these people are just getting into using computers and networking sites and may not be as tech savvy as their younger counterparts. Thus they may not be as quick to detect what may be a lure to a virus. Obviously, this is a problem, and one to keep in mind with using such sites safely.
How to identify “Koobface”
The way “Koobface” operates is like this:
You get a message from one of your friends on Facebook (or other site), which invites you to watch a video by clicking on a link. Now, most of us obviously know the old adage “don’t click on links if you aren’t sure where it came from!“ but they are trickier with it since it is supposedly from a friend of yours, which makes it appear safe.
Then, if you do go and click on the link, it takes you over to a page that looks like a YouTube page. This page even has a picture of the friend who supposedly sent you the link. Doing this, using your friends to lure you in and then trick you into downloading malicious software, is called “social engineering.“
Ok, so you are now on the “YouTube page,“ which isn’t a real YouTube page. Next, it tells you to install Adobe Flash Player so you can watch the video. Ding! Ding! Ding! Warning! Warning! This is where the red alarms and sirens should be going off. But again, for many not familiar with this sort of thing, it all seems perfectly legit. If you DO decide to follow the command, guess what? You won’t be downloading Flash Player. Instead, you will be getting the worm.
What the worm does is gains control of your computer, as well as helping itself to looking through your Facebook friends and sending them messages with the link to the “YouTube site.“ The more the merrier is the Koobface motto.
Stay Safe
Obviously, it is very important to be extremely careful about what links you click on (even if you think your friends sent them). It’s not like viruses tend to come with the subject line of “Hey! I’m a virus. Click on enclosed link so I can really f@*k with your computer!“ While that would be ever so helpful, it’s not very realistic. Also, if you are going to install any kind of program or plug-in, it is always better to go and get it right from the vendor site. So, in this case, if you were told to install flash, go to adobe.com to get it. Another site I do trust is download.com.
Facebook has a ton of applications for download. Make sure you know what you are installing. If it is new especially, you may want to search its name out to make sure it isn’t a spam program or worm. TrendMicro has reported two “rogue apps.“ One is “The Error Check System”, and the second is an application that shows a notification telling users that they’ve violated Facebook’s terms of service.
What else can you do? Keep your anti-virus software up to date and run scans on your system. A list of some good (free) programs can be found here.
Highland’s 10 week program is only open to enrolled graduate and undergraduate students or recent graduates (no later than December 2008). But only one member of a start-up team has to meet this criterion. Teams can have up to 4 people and will be given the option of working in the VC firm’s Menlo Park, CA or Lexington, MA offices. Stipend amounts range from $7,500 to $15,000, depending on how many people are part of the team.
Interestingly, Highland doesn’t ask for anything in return, like some incubators and programs do. Depending on the success of the idea, Highland says that some start-up teams could qualify for seed funding. Similar to most startup incubators, Highland is giving the startup teams access to investment professionals and industry leaders along the way. Also, Highland stipulates that preference will be given to ideas that somehow involve the VC fund’s areas of expertise, including information and communication technology, digital media, life sciences, advanced materials & semiconductors, cleantech.
The deadline for applications is April 9, 2009. Here’s more information.
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The areas of the brain involved in religious thought are not a separate region. An fMRI study showed that the region that is active when people listen to statements about God is the same area that is used to understand what other people are thinking. This suggests that religious thought may have begun as a byproduct of other kinds of thinking.
Voxli, a new Y Combinator startup launching today, is looking to make group voice chat as simple as possible. The service allows gamers and team members to visit a static persistent URL to join a group chat session, and features push-to-talk using a browser plugin. Voxli is available on Internet Explorer and Firefox (both Mac and Windows) with support for more browsers on the way.
At launch, Voxli is focusing on making its service appealing to gamers, who often like to speak with each other as they play team based games. In-game voice chat isn’t a new concept - I remember using a program called Roger Wilco to play Counter Strike nearly a decade ago. Since then games like World of Warcraft have made voice chat a necessity, as they revolve around large-scale group activities (called raids) where communication is essential.
Now there are a variety of chat clients available, including Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, and Mumble. But most of these require manual entry of port numbers and server addresses, which can be confusing. Voxli gets around these issues by offering users a static URL that they can then send around to their team members, which is far more convenient. Voxli is also a browser plugin, not a native client, which the team believes will make it more appealing.
