Here's an oldie but goodie to start your morning. Seems that with a little bit of time, a duffel bag's worth of gadgets, and a Belkin headphone splitter, one could create a satisfying little hook.... Source: Gizmodo | 10 May 2009 | 3:00 pm
stephen.schaubach writes "Spanish Mathematicians have discovered a new pattern in primes that surprisingly has gone unnoticed until now. 'They found that the distribution of the leading digit in the prime number sequence can be described by a generalization of Benford's law. ... Besides providing insight into the nature of primes, the finding could also have applications in areas such as fraud detection and stock market analysis. ... Benford's law (BL), named after physicist Frank Benford in 1938, describes the distribution of the leading digits of the numbers in a wide variety of data sets and mathematical sequences. Somewhat unexpectedly, the leading digits aren't randomly or uniformly distributed, but instead their distribution is logarithmic. That is, 1 as a first digit appears about 30% of the time, and the following digits appear with lower and lower frequency, with 9 appearing the least often.'"
DUBAI, May 11 (Reuters) - Abu Dhabi-listed Dana Gas's production levels in Egypt has risen 20 percent over the annual average achieved last year, the company said in a statement on Sunday. Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 May 2009 | 2:20 pm
Awwwwwwww. Google is just so gosh darn cute sometimes. Like today. They have the little yellow Google Streetview guy walking around with his mom. Happy Mother's Day!
Just don't take the little guy... Source: Gizmodo | 10 May 2009 | 2:00 pm
Talk about Twitter’s reach growing. Apparently it is now going into outer space. NASA astronaut Mark Polansky will be commanding the upcoming mission to the International Space Station, and he just posted an invite on YouTube. This invite, which was posted on NASA’s official YouTube channel, invited users, as well as Twitter folks, to be a part of his next mission by submitting questions through YouTube and then following updates via Twitter.
He asks that the questions be sent on a video (about 30 seconds long) and posted to YouTube, and then sent to his Twitter account (using the @reply method). He will then respond to the question on the nationally broadcast NASA TV.
As one YouTube commentor put it, “I find it frightening that the first alien contact we might make could be a tweet.” Well, they will probably surely wonder about a society that can only speak in 140 character or less, and uses a hell of a lot of weird acronyms. Maybe we should send them the Guide to Twitter 101.
Actually, Polansky isn’t even going to be the first to be Tweeting from space. Mike Massimo plans to Tweet away from the Space Shuttle Atlantis in under three days when it sets off on mission STS-125.
Trying to reach a larger audience, NASA has been reaching into modern consumer technology…making use of things like the web and social sites. I have to agree with Jason Kincaid’s view in that at least the astronauts might have something educational to Tweet to us, instead of a lot of what many of hollywood flavors of the week are filling space with each day.
I wonder if anyone we don’t expect will intercept and Tweet back? Oh…that’s right…ET used a good old fashioned phone.
(TrendHunter.com) There's no danger of overserving a guest at your next party with the DIY SOBEaR v02 bartender bot by Joe Saavedra. This little guy looks friendly, but he's equipped with a built-in... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 May 2009 | 1:20 pm
Not-A-Microsoft-Fan writes with this excerpt from The Coffee Desk: "Netbooks are making huge waves within the hardware and software industries today, but not many would believe that the whole Netbook craze actually started back around 1996 with the Toshiba Libretto 70CT. Termed technically as a subnotebook because of its small dimensions, the computer is the first that fits all of the qualifications of being what we would term a netbook today, due in part to its built-in Infrared and PCMCIA hardware, and its (albeit early) web browsing software. The hardware includes the two (potentially) wireless PCMCIA and infrared network connections, Windows 95 OSR 2 with Internet Explorer 2.0, a whole 16MB of RAM and a 120Mhz Intel Pentium processor (we're flying now!)."
So what do you think? Is the upcoming Palm Pre Touchstone inductive charging station kit worth $70?
Because that's the rumored price this morning, delivered blurrycam style by some mole at Best Buy... Source: Gizmodo | 10 May 2009 | 1:15 pm
Here's another great cartoon we found on archive.org when we were researching corporatism propaganda for Life Inc. In Destination Earth, sponsored by the American Petroleum Industry in 1956, Martian dissidents learn that oil and competition are the two things that make America great.
In spite of its unfaltering market bias (or maybe because of it) the film is still quite an entertainingly assembled piece of work.
(TrendHunter.com) We've seen free cruises before for last minute travelers, but a German cruise line is offering refunds for women who get pregnant while on board their line. Starting this May, TUI... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 May 2009 | 12:59 pm
Gadgetell Guide: What to expect with Windows 7 RC1 “First things first, while Windows 7 should be stable, it is important to point out that this is still a Release Candidate. In other words, this is not the final release and you may experience an issue or two. That said, I have been running Windows 7…” MORE »
Amazon’s got a giant Kindle secret? It’s free (rumor) ” Today, Amazon delivered invites to an event being held at the New York Times former headquarters in the City. Amazon doesn’t hold a lot of these, so speculation is something new is coming. This new thing…” MORE »
Sprint employees to begin Palm Pre training on May 6 “It looks like we are getting a little closer to seeing the launch of the highly anticipated Palm Pre. According to a recent posting over on the Sprint Gurus user forums training is scheduled to begin very soon. In fact, it is just a few days away…” MORE »
Nine Inch Nails App update rejected, Trent Reznor gets angry “It shouldn’t surprise anyone who didn’t already know that Apple rules over the iPhone/iPod touch App Store with an iron fist. There have been several stories of Apps that got rejected for ridiculous reasons, or even some that were approved then taken down, like the Shaken Baby app. However, not…” MORE »
32GB Cowon S9 PMP now available with Amazon ” Looking for another decent option when it comes to a portable media player? Well Amazon has just listed the latest, or should I say largest Cowon S9 PMP. We have had the MORE »
Gadgetell Guide: Dual booting Linux and Windows XP ” Even though I’d like to think of myself as an open-minded individual, I have never really experimented with Linux. At school, I take a computer class, and one of our recent projects was installing Xubutu (a form of…” MORE »
Gadgetell Review: XLink Bluetooth Cellular Gateway “What Is It: The XLink Bluetooth Cellular Gateway is a $99 device ($119 for an upgraded model) that lets you pair up to three cellphones with your old landline handsets. Gadgetell got to test out the $99 BT model.…” MORE »
Hands on with the Kindle DX (photos and video) “So we got a chance to play with the Kindle DX. It’s exactly what we expected. It’s very light and is very fast. The price tag is a bit high, but it’s probably less costly when compared to textbooks. Check out the video of it in action below. MORE »
Scientists are rescuing dozens of one of the world's most rarest species of amphibians, the mountain chicken frog. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 10 May 2009 | 12:55 pm
Ministers from 70 countries will congregate in Indonesia Monday to discus how to save the world's oceans and to plan climate change discussions in December.The five-day World Ocean Conference in Manado city is being called a unique congregation on the oceans' part in justifying climate change and the cost of higher temperatures like rising seas, loss of species and famine. Environment, fisheries and resources ministers are anticipated to concur where the direction of the Copenhagen discussions scheduled for December will go. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 10 May 2009 | 12:47 pm
(TrendHunter.com) On Monday, the Discovery Channel will debut my dream TV show, and its called Weaponizers. The show basically pits two crews against each other in a race to turn a regular junkyard car... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 May 2009 | 12:40 pm
(TrendHunter.com) Alice Scott's 'Written on the Body' is an unusual piece of jewelry, albeit a beautiful one. It's a network of silver 'veins' that form an interlocking web that covers much of the back... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 May 2009 | 12:19 pm
LONDON, May 10 (Reuters) - Barclays Plc said on Sunday it has received new interest from both trade and private equity buyers for its iShares funds business, responding to a media report that said BC... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 May 2009 | 12:15 pm
neurone333 sends along the cause célèbre of the moment in France: a Web executive working for TF1, Europe's largest TV network, sends an email to his Member of Parliament opposing the government's "three strikes and you're out" proposal, known as Hadopi. His MP forwards the email to the minister backing Hadopi, who forwards it to TF1. The author of the email, Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim, is called into his boss's office and shown an exact copy of his email. Soon he receives a letter saying he is fired for "strong differences with the [company's] strategy" — in a private email sent from a private (gmail) address. French corporations and government are entangled in ways that Americans might find unfamiliar. Hit the link below for some background on the ties between TF1 and the Sarkozy government.
