Toronto's Pages bookstore, one of my favorites in the world, is set to close after a rent-hike left it unable to remain in its 30 year Queen Street location. I worked at Bakka, the science fiction bookstore, when it was just a few doors down from Pages (which has a phenomenal periodicals and underground, design, art, and culture book sections, as well as some of the friendliest, most knowledgeable staff you could hope to meet), and I remember when we lost our lease after a rent hike. The store eventually landed back on Queen Street after being acquired by a new owner, but it was touch and go for years. Apparently Pages can't find anywhere else to go and will be shuttering. I'm gutted -- Pages was always one of the highlights of my trips back home to Toronto.
"Landlords seem to be recession-proof at this point," he says. "They're just keeping their prices up."
Currently, Glassman figures he's getting a good deal at $235,000 a year. But landlord Yoram Birenzweig, VP of Pinedale Properties, says the true market value at 256 Queen West is $100 a square foot - which my calculator tells me is $400,000 a year.
That's not what he's demanding Glassman pay, but even if they split the difference, it's all too much for Pages.
Glassman keeps stressing his relationship with Birenzweig is genial and that he's not getting screwed over.
"It's life," he says. "He appreciates what we're doing, [but] for him, if you can, you should make more money," he says.
The article goes on to mention that another great Toronto bookstore, This Ain't the Rosedale Library, rescued itself by moving to Kensington Market from Church Street. I've been to the new location and it's fantastic -- a great store for a great neighborhood. Visitors to Toronto, take note.
French hackers claim to have sabotaged Internet forensics by creating a firmware for routers that cracks nearby WiFi networks and routes your traffic through them at random, creating false trails leading to your neighbors instead of you. They're calling it the HADOPI Router, in honor of Nicolas Sarkozy's crazy Internet law of the same name.
HADOPI originally required ISPs to disconnect users after three unsubstantiated claims of copyright infringement (Princeton's Ed Felten compared this to giving publishers the power to take away all the printed matter in your household if you were accused of committing three acts of illegal photocopying or cut-and-paste). The law was initially defeated in the French parliament, then it passed on reintroduction, only to be struck down by France's high court on the grounds that it violated human rights.
Undaunted, Sarkozy has reintroduced the bill, on a fast track, with a provision that creates a five-minute judicial review prior to account termination, fines and imprisonment for those accused of illegal file-sharing. The French HADOPI Router hackers created their technology to highlight the unreliability of network forensics under the best of circumstances, and to create a veneer of plausible deniability for any accused: "Your honor, I must have been the victim of a neighbor with a HADOPI router."
A hacker known only as 'N' says he has developed some software known as 'Hadopi Router', a term first penned by bloggers who devised the concept. 'N', who is said to have previously worked manufacturing routers, says he and a few friends wrote 'Hadopi Router' in order to prove that the evidence gathered by the Hadopi agency is unreliable.
"It locates Wi-Fi networks in the neighborhood, then begins to crack all their passwords," says 'N'. "Once we have the keys, we can create a virtual access point," which in basic terms means using the Internet connection without the account holder's knowledge.
'N' says that if an 'owned' router has its password changed, the system automatically switches to another Wi-Fi signal in the neighborhood and starts to attack the new password.
Additionally, 'N' claims that with Hadopi Router it is possible to monitor activity on the cracked networks but one of his accomplices called 'V' says they have no bad intentions.
MIDDLETOWN, R.I., July 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- KVH Industries, Inc., (Nasdaq: KVHI) will announce its financial results for the second quarter that ended June 30, 2009, on... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Jul 2009 | 11:30 am
CLEVELAND, July 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Park Place International, an Independent Service Organization (ISO), announces its partnership today with BlueBridge Networks(R), a provider of Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Jul 2009 | 11:30 am
If you visit Barcelona, Spain, don’t drink the tap water. Depending on which part of town you are in, water from the faucet either tastes of chlorine, gives you cancer, or both. This is why almost everyone buys giant eight-liter (541 tablespoons) bottles of water and drags them up the stairs of their seven-story, elevator-free apartment buildings.
Yes, yes, the environment would be better if only I used a water filter. The problem is that they are so frikkin’ ugly. And plastic. Here, though, is a glass and steel beauty, a jug so fine it doesn’t use boring old everyday charcoal cartridges but real lumps of Binchotan charcoal and louseki stones, all the way from the “mountains in Kanazawa, the capital city of Ishikawa Prefecture, on the Sea of Japan coast.”
This is, clearly, the home-made equivalent of Fiji bottled water.
The cost is a not unreasonable $85, fine for something used several times daily. The refills come in at $25 each, which - even if one lasts just half the promised six months - is a whole lot less than the money spent on water, plus the environmental costs of trasport and plastic bottle disposal.
The best part? The refill is called “Purifying Sticks and Stones”, with which you can also, presumably, break somebody’s bones.
AP - South Korea said Friday it had identified and blocked five IP addresses used to distribute computer viruses that caused a wave of Web site outages in the U.S. and South Korea.
Moving forward, any smartphone that joins Sprint’s lineup will be expected to have built-in Wi-Fi. I cannot say this latest tidbit is all that bad of an idea.
According to Jeff Clemow, the carrier’s director of business product marketing:
“Sprint is embracing WiFi in all its major devices going forward,”
“Several quarters ago we made a conscious decision to require all of our PDA suppliers to support WiFi.”
Unfortunately, a specific date of when we can expect to see only Wi-Fi equipped smartphones in their lineup is unknown. Which ultimately means that this decision is not help the fact that they are getting ready to launch the BlackBerry Tour sans Wi-Fi on July 12.
I don’t think that’s likely. We’re looking and talking to a lot of laboratories and big companies around the world, like Sony and Samsung. We’re all working on wireless readers for books or newspapers or for magazines. I think they’re a year or two away being marketed in a mass way, high quality ones, and we’ll be absolutely neutral. We’re happy to have our products distributed over any device provided it’s only going to subscribers paying for it.
Remember the USB chainsaw that was last seen defying the laws of physics and shredding plywood into brittle splinters on just five trickling volts of bus-power? It was, as we predicted, a spoof. But the reasons behind it are quite serious, if you’re a hippy tree-hugger, that is.
The i.Saw site has transformed into the Papercut site, from where you can download a small application which makes the sound of a tree-murdering chainsaw every time you hit command-p (or ctrl-p on Windows) to print a document.
You already know, of course, that we here at Gadget Lab hate printers, but mostly for reasons of cost and space-invasion. Now, though, we have a legitimate do-gooder reason to add to our list.
LONDON, July 10 (Reuters) - Caledon Resources Plc , the coking coal company, is in advanced takeover talks with two possible buyers from China and India, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday,... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Jul 2009 | 10:31 am
Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry. An MTV International promotional... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Jul 2009 | 10:30 am
Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.
Today we launch the TechCrunch Europe Top 100. This is a new, constantly updated Index of the most innovative and highest-potential European tech companies, as compiled by our partner YouNoodle. As you’ll see, the Index is focused on mobile and web companies, although cleantech and gadget companies will have a presence on the list, which covers the broad Europe, Middle East and Africa region (EMEA).
So I bet you’re wondering why we created this list? Well Europe, despite being a bigger market than the U.S., is spread across multiple countries, jurisdictions and languages. However, many companies themselves trade both across this complex matrix and internationally. So in order to throw some light onto the situation we wanted to do more that just cover the market in a traditional media manner (as we already do). We wanted to use a data-led approach to create a list which could start to throw up both the themes and the diversity of this rich marketplace. We hope the TechCrunch Europe Top 100 will help throw some light on the European companies that are generating strong, genuine progress.
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Today we launch the TechCrunch Europe Top 100. This is a new, constantly updated Index of the most innovative and highest-potential European tech companies, as compiled by our partner YouNoodle. As you'll... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Jul 2009 | 10:12 am
(TrendHunter.com) From Marloes ten Bhmer come these concept shoes made from a single piece of leather wrapped around a stainless steel support. Ten Bhmer called these shoes Beigefoldedshoe and will... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Jul 2009 | 10:10 am
Amazon’s Kindle now does sheet music. It seems like the perfect match, especially if you choose to read it from the oversized Kindle DX.
The music, which can be bought in the Kindle Store, comes from Novato Music Press catalog of over 20,000 titles, including 650 from Dave Beeth-Oven himself. The books are cheap, too, starting at less than $3 — a clear win for non-paper, non-posted goods.
Of course the Kindle version of sheet music has the same problem as that of the dead-tree version: how to turn the pages while playing? We’re sure it would be easy enough to rig up a foot pedal, but the more traditional method of hiring a hot young boy or girl to flip the pages of the book for you isn’t quite so glamorous when applied to pushbutton plastic and e-ink.
Musicians, go check it out. Even if it is called, lamely, “Kindle the Muse”, at least you’ll have one less pile of stuff to carry to the gig.