To use Voxli, users assign a hotkey to their chat room which they press whenever they want to speak in-game (the hot key works regardless of which application is open). The system supports up to 200 simultaneous users per room, and gamers can open new tabs if they’d like to participate in multiple chats at once (they can assign a different hot key to each room).
For the duration of its public beta period, which will last 1-2 months, Voxli will be free for everyone, with no registration required to get started. This lack of restrictions comes with one major caveat - there’s currently no way to restrict access to your chat room, so a rival guild member could potentially infiltrate your group (the Voxli team says introducing restricted rooms is a top priority). Eventually Voxli will begin charging users a modest amount, but the team says that its reduced infrastructure costs (they use services like EC2) will allow it charge around half of what its competitors cost.
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narramissic writes "On Friday, Judge William Chandler III of the Delaware Court of Chancery approved a settlement that will roll back a Yahoo employee severance that was implemented by Yahoo's former leaders. Some investors, including the vocal Carl Icahn, described the plan as a poison pill, arguing that the severance payouts would be so expensive that no company would want to acquire Yahoo. The settlement narrows the reasons why employees can quit and receive the severance, removing some of the incentives for them to leave the company in the event of a Yahoo acquisition, whether by Microsoft or some other suitor."
French researcher Luc Montagnier, who helped discover HIV, is accused by an inventor of allegedly stealing a technique that could cure AIDS.
Bruno Robert claims he has the intellectual property to a technique that uses electromagnetic signals to pinpoint HIV, or the human immunodeficiency virus, and other diseases, Britain's Daily Telegraph reported Monday.
Robert, who registered a patent for the process in November 2005, said he showed Montagnier his work on electromagnetic waves earlier that year. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 9 Mar 2009 | 9:33 pm
I have been using a BlackBerry Storm for about a month now and have came to like the phone. While I don’t have an iPhone love affair going on, it’s a solid phone I wouldn’t not recommended. (understand?) It has its quarks like any phone, but the single most annoying feature could - and should - be resolved by Research in Motion.
You see the Storm auto rotates everything unlike the iPhone where only certain apps switch to landscape view. That’s fine with me for apps and such. Auto rotating the main menu/app menu doesn’t add any usability and in fact, is frustratingly annoying. Half the time the phone takes a few seconds to change orientation causing random bad thoughts to race through my head while the phone decides what to do. But mainly, there is no reason to have the home screen rotate and RIM needs to address this aggravating trademark of the Storm.
The BlackBerry Storm has square-like icons just like the iPhone and the beauty of these squarish icons is that you can tell what they are no matter how you are looking at them. The Twitter app still looks like the Twitter app when viewed on its side. The same thing goes for the Calendar, Contacts, Messages, all of them really cause they are square.
Listen, I would not have an issue with the auto-rotating thing if the Storm were fast enough to rotate. But when you pull the phone out of your pocket to make a quick call, you shouldn’t have to wait for the phone to decide which way it’s going to orientate itself and then allowing you into the phone dialing app.
This should be an easy fix by RIM. Just give users an option in the Homescreen Preferences to disable this action. Maybe some people like the feature, but a quick look at BlackBerry forum sites will turn up dozens of threads ranting about the same thing.
Other than that annoying feature and typing on a touchscreen, I have been pleasantly surprised by the Storm. The early reviews blasted the touchscreen BlackBerry, but if you’re bound to stay with VZW for some odd reason, the Storm isn’t that bad. Or you could wait for the 9630.
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Lawyers for Jammie Thomas and the Recording Industry Association of America are to meet within days to see if they can hammer out a settlement agreement to prevent a retrial of the nation's first and only file sharing civil trial. A Minnesota jury ordered Thomas to pay $222,000 for sharing 24 copyrighted songs on Kazaa, but the judge declared a mistrial over an error in jury instructions.
TechDirt is reporting that in response to the frustrations with Apple's app store dictatorship, a few developers are looking to set up their own alternative app stores. Alternate app stores would only work on jailbroken phones, making their adoption scope limited, so the question is whether Apple will go after these start ups on the legal battlefield. "Apple, which collects a 30% commission from sellers on its store, doesn't break out the site's revenue. Brokerage firm Piper Jaffray estimates the site generated about $150 million in sales last year and projects total sales will grow to $800 million this year. Apple did not respond to requests for comment. But it has said in the past that with the iPhone it was trying to strike a balance between a closed device like the iPod and an open device like the PC."