(TrendHunter.com) I don't usually go for macabre chic, but these Iron Fist 'Zombie Stomper' heels are Frankenstein fabulous. The feminine peep toe and black bow on the heel balance the gruesome zombie... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 May 2009 | 11:59 am
MOSCOW, May 10 (Reuters) - Canadian auto-parts maker Magna has asked Russia's GAZ to make a bid for a stake in General Motors' German carmaking unit, Opel, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 May 2009 | 11:53 am
(TrendHunter.com) Traditionally, a guitar is defined as an instrument that has a long, fretted neck, flat wooden soundboard, ribs, and a flat back. That renders this collection of awesome axes undefined... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 May 2009 | 11:40 am
(TrendHunter.com) This video starts out innocently enough, but you know that when Lil Jon gets involved, things are bound to get a dirty. The video is entitled Cooking by the Book (A Lil Bigger Remix)... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 May 2009 | 11:20 am
(TrendHunter.com) Encore Events graphic exhibition The Universe Within, which features preserved body parts, was explicit enough to be banned in France. A French court has suggested that the shows organizer... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 May 2009 | 11:00 am
(TrendHunter.com) Rihanna and Lady GaGas Silly Boy is a reflection of one of my favorite pop collaborations in a long time, and Im happy to be able to share it with you this morning. Silly Boy by Rihanna... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 May 2009 | 10:58 am
(TrendHunter.com) LSD s.r.l. is an Italian photography company with some serious flair.There is no limit to what they shoot, be it strawberry babies or ladies with underwear on their head. The companys... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 May 2009 | 10:40 am
My latest Locus Magazine column, "Extreme Geek," is online: it's a description of three geeky writing tools I use that are a) useful; b) too geeky for most people; c) ripe for being turned into something useful to less geeky people.
I put the call out to the readership at Boing Boing, the blog I co-edit, and Dan McDonald, one of my readers, came through with a fantastic little Perl script called tagcloud.pl that does exactly this, parsing all my notes into a database that I can search or query visually, by clicking on the cloud.
Now, as I write the novel, this has become an invaluable aid: for one thing, it lends itself to a kind of casual, clicky browsing in which one hashtag leads to another, to a search-query, to another tag, exploring my notes in a way that is both serendipitous and directed.
For another, the format is one that comes naturally to me, because of all the other services I use -- such as Twitter -- that employ this telegraphic, brief style.
Johannes from Monochrom sends us his essay on Hackerspaces, HACKING THE SPACES:
The history of the so-called hackerspaces expands back to when the counter culture movement was about to make a serious statement. In the decade after the hippies attempted to establish new ways of social, political, economical and ecological relationships, a lot of experiments were carried out concerning the construction of new spaces to live and to work in. Thus, the first hackerspaces fit best into a countercultural topography consisting of squat houses, alternative cafes, farming cooperatives, collectively run businesses, communes, non-authoritarian childcare centres, and so on. All of these established a tight network for an alternative lifestyle within the heart of bourgeois darkness.
Hackerspaces provided room where people could go and work in laid-back, cool and non-repressive environments (well, as far as any kind of space or environment embedded into a capitalist society can be called laid-back, cool and non-repressive).
Sociological termed "third spaces" are spaces that break through the dualistic scheme of bourgeois spatial structure with places to live and places to work (plus places for spare time activities). They represent an integrative way that refuses to accept a lifestyle which is formed through such a structure. This means they can come to cooperative and non-repressive ways of working on e.g. technical problems that may result in new and innovative solutions. And that's exactly where Adorno's "Wrong Life" could slip in too...
The Roomba's coverage algorithm looks maddeningly random and inefficient when watched with human eyes, but use a long-exposure camera to track it and you can see how thorough it really is:
Now here's something interesting, I set up a photo camera in my room, turned out all the lights and took a long-exposure shot of my roomba doing it's thing for about 30 minutes. The result is a picture that shows the path of the roomba through it's cleaning cycle, it looks like a flight map or something. It really hits every spot!
theodp writes "Slate's Farhad Manjoo feels the end of voice-mail is nigh, and it won't be missed. Since March, he's been using Google Voice to transcribe his voice-mail messages into text that he gets as skimmable e-mail. No more listening to at least a bit of each voice-mail message, hearing the same instructional prompts between each, and worrying about whether it's 9-to-archive and 7-to-skip (or vice versa). Goodbye and good riddance, says Manjoo, to an 'absurdly backward mode of human-computer interaction' that he half-jokes must violate the Geneva Conventions."
AFP - Google's unabashed success as an Internet search and advertising juggernaut has placed it in the crosshairs of regulators worried the firm will trample free market competition.
It was like a liveblogging tournament this past week–one that included a lot of the big players, but ended in a three-way tie.
According to BoomTown’s reliable sources, the elusive Microsoft (MSFT)-Yahoo (YHOO) deal is making “meaningful” progress. Accordingly, BoomTown also wondered whether Ballmer planned on visiting Carol Bartz on his trip to the Bay Area this week, or if the proximity of Stanford to Yahoo was just chance, given that Stanford was his main destination. At least one of his reasons for being in the area was to give a talk at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium for the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar. BoomTown liveblogged the session and attempted to determine Ballmer’s soul mate status. And given some of the acquisition rumors flying around this week, BoomTown decided to conduct a little experiment. Would the same sort of “Brangelina“-esque mystique apply as well to the combination of two incredibly hot tech companies? Would it create the same hysteria, and sell as many magazines (figuratively speaking)? (Non) results on BoomTown.