The eastern lobe of the disaster-struck Aral Sea seems to have shrunk by four-fifths in just three years, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Friday. It released an overlay of... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Jul 2009 | 10:05 am
A sequel for cult movie Tron was rumored to be in preparation for years now, and today Walt Disney Pictures has finally revealed a few tidbits of information about the reboot of the “virtual reality film”. It will simply be called Tron (and not Tron 2, Tron 2.0 or “Tr2n”) and we’ll be able to see some footage very soon.
Disney said they will show a 3D clip from the movie during the Comic-Con in San Diego on July 23. The poster above is from the first movie, which was made back in 1982 (and has aged pretty well).
This is the official synopsis for the Tron reboot:
“TRON is a 3D high-tech adventure set in a digital world that’s unlike anything ever captured on the big screen. Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), the tech-savvy 27-year-old son of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), looks into his father’s disappearance and finds himself pulled into the same world of fierce programs and gladiatorial games where his father has been living for 25 years. Along with Kevin’s loyal confidant (Olivia Wilde), father and son embark on a life-and-death journey across a visually-stunning cyber universe that has become far more advanced and exceedingly dangerous.”
HONG KONG, July 10 (Reuters) - The following are planned or potential foreign-currency denominated debt issuances from Asia, excluding Japan. Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Jul 2009 | 10:02 am
Scribd, the popular document sharing service that’s recently made moves into the Ebook market, has just launched the latest version of iPaper, the site’s online document viewer. Scribd originally debuted iPaper in February 2008, after deciding that the existing Flash Paper viewer developed by Adobe didn’t perform well enough or offer enough features to keep up with the quickly growing service.
The old version was an improvement on Flash Paper, with a much smaller footprint and speedier browsing, but it still left quite a bit to be desired. For one, it was still clearly very Flash and not a native browser element. And the navigation bar at the top of the viewer was unnecessarily cluttered, making the widget seem bulky. Contrast that with Google’s document reader, which uses HTML and image files, and it just didn’t feel like a natural extension of the browser.
The new viewer (screenshot below) is a big improvement. It’s still in Flash, which may be enough to turn some people off, but it manages to look like it’s native. Scribd says that iPaper 2 does this by hooking into the browser’s native widgets (the company believes it’s among the first Flash apps to do so). It may sound like a small addition, but it definitely makes a difference. The new viewer also has improved searching functionality, adding the ability to see where a search result lies in context with the text around it.
Most of the other additions are more minor: the viewer simplifies the process to share a doc through Twitter or Facebook, and the view modes are a bit easier to use. But really, the big difference here is aesthetic, and it’s safe to say the streamlined design is a big improvement. iPaper 2 is currently live on Scribd’s main site, with plans to roll out support to embedded documents in about a month.
While Scribd is the leader in this space, it has plenty of competitors that offer their own document viewers, which include DocStoc, Issuu, and Edocr, not to mention Google’s own embeddable doc viewers.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Scribd, the popular document sharing service that's recently made moves into the Ebook market, has just launched the latest version of iPaper, the site's online document viewer. Scribd originally debuted... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Jul 2009 | 10:00 am
(TrendHunter.com) Love a fast-paced work environment that is riddled with fun and excitement? Looking for an opportunity in Toronto to put your creative juices to good use? TrendHunter is offering an... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Jul 2009 | 9:50 am
(TrendHunter.com) Created by Japanese architects, the Suppose Design Office is a residence that is based on classic pit dwelling houses. The house has a hill made from excavated dirt and grass that has... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Jul 2009 | 9:29 am
As the final posting of the onstage interviews at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, here is one of the sessions that generated a lot of news: The first major interview about the Palm Pre with Elevation Partners Managing Director Roger McNamee and Palm Chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein.
The pair are trying to remake Palm (PALM)–see the AllThingsD.com topic page on the Pre here–in a bet-the-company move to recover the Silicon Valley icon’s long-lost glory via innovation.
Palm is trying to muscle into a market with multiple competitors, such as Apple’s iPhone, Android from Google (GOOG) and many more.
In the session with Walt Mossberg and me, McNamee and Rubinstein talked about the new smart phone and its various features, including a controversial way of syncing with Apple (AAPL) iTunes.
Also, McNamee and I had a debate over the Pre’s mirror. Really.
Here’s the video of the full D7 session (along with a very funny intro video making fun of McNamee’s loose lips):
Back in June of last year, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, the husband/wife team that started Flickr, left Yahoo to pursue other interests. We already know what Fake's new project is, the just-launched... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Jul 2009 | 9:11 am
Back in June of last year, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, the husband/wife team that started Flickr, left Yahoo to pursue other interests. We already know what Fake’s new project is, the just-launchedHunch. Now we know what Butterfield’s new project is. Or, at least, what it’s called: Tiny Speck.
Butterfield sent out a tweet tonight announcing that the new company was hiring. The link he sent goes to a page on a site for the Tiny Speck project. Along the top of the jobs page it reads “We’re a new company, founded by four core members of the original team behind Flickr.” It’s no secret that another of those four core team members is former Flickr head of engineering, Cal Henderson, who left Yahoo in April of this year.
So what is Tiny Speck all about? That is still not entirely clear. The word on the street has been that it’s some kind of new social gaming endeavor, but all they’ll say on the site is “We are working on something huge and fun and we need help.”
And the main page doesn’t offer much help either. On it you’ll find the words, “O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t!” For the non-English majors, that’s a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which is also the passage that inspired the title of Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World.
Below that, you’ll find the logo, and below that you’ll find the link stating that Tiny Speck is hiring. And below that it reads, “Other than that, we have nothing in particular to say for ourselves right now.” Mysterious.
So, is there anything to be drawn from this position they’re hiring for? A bit, yes. The position is Creative Production Team Lead. The description says this person will be supporting staff and contractors including “illustrators, along with the occasional writer, animator or sound designer.”
So clearly this is a creative project — it almost sounds like their making an animated movie. As awesome as that would be, with people like Henderson on board, you can bet there’s impressive engineering going on to turn this all into a game of some sort (if that is in fact what this is all about).
Something else that is interesting is that this is being run out of Vancouver, according to the job posting. That is also where Flickr got its start. And guess how Flickr started? As a photo tool for a project called Game Neverending, a massively multiplayer online game.
It eventually became clear that the photo sharing aspect was the idea that would take off for Ludicorp, Butterfield and Fake’s company. So Game Neverending was tabled, and Flickr was born. Yahoo then bought Ludicorp and the rights to Flickr in March of 2005.
Looks like we may be seeing Butterfield returning to his roots.
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PC World - Most of the PC vendors Google listed on its blog as partners for the new Chrome operating system say they're evaluating the software but have not committed to creating devices around it, a far less upbeat message than Google had portrayed. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Jul 2009 | 9:10 am
(TrendHunter.com) From the brain of Steven Holl Architects is this Linked Hybrid mixed-use complex. It connects eight towers in Beijing, China through the use of 'skybridges.' This Linked Hybrid mixed-use... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Jul 2009 | 9:10 am
An interesting tidbit from today’s Naked Truth event in Seattle: Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman said his company just turned profitable. Since I was sitting next to him on the panel, I asked him off microphone what revenues were. He said the run rate is around $15 million. 2007 revenues were $5 million, 2006 revenues were $1 million.
That’s great news for everyone except the real estate industry. The Seattle-based startup represents buyers and sellers in home real estate transactions for far less than the entrenched industry rates that take 5%-6% of the sale price of a home and split it between buy and sell brokers. On the buy side they reimburse 50% of the fee they receive back to the buyer. On the sell side they charge a $5,000 - $7,000 flat fee. The normal broker fees on a million dollar house are up to $60,000, so the savings are obvious.
The company was profiled favorably by 60 Minutes in 2007, but real estate agents and brokers have known about the company for far longer. Even as far back as 2006, Kelman told me, they’ve had to deal with “threats, stalkings and other disturbing behavior towards their employees and some customers from, apparently, angry real estate professionals.” Now that Redfin has shown that their model works profitably those threats will likely become worse.
Disruption is never fun for those being disrupted. The DOJ is hitting the real estate industry from one side, and Redfin is hitting them from the other. The result? A better deal for the rest of us.
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
NEW YORK, July 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Telnic Limited (http://telnic.org), the
registry operator for the new communications-focused .tel top level domain
(TLD), today announced that its application for managing and integrating .tel
information directly into the BlackBerry(R) address book is now available
through BlackBerry App World.
.tel domains, Launched in March of 2009, have been broadly adopted by
businesses and individuals around the world as a simple and low-cost way of
sharing 'real time' contact information under one simple-to-remember name.
Accessible from any device, .tel provides a listing in the first 'live'
global contacts directory accessible by cell phones and through search
engines.
Since its launch prior to its availability on the BlackBerry App World
store, the .tel application has been downloaded thousands of times, enabling
BlackBerry owners to update their contact information in real time, enhancing
their mobile working whilst being accessible to customers and colleagues in
the best way for them. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 10 Jul 2009 | 9:00 am
Boccaccio writes "NASA on Wednesday successfully tested its MLAS alternative launch escape system designed for the new Orion Crew module. MLAS, or Max Launch Abort System, is named after the inventor of the crew escape system on the Mercury program, Maxime (Max) Faget and consists of four rocket motors built into a fairing that encloses an Orion module during Launch. MLAS is designed to pull the crew away from the main rocket stack during the critical first 2.5 minutes of flight in the event of a catastrophic failure. The advantage of the MLAS system over the more traditional LAS (Launch Abort System) is that it reduces the total height of the rocket, lowering the center of gravity and adding stability, and potentially allowing higher fuel load. You can watch a video of the launch at the NASA website, and there are also a bunch of pictures."