Experts weigh in on the pros and cons of selecting embryos for cosmetic traits prior to implantation. James Hughes, author of Citizen Cyborg. argues people should be free to choose based on hair or eye color. Marcy Darnovsky, associate executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, argues that it's a slippery slope.
A fella in Illinois has himself an iPhone protoype with an early beta OS and it’s up for sale on eBay if you’re into that sort of thing. In fact, he has two prototype iPhones for sale, but only one works and it has a matte plastic screen. The dud has a glass screen and doesn’t seem to offer much of anything save for spare parts at best.
The working prototype appears to be able to send and receive phone calls, but only receives text messages along with a few other issues. Neither is denoted with “iPhone” or storage capacity size anywhere on either device. The best part about the working prototype is that it has a set of alternating subtitles that includes “skankphone.”
The seller seems to have done his research, too. Based on the serial numbers, the working protoype was built in week 49 of 2006 while the dud was pushed off the factory line the following week. The OS that’s running is 03.06.01_G. Official iPhone OS that launched was 03.11.02_G. Bidding ends on March 11th and the highest bid is currently $315.
Archaeologists from the Museum of London say they have unearthed what are likely the remains of Shakespeare's first theatre in Shoreditch, BBC News reported.The remains of the theatre were found last summer and experts believe it was constructed around 1576. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 9 Mar 2009 | 8:40 pm
AP - IBM Corp.'s chairman and chief executive, Sam Palmisano, received a compensation package valued at nearly $21 million in 2008, only slightly higher than the year before, according to calculations by The Associated Press. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 9 Mar 2009 | 8:36 pm
Matt_dk writes "Move over, Morning Star. Once Canadarm2 helps install the fourth and final set of solar array wings to the International Space Station later this month, the Station will surpass Venus as the brightest object in the night sky, second only to the Moon. The Space Shuttle Discovery is set to deliver the power-generating solar panels and Starboard 6 (S6) truss segment to the ISS on the 125th mission in the Shuttle program, known as STS-119/15A (slated for launch on March 11)."
There hasn’t been a whole lot of improvements in hard drive technology in the past few years aside from increasing capacities. Sure, there’s the advent of the SSD, but it’s still way too expensive for most people. For the most part we’ve been using SATA 2 connections with upwards of 1TB drives. It’s about time we get around to SATA 3.
Turns out, Seagate, partnering with AMD, is actually getting around to SATA 3. At the Everything Channel Xchange Conference in New Orleans, Seagate’s been showing off its newest HDDs running on SATA 3, which it plans to have out by the end of the year. The big improvement is in transfer speeds SATA 3 can handle burst transfer speeds of 6 GBps (that’s Gigabits per second), compared to SATA 2’s 3 GBps. For steady transfers, SATA 3 can handle 600 Mbps which is nothing to laugh at.
The one depressing part of the new SATA 3 drive Seagate was showing off, is that it requires a chipset capable of handling it. So, if you need the 6 GBps burst speeds, you’ll need to upgrade the whole machine along with the hard drive. It is backwards compatible with SATA and SATA 2, though as it uses the same cables. The steady stream transfer rate is about comparable to the Z drive that OCZ was showing off at CeBIT, so even though SSD might be the way of the future, it seems HDDs still have some life in them and will continue to compete with the more expensive SSDs.
Now that the Internet is blowing out a kidney over news coming out of Asia that Apple bought up a bunch of touchscreens, I thought it might be nice to posit what Cupertino has in store for those babies.
The news came from Digitimes this morning:
“Wintek revealed that it is currently working with Apple to develop some new products, but it said it does not know what applications the new products are for. Wintek added that no shipment schedule has been worked out yet, but shipments are likely to begin in the second half of the year.”
The report then names Quanta Computer as the manufacturer “of Apple’s new netbook." Here's what we think could be happening.
An analysis of the engineering and economics for a solar water-heating system shows it to have a payback period of just two years, according to researchers in India. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 9 Mar 2009 | 7:35 pm
AP - Iridium Satellite LLC said Monday that it has moved a spare satellite into the orbit of the one that was destroyed in a collision with a Russian satellite a month ago. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 9 Mar 2009 | 7:34 pm
Apparently the LG Viewty II was on display at Mobile World Congress and nobody noticed. Unfortunately absent from the convention was any sort of cloth that could be used for cleaning the glass in front of the phone.