MediaMemo had a Kindle-ish kind of week. Amazon (AMZN) unveiled the latest iteration of the device on Wednesday, and MediaMemo was there to liveblog the whole thing, including the crazy demo, during which the location’s facilities prevented Jeff Bezos from demoing pretty much anything. Also, Bezos forget to mention the fact that Amazon will be conducting a pilot program at with the Kindle at six colleges starting this fall. Forget about getting your hands on one, though–only five students per school will be carrying their textbooks around in a Kindle instead of a backpack. MediaMemo’s advice for cash-strapped students once the devices do become available? Wait three years until the price drops. $489 is a lot to shell out on a student’s budget.
News Corp.’s (NWS) Rupert Murdoch had some news this week during the company’s earnings call (besides earnings)–he believes that while the state of the economy is still dire, “The Worst Is Over.” He also noted that although he plans to extend WSJ’s online pay model to his strongest properties soon, News Corp. will not be selling any of its content via the Kindle, as some of its competitors will. All this and more on MediaMemo.
On Thursday, Digital Daily liveblogged a press event hosted by Google (GOOG) in advance of its annual shareholder meeting. Some of the topics covered? AOL (TWX), the econalypse, YouTube, netbooks, China, antitrust issues and the Apple (AAPL) Board. CEO Eric Schmidt was most forthcoming about the Federal Trade Commission’s just-opened inquiry into Google and Apple’s overlapping boards: when asked if he’d resign from the board, he said the thought “hasn’t crossed his mind.” Elsewhere, Oracle (ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison probably ruined a few people’s mornings over at IBM (IBM) and HP (HPQ) when he told a Reuters reporter that part of his plan for Sun (JAVA) is to create an integrated hardware and software solution, effectively making their competition a little bit more steep. As such, it’ll be extra interesting to see how the little matter of Sun and a possible violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act plays itself out in the courts. Details on Digital Daily.
Over in Personal Technology, Walt Mossberg reviewed Quickoffice, a program that brings some full-fledged word-processing capabilities to the iPhone, but has its limitations. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt answered questions about using Macs and PCs together on the same home network, backing up and transferring Outlook Express data and whether it’s possible to find a GPS program for the iPhone that will speak its directions. In the Mossberg Solution this week, Katie Boehret reviewed the Sidekick LX, and found it a little bit out of touch with its market. More in-depth discussion, of course, on the section of the site containing Walt’s columns.
An anonymous reader touts a blog posting up at PC World titled "Trademarks: The Hidden Menace." Keir Thomas asks why open source advocates are keen to suggest patent and copyright reform, yet completely ignore the issue of trademarks, which can be just as corrosive to the freedom that open source projects strive to embody. "Even within the Linux community, trademarking can be used as obstructively as copyright and patenting to further business ends. ... Is this how open source is supposed to work? Restricted redistribution? Tight control on who can compile software and still be able to call it by its proper name? ... Trademarking is almost totally incompatible with the essential freedom offered by open source. Trademarking is a way of severely limiting all activity on a particular product to that which you approve of. ... If an open source company embraces trademarks then it embraces this philosophy. On the one hand it advocates freedom, and [on] the other it takes it away."
unlametheweak recommends an Ars Technica piece detailing the convoluted lengths to which the MPAA will go in order to keep anybody from ripping a DVD, ever. The organization showed a film to the US Copyright Office, in the triennial hearing to spell out exemptions to the DMCA, giving instructions for how a teacher could use a camcorder to record a low-quality clip of a DVD for educational use — even though such a purpose is solidly established in law as fair use. "Never mind that this solution results in video of questionable quality and requires teachers to learn even more tech in order to get the job done. It also requires schools (or, given the way most schools are run, the teachers themselves) to incur additional costs to purchase camcorders and videotapes if they don't have them already. Add in the extra time involved, and this 'solution' is a laughably convoluted alternative to simply ripping a clip from a DVD."
Boy Genius Report has it on very good faith that Verizon will be bringing out the HP Mini 1151NR netbook on May 17th, which not-so-coincidentally is the same date Verizon is releasing the MiFi.
BGR... Source: Gizmodo | 10 May 2009 | 2:35 am
The Hubble space telescope, the object of NASA's fifth and last servicing mission next week, is a veritable time machine that has revolutionized humankind's vision and comprehension of the... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 May 2009 | 2:29 am
We're supposed to take heart in the fact that the Treasury Department's bank "stress tests" didn't come out worse. No, our biggest banks aren't insolvent, exactly. In fact, enough cash was printed to guarantee that they should be able to survive the rest of the recession. Worst case, with a little late-night printing and lending by the central bank, even the worst of them - like Citibank - should be able to hobble through. Our Treasury Department wants us to be reassured.
True enough, as long as banks are understood by many as fueling the economy, this should be good news. By this logic, banks disperse the capital that allows businesses to do their business. As so many have explained to me, it all starts with the banks. Banks lend businesses money, and then those businesses turn it into something real - like products, salaries, or innovation.
Sorry, but that's just not true. Labor might make money, but money doesn't make labor. (Or as I said to Rolling Stone's editor, music makes money - money doesn't make music). And while we can certainly point to the fact that assembly lines and mixing boards cost money, neither are required as the first step in creating a car company or a musical act. Yes, in a well-functioning economy, good production yields income, part of which goes to making production better. A great company dedicates part of its winnings to R&D.
But the notion that enterprise and production starts with banking is just another artifact of Renaissance-era currency monopolies. Back before the first central banks, production and yield actually created money. (That's what all this hoopla about complementary currency is about.) Money was not lent into existence by a bank. Instead, farmers brought their grain to town and received receipts for the grain. These receipts served as the local currency. Currency was worked into existence. There was as much money as there was grain.
The problem with this scheme was that people got too wealthy - especially in comparison with the feudal lords and fledgling monarchy, who had always been used to getting rich, well, by being rich. So they went and made all the grain-based currencies illegal, and forced everyone to use coin of the realm - central currency. While this coin was better for long distance trade and collecting taxes, it was lousy for local transactions. People lost their ability to live off the land, took jobs with early corporations, got poor, less fed, and eventually the economic downturn in Europe led to a plague that killed half the population. This isn't economic interpretation - it's just fact.
Eventually, with only half the population to deal with, Europe's new economic scheme proved basically sufficient to the task. And we got the rules that have - in one form or another - defined economics to this day: people don't make money, banks do. The chief function of money is for money to make money - not for it to be used for successful transactions.
But today we may be smart enough, information may travel around fast enough, for many of us to realize just how transparent a fraud we're witnessing unfold before us today - how the bailouts of AIG were really funding Goldman Sachs, how intimately involved are bankers - Rubin or Paulson, are with Treasury chiefs like, er, Paulson and Rubin. How government and banking are one and the same, both after the same centralization of authority, both inextricably linked with the biases of lending-based wealth schemes, and both utterly incapable of serving as the source of anything.
Several years ago, my longtime friend and colleague Amy Dickinson suddenly became, well, Ann Landers.
Well, not exactly Ann herself, as that would be weird–but she took over the famous advice syndicated column in the Chicago Tribune, which was changed to the name “Ask Amy.”
So, BoomTown did just on my recent visit to Chicago, interviewing Dickinson about what questions she gets about the Internet from readers.
While they now mostly send her emails instead of letters seeking help for their troubles and tribulations, the problems still are mostly about relationships, jobs and similar issues.