Well it appeared to be signed and sealed when news leaked back in April that two icons of the UK’s tech startup world were joining forces to create a new fund to address the so-called ‘equity gap’ in Europe. But it gradually emerged that the actual name of the project would change and there were no real details, not even a web site to explain how it would work. But at last night’s Europas Awards in London, Bebo co-founder Michael Birch and Brent Hoberman (Lastminute and mydeco) announced the launch of the fund they’ve now set up together: PROfounders Capital. It’s understood that Birch, who exited from Bebo when it sold to AOL last year for $850m, is the prime investor, however they hope to double the “founder-lead” £30m fund over the next few months.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
The Europas, the inaugural TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 for European and EMEA tech companies, were held last night, Thursday July 9, 2009 in London. Check out our live blog from the event. For these inaugural awards, over 400 entrants were voted on by the industry and the results merged with those from 19 expert advisors from across Europe. Here are the winners, highly commended and finalists in each category. Congratulations to all!
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
PC World - The world's largest chip maker is working with Google on the Chrome operating system and has been privy to the project for some time, a spokesman for the company said Friday. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Jul 2009 | 8:30 am
Talk of cyberwar is in the air after more than two dozen high-level websites in the United States and South Korea were hit by denial-of-service attacks this week. But cooler heads are pointing to a pilfered five-year-old worm as the source of the traffic, under control of an unsophisticated hacker who apparently did little to bolster his borrowed code against detection.
Just how many file-sharers has the RIAA gone after? Those in the know were widely reporting a figure just north of 30,000 cases—the RIAA never liked to provide exact numbers—but the music trade group stated in a recent court filing that the real number of people sued is only 18,000. What’s going on?
I’m not sure “spell check this” has the same ring as “I’ll be back,” but I have enjoyed the series of promo videos for Office 2010 that try to cast the software as the plot of an action movie.
The latest installment shows the grave of Clippy, the oft-mocked help tool that has been absent from recent versions of the productivity software.
Whatever happened to the revolution in personal transportation promised by the Segway?
In the eight years since the upright, self-balancing “personal transporter” first debuted, this question has become a perennial during speculative-future parlor games, on par with queries like “When will soccer finally supplant football in the hearts of Americans?”
As more diverse organizations dive into web marketing, for-profit organizations can learn well from their indie counterparts about experimentation and innovation online. A few notable community and arts groups have been inventive in their use of social media and truly collaborative in their outreach in ways that even the most seasoned corporate marketer can appreciate.
I am not a cyborg, but I am getting closer and closer to being a terminator. My back is already full of titanium, and I've got a radio-controlled device in my abdomen that feeds medication into my spinal canal. If the trials go well, I hope to get my chance at being the female Hardiman with the ReWalk system. You can start calling me Ripley when that happens.
The Data Portability wars just got a little more interesting. Power.com, the service that lets users aggregate their social networks into a single hub, is countersuing Facebook for restricting users’ ability to export and move their own data. The company is claiming that Facebook is unlawfully withholding the data that users own (as stated in Facebook’s own ToS), and is stifling competition by refusing to allow third party services like Power.com to access the data, among other things. This should be fun.
It’s been over six months since we last heard about these two duking it out, so here’s a quick refresher: Power.com launched last August, offering users the ability to import their latest updates and user information from Facebook, MySpace, and a number of other social networks. It did so by tapping into the social networks’ APIs when available, but also by scraping user data when they couldn’t access it through other means — a big no-no for most social networks, as we saw with the Scoble/Plaxo fiasco. It didn’t take long for Facebook to file suit against Power.com for scraping user data and storing user credentials (another violation of Facebook’s ToS). A week later we heard that the two parties might be close to a settlement, but apparently that didn’t work out — the suit is still pending.
Power.com CEO Steve Vachani likens the current situation with Facebook to one the cell phone carriers saw before they allowed for number portability. In the case of the cell phones, users were effectively locked into a certain carrier because they had spent so much time building up contacts and giving them their phone numbers, and it would be too much effort to switch to a new one. It’s an analogy that has been drawn since the data portability movement began, and while it may make sense, there’s no guarantee the courts will view phone numbers and a user’s social network data in the same light.
That said, Power.com is making some good points. The idea that users aren’t allowed to input their username and passwords into other services is particularly hypocritical, as that’s exactly what Facebook invites you to do to import contacts from services like Gmail and Yahoo Mail.
Facebook can point to its efforts with Facebook Connect, which lets you log in with your Facebook username at third party sites and import some select data from your profile, as evidence of its openness. But this isn’t true data portability, it’s just a new walled garden — third parties are generally only allowed to cache your data, which means that you’re still tethered to Facebook.
Of course, while we may not like the current situation, there may well not be anything illegal about it — that’s up to the courts to decide. We’ve all agreed to the Facebook Terms of Service, and there’s no question that Power.com breaks them. We’ll be following the upcoming case closely.
tsu doh nimh writes "Several news sources are reporting that the tens of thousands of Microsoft Windows systems infected with the Mydoom worm and being used in an ongoing denial of service attack against US and S. Korean government Web sites will likely have their hard drives wiped of data come Friday. From The Washington Post's Security Fix blog, the malware is 'designed to download a payload from a set of Web servers. Included in that payload is a Trojan horse program that overwrites the data on the hard drive with a message that reads "memory of the independence day," followed by as many "u" characters as it takes to write over every sector of every physical drive attached to the compromised system.' ChannelNews Asia carries similar information."
BANGALORE, India, July 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ --
- Q1 Revenues Declined by 2.9% Year on Year; Sequentially Grew by 0.1%
Highlights
Consolidated results for the quarter ended June 30, 2009
Revenues were $ 1,122 million for the quarter ended June 30, 2009; YoY
decline was 2.9%
- Net income after tax was $ 313 million for the quarter ended June 30,
2009; YoY growth was 1.6%
- Earnings per American Depositary Share (ADS) increased to $ 0.55 from $
0.54; YoY growth of 1.9%
"We believe that in the short term the global economic environment will
Oh, Nokia N97. I wanted to touch you from the first time I Iaid eyes on you. You seemed like everything I wanted in a handset. You'd be the phone that surmounted the shortcomings of every smartphone before it. You were to be the mobile masterpiece. At least, I thought you were.
I've had the Nokia N97 for roughly 3 weeks now. Usually, we push out our reviews after just a week or so with the device - but I just couldn't bring myself to sit down and review this one. Why? Because I thought I was missing something. There just had to be something I was overlooking - some setting, some application, just something that would earn this handset its pre-allotted spot in my pocket.
I wasn't missing anything.
Oh, Nokia N97. I wanted to touch you from the first time I Iaid eyes on you. You seemed like everything I wanted in a handset. You'd be the phone that surmounted the shortcomings of every smartphone before it. You were to be the mobile masterpiece. At least, I thought you were.
I've had the Nokia N97 for roughly 3 weeks now. Usually, we push out our reviews after just a week or so with the device - but I just couldn't bring myself to sit down and review this one. Why? Because I thought I was missing something. There just had to be something I was overlooking - some setting, some application, just something that would earn this handset its pre-allotted spot in my pocket.
I wasn't missing anything.
Oh, Nokia N97. I wanted to touch you from the first time I Iaid eyes on you. You seemed like everything I wanted in a handset. You’d be the phone that surmounted the shortcomings of every smartphone before it. You were to be the mobile masterpiece. At least, I thought you were.
I’ve had the Nokia N97 for roughly 3 weeks now. Usually, we push out our reviews after just a week or so with the device - but I just couldn’t bring myself to sit down and review this one. Why? Because I thought I was missing something. There just had to be something I was overlooking - some setting, some application, just something that would earn this handset its pre-allotted spot in my pocket.
I wasn’t missing anything.
Now, I pay enough attention to our visitor statistics to know that a significant chunk of MobileCrunch readers are new to the site. As a result, any post in which I spout anything but the most positive of praise towards a phone leads to countless comments claiming I’m a “fan boy” of whichever competing company happens to fit the bill. For the sake of credibility, a bit of background on myself: I carry lots of phones, but I carry no allegiances. I have no primary handset. I am a fan boy of phones in general.
Now, with that out of the way, I feel I can more openly say: Of all of the most oft-discussed smartphones of the moment (Pre, G1, iPhone, myTouch, and Touch Pro 2, to name a few), the N97 is somewhere near the bottom of the list for me. It does so many things, but does none of them anywhere near perfectly. For every aspect of the handset, there is at least one flaw that just wrecks it.
Hardware:
If the N97 were just sitting on a table, you’d probably look at it and say, “Damn. That is a really, really nice looking phone.” You’d pick it up, play with it a little - and still, it’s an incredibly nice phone.