PhoneArena noticed the photos of the handset amongst their collection from the show, and have put them online for all to see. LG has bumped the camera up to 8 megapixels (from 5), added WiFi and the S-Class interface of the Arena, while maintaining the Xenon flash and 3″ touchscreen of the predecessor. No word yet on where it’s going or who will offer it.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Study shows coreceptors work together as 'navigators' for a growing axonTo a growing axon, the protein RGMa is a "Wrong Way" sign, alerting it to head in another direction. As Hata et al. demonstrate in the March 9, 2009 issue of the Journal of Cell Biology, translating that signal into cellular action requires teamwork from two receptors.During development, new synapses form when the growing axon of one neuron reaches another neuron. As an axon searches out the path to its destination, it bends toward so-called attractive guidance molecules and veers away from repulsive guidance molecules such as RGMa. For example, if the tip of an axon touches a glial cell instead of a neuron, the extension pulls back. On its membrane the glial cell sports RGMa, which latches onto the receptor neogenin on the axon. Researchers knew that the interaction between RGMa and neogenin halted the axon by activating the GTPase RhoA. However, they didn't know how neogenin switches on RhoA.Hata et al. discovered that it gets help from another axon membrane receptor called Unc5B. The researchers found that after a dose of RGMa, the tip of a growing axon halted and often retreated. Eliminating Unc5B prevented this collapse.Neogenin and Unc5B stick together and serve as coreceptors, performing slightly different tasks, Hata et al. conclude. Neogenin's job is to hook up with RGMa. Unc5B, by contrast, never contacts RGMa. Instead, it serves as a docking point for the RhoA activator LARG. Unc5B indirectly switches on RhoA by interacting with LARG.But that left one further mystery to explain. LARG clings to Unc5B all the time, so why does it fire up RhoA only in response to RGMa? The researchers found that binding of RGMa prodded another protein, the focal adhesion kinase (FAK), to switch on LARG, allowing activation of RhoA. How RGMa binding triggers FAK is the next question the researchers want to answer.Hata, K., et al. 2009. J. Cell Biol. doi:10.1083/jcb.200807029.---Image Caption: An elongating axon tip (left) crumples when it encounters RGMa (right). Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 9 Mar 2009 | 6:56 pm
German and Swiss scientists say they have used the combination of two drugs to achieve a substantial improvement in the treatment of certain brain tumors.
The researchers led by Professor Dr. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 9 Mar 2009 | 6:53 pm
Media search engine Technorati is about to release The Technorati Attention Index, which measures the mainstream media websites with the highest number of blogs linking to them in the past 30 days. Right now it has a blog post with the inaugural list. YouTube takes the top spot with the New York Times, BBC News, CNN.com, and MSN rounding out the top five. Compared to the top non-blog sources on Techmeme’s leaderboard, which is a narrower universe of sites which tech blogs link to, the top five mainstream media sites there are CNET News, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and Computerworld. (The leaderboard for sister site Memeorandum, which covers politics, more closely matches Technorati’s list).
Here’s the list in its entirety from Technorati’s index:
YouTube
New York Times
BBC News
CNN.com
MSN
guardian.co.uk
Washington Post
Yahoo! News
Reuters
Los Angeles Times
Telegraph.co.uk
MSNBC
The Wall Street Journal
Time
Wired
USA Today
boston.com
FOX News
Daily Mail
ESPN
CBS News
Financial Times
Forbes
San Francisco Chronicle
Chicago Tribune
The White House
New York Post
New York Daily News
International Herald Tribune
PBS
Salon.com
BusinessWeek
Slate
Newsweek
New York Magazine
Economist.com
CBC.ca
San Francisco Examiner
MarketWatch
Chicago Sun-Times
US News & World Report
Houston Chronicle
Yahoo! Sports
Entertainment Weekly
Seattle Times
E! Online
People
Science Daily
Style.com
The Christian Science Monitor
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The collision of two important recent events has resulted in something wonderful - TechCrunch now has offices in downtown Palo Alto.