But, as the Web insinuates itself into people’s lives, there are also sticky situations galore, digitally speaking. To friend or not to friend, for example, that is the question.
Dickinson gets a lot of questions about Facebook and social networking, in fact, and uses a lot of such tools, including Twitter.
In other words, this is not your grandmother’s advice columnist!
Here’s the video interview I did (and you should also click this link to learn more about a marvelous new book by Dickinson that was recently published called “The Mighty Queens of Freeville,” a memoir about raising her daughter as a single mother with a little analog help from her family and friends):
I've started doing a rather free-form talk radio show on WFMU-FM and WFMU.ORG called The Media Squat, in which we explore bottom-up, open-source style solutions to some of the problems engendered by a relentlessly top-down, closed source society. We've had some great guests so far, from Richard Metzger and Paul Krassner to Joanna Harcourt-Smith and RU Sirius.
We also focus on "real people doing real things" - from people turning cement tracts in the projects into urban agriculture centers, and unemployed workers developing local currencies.
A month or so ago, a group from Indiana emailed asking if they could meet up with me in New York to get some advice and support for some bottom-up ventures they're initiating - and I figured it would be a great opportunity to take advantage of some of the community we've developed through the show. So they're coming on this Monday evening, May 11, at 7p EST.
I invite you all to tune in and help them figure out exactly how to proceed. Here's what they sent me so far:
The Bloomington Think Tank, aka the 'Culturvators,' are a group of young people in Bloomington, IN who are exploring and enacting hyper-local methods of creating, supporting, and improving permaculture practices, local economic initiatives, and community. They are promoters of and participants in organic agriculture, the art community, and local currency/bartering. They are engaged with local permaculture practitioners, and are earning food through a work-share CSA.
The Culturvators believe in the tribe, or small to medium social group, as the key component in improving their local community, and the world at large, in our present moment of crisis. Culturvation is the process of bridging the gaps of individuation that prevent us from creating and sustaining working relationships with our neighbors. Culturvators are those who break down barriers to form the social groups that produce change. In short, many hands make light work, and the Culturvators get those hands to shake so the work can get done.
HSBC will come under fire on Monday when it reports a steep rise in US bad debt. HSBC's ill-fated foray into America has been hit by the worsening performance of its credit card business, with most of... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 May 2009 | 1:42 am
A British Member of Parliament claims he saw two undercover cops acting as agents provocateurs at the G20 demonstrations, attempting to get the crowd to riot. It was during one of the "kettling" sessions (this is a tactic used by UK cops wherein all protesters and bystanders are crammed into a physical space that is cordoned off indefinitely, and though the protesters are not charged with any offense, they are not allowed to leave, seek medical care, use toilets, etc). The men apparently threw missiles at the cops and tried to get others to do the same, then, after being accused of being provocateurs, flashed credentials at the police and passed through their lines.
"When I was in the middle of the crowd, two people came over to me and said, 'There are people over there who we believe are policemen and who have been encouraging the crowd to throw things at the police,'" Brake said. But when the crowd became suspicious of the men and accused them of being police officers, the pair approached the police line and passed through after showing some form of identification.
Brake has produced a draft report of his experiences for the human rights committee, having received written statements from people in the crowd. These include Tony Amos, a photographer who was standing with protesters in the Royal Exchange between 5pm and 6pm. "He [one of the alleged officers] was egging protesters on. It was very noticeable," Amos said. "Then suddenly a protester seemed to identify him as a policeman and turned on him. He legged it towards the police line, flashed some ID and they just let him through, no questions asked."
If you’ve been reading some of the comments on TechCrunch recently, perhaps you’ve noticed some backlash against our coverage of Twitter. As is usually the case with comments, a small, but vocal minority get all worked up about something and air their grievances — over and over again. And that’s fine. More often than not, the comments are amusing, and sometimes they’re even insightful. We’ve actually already weighed in on the topic of Twitter coverage once before, a few months ago, but seeing as I’m now the primary driver of Twitter stories on the site, I thought I’d take this weekend afternoon to weigh in myself.
Simply put, we write about Twitter so often because right now, it matters. From news organizations to movie stars, from earthquakes to fires, from Facebook to Google — everyone seems to be talking about, to or with Twitter. In an era of mass communication, it is the latest medium. And it’s fundamentally changing the ways in which people interact with others using the web. What you may view as a stupidly simple service with no real point, I view as one of the few inspirational products in bleak times.
I would argue that Twitter works so well precisely because it’s so simple. It fools some people with its “What are you doing?” question that resides at the top of the page, but Twitter can pretty much be about whatever you want it to be about. That’s why it’s an absolutely brilliant platform for so many new startups to build on top of. And those startups are really the key. They’re what are keeping Twitter so hot right now. Every day, something new launches on top of Twitter; some get coverage, some don’t. Some are silly, some are smart, some might actually work. But overall, the level of activity around the platform is amazing.
And that activity, fuels growth and feeds the system full of its most important life-blood: Information. It’s this real-time information that is Twitter’s most valuable asset. And it’s information that Twitter will soon begin mining in more interesting ways with its search product — which should be useful to a lot of people. And it should lead to even more innovation and more startups.
Stop and think for a moment about any one startup that has had such an impact on other startups. There aren’t many, and there really hasn’t been one for a while. I suppose you could throw Facebook in there, and before that obviously Google. But really, there aren’t too many companies in general that are changing the ways others do things, the way Twitter is right now.
And that’s why I think it’s worth writing about so often. It’s not just about Twitter, the product, it’s also about Twitter, the idea. And Twitter, the catalyst of change. Twitter has shaken shit up in the industry. And it’s exciting as hell when a company does that, because the subsequent chaos almost always breeds cool new things. And “cool new things” is what technology is and always has been about.
And if you’ve been paying attention, Twitter is hardly the only thing in technology to have gotten a lot of hype and draw complaints for getting too much coverage in the past few years. We saw it with Google, we saw it with Facebook, we saw it with the iPhone and then we saw it again with the App Store. What do all of these things share in common? They all shook shit up. They were all great products, all became very popular, and all caused industry shifts. Twitter is just the latest of these. But it won’t be the last.
When that something new comes along, we’ll be on it, covering it relentlessly too. Because these things matter, because we’re passionate about them and because the vast majority of readers do care.
And at least we’re not gushing over the people behind the scenes at Twitter as they go out drinking at night, like The New York Times did today. Not yet, anyway.
Wired is running a piece on the big idea of Robin Chase — the founder of Zipcar — that we need to build our smart power grid on open standards and include cars as nodes in a mesh network. "'Today in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers and tanks and airplanes are running around using mesh networks,' said Chase. 'It works, it's secure, it's robust. If a node or device disappears, the network just reroutes the data.' And, perhaps most important, it's in motion. ... Build a smart electrical grid that uses Internet protocols and puts a mesh network device in every structure that has an electric meter. Sweep out the half dozen networks in our cars and replace them with an open, Internet-based platform. Add a mesh router. A nationwide mesh cloud will form, linking vehicles that can connect with one another and with the rest of the network. It's cooperative gain gone national, gone mobile, gone open."