Then you’d play with it some more. You’d poke around, slide its hinge, punch the keyboard a bit.. and it all starts to go downhill. It’s like finding the girl of your dreams, taking her home, and realizing she has a tattoo of Bill O’Reilly on her back.
The first thing we noticed amiss was the battery cover. Nokia is incredibly inconsistent when it comes to the backside of devices. The battery cover on the E71/E71x? Stunning. On the N97? Chintzy piece of garbage. The quality of the material in no way matches that surrounding the rest of the device, and the tabs feel like they’re going to snap off every time you pop the cover off. Yeah, yeah - critiquing the battery cover seems like a low blow, the ultimate nitpick. But considering that the only way to access the SIM and microSD slot is through the backdoor, it’s worth noting.
Next up: the hinge. The screen on the N97 slides up to reveal a QWERTY keyboard, and Nokia has incorporated a rather fancy looking hinge to handle the heavy lifting. Everyone’s immediate response to the hinge is positive - because it really does look quite nice. You’re not looking at a bunch of springs levers - just one, nice, flush lift. Looks aside, the hinge might be one of the N97’s biggest downfalls. It requires way too much force to slide this thing open, even after a few weeks of use. On nearly every slide-out QWERTY handset that I’ve owned (and I’ve owned more than I care to count), sliding the keyboard out was satisfying - addictive, even. I would do it just for the hell of it, just to hear the gratifying “Swoosh! Thump.” of the open/close mechanism. Not the case on the N97 - in fact, I tended to avoid opening it.
Additionally, the unique design of the hinge means that the default position of the screen, which is about 45° or so in relation to the keyboard, is the only position possible. There is no tilting. Tilting isn’t all that common in smartphones, so that’s okay - but the default position just feels slightly off regardless of whether we’re sitting, standing, or laying down. It never feels like you’re getting a proper angle of both the screen and the keyboard.
Speaking of the keyboard: It was the flagship feature of this flagship phone. It was bigger than the Pre’s, prettier than the G1’s, and more “real” than the iPhone’s. It was the primary element that drew me to the N97, so I’m incredibly disappointed to say that it.. well, it sucks. The buttons just don’t feel like buttons. Have you ever worked one of those keyboards that is built for an environment that might get messy, like those of a cash register? Those ones that are not buttons, but just a thin sheet of plastic laid across buttons for easy cleaning. It feels like that.
The Screen:
Damn it, Nokia. Stop with the resistive screens. You could have a phone that doubled as a jet pack and could read my thoughts, and the resistive touchscreen would still make it feel archaic right after launch.
For those who are wondering what I’m babbling about: there are two common types of touchscreens. Capacitive, and resistive. The iPhone, G1, and the Pre use capacitive screens, giving them that hard, smooth, glide-friendly feel. The N97 and many other smartphones uses resistive screens, which require you to push a liiiittle bit harder. It’s trivial and fairly easy to adjust to, but it feels like hot garbage. The stylus is dead, Nokia. Capacitive screens may cost a little bit more - but when the N97 already costs some $700 dollars (unlocked - no US carrier currently offers it), it’s worth the difference.
The screen on the N97 is no where as responsive as the phones it is competing with, and the accuracy is quite spotty. Sometimes it’s to the right of our thumb, while other times it’s immediately below.
3.5mm Headset Jack:
When we declared our hatred for headset jack adaptors back in May, we promised that we’d make every attempt to praise any phone that incorporated a 3.5mm jack. The N97 does. They put it right up dead center on the top of the handset, perfectly flush and ready for use with your favorite pair of buds. For that, Nokia, we love you.
The Software - Symbian S60 5th Edition:
When Nokia decided to get heavy into this touchscreen business, they decided to bring S60 with it. So they tweaked, they twirked - and in the end, S60 5th Edition was born.
5th edition feels exactly like what it is: a touchscreen user interface spun off of a non-touchscreen interface. It’s definitely usable, but by no means our favorite. If we had to rank it, it would be somewhere below iPhone OS, Android, and WebOS, but somewhere above Windows Mobile.
It’s just too messy. Every single screen has at least two on-screen softkeys (with space for four), almost always listing “Options” and “Back” or “Options” and “Exit”. Nearly every time, the stuff listed on the other two (non-Options/Back/Exit) keys are listed a second time under the options button, which seems useless. These things take up anywhere from 10-20% of the screen and, to put it bluntly, are ugly as all hell. We’d kill for them to be a slide out drawer, a la the Palm Pre quick launch bar.
Another strange design choice is navigation. On some screens, you double click to enter an item. On others, you single click. This is a fault of the resistive touchscreen; as you have to actually push down and “drag” lists to scroll through elements (rather than “flick” through them), this ensures that you don’t accidentally click an item whilst scrolling. At least, that’s what we assume. Even on the single click sections, however, we’re able to scroll around without accidental clicks - so when the double click screens come up, we tend to forget. I’ll usually click once, then wait a few seconds thinking that the app had hanged before I remember this screen needs two clicks. It’s really quite strange.
The interface is a bit strange, but surmountable. What we can’t get past, however, is the lag. It lags seemingly at random, and in fairly nasty ways. For example: when we were testing out the widgets for the section on them down below, we launched the Facebook application. Part of the app loaded within a second or two - but the on-screen softkey area we mentioned above took nearly 15 seconds to catch up. So we had 80% of an app, and then a gaping hole that showed through to the homescreen taking up the other 20%. The only other apps open were the browser and the Ovi store.
Widgets:
The N97 homescreen makes use of a new widgeting system, and it’s one of the few elements of this build of S60 that we’re quite fond of. You’ve got 6 widget slots, which you can fill with widgets that tie into your favorite applications. The Facebook widget, for example, shows the number of messages in your inbox, recent pokes, friend requests, and the last 3 status updates your friends have posted. Clicking on the widget launches the correlating app.
You can swipe the widget screen to hide all the widgets besides the clock and calendar, supposedly intended to minimize distractions when you’ve got it on your desk. Instead, it just confused us at first, and then annoyed us after we realized what was going on. We honestly thought it was a bug.
The Browser:
The browser seems decent, though the UI seems incredibly silly. The page is rendered in a view window about 70% of the maximum size, with the page title and the navigation taking up the other 30%. If you don’t click anywhere in the navigation area for a second or two, the page expands to fill the whole screen. To get the navigation back up, you click a button in the lower right of the screen. It’s not bad, but it seems very outdated by the default browsers on competing handsets.
Browsing seemed a bit slow, even over WiFi. Pages took anywhere from 2-3x as long to load on the N97 as they did on both the G1 and the iPhone, all of which were on the same wireless connection.
Phone:
It’s strange; when it comes to smartphone reviews, it’s easy to gloss over reviewing the actual phone part. Don’t worry, you’re never going to be missing much. It’s always going to be incredibly arbitrary (even more so than the rest of the review), affected by so many elements that it’s silly to spend much time on it beyond saying “It works.”
That said, it works. The phone is easily accessible from nearly any screen just by tapping the green “Dial” button, the numbers are big, and contacts were simple to navigate (Hurray, group support!). In a completely scientific test, we asked 5 people how we sounded through the phone. The general response: “Uh, fine?”. We got about 4 hours of talk time out of the handset before it faded out.
Photos:
Bright light, indoors, no flash. Low light, with flash. Low light, no flash.
The 5 megapixel, autofocus camera on this phone is one of its strongpoints. It especially shines during outdoor photoshoots with lots of bright colors; alas, we can’t seem to scrounge up any of those test shots and it’s far too dark outside at the moment to recreate them.
The dual LED flash is only somewhat worth while, generally washing out pictures more than it actually improves them. This is another place that Nokia seems to have taken a shortcut. With a nice xenon flash, this camera would have been killer.
Conclusion:
I could go on and on about the N97 - but there’s no point, and no way to do so without seeming unnecessarily harsh. Nearly every element of the phone has one glaring fault that just kills it for me. A nasty lag here, an odd interface choice there. Even down to the media functionality: it’s as basic as can be (we had no trouble with audio files, but we had a hell of a time finding videos that would play on it), but the built in speakers make even your favorite songs sound like they’re being played through a cat. Nokia makes a valiant effort to cram everything into this phone, but doesn’t pull a damned thing off perfectly.
S60 has seemed as if it was on its last limb for some time now; with other interfaces now swooping in for the kill, it’s really dragging down Nokia’s efforts. It may be one of the most popular platforms in the world, but that doesn’t mean its one of the best. Sorry, S60 - it’s game over.
What we like:
It takes some great photos
It looks really, really nice.
3.5mm headset jack
What we don’t:
They cut corners on the hardware in all the places you wouldn’t look first.
The keyboard is terrible.
Resistive touch screens are dead.
Every aspect of the UI feels archaic.
Lots of sporadic lag.
There are a number of elements we didn’t get into here; the Ovi store, the front-facing camera, the FM transmitter… Thing is, they’re fantastic icing on the cake, but the cake is made of crap. I’m sorry, Nokia - I really, really wanted to love the N97.