The first event: the city of Atherton, where I live, decided to put the hammer down on me running a business from my home. Apparently some of the neighbors complained about the traffic or something. Legal action was threatened.
The second event: the wholesale destruction of the office rental market in Silicon Valley gave us the opportunity to pick and choose our space and cut a great deal.
I’ll miss having TechCrunch at my house, where my commute time was measured in seconds and I was always surrounded by fascinating people who dropped by for interviews.
But there was the downside, too. There was absolutely no separation from my work and personal life. And for some reason crazy (usually European) entrepreneurs felt the urge to stop by at any time without warning and, if I didn’t answer the door, simply break in. And having TechCrunch staff wander into and out of my house at random times wasn’t always great, either.
Until 2006 most of our events were still at my house, until they grew too large to host them there (the last one had 600 people and a wedding tent in the back yard).
So now we have a real office (with a really nice deck for events) in downtown Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley. My commute time is now ten minutes, which still isn’t bad. Hopefully I’ll see you there sometime soon.
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Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, has announced that the Venezuelan government has teamed up with a firm to create a $14 phone complete with MP3 playback, FM Radio, and a camera. Called El Vergatario, the handset should launch in May.
We dug around a bit, but we’re having a hard time figuring out exactly what El Vergatario means in this context. It seems that Vergatario is everything from slang for “Great” to a few things that are, as Wired points out, a bit more offensive.
We’re still a bit torn on this one. The good side: Cheap cell phones for people who otherwise couldn’t get them. The bad side: Chances are, these things won’t be very ecologically friendly. Cheap phones means lots of phones sold, which means lots of phones in land fills within 4-5 years.
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Couch potatoes take note: Aiming your remote control and trying to bounce the signal off the wall is about to become a thing of the past.
Remote controls are set to get an upgrade as a consortium of consumer electronics companies have finalized a set of standards for using radio signals to control your TV, home stereo or other appliances. The new radio-frequency remotes use non-directional radio waves instead of the infrared signals emitted by a light-emitting diode in traditional remotes. RF remotes won't require devices to be in your line of sight. And they are expected to be widely available by early next year.
"RF-based remote control will bring a lot of new functionality to
consumers," says Bas Driesen,
chairperson of the consortium that made the standard, RF4CE, and
technology manager at
Royal Philips Electronics. "It is faster and allows for two way
communications with devices, which means your remote control can do a
lot more than what it does today."
With the new remotes, you could be sitting in anywhere in the room to change channels and can turn on your home audio equipment from
any room. You can even put your audio equipment inside a cabinet and still be able to control it even when the cabinet door is shut. And the technology could be used to open your garage door or unlock a keyless entry
system.
So what's exactly wrong with the traditional infrared remotes including the new "universal" remotes today, aside from having too many buttons? Plenty, say RF-remote advocates. Infrared remotes are based on line of sight so point and shoot is a must. They do not offer two-way connectivity so devices cannot communicate with the remote. Infrared based remotes also offer slower response time, so you have to press the buttons more than a few times to change the channel. It's all too much work for people who just want to use a remote.
"Infrared based remotes can be a nuisance," says Bob Heile, chairman of the ZigBee Alliance. "You can use them only in the same room and you can't teach the remote any new tricks."
That's where they are hoping RF-based remotes could step in. The growth curve for these products is just beginning, says ABI Research, which forecasts a 55 percent growth rate through 2014 for RF remotes.
RF Remote Control Faster: 20 times faster in terms of response time than infrared remotes.
Omnidirectional: No more point and shoot. Use the remote from anywhere.
Two way communication: Get rid of device loneliness. Have your TV talk to the remote, instead of just the remote barking instructions at the TV.
Greater power efficiency: Longer battery life than infrared versions. Run a RF remote for several years on a set of new batteries instead of having to change them at least every year.
Interoperability: Between remote control and audio/video devices that infrared remotes do not provide.
The ZigBee-RF4CE specification is based on IEEE 802.15.4.
MAC/PHY radio technology in the 2.4GHz unlicensed frequency band. This allows for worldwide operation, low power consumption and near instantaneous
response time, says Driesen. For instance, the response time for a can be up to 100 milliseconds compared to 5 milliseconds for a RF-based remote.
For switching from Lost to Hell's Kitchen that response time difference may not matter, but if you want to use your remote to browse the internet, much like a mouse, the difference can be palpable, says Driesen.