After months of delay, NASA cleared space shuttle Atlantis for a Monday launch to the Hubble Space Telescope. Mission managers concluded Saturday that Atlantis is ready to take off on... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 May 2009 | 12:13 am
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA managers have cleared space shuttle Atlantis for launch on Monday on a final mission to refurbish the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, officials... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 May 2009 | 12:09 am
MySpace has let go of as many as 45 employees in the last week, we’ve confirmed. Sources close to the company say that the exact figure may be smaller, but that MySpace has definitely laid off a significant number of people. MySpace has refused to comment on the matter, so it isn’t clear if this was the result of a canceled project, general layoffs, or performance-based cuts. A source says that early signs indicate that the open positions will not be filled by other employees.
The news comes only a few weeks after MySpace suddenly dropped founding CEO Chris DeWolfe and brought on a new executive team led by Owen Van Natta. It’s unclear if the cuts are directly related to decisions made by the new team or if they were already set in motion prior to DeWolfe’s departure. In any case, we’ll probably hear about more restructuring as Van Natta and team slash the projects they don’t want to continue pursuing.
Last July MySpace was rumored to have laid off as much as 5% of its workforce, though the company later said that the cuts were performance based and amounted to “less than 5%” of the company.
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
AT&T is planning to purchase the leftovers of Alltel's network, including physical assets like towers, licenses, and 1.5 million subscribers from Alltel's new owner, Verizon, for the tasty sum of... Source: Gizmodo | 9 May 2009 | 10:30 pm
gollito writes in with news that Microsoft has released an open source alternative to Google's BigTable file system, which is used on large distributed computer clusters. Matt Asay writes for CNet: "I also believe that Microsoft's fear-mongering around open source cost it years of productivity and quality gains that it could have been delivering to customers through open source. I hope that reign of ignorance is over."
An unknown number of hackers broke into UC Berkeley's database and were able to access the personal and health information of over 160,000 students and former students. They're still at large.
The... Source: Gizmodo | 9 May 2009 | 9:45 pm
AP - AT&T Inc. said Friday it will buy the assets of Verizon Wireless in 79 mainly rural areas for $2.35 billion, a deal that will affect more than 1 million subscribers. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 9 May 2009 | 9:30 pm
SAN DIEGO, May 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Bridgepoint Education, Inc. (NYSE: BPI), a leading provider of postsecondary education services, announced today that Ashford University graduated a total of 1,702 students in its May semiannual graduation. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 9 May 2009 | 9:00 pm
SAN DIEGO, May 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Bridgepoint Education, Inc. (NYSE: BPI), a leading provider of postsecondary education services, announced today that Ashford... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 9 May 2009 | 9:00 pm
Is there anything Official DTV Spokesperson Carol Brady can't do?
Hard as it may be to believe for nerds like you and me, there are some people who just can't wrap their heads around this whole DTV... Source: Gizmodo | 9 May 2009 | 9:00 pm
Right whales have plenty to celebrate this Mother's Day _ the sea moms gave birth to a record 39 calves this spring. The New England Aquarium said Friday that the birth surge breaks the... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 9 May 2009 | 8:59 pm
The White House has ordered a complete outside review of NASA's manned space program, including plans to return astronauts to the moon. Officials want a report from an independent panel... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 9 May 2009 | 8:56 pm
ChrisPaget writes "Thinking about buying Alienware (now owned by Dell)? Think again. After buying an almost-new Alienware laptop on eBay, I've spent the last week trying to get hold of a Smart Bay caddy to connect a second hard drive (about $150 for $5 of bent metal). Four different Alienware teams have refused to even give me a price on this accessory, instead accusing me of stealing the machine since I didn't buy it directly from their eBay store. They want me to persuade the eBay seller I did buy it from to add me as an authorized user of his Alienware account — they have no concept of 'ownership transfer' and instead assume that if you're not in their system, you must be a thief."
The Star Trek Bridge playset was, hands down, the best toy I owned as a child. I played with it for approximately 10,000 hours. Especially the whirly-twirly transporter cubicle. I loved the psychedelic cardboard viewscreens, the tippy chairs and furniture, the stick-on UI for same that was as inscrutable and ridiculous as the authentic show computers. This toy had the magic, a vinyl-covered, detailed, configurable kind of magic that made you want to play with it for hours and hours on end.
I kept my Bridge playset for all these years. It sat in my Toronto storage locker for a decade, and then got shipped to London, where it now resides, along with my action-figures, in my office. And it still has the magic.
And now: the toy has been reissued, along with all the original action figures, including the two-tone aliens and the lizard dudes. The crew have the tiny blue phasers and the same dead eyes and the miniatures plastic Blundstones from the future. And I just saw the set, in person, in a comics shop, and it still has the magic.
Yup, we come to CrunchGear for the latest in Department of Defense news. Looks like the DoD (that’s fancy inside-the-beltway talk) is telling Boeing to stop researching its Airborne Laser and Multiple Kill Vehicle. The DoD would rather Boeing spend its time (and taxpayer money) on less Star Wars/Trek-like tech. In other words, build guns and bullets, sure, but try not to focus your energies on replicating the BFG or Cerebral Bore.
Here’s a video that’s straight out of Iron Man (a fun movie, if you haven’t seen it yet). It shows the MKV running amok in a controlled environment.
Love the 1980s music in that video, by the way. Reminds me of that episode of the (UK) Office.
Also, count the pop culture references in this post. Crutch much, Carlos?
Now this is one amazing Goodwill find: A vintage pop-up book designed to teach burgeoning nerds about the wonders of the modern computer. Floppy disks, ASCII, and the dot-matrix printer. Oh my.
Some... Source: Gizmodo | 9 May 2009 | 8:00 pm
Remember the revelation that pharma giant Merck had paid Elsevier to publish a fake peer-reviewed journal that promoted its products? Turns out Elsevier has an entire division devoted to publishing fake journals for money:
Now, several librarians say that they have uncovered an entire imprint of 'advertorial' publications. Excerpta Medica, a 'strategic medical communications agency,' is an Elsevier division. Along with the now infamous Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, it published a number of other 'journals.' Elsevier CEO Michael Hansen now admits that at least six fake journals were published for pharmaceutical companies."
Hugh Pickens writes "Work resumed this week on the five-year project to link a chain of tower-mounted sensors and other surveillance equipment over most of the 2,000-mile border with Mexico. The network of cameras, radar, and communications gear is intended to speed deployment of US Border Patrol officers to intercept illegal immigrants, drug smugglers and other violators, yielding greater 'operational control' over the vast and rugged area. A $20M pilot project for the Secure Border Initiative, or 'SBInet,' carried out in the Bush administration, was generally considered a colossal IT failure. Since that time the DHS has given the prime contractor, Boeing, another $600M. The government says it has learned many lessons and made many changes in the program since the previous pilot rushed off-the-shelf equipment into operation without testing. The Obama administration has lowered the cost estimate for the 5-year project by $1.1B, to $6.7B, mainly by deferring work on the most difficult 200 miles of the border, in southwest Texas."