[Disclosure: Nokia supplied the N97 to me for review purposes, and it will be sent back in the following weeks.]
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Looks like WebOS 1.1 is coming in “the next 30 days” with some new applications as well as exchange server policies that allow for remote wipe and smarter password controls. A tipster leaked this slide which is purportedly from the secret lair of Palm herself.
PalmCentral writes:
We’ve also heard from other sources that the update will also likely include more applications — though whether that will come via an expanded selection of 3rd party apps in the App Catalog or via more apps written by Palm is unclear.
Reuters - TiVo Inc announced on Thursday a marketing alliance with retailer Best Buy and will consider putting its television recording technology into Best Buy's own brand of TVs and electronics.
Toshiba's first foray into the crowded netbook market is solid and a little bulky. The laptop lasts for hours on a battery that chugs along for more than six hours. But the 6-cell power supply juts like J-Lo's butt (and that's not necessarily a bad thing.)
Toshiba's first foray into the crowded netbook market is solid and a little bulky. The laptop lasts for hours on a battery that chugs along for more than six hours. But the 6-cell power supply juts like J-Lo's butt (and that's not necessarily a bad thing.)
Movie studios spend billions to morph strings of code into giant robots, flying superheroes, and apocalyptic mushroom clouds. Still, the toughest f/x challenge turns out to be the most elemental: re-creating Mother Nature. "There are not enough CPU cycles in the day to capture the complexity found in the environment," says Industrial Light & Magic visual effects supervisor Tim Alexander. That hasn't stopped him and his Oscar-winning team from trying. They crafted near-perfect CG waves for the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. But their assignment for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince set the bar higher than ever: Mix fire with water. The clash of elements transpires when Harry Potter is rescued from sea-dwelling beasts by Dumbledore, who sets the ocean ablaze with a bolt of fire. Harry bobs to the surface only to find himself surrounded by a fiery tornado.
2009 Warner Bros. Ent., Harry Potter Publishing Rights J.K.R.
Prepping the sequence, ILM first did some real-world homework by studying wildfires, fire "art" vortices, and magma. "We did a lot of research on molten volcanoes, which have a lot of heat going on but no actual flames," Alexander says. "We collected a bunch of other references, including flares that burn underwater, and showed them to the Potter folks."
Once Half-Blood Prince director David Yates signed off on a visual template, ILM deployed supercharged Linux machines, each loaded with 16 processors and 4 gigs of RAM. "We emulated all these fire parameters: heat ripples, smoke, buoyancy, viscosity, opacity, and brightness," Alexander says. Processing the massive particle simulations for the 100- by 300-foot firewall was burning up days of data crunching for each frame. So computer graphics artist Chris Horvath spent eight months obsessing over a faster way to conjure impressive flames. "Chris figured out that a lower-resolution particle set still had a fluidy flow," Alexander says. "The effect looks as if you sprayed propane and then lit it." For CG geeks, that's hot stuff.
Behind the scenes of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
BEIJING, July 9 /PRNewswire-Asia-FirstCall/ -- Vimicro International
Corporation (Nasdaq: VIMC) ("Vimicro"), a leading multimedia semiconductor and
solution provider, today announced that it filed its annual report on Form 20-
F for the year ended December 31, 2008 with the United States Securities and
Exchange Commission (SEC) on July 9, 2009. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 10 Jul 2009 | 3:00 am
David Orenstein writes "Teams at Stanford and MIT have each reported getting strong light signals from germanium-based diodes on silicon at room temperature. Engineers have long sought to do this because, with further refinement into lasers, such diodes would allow for optical interconnects on chips. Optical interconnects could operate much faster and with less power than electrical (metal) ones that are becoming bottlenecks on current chips."
SEATTLE, July 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Online real estate broker Redfin today announced at the Naked Truth panel that the company earned its first monthly profits in June 2009.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20070426/SFTH054LOGO)
The Naked Truth is a summer event that Redfin hosts with entrepreneurs, investors and journalists to offer pragmatic advice for startups; this year Michael Arrington, Damon Darlin, Fred Wilson and Fred Vogelstein joined entrepreneurs from Redfin, Urbanspoon, Picnik and Animoto to compare revenue models for Internet consumer companies; more than 500 people registered to attend. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 10 Jul 2009 | 1:00 am
Soccer! Football! Golf! Fishing! Spearfishing! Baseball! Going in a car driving! Fishing! Fast driving! It’s all here! This 38 piece Wii kit includes everything you need so you and a friend can do whatever you want on the Wii! You can fish! And play golf! And play tennis! And play baseball! 38 sports in all! Wow!
Last Friday, a fire at Fisher Plaza in Seattle knocked out a number of popular websites, including Microsoft Bing’s recently launched Travel portal. The site was back up by Saturday afternoon, but not before Google caught the site’s placeholder “Bing Temporarily Unavailable” page and added it to its index (you can see the cached page here).
Now, five days later, “Bing Temporarily Unavailable” is the second search result offered when you search Google for “Bing”. It doesn’t take much to picture Google CEO Eric Schmidt cackling with glee over this.
This would be amusing enough on its own — It’s been days since Bing was last unavailable, and while I’m sure Google’s automated bots caught the page while it was actually down, it’s strange that it is taking this long for it to recognize the updated page. Bing may currently see traffic that pales in comparison to Google’s, but it’s no slouch either, and many much smaller sites are indexed by Google on an hourly basis.
But it gets even better: Bing’s Twitter account just sent a message directed towards Google’s, asking if they could take a look at their index and captions.
This might seem like a trivial goof on Google’s part, but it could actually have a fairly significant impact. Given how many people rely on using their browser’s integrated search box (which is often set to Google) rather than their address bar, I suspect there are quite a few queries for “bing” on Google every day.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Taking place tonight in Seattle is The Naked Truth 2009, a Redfin-hosted conference to give entrepreneurs advice. Michael is there participating as an expert to discuss industry trends. This year’s topic is revenue models for consumer Internet startups. The four presenting startups, Redfin, UrbanSpoon, Picnik and Animoto have some interesting information to share via their slides, which we’re posting below, pointing out a few of the highlights.
For those who want to follow along live, you can find the video of the event here.
Urlesque has posted a collection of videos that document a sport I wish did not exist: "Mutton Busting."
And while 'mutton busting' sounds categorically filthy, it is, in fact, merely the act of a child riding a hyper sheep bareback.
I'm of the mind that it's, ah, not a good thing for the child or the sheep. But here I am, suggesting in muted horror from the safety of my desk that you watch the videos.
Today, Amazon launched a new website called “AmazonWireless” that aims to sell cell phones at affordable and competitive prices. Basically, they want to offer cell phones and plans to ease the shopping experience and to not have customers worry about rebates.
In addition, the beta AmazonWireless will have guaranteed free two day shipping, which is a nice gesture from Amazon. AmazonWireless aims to help both customers who are looking to upgrade, or ink a new contract. Essentially, they have created a system that will help you find the phone you want easily and efficiently.
I can’t imagine Gadgetell readers having this problem, but sometimes cell phone spec details contains crazy technical terms, and Amazon emphasizes the fact they took away all that jargon, making it easier for the casual customer. Also with mail in rebates out of the picture, customers don’t have to worry about forgetting to submit the rebate.
Since the website is still in the Beta stage, AmazonWireless only contains around 130 phones. All of these phones are either on the Verizon network or the AT&T network. I imagine they will expand to cover more carriers and phones shortly. Furthermore, you can sort through phones by brand, carrier, color, prince, or a specific feature.
Since this website is a product of Amazon, I expect it to be fairly popular - once it expands to most carriers, anyway.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate-group watchdog organization based in Alabama, will present documentation to Congress on Friday about the presence of active duty military personnel on the white supremacist social networking site newsaxon.org. On that website, SLPC spotted 40 users who claim to be serving in the military, an apparent violation of Pentagon regulations prohibiting racist extremism in the ranks.
Mark Potok, editor of the Intelligence Report, a magazine produced at the law center, [said] "The Pentagon really has shrugged this off and refused to look at this in any serious way."
On the newsaxon.org website, which Potok termed "a racist version of Facebook run by the National Socialist Movement," many participants list their branch of service, base location and hometown on colorful pages festooned with Nazi art and Confederate battle flags. Some say they have served or will soon be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Several include pictures of themselves in camouflage combat uniforms.
One participant under the username "WhitePride85," who said he is a 24-year-old staff sergeant from Madison, Wis., wrote: "I have been in the Army for over 5 years now ... I am a SSGT ... I have been in Iraq and Kuwait ... I love and will do anything to keep our master race marching. I have been a skinhead forever."
Screengrab: In his "about me" section, newsaxon.org user "SoldatAMG" describes himself as a "Sergeant in USMC stationed at Camp Lejeune (...) recently returned from my 3rd trip to Iraq. I fight every day to stem the tide of multicultturalism and to ensure that my children have a better world. SIEG HEIL!"
The “S” in iPhone 3GS stands for “speed,” but it could very well stand for “slow” if you look at the dated chip it uses for uploading data.