RF remotes also allow for two-way communication, thus changing how universal remotes work. Instead of doing the set-up for each device individually on the remote, RF remotes could auto detect all the devices in your house automatically.
"In case of RF remotes its not just the remote that talks to the device, the device can talk back," says Heile.
Nailing down the specification for RF remotes is important because
it allows companies to make RF remote controls that are interoperable,
says Royal Phillips' Driesen. So far only a few high end electronics
makers such as Sony have introduced RF-based Sony offers RF remotes with some of its Bravia products.
"Interoperability makes it easier for consumers to buy remotes and
it makes it easier to shift to RF-remotes from infrared based remotes,"
says Driesen.
The first version of the ZigBee RF4CE specification is expected to be made available to members by summer. RF-based remotes will become a standard fixture early next year, say Driesen and Heile.
Now if only they can figure out how to ensure the remote does not get lost every couple of minutes, it would be truly magical.
According to Google’s Erick Schmidt, netbooks should be given away like cookies so folks can consume the advertising and services. Does this mean we can add our names to the queue for free netbooks? Not likely.
Erick Schmidt made a very similar comment two years ago regarding mobile phones. He again said the phone and the connectivity should be free so advertisers could take advantage of the high usage. Since that statement, we’ve witnessed the birth of Android, Google’s free operating system, but so far no free phones or service.
Schmidt’s intention is deciphered from this statement:
“What’s particularly interesting about netbooks is the price point. Eventually, it will compose sense for operators and so forth to subsidize the use of netbooks so they can build services revenue and advertising revenue on the consumption. That’s another new model that’s coming.”
Over at Computer World, blogger Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols says he believes the statement to imply Google is getting into the netbook OS business. We know Google has its sights on Microsoft and netbooks are surely one area where a compelling Linux offering with Google simplicity might be just the ticket. Perhaps this is the Android port to netbooks we’ve been hearing about for some time?
Whether netbooks evolve into the tech geeks favorite toy or supplant entry level notebooks, it is clear these diminutive devices are not going anywhere for some time. And while free is good, many would agree it is just silly to offer something free when so many are willing to pay.
What do you think? Will the day come when advertising and other services support the hardware and connectivity costs or is Google just wishfully hoping here?
This is one of the better concepts I’ve seen ’round these parts, and I see plenty of them. It’s called the kre-8 (the name could use some work, yes), and it’s a cellphone designed, as it were, for those who fancy themselves as DJs, music creators, etc.
So what is it, and why should you care? Its designer, one Jose Tomas DeLuna , describes it as “the next-generation music tool/communication device for the musically creative and the aspiring musician as well.” That covers just about everyone on planet Earth, right?
Like the iPhone, the kre-8 would be outfitted with a touchscreen and an accelerometer. That last part is key, since, depending on how you hold the phone, it’ll go into one of three different modes: instrument mode, mix mode and record mode. All musical output conforms to the MIDI standard, so, theoretically, you’d be able to integrate it into your multi-thousand dollar Pioneer setup. Even better, all the music you compose, mix or whatnot can be shared over the 3G connection to other kre-8 users. These other users would then either merely enjoy the music you created, or can mix and add to it as they sit fit. Crowdsourcing!
Presumably kre-8 also makes phone calls, but cellphones haven’t been about phone calls for some time now.
Also, keep in mind that it’s just a concept, and hell will freeze over before you’re likely to see it move beyond an Adobe Creative Suite render.
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A consortium of consumer electronics companies finalize the specifications for radio-frequency based remote controls that will eliminate the problems that infrared remotes face today. The RF remotes are expected early next year.
We’re not sure whether the big-wigs over in Finland gave this one the greenlight, but a series of photos taken by a prototype E75 have escaped their owner’s cubicle and landed on the internets. We certainly hope he got this approved, seeing as how one of the photo samples is his badge.
The photos themselves don’t look too shabby to us, though they’re not mind-blowingly exceptional. All of the blues/grays seem a bit noisy, but it’s only noticeable at the larger sizes. However, it should be noted that all of the shots are taken in a relatively optimal environment, all nice and naturally lit. Low light shots are where most phone camera’s fail miserably. Hey Stefan - how about some shots from a night out at the pub?