The "HyperRocket" was built by a Ford efficiency expert in his garage, and with two seats, a whopping 125 mpg, and a comfortable cruising speed of 65 mph, we're awfully tempted to buy the thing.... Source: Gizmodo | 9 May 2009 | 7:15 pm
Remember the DTV switch? Yeah, it got pushed back a few months but the new deadline of June 12, 2009 is quickly approaching. Have no fear Carol Brady is here! The perpetually positive mother on The Brady Bunch has some handy tips for aging baby boomers about the transition. One look at Florence Henderson and you can tell that she knows her DTV stuff. And she’s very excited to tell you about it too.
Truthfully, her Digital Tips PDF guide might not be a bad thing to print out and stuff in your mom’s Mothers Day card. Nothing says “I love you” more than ensuring she doesn’t lose her TV after June 12, 2009.
The European Union is set to ban the sale of incandescent light bulbs, forcing consumers to buy more energy efficient alternatives, officials said.
Taken off store shelves by September will be conventional 100 and 60 watt pearl bulbs, as well as frosted 25 watt and 40 watt bulbs, The Daily Telegraph reported Saturday.
Shoppers will be forced to buy low energy compact fluorescent lamps or low energy halogen bulbs. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 9 May 2009 | 7:01 pm
FROM APPLETELL - Another fantastic week on the App Store. I don’t recall any huge announcements or amazing treasures, but there sure were a lot of decent and useful apps and games. MORE »
Earlier this week, we got our first glimpse of the Kindle DX, Amazon's upcoming E-book reader that has taken the original Kindle's nearly prohibitive $359 price tag and bumped it up to an even more exorbitant $489 for good measure. Granted, the DX has one major improvement: a bigger screen that makes it suitable for textbooks, professional journal articles, and even newspapers. I've spent the last few days mulling over the future prospects of the new device, and up until a few hours ago my forecast was looking pretty grim. But then a lightbulb went off over my head: pirates are going to save the Kindle DX.
But before I get to that, let's address why the Kindle DX is poised to fail.
The Newspaper Strategy
Three major newspapers have banded together for an experimental trial run on the Kindle DX, offering cheaper long-term subscriptions to customers in return for the fact that their distribution costs will be next to nothing.
Hackers infiltrated US air traffic control computers numerous times in the last few years and increased dependence on Internet applications and software has caused increased vulnerability, states a government audit.This includes an assault on a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) computer in February 2009 where hackers received admittance to personal data on 48,000 FAA workers, the report noted.In 2006 a virus sent via the Internet multiplied and required the FAA to close down several air traffic control (ATC) systems in Alaska.The audit was lead by an assistant inspector general at the US Department Of Transportation. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 9 May 2009 | 6:37 pm
Sun Microsystems Inc., a hardware maker that Oracle Corp is buying for more than $7 billion, admitted Friday that it may have broken a U.S. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 9 May 2009 | 6:31 pm
The creator of iCombat weighed in with his thoughts on newly-popular piracy of iPhone apps with an interesting conclusion: It's not worth the trouble to police the pirates, and they might even prove... Source: Gizmodo | 9 May 2009 | 6:30 pm
California officials have asked the federal government to review rules that reduced water exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to protect a fish.
In a letter to the U.S. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 9 May 2009 | 6:25 pm
Did you know that solid state drives could suffer from fragmentation and slowdowns? SSDs are basically huge chunks of ultrafast flash memory designed for massive data storage. There are no moving parts but as you read and write to the disks, the quality and speed degrades over time.
Because they’re fairly new, not much is known about how they will react to prolonged use. While SSD OEMs tout the speed and convenience, there is little proof that that speed will remain constant.
The good news is that after an initial dip in performance, SSDs tend to level off, according to Eden Kim, chairman of the Solid State Storage Initative’s Consumer SSD Market Development Task Force. Even if they do drop in performance over time — undercutting a manufacturer’s claims — consumer flash drives are still vastly faster than traditional hard drives, because they can perform two to five times the input/ouput operations (I/Os) per second of a hard drive, he said.
Is it a big deal? Probably not. A second or two here or there won’t kill your Quake session. However, for heavy duty servers SSDs might be a bit of a risk.
Earlier this week, we got our first glimpse of the Kindle DX, Amazon’s upcoming E-book reader that has taken the original Kindle’s nearly prohibitive $359 price tag and bumped it up to an even more exorbitant $489 for good measure. Granted, the DX has one major improvement: a bigger screen that makes it suitable for textbooks, professional journal articles, and even newspapers. I’ve spent the last few days mulling over the future prospects of the new device, and up until a few hours ago my forecast was looking pretty grim. But then a lightbulb went off over my head: pirates are going to save the Kindle DX.
But before I get to that, let’s address why the Kindle DX is poised to fail.
The Newspaper Strategy
Three major newspapers have banded together for an experimental trial run on the Kindle DX, offering cheaper long-term subscriptions to customers in return for the fact that their distribution costs will be next to nothing. The newspaper angle might be attractive for a few people, but I’m not convinced that it’s actually going to sell many Kindle DX’s - at least, not without the newspapers subsidizing the device’s cost as part of a subscription plan. Over $500 after taxes, plus paying for the newspaper subscriptions themselves, for convenient access to content that is already available for free online? I just don’t see it happening.
Kindle DX As A Textbook Reader
The other big marketing angle for Amazon is that the Kindle DX is the ultimate textbook reader. This sounds great in principle: students won’t have to lug around massive tomes between classes, and their books may even be slightly cheaper to boot! Unfortunately, for anyone who has ever actually used a Kindle, it’s pretty clear that this isn’t going to be as amazing as it sounds. Sifting through an E-book looking for a certain passage or image when you don’t know its exact page number (some call it ‘random access’) is a strange and unnatural experience. The Kindle sort of makes up for this by offering text search, but this is only helpful if there’s a proper name or unusual vocab term that you can remember in the passage.
But the Kindle’s real weakness is its highlighting and annotation functionality. In a real book, you can mark up your textbook and make notes to yourself in the margins. The Kindle lets you highlight and take notes, but the interface is painful to use with any kind of frequency - E-ink doesn’t lend itself well to quick navigation, nor does the Kindle’s joystick/button interface. From a student’s perspective, the Kindle is badly in need of a touchscreen. And while some students may initially grab the Kindle DX as soon as it comes out for the ‘cool’ factor, practicality (and cost) will rule it out for most of them.
Unless..
Pirates To The Rescue
College textbooks are really expensive. As in, $300+ per quarter (a small fortune for someone with little to no income) for a set of books that you may only occasionally look at and will have no use for three months down the line. If you’re thrifty you can sell those books back to your school and get doubly screwed when they fork over a laughably small return. Selling them online through services like Chegg usually yields better results, but for whatever reason most students still don’t use them.
So why don’t these students, renowned pirates as they are, simply copy the books? Well, textbook piracy already exists. If you know where to look online, you can find many novels and textbooks scanned in their entirety as PDFs. But until now, pirated textbooks were more trouble than they were worth. Reading them on a computer screen is a pain for obvious reasons. The alternative, printing out hundreds of pages at a time, results in an unwieldly mess that also stands out like a sore thumb whenever you pull it out in class.