At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, the company proudly boasted that the new iPhone 3GS supports 7.2Mbps High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) — a faster, next-generation network standard that many carriers plan to adopt. However, downlink only refers to download speeds; the company made no mention of uplink speeds, or how fast users will be able to upload data.
That’s probably because Apple didn’t want anyone to know that the iPhone 3GS contains a 3G chip with a surprisingly low upload speed — a Universal Mobile Telecommunications Systemchip High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (UMTS HSDPA) chip, one of the earliest 3G technologies that phones were using years ago, according to Tero Kuittinen, an MKM Partners telecom analyst. A teardown by iPhone repair company RapidRepair revealed the UMTS HSDPA chip, whose upload speed is capped at 384 Kbps — significantly slower than its 7.2Mbps downlink capability. A combination of a high download speed and a low upload speed was typical for most mobile chips two years ago, but today, most high-end smartphones offer 2 to 5 Mbps upload speed, Kuittinen explained.
Kuittinen believes Apple purposely kept the uplink details of the chip secret to help its wireless partners.
“Carriers are frantic on this issue of how to prevent consumers from overloading the mobile data without creating obvious obstacles,” Kuittinen said. “They have to somehow clamp down on heavy mobile users without telling consumers they’re being hamstrung.”
When marketing their broadband services, carriers and internet providers typically advertise their downlink speeds and care little to highlight uplink. And it’s clear why: The average consumer cares more about how quickly he or she can receive rather than give. However, for iPhone 3GS owners, slow network uploading speeds will likely discourage them from taking advantage of one their phone’s major new powers: video recording and sharing.
Then again, U.S. consumers typically aren’t keen about uploading video, Kuittinen said. He noted that 90 percent of Nokia smartphone users don’t use video-sharing features. Video-sharing has been most popular among Japanese consumers, who tend to be more multimedia savvy thanks to the complex feature sets in their cellphones, Kuittinen said.
But a large consequence of slow uploading is that it stifles the iPhone 3GS’ potential to make the rest of the globe more interested in mobile video, Kuittinen said.
“How many people are going to spend 10 minutes uploading a 30-second clip?” he said. “That’s going to take real commitment…. People are going to buy the device and only then are they going to figure out [video sharing] is basically undoable.”
In a previous report, Wired.com examined the implications of Apple and AT&T prohibiting a TV-streaming application called SlingMobile from working on cellular networks. Apple asked Sling to revise the app so it only works on a Wi-Fi connection rather than 3G networks, and AT&T said this move was necessary to prevent network congestion. In that story, Ken Biba, founder of wireless consultant firm Novarum, said that after performing a stress test on 3G networks in the United States, it was clear that AT&T’s network was overloaded.
“The new iPhone 3GS is going to have a massive upswing of people uploading video, and it’s going to stress both the downstream and the upstream network,” Biba said. “When you begin to add video you’re adding even more high congestion.”
That upswing is already occurring. Video-sharing site YouTube said in a blog post that uploads to YouTube were increasing 400 percent a day ever since the iPhone 3GS launched. YouTube officials Dwipal Desai and Mia Quagliarello said video-enabled phones with streamlined video-sharing tools were driving 1,700 percent growth in uploads in the last six months. In that story, Wired.com pondered what Apple and AT&T were going to do to address upstream traffic for the iPhone 3GS, a particularly popular phone with a very easy-to-use video-uploading feature.
Kuittinen called the slower chip an elegant solution for Apple and AT&T to avoid overloading networks with the iPhone 3GS’ video-savvy powers.
“It’s kind of clever, I have to say,” Kuittinen said. “This is more elegant than doing the capping from the operator. Now that it’s a hardware limitation, you can’t do anything about it. You can’t call AT&T and say, ‘Why are you slowing down the upload speeds?’”
Despite his testing confirming that uploads are capped at 384Kbps on the iPhone 3GS, Biba does not agree with Kuittinen that Apple purposely used this chip to appease to networks such as AT&T. He said that significantly boosting the uplink capability would hurt the iPhone 3GS’ battery life, which is probably why Apple opted not to upgrade the phone with faster uploading capability. (Enough consumers are already complaining about the iPhone 3GS’ battery life to begin with.)
“We can talk about the future of doing video, but there aren’t a whole lot of people doing it,” Biba said. “I doubt they did it for AT&T. I think it’s more power consumption.”
Apple did not return phone calls seeking comment on this story. AT&T declined to comment.
Why do you think Apple used an old chip in the iPhone 3GS? Add your theories in the comment section below.
Apple was proud to mention the iPhone 3GS is compatible of faster download rates (7.2Mbps). But a teardown reveals its upstream chip, for uploads, is dated and slow. An analyst and a wireless expert explain their theories for why Apple opted to do this.
Apple was proud to mention the iPhone 3GS is compatible of faster download rates (7.2Mbps). But a teardown reveals its upstream chip, for uploads, is dated and slow. An analyst and a wireless expert explain their theories for why Apple opted to do this.
(Image: "Karakorum Highway, Xinjiang" by flickr user pmorgan.) For folks struggling to understand the current explosion of ethnic unrest in what the government of China officially refers to as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, this Far East Economic Review essay by Calla Weimer may be helpful reading. Snip:
What makes Xinjiang so volatile is a simmering resentment by the native Uighur people against repression by the Han majority. Uighurs in many respects are denied the opportunity to live the life they desire. They are inhibited in the practice of their Islamic faith. They are limited in their access to economic opportunity. And, not unlike their Han Chinese counterparts, they are denied basic freedoms of expression and assembly.
China's ethnic-minority problems are deeply rooted, and resolving them will require change of a systemic nature. China is not a society that embraces pluralism. Difference is seen as a threat and little quarter is given to alternative points of view or ways of life. The government controls many aspects of people's lives and livelihoods, and local officials have a great deal of power within that context, power that is subject to abuse whether toward Han or toward minorities. But minorities suffer more under a system where prejudices can weigh on official behavior. This in turn brews resentment among those systematically victimized. An acrimonious dynamic builds and festers. This can happen with minority groups anywhere, but in China there is more scope for those who have power to abuse it. And there is no voice for those who have grievances.
itwbennett writes "A large number of Chinese parents are finding their teenagers to be exhibiting such psychological symptoms as depression, antisocial behavior, and slipping grades. The cause: Internet addiction. World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike rank beside Chinese role-playing games as those that hook the most patients, says Tao Ran, the founder of a youth rehabilitation center on a Beijing army base. Online chat programs more often hook girls, who make up a handful of Tao's current 70 patients. The teens are subjected to a 'strict regimen of military drills, martial arts training, lectures and sessions with psychiatrists.' And, most importantly: no Internet."
From a photo-essay "narrated" by chef Eric Ripert with delicious little details about what goes on behind the scenes at the world-famous, Michelin 3-star NYC restaurant Le Bernadin:
When serving crab, it is very important to get out each tiny piece of shell that might have been left behind and that is a difficult job. To make the task easier, we inspect the crabmeat under a black light. The shells glow under this light and they are easy to pick out.
By Geoffrey Fowler, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Figuring out when Web sites have been blocked by governments is an imprecise science.
Take, for example, Wednesday, when some Chinese Internet users began reporting an inability to access Amazon.com (AMZN), the U.S. Web site for the online retail giant. Yet Amazon spokesman Craig Berman said that “nothing happened.”
To back up the claim in blog posts and Twitter discussions, Chinese Internet users and watchers pointed to Herdict Web, a four-month-old system run by the Berkman Center at Harvard University, which aggregates reports of Web site accessibility into one database. On Wednesday, 12 reports on Herdict claimed Amazon.com was inaccessible in China, and as of the time of this posting three claim it is back up. The reports came from users all over the country, including people whose Internet service providers are in Beijing, Shanghai, Fujian, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Ningbo and Tianjin.
Scientists in San Francisco said a team of divers has been recruited to rid marinas of an exotic form of fast-growing seaweed.
The scientists said the kelp, Undaria pinnatifida, is native to Japan and China and was first discovered at the San Francisco Yacht Harbor and the South Beach Harbor Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 9 Jul 2009 | 11:03 pm
AFP - Computer security experts were divided Thursday on whether North Korea was behind the ongoing attacks on US and South Korean websites, an assault that highlighted the vulnerabilities of the Web.
World of Warcraft players are a notoriously picky bunch. They know what they like, what they don’t like, and have absolutely no issue with telling you exactly how they feel. Loudly, and with many, many petitions and forum postings. And that’s just the basic game. When you get into modifications, you’re into a whole new ballgame. And just making sure you have the most up to date software installed can turn into a major undertaking.
Some guilds won’t even let you go on a raid unless you have the proper addons, and anyone who’s had to try to help the less, shall we say, technically inclined know that getting everything to work right is sometimes half the battle. Now of course, we have software like the Curse Client Addon manager.