Asus has added another model into their Eee Box lineup, this time its home theater capable B208. Overall, I would not say this is a powerhouse, but due to the small size, both in terms of the keyboard, mouse, and the actual PC, plus the addition of a remote this would make a nice addition to a home theater setup.
As far as the PC, it features a 1.6GHz Intel Atom 330 processor with an ATI Radeon HD 4350 graphics card that has 256MB of memory and an HDMI output. Additionally, the B208 includes 1GB of RAM, either a 160, 250 or 320GB hard drive, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Ethernet, four USB ports and a built-in card reader. The B208 also features a built-in battery that functions as a power supply should you loss power in your home.
The Eee Box B208 will allow for a choice of either Windows Vista Home Basic or Windows Vista Business. Both also have Windows Media Center capability. Sadly the one piece that really would have added some benefit is the inclusion of a built-in TV tuner. Oh well, maybe in a future version they will add one. In the meantime there are always external options available.
InfoWorld - Microsoft is touting support for its Silverlight multimedia application technology in the Eclipse open source tools platform. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 9 Mar 2009 | 4:35 pm
The SmartSwitch, from Peter Russo and Brendan Wypich at Stanford University, brings force-feedback to environmental gadgets.
The idea is simple -- the switch knows how much power is being used in either your home or on the Grid in general. As consumption increases, the servo motor inside makes the switch harder to slide. The motor pushes a brake-pad against the switch offering extra resistance.
The switch itself only has a network collection -- the workings out need to be done elsewhere and transmitted to the unit. Still, I can imagine this making lighting a lot more annoying. It's bad enough when I have to open jam jars and gin bottles for my mother -- "my old hands aren't as strong as they used to be," she'll say, " can you turn the light on for me?"
Otherwise, a great idea, making people instantly aware of their power wastage.
Berlin is a curious place, a city with an extraordinary amount of layered textures. This is most obvious in the bars and streets, where you see old, peeling walls and graffiti alongside organic produce and gleaming coffee machines. It is also seen in the city's tech, most interesting of which is left over from previous ages. Here's a quick zip through some of the things I saw recently on yet another trip to the city. And we know that Berlin has an East and a West. These pictures are from the East.
The Hot Mangle
If this were purely about the retro, we might have picked the eye-tearing color scheme. As this is a gadget blog, we're looking at that huge, industrial Heissmangel, something that would look more at home rolling through a field and harvesting wheat.
The name of the hot mangle is somewhat confusing when translated into English -- it appears to be more of a rolling iron than a real, water-squeezing mangle. However, it looks like great fun, and the instructions don't even warn against wearing a necktie while operating it:
Bondi Blue Macs
Many bars still seem to be running their music software from ageing Macs. Ironically, many of these bares also have big plasma screens dedicated to showing looped footage of a cosy fireplace -- tacky in the extreme but also somehow comforing under Berlin's Tupperware skies (they're like solid gray lids hanging above you).
Here we have two fine example. First, the original iBook:
This was spotted in a Prenzlauerberg café which seems to be unchanged since the days before the Wall fell. The screen went to sleep just before the photo, but the machine is running OS 9 quite happily. We're not sure if those cassette tapes are ever actually used, or if they are there just to make the Mac feel at home, but they're a great touch. Photo by John Brownlee.
Here we have another Bondi Blue Mac, this time an iMac. It's hard to tell which OS it is running from the picture -- that beach screensaver is still bundled with Macs today, but I'd be surprised if it was OS X. We would have checked with the owner, but at this stage we were already a little drunk.
The Hurricane
This one is slightly outside of the target area -- the Hurricane dryer was found in Geneva -- but as I got the mail whilst still in Berlin it counts. It is also the best clothes dryer ever, as it is called the Hurricane. The device is best described by the mail I got from the dicoverer and photographer, Travis Tarr:
Guys, check out this awesome contribution to clothes laundering technology that’s in the basement of the place I’m staying in the Carouge suburb of Geneva…
The HURRICANE Dryer! By Tachsel. Pics attached. Maybe it’s got something to do with the fact that all Geneva basements were made to double as Cold War radiation shelters.
The Hurricane looks to be a cabinet into which is pumped hot air. My mother used to have something similar, a freestanding English version which loaded from the top and made the electricity meter spin like hip-hop DJ. Hers however, was not called a Hurricane, and was therefore rather dull.