The Kindle DX changes that. Just find the book you want in PDF form, upload it to your Kindle over USB, and you’ve got a perfectly readable and convenient textbook. Sure, students will have to deal with the usability issues I raised above, like slow highlighting. But these books, frustrating as they might be, will be 100% free. That’s $300 per quarter in extra beer money. Most obstacles and morals fade quickly in the face of that much alcohol.
Now, this is an issue we’ve brought up before when the original Kindle came out, and it hasn’t really been a problem. But most of the books people have been buying up until now are available for a mere $9.99 from Amazon. For most people, the motivation simply isn’t there to figure out how to pirate a book. But when you’re faced with a price tag of around $70 per textbook there’s a far greater incentive to find a workaround. It’s easier to find pirated files on campus too - students will be surrounded by classmates using the exact same textbooks so there’s a better chance someone will have a pirated digital version. And there’s always the resident friendly geek down the hall ready to help with any tech support issues.
So the Kindle DX may wind up selling well to Amazon’s chagrin. Amazon is really in the business of selling ‘the blades’ - it cares more about selling books than it does about selling devices (this is why Amazon offers an E-book reader for the iPhone too). Then again, it might just work out for the company after all. Students may take the time to pirate expensive textbooks, shortchanging their publishers. But a New York Times Bestseller? Why, I’d save myself the trouble and just buy it for $9.99 off Amazon.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Across the U.S., a number of state attorneys general have begun taking a closer look at a proposed deal between Google Inc. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 9 May 2009 | 5:27 pm
There are plenty of good practices to pick up when working with a computer. However, it’s really easy to fall into traps by being lazy. Take a look at this list. Do you have lousy tech habits? The first step is identifying your problem. Next, is finding a solution.
5. Not having a junk e-mail address
So many sites require signing up to get access to more information. Software registration also asks for your e-mail. Giving out your personal e-mail address can make for a very cluttered inbox. Sure you could create filters to avoid this, but you can stop the problem from happening from the beginning by getting a junk e-mail address.
Now many people suggest using your gmail account and modifying it. So if your e-mail address was “User@gmail.com” you could write “User+junk@gmail.com” instead. Then you could filter out those messages. While that does work (and is nice for filtering purposes), not all sites accept an e-mail with a “+.”
There are several ways around this. You could just sign up for another e-mail address. However, there are many web services that give you a temporary e-mail address. This is very handy when you sign up for forums.
4. Not cleaning out your inbox regularly
The amount of unread e-mails in your inbox can be overwhelming. Sometimes, you’ve just got to put your head down and go through your e-mails. The trick is really consistency. If you do a little every day, you’ll take care of it. Remember, 5 minutes of work is still better than none.
Keep something in mind, you don’t have to read every e-mail. Take a look at the sender and the subject and see if it’s even worth reading. You can get rid of lots of e-mails this way. Not cleaning out your e-mail can lead to lost opportunities.
3. Using one password for all things
This is a huge mistake. Sure, having one password for your e-mail, your computer, your Facebook account and everything else is easy. The only problem is, if someone figures out that one password, you’re sunk. You don’t have to get paranoid with super-hackers messing with your Facebook status, but your roommates may have a propensity for pranks.
How can you avoid this? Simple. Grab some other passwords. You’ll need some kind of password manager, but it’s worth it.
2. Poor file structure
Do you have files strewn all over your hard drive? Are your pictures partly in your “Downloads” folder, and some are in your “Pictures” folder? Do you have music on your desktop and some in another folder? Who knows where your documents are?
What makes this such a bad habit? The fact is, you can probably find your files using searches and then saving those searches for smart folders. However, it does rob you of precious time and processing power. Why make your system run a little slower?
You can actually pick up some software that will move your files for you if you don’t feel like doing the work yourself. Check out Belvedere written by the guys at Lifehacker. Now you’ll know where everything is instead of wasting time.
1. Not backing up
Admit it—you don’t back up regularly. This is always trouble for lots of people. The more data you have, the larger your backup solution has to be.
The fact is, you don’t need to back up your entire hard drive. Having a cloned drive is always nice so you don’t skip a beat, but if you want to be somewhat lazy about it, you can just back up your most important data. There’s a really easy way to do this.
Get Dropbox. Dropbox’s primary purpose is to sync folders on multiple machines. However, Dropbox also creates an online copy of your files. Every change you make to files in your Dropbox is uploaded to a server somewhere in the world. You’ll be backing up without even knowing it. [Dropbox]
Farhad Manjoo at Slate makes a good point: voicemail, the clunky old process of “pressing 1 to play, 9 to delete,” is dead. Transcription services like Google Voice and Spinvox have made the process of getting messages from your phone in audio format obsolete. And good riddance.
The bill of particulars is damning. Unlike your e-mail inbox, voice mail is impossible to skim: If your phone tells you that you’ve got five new messages, you’ve got no choice but to listen to at least a bit of each one before you can decide what to do with it. In a user-interface decision that I suspect might violate some subclause of the Geneva Conventions, your voice-mail system insists on making you listen to the same instructional prompts between each message.
I haven’t listened to a voicemail in years now, instead using various third party systems for transcription. I’ve even disabled visual voicemail on the iPhone mostly because it still requires a few seconds of listening. I’d much rather get a poorly transcribed voicemail message (”hey john this is kevin ray from you start sorry to bug you again on the phone minutes away”) and get the gist of the conversation awaiting me than wait for a message from a warranty renewal service to pop up like a whack-a-mole. So goodbye, voicemail. Go. Go now.
Mother’s Day is just around the corner and those of you who are on top of your game have probably already sent a card and arranged to give your mom a thoughtful gift of flowers, candy, or a gift certificate to a spa. For those of you out there who have done none of the above, Animoto, a startup that automatically generates high quality slideshow/music videos from a set of photos, offers you the ability to make a heartfelt video greeting that would warm any mother’s heart.
The site features a Mother’s Day card that allows you to submit a handful of photos to automatically create a sentimental video-slideshow set to your mom’s favorite music. It’s an easy, quick and and innovative way to show your Mom how much you love and value her on Mother’s Day.
Animoto, which launched in 2007, also helped users make creative slideshow greetings cards on Valentine’s Day and and over the holiday season. Animoto offers a nifty service and does a nice job of spicing up photo albums, with little effort needed on the users’ part. Competitors include RockYou and Slide.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
For a while now, we’ve been tracking a number of companies who are hard at work trying to build the ultimate social networking desktop app. We’ve talked about TweetDeck, Twhirl / Seesmic Desktop, AlertThingy, and there are many more especially if you also include the ones that focus only on Twitter (Tweetie, Nambu, Twitterific, etc.).
Another horse in this race that barely gets a mention is Sobees, probably in big part because of the fact it’s only available for Windows users (with the latest .NET framework, moreover), although it doesn’t really deserve to be below the radar this much at all.
We covered the company’s social network aggregator when it entered public beta, and wrote that they were aiming to attract a mainstream audience for their software, which enables users to manage a fairly wide variety of web apps and social networking services from their desktops. It’s a nifty companion that plugs into Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr, YouTube and many more web services, but I’ve always felt it was far too overloaded with features for me to use it on a daily basis.