Put simply, the Curse.com’s software client allows you to manage all your favorite addons without making it complicated. Click the refresh button up at the top of the screen, and the client automatically checks all of your installed addons for new versions, and gives you the option to update them if a newer version is available. When you are looking for something new, you can search via name, category, or author. The interface then displays the description of the addon, the version number, and has a link to the addon where it is hosted. Curse hasn’t forgotten the Mac players either, there is a version of the client that works with the Mac OS as well.
There are a few things that set the Curse client apart from the other addon management software out there. Yes, you have to log in to download the addons, but registration for the website is free. The Curse.com website also has a very active community on their forums, and many times you can discuss future versions of the addons directly with the authors themselves. Curse also has a subscription option, which adds the ability to update all of your addons at once, removes the advertisements, and allows you priority access to the servers when it’s time to download. The subscription price varies based on the time period you are signing up for, but it runs anywhere from $2.45 a month (the best deal, billed annually) to $4.95 a month (billed month to month). The subscription fees help to cover bandwidth costs, and a percentage is passed on to the addon author, making it easier to help support your favorite.
As a WoW player myself, I feel confident recommending the Curse client over the other options available. I’m also able to show you something very something very special, a sneak peek of the new 4.0 client which is still in alpha, and won’t be available for download for about 1-2 months. All I can share with you is a screenshot, but having used the new client myself, I can tell you it is significantly faster then the 3.0 version, and works great with Windows 7 and Vista.
Lawyers ask a federal judge to answer this question: Can a U.S. president, without warrants or congressional authorization, eavesdrop on electronic communications in the name of national security?
oberondarksoul writes "Every now and then, you hear about a new port of Mozilla to one of the lesser-used platforms. Recently, a new version of Mozilla has been released for Mac OS 9 — an operating system no longer sold or supported, and with no new hardware available to buy. Dubbed Classilla, it aims to provide 'a modern web browser running again on classic Macs, and the currently-released build seems to work well on my old PowerBook 1400 — despite being a little memory-hungry."
SEATTLE, July 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Digital entertainment services company RealNetworks, Inc. (Nasdaq: RNWK) will release its financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2009, on Thursday, July 30, 2009. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 9 Jul 2009 | 10:23 pm
Ladies and germs! If you’re an AT&T Broadband customer you should know that your ISP is shutting off access to Usenet at the end of the month. Why? Yup, it’s related to that whole smear campaign from last year. Some nonsense about illegal content that may or may not be there. Anyway, Giganews has a little sale for you guys: 50 percent off three months of the Diamond Plan and 20 percent off other Giganews plans.
The Diamond Plan, which includes 20 connections (plus SSL, which is sorta unnecessary, but whatever) and unlimited monthly bandwidth. That’s usually $30 per month.
Giganews is sorta the Ric Flair of Usenet access, which is sorta weird since it’s only 11 years old. (Usenet itself predates the Bronze Age.)
For the record, I use Newdemon. I pretty much live in alt.binaries.hdtv.x264. True story!
Just two weeks after blocking most all Google services, China has blocked Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube (which had already been sharply restricted) following ethnic violence and civil unrest there. In the province where 140 people have been killed and 800 injured in clashes between Uighurs and authorities, the government cut mobile phone service and internet access.
While China is known for its insistence on blocking its citizens’ internet access, it’s speculated that this latest move was done to prevent a video like that of Neda Soltan, the young woman who’s violent death at the hands of Iranian security forces was captured on video, spread rapidly across the internet and became a symbol for the opposition.
On Tuesday, Web2Asia’s George Godula wrote: “As of today 8pm Chinese time Facebook seems not to be accessible from most parts of China Mainland anymore. On the China Telecom connection of our Shanghai office the service vanished at around 7:45pm. Friends in Hong Kong are reporting that they can still access the website.”
Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook are becoming increasingly popular ways to communicate about critical issues and hot headlines. When Michael Jackson died traffic on both sites became so heavy both suffered outages and slow load times, and Facebook reported that 6,000 status updates a minute were posted during his funeral on Tuesday. Twitter has also been so crucial to Iranians during the recent protests there that the State Department requested they cancel their scheduled downtime for maintenance to protect communications in that country.
As I’ve said before we should all count our blessings that we live in a country where citizens have the freedom to organize, attend and document protests without fear of prosecution and where they alone can decide what to view online.
Clad in brilliantly distracting pink (but also available in four other colors), the Toshiba mini NB205 sports a 1.66-GHz Intel Atom N280 CPU, 1 GB of RAM, a 160-GB hard drive and up to six hours of battery life.
Clad in brilliantly distracting pink (but also available in four other colors), the Toshiba mini NB205 sports a 1.66-GHz Intel Atom N280 CPU, 1 GB of RAM, a 160-GB hard drive and up to six hours of battery life.
NASA and the Canadian Space Agency are inviting the public to see an ongoing international research project investigating the origin of rare carbonate rocks.
The Tuesday event will take place at Pavilion Lake, located in British Columbia. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 9 Jul 2009 | 9:51 pm
Macworld.com - App4Mac announced an update for CheckUp, improving the interface and adding other enhancements to the system maintenance tool. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 9 Jul 2009 | 9:51 pm
In the news release, Spare Backup Version 5 Receives 4.5 out of 5 Stars from OnlineBackupReview.Info, issued 09-Jul-2009 by Spare Backup, Inc. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 9 Jul 2009 | 9:48 pm
dp619 writes "Mono, a framework based on Microsoft technology, has become more popular for Linux desktop applications than Java, but recent changes could strengthen Java's hand, SD Times is reporting. The story also touches on the failure of Linux distros to keep pace with Eclipse."
By Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron’s, Tech Trader Daily
TiVo (TIVO) this morning announced a multi-part deal with Best Buy (BBY) that includes the development of a special version of the TiVo player that would include specialized content–oh, okay, advertising–from the electronics retailer.
Or as the release puts it: “Best Buy intends to utilize TiVo’s robust platform to deliver educational and marketing messages directly to consumers.”
Microsoft’s new Bing Internet search engine may have exceeded the growth of its rivals in June, but it didn’t do much for the company’s overall share of the search market. Bing grew faster than Yahoo, Google and Ask.com during the month, its percentage of U.S. searches going from 3.4 percent in the first week to 6.63 percent by the last.
Week ending June 6: 3.43 percent
Week ending June 13: 4.57 percent
Week ending June 20: 5.35 percent
Week ending June 27: 6.63 percent
“Looking at the weekly percentage of U.S. searches for Bing, the search engine has grown at an average weekly rate of 25 percent for the month of June 2009,” Hitwise explains. “Adding in Live.com and MSN Search along with Bing, the combined search engines have grown at an average of 16 percent during June 2009. Bing grew faster than the three other prominent search engines for the month.”
Impressive. But sadly, not enough for Microsoft (MSFT) to make real headway. Because Bing actually ended up losing market share during June, slipping to 5.25 percent from the 5.64 percent it had in May (click on chart below). Meanwhile, Google (GOOG) gained share, rising to 74.04 percent from 73.66 percent in May. And Yahoo (YHOO) gained as well, starting out the month with a 15.55 percent share and ending it with 16.19 percent.
A Chinese team of scientists has identified the protein composition of venom from the Scorpiops jendeki scorpion.
Wuhan University researchers said their findings -- from the first venom analysis of the arachnid -- uncovered nine novel poison molecules never before seen in a scorpion species.
The scientists led by Yibao Ma of the university's Laboratory of Virology studied the sting of S. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 9 Jul 2009 | 9:31 pm
Serket, formerly Scorpion, is one of my favorite US-based boutique manufacturers and I’m quite impressed by their latest, the Telson. it’s a 48mm watch with ETA 6497 manual wind movement and exhibition back showing off Cotes D’ Geneve engraving with a scorpion.
The movement is a workhorse - I believe Glycine uses it in their Incursore line - and the design is quite striking, especially the blue, shown here. They’re water resistant to 10ATM and come on a strap or a bracelet.
Now for the bad news: The new models cost $1,250. This one is part of a 200 piece set so you’re getting something amazingly unique, which is great. The Reef Diver 2.0, their beautiful 47mm diver, still costs $999, though, if you’re so inclined.
There is no age restriction on the chance to make a significant contribution to our understanding of the universe. Caroline Moore, a 14-year-old from Warwick, N.Y., has made such a mark on astronomy with the discovery of Supernova 2008ha. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 9 Jul 2009 | 9:25 pm
WASHINGTON, July 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Verizon has tapped Kathleen Grillo to lead its federal regulatory team in Washington. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 9 Jul 2009 | 9:23 pm
CHANDLER, Ariz., July 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Valley residents, businesses and travelers are enjoying improved service thanks to six new Verizon Wireless cell sites added in the second quarter. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 9 Jul 2009 | 9:21 pm
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley have demonstrated a way to fabricate efficient solar cells from low-cost and flexible materials. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 9 Jul 2009 | 9:15 pm
DoubleTwist, a universal media management desktop application for Macs and PCs, not only has a clever marketing team behind it but also seems to be something a lot of people have been waiting for. The free software, which works like a multi-platform version of iTunes with a social networking component, has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times since it launched in February (exact number aren't disclosed for the time being).