Bonus: Fridge
Last, and most certainly least, is this old refrigerator, tucked away in a bar on a bleak Berlin corner. Made by Bosch, it has the stylings of a 1950s US model, complete with dangerous, child-trapping trigger lock handle (I'm not kidding -- there were actually public service ads in England in the 1970s warning kids against climbing inside these). This fridge could, of course, be a completely modern model with retro styling but, given the surroundings, we doubt it.
Tethering a mobile phone to a laptop was once was a laborious adventure into the depths of forums and hack sites. Eventually though, the task become a bit easier with just a few settings on both the phone and the notebook, but TetherBerry makes it even easier. Like stupid easy.
TetherBerry has been in beta for a while now and set to go retail at 1pm PT today so you may wanna jump on the beta quick to give her a test drive. You will be impressed.
The tethering task is completed with a small app being installed on both the BlackBerry and the PC. Once both of these small programs are fired up, you’re done. There isn’t any settings that needs adjusting on either the PC or mobile. It just works, and it’s not terribly slow.
I saw a speed of 1403 kb/s up and 584 KB/s down while testing the app this morning which is totally acceptable by my standards. Google Chrome loaded the pages fast and it worked great. This is seriously the easiest solution available. It’s too bad that there isn’t a OS X release or Bluetooth mode, but we have to imagine that those are coming soon. Hopefully.
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Gragraph does not rock your world, but it at least beeps when something else will.
NVIDIA is known primarily for their PC graphics cards, but they've been in the news recently both for the expansion of their CUDA and PhysX initiatives as well as (allegedly) developing a CPU to challenge Intel and AMD. They've been proponents of parallel processing for quite a while, naturally, and have made some investments in companies like MotionDSP and Elemental Technologies, both of which are developing software that really leverages the GPU.
The success of these investments is difficult to measure (NVIDIA's been hit as hard as the other semiconductor-related companies, losing 50% of its revenue), but it's hard to argue with the fact that parallel computing is where practically the entire industry is heading. In light of this, NVIDIA has started what they're calling the GPU Ventures Program, by which they hope to "identify, support and invest" in companies that are working on GPU-based computing applications.
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Web startups that plan to make money from advertising are having a rough time raising money. But Web startups that say they’ll do it by charging customers? Still possible.
Those Apple Web ads — intrusive, hard to ignore, but clever and entertaining — 
G — What can he chase them with? What if he jumps on a camel?
Casual games may see a vast amount of traffic, but monetizing them can be more than a little tricky due to issues relating to Flash-based game files and the needs of various publishers. Israeli startup 
TicTacTi’s image recognition engine seeks these visual events in order to trigger the ad insertion. If the game source already includes TicTacTi’s IGA logo marker (see right), the game preparation stage can be skipped altogether because the image recognition engine will identify it automatically.
Sales executive Marc Oakland was pushing a rake around the bed of the shallow pool when he found the object with its distinctive eye stalk.
Wristwatch cell phones, for whatever reason, seem really difficult to do correctly. Between problems with the 
If you’re an Android dev freak, it’s time to update that sucker “1.0″ nonsense you’re rolling with. Girls flip when they see you rock the 
Attention all PC case artists and modders!
Google chief Eric Schmidt said this weekend in a interview with Charlie Rose that his company is not interested in buying Twitter, which he described as a “poor man’s email system,”claiming the price is too high. 
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- A new language from MIT's Media Lab makes it easy for kids to develop programs that interact with things in the real world: Pencils, paper, water, and even vegetables.
Whatever does not kill us will make us stronger. That’s
There hasn’t been a whole lot of improvements in hard drive technology in the past few years aside from increasing capacities. Sure, there’s the advent of the SSD, but it’s still way too expensive for most people. For the most part we’ve been using SATA 2 connections with upwards of 1TB drives. It’s about time we get around to SATA 3.
Now that the Internet is blowing out a kidney 
The collision of two important recent events has resulted in something wonderful - TechCrunch now has offices in downtown Palo Alto.
Asus has added another model into their Eee Box lineup, this time its home theater capable B208. Overall, I would not say this is a powerhouse, but due to the small size, both in terms of the keyboard, mouse, and the actual PC, plus the addition of a remote this would make a nice addition to a home theater setup.