So I was interested when the company set out to build a stand-alone client for Twitter, Facebook and Twitter Search. And just as they were working on that, Facebook launched its Open Stream API so they made thankful use of it quite rapidly and converted the API to .NET and integrated the stream into the new client. The software is now in alpha and publicly available under the name bDule, and it’s definitely worth checking out even if you only use one of the two services it supports.
Soon, we’ll do a feature-by-feature comparison for all the existing social desktop applications, but for now let me just say Sobees is very much worthy of being included whenever someone talks about Facebook / Twitter clients. As mostly all of the apps mentioned on top bDule is a bit of a memory drain, and at times renders a bit slow, but the UI is really well thought-out (love the different templates you can switch to in just one mouse-click) and it does what it’s supposed to do really well.
Too bad it’s Windows / .NET only, because I’m sure there’s an audience out there that’s looking for just this type of app.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
It would likely be Huawei with a T-Mobile branded handset. The OEM manufacturer already stated plans to launch two to three handsets this year, and both companies have worked together in the past. Chances are we might see the unnamed touchscreen Android phone we spotted at MWC09 launch for the ‘10 holiday season. We can’t wait.
It would likely be Huawei with a T-Mobile branded handset. The OEM manufacturer already stated plans to launch two to three handsets this year, and both companies have worked together in the past. Chances are we might see the unnamed touchscreen Android phone we spotted at MWC09 launch for the ‘10 holiday season. We can’t wait.
A MBTA trolley slammed into the back of another one in downtown Boston last night, injuring 100 and sending 49 to the hospital. In what MBTA officials called an outrage, the driver of the trolley that caused the crash admitted he had been texting his girlfriend at the time and didn’t see the red signal in front of him until it was too late. Thankfully none of the injuries were considered life threatening.
The 24 year old conductor will likely lose his job as MBTA policy states texting on the job is dismissible offense. Last September, a commuter train in California ran a red light and slammed into a freight train, killing 25 people including the engineer, who’s texting was blamed for the crash.
But the moving Green Line trolley that came from behind had enough force to jolt a second trolley parked at a red light about 100 feet into the tunnel toward the Park Street station. Both trolleys derailed and sustained significant damage at the point of impact.
I am from Boston and have spent countless hours on the T. There is just no way a train, bus or trolley can be operated safely while texting. None. The same goes for a car or truck. A recent Nationwide Insurance survey of 1,503 drivers found that almost 40 percent of those respondents from 16 to 30 years old said they text while driving. Where is the common sense? Please people, if you text while driving, STOP. It’s not worth risking your life or anyone else’s.
Google.co.ma, the domain name for Google Morocco’s search portal, was taken hostage by hackers earlier today reportedly for several hours before the problem got fixed (it’s working fine again now). We got a bunch of tips about it, and the situation lasted long enough for lots of people to take screenshots of the website the domain name briefly pointed to due to the hack.
You can find loads of screenshots here and here, but the main domain name pointed to the website shown on top of this post.
There’s a bit of confusion about how the hack was performed exactly, but it appears as if the hackers found a way into NIC.ma, which controls the DNS for the country, and targeted the Google domain name especially. The domain was pointed to a different server, and the web page above was shown when people tried to access the search engine. Google apparently at one point automatically relayed visitors from Morocco to Google.com instead of Google.co.ma, but it took a while to get the latter functioning correctly again.
PAKbugs.com leads to a forum where Pakistan hackers hang out, and the names on top of the web page above are all members of the message board. They’re being proud of it here.
This website (in French) claims that this isn’t the first such incident this year, as apparently the websites for Google Algeria and Google Puerto Rico were taken hostage by hackers last month too.
NewsFactor - Google told media outlets on Thursday that the Federal Trade Commission is eying CEO Eric Schmidt's dual membership on the board of Directors for Google and Apple as a potential violation of the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914. Though initially not rivals, the two companies are poised to become competitors once more handsets running Google's Android platform become available to challenge Apple's iPhone. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 9 May 2009 | 2:09 pm
NewsFactor - Activision Publishing on Thursday announced news that's music to the ears of its Guitar Hero franchise fans. The company will release three new Guitar Hero titles this fall. DJ Hero, Guitar Hero 5, and Band Hero are nearly ready for release. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 9 May 2009 | 2:08 pm
Do you need telemetric data from your fish tank? Do you even have a fish tank? Well, you’re in luck because TankedCAM is a fish tank monitoring and video system for iPhone that allows you to watch your fishy fishes as well as turn on their little fish toys. there’s even a flash demo for those who wish to open and close a dinosaur’s mouth.
Best of all, the system, which runs on a mini PC, can send messages to Twitter regarding your tank’s status. For the life of me, however, I can’t find out how to buy the darned thing. It looks like they have a prototype board with camera, PH probe input, and wireless antenna.
I’m sure any self-respecting Star Trek fan knows this is opening weekend for the latest Star Trek film. So, in honor of the big weekend, here is a nifty little gadget just for you. A Star Trek Communicator Internet phone. Say that five times fast.
It is a replica of “The Original Series” with USB (plug and play). It comes with a built in mic and earphones, as well as a built in speaker with 21 sound effects. It works with Skype, AIM, MSN, iChat, and more. The LCD Moire (that little circle in the middle) will spin when the cover is open too.
It comes with a six foot cord, a volume switch, and a mute button, and is compatible with Windows XP, Vista, and Mac.
By the way, word on the street is that the movie is worth the ticket price. Star Trek fans (and even someone you are dragging along) should really enjoy it. Though it is argued that it isn’t quite as good as “The Wrath of Khan”.
Talk about Twitter’s reach growing. Apparently it is now going into outer space. NASA astronaut Mark Polansky will be commanding the upcoming mission to the International Space Station, and he just posted an invite on YouTube. This invite, which was posted on 
![](http://craphound.com/images/corycloudtag_400x210.jpg"><br>
As I made these notes, I had a sense that, somewhere, there)
I put the call out to the readership at Boing Boing, the blog I co-edit, and Dan McDonald, one of my readers, came through with a fantastic little Perl script called tagcloud.pl that does exactly this, parsing all my notes into a database that I can search or query visually, by clicking on the cloud.
It was like a liveblogging tournament this past week–one that included a lot of the big players, but ended in a three-way tie.
I kept my Bridge playset for all these years. It sat in my Toronto storage locker for a decade, and then got shipped to London, where it now resides, along with my action-figures, in my office. And it still has the magic.
Earlier this week, we got our first 
There are plenty of good practices to pick up when working with a computer. However, it’s really easy to fall into traps by being lazy. Take a look at this list. Do you have lousy tech habits? The first step is identifying your problem. Next, is finding a solution.
For a while now, we’ve been tracking a number of companies who are hard at work trying to build the ultimate social networking desktop app. We’ve talked about 
A MBTA trolley slammed into the back of another one in downtown Boston last night, injuring 100 and sending 49 to the hospital. In what MBTA officials called an outrage, the driver of the trolley that caused the crash admitted he had been texting his girlfriend at the time and didn’t see the red signal in front of him until it was too late. Thankfully none of the injuries were considered life threatening. 