Users can share music files, photos or videos across (almost) any device via drag and drop and share the files with others. DoubleTwist's main selling point: It supports hundreds of devices, from cell phones or mobile gaming devices to portable music players. For example, the software can sync all music files you bought on iTunes with your Blackberry, Nokia phone, Kindle or Sony PSP without you having to worry about file format compatibility. Media files can then be uploaded to sites like Flickr, Facebook or YouTube from within doubleTwist.
Macworld.com - We know the folks at Intuit are busy, but we worry that perhaps they forgot to flip their calendar forward some time back in 2007. On Thursday, the company said that it would once again be delaying the appearance of its new Mac version of Quicken. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 9 Jul 2009 | 9:11 pm
A destructive earthquake will strike a lone, wooden condominium in Japan next week, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor Michael Symans will be on site to watch it happen.Symans is among the team of researchers who will converge in the Japanese city of Miki to perform the largest earthquake simulation ever attempted on a wooden structure. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 9 Jul 2009 | 9:10 pm
As my son gets ready to move out of the house to go to college, I've been thinking about another Russian writer who captures universal human themes that resonate over a hundred years later: Anton Checkhov. His story "Dushechka" or, in English translation, "The Darling," has many layers of meaning. Indeed, the Russian word Dushechka originates from the Russian word "dusha" or soul, and thus the title alone has multiple meanings -- soul mate, someone who is all soul, or has a great soul. I'm not going to do Dushechka justice in this post so please forgive me, dear Russian literature fanatics.
The heroine of "The Darling" is a young woman, Olenka, who becomes passionate about whatever her loved ones are involved in. First she marries a theater owner and all she talks about is theater. She speaks with contempt of the public, of its indifference to the arts, of its boorishness and insensitivity. She weeps at unfavorable revues and argues with editors. When her husband dies, she marries a timber merchant. Suddenly, lumber is the most fascinating subject on earth as far as Olenka is concerned. She manages her husband's business affairs and dreams of boards, planks, beams, and joists. When the second husband dies, Olenka takes up with a veterinary surgeon. Her acquaintances find out about this simply because she suddenly becomes overwhelmingly concerned with the sanitary conditions of animals: "The health of domestic animals ought to be as well attended to as the health of human beings." And so it goes.
It is hard to be a parent and completely avoid turning into a Dushechka just a bit, particularly in this day and age of high parental involvement. Whether we like it or not, we become engaged in our kids' passions and pursuits, and often absorb them as our own. That brings me to baseball and bluegrass.
For years after coming to the US, I had absolutely no interest in baseball. In fact, I didn't get it at all -- there just wasn't enough action on the field as far as I was concerned. Once, someone invited me to a party in the box at San Francisco's Candlestick Park where many people watched the game on a TV screen. My reaction? "This would be great if you could only switch to a different channel." I was convinced that you had to be born in America to understand and appreciate baseball. This all changed when Greg, my son, joined his first T--ball team. I grew to love baseball as he moved from T-ball to Little League. We are now proud San Francisco Giants season ticket holders. My husband told me he knew I was fully on board when he heard me say after a pitch, "That was a mean slider!"
Similarly, I found myself falling in love with the most American of music genre -- bluegrass. This happened when the building housing the music room in my son's school had to close for repairs, and the kids could not use their favorite electric instruments to play rock music. Instead, John Fuller, music teacher and bluegrass musician, brought out acoustic instruments outside--mandolin, guitars, upright base--and Greg, a 5th grader at the time, suddenly discovered bluegrass. Within a few months, he and his buddies had a bluegrass band and were playing at festivals and farmers' markets. And I, who was raised on Bach and The Beatles, suddenly found myself camping out at various bluegrass festivals, hanging out with bluegrass musicians, and learning to love Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs, among others.
As Greg gets ready to leave for college, the cautionary image of "Dushechka" looms big on my mind. I am going to a lot of ballgames and listening to a lot of bluegrass musicians, probably more than ever before. Am I trying to ensure that my adopted passions continue as Greg moves out, and that I don't turn into a Dushechka? If that is the case, thank you Chekhov for a cautionary tale.
AP - New York's attorney general charged Thursday that Tagged.com stole the identities of more than 60 million Internet users worldwide by sending e-mails that raided their private accounts. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 9 Jul 2009 | 9:01 pm
I’ve heard good things about Activision’s Prototype, but was never sent a review copy even though I’ve received other titles from the publisher for review in the past. Currently reviewing Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (preview here) for the Xbox 360. Not a bad game, but I have some gripes with it.
Anyway, Prototype is the featured Video Games Deal of the Day over at Amazon. You can grab it for $20 off the regular price and it’s available across all major platforms. Anyone in the audience played it? Thoughts?
[Update] Matt here. This game is great. I’ve been playing the heck out of it the last few days on the PC. The save system is a bit wonky, but the action is great. The game does a great job of allowing the player to advance the story or just play around in NYC. Recommended.
For more than 100 years it has been known that light comes in small packages, the so-called photons. The discovery of this quantization of the light field has opened up a new field of physics - quantum optics. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 9 Jul 2009 | 9:00 pm
Controversial electroshock weaponeer Taser International is quickly building up it arsenal. But the results from the safety and field tests of that new gear ... well, that’s coming along much more slowly.
nerdyH writes "An architect of the Moblin Project has announced that Moblin 2.0 for netbooks and nettops is the first Linux distribution to run the X server as the logged-in user, rather than SUID'd to root. The fix to this decades-old security liability comes thanks to 'NRX' (No-root X) technology reportedly developed by Intel, Red Hat, and others in the X community, and the Moblin-sponsored 'Secure X' project. Besides making Linux netbooks a lot more snoop-proof, it seems like this could lead to an X-hosting renaissance of sorts, since you wouldn't be risking the whole system just to open up a specific user's account to remote X servers."
An Australian-led team of scientists says it has determined the amount of frozen carbon in Earth's northern regions is more than double previous estimates.
We now estimate the deposits contain over 1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere, said Charles Tarnocai of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, the study's lead author.
Pep Canadell, executive director of Australia's Global Carbon Project and study co-author, said the existence of super-sized deposits of frozen carbon means any thawing of permafrost due to global warming might lead to significant emissions of carbon dioxide and methane -- both greenhouse gases.
Radioactive carbon dating shows that most of the carbon dioxide currently emitted by thawing soils in Alaska was formed and frozen thousands of years ago, University of Florida Professor Ted Schuur said. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 9 Jul 2009 | 8:44 pm
Earlier this morning I highlighted the current list of launch partners for the Chrome OS from Google and as I mentioned Intel was not on that list. Of course, Intel may have been left off because they have already given their support for another netbook operating system—Moblin. However the announcement of the Chrome OS does not appear to be making Intel nervous.
For those unfamiliar, Moblin is a recent newcomer into the netbook OS market, they are currently at v2.0, which is still being listed as a beta. According to the Moblin.org webpage:
“Moblin is an open source project focused on building a Linux-based platform optimized for the next generation of mobile devices including Netbooks, Mobile Internet Devices, and In-vehicle infotainment systems”
According to recent statements from Michael Chen, director of Intel’s embedded sales group and ultra mobility group in Asia-Pacific:
“Intel doesn’t see Google Inc.‘s new operating system built around its Chrome browser as a threat to Moblin”
And furthermore, they are actually looking forward to the competition because it “will drive up more innovations and that’s food for consumers.” Sounds great, and what a way to make some fans, by coming off as they are playing nice. Of course, it would also appear as if they are looking towards Chrome OS as another way to sell a few more Intel chips. So, in this case it seems Intel will have something to celebrate even if Moblin does not beat Chrome OS in the long run.
That said, Moblin is still in beta and Chrome OS is still a long time out, which means at this time both have a long way to go.
A Chinese national arrested on his way to a clandestine meeting with an undercover federal agent tells investigators he's buying NSA-designed crypto gear off the internet as part of a Chinese-government program to intercept U.S. communications.
One of the world’s largest glaciers is under attack from global climate change, researchers reported on Thursday.Located along Greenland’s west coast, Ilulissat is known as the most active glacier in the northern hemisphere and among the world’s largest.An American study last summer showed that climate change had melted 60 square miles of surface area from the UNESCO-listed glacier from 2001-2005.A recent report by Andreas Peter Ahlstroem, of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, showed that the glacier is shrinking at a faster pace than ever before."Its calving rate (breaking off of ice) has never been so rapid," Ahlstroem told AFP.Last month, some 30 climate delegates from the world’s developed nations met at Ilulissat to "change points of view and go further in its conclusions than those in other forums,” said Danish Climate Minster Connie Hedegaard.The informal meeting involved some of the world’s largest polluters, including the United States, Germany, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, India and Brasil.Glacier expert Shfaqat Abbas Khan, of the Danish Space Center, said the site was chosen because it represents the "most visible and striking example of climate change."Khan told AFP that Ilulissat is shedding 85 million tons of icebergs per day."A lot of glaciers in Greenland are melting at more or less the same pace and even with an ambitious agreement at the summit ... Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 9 Jul 2009 | 8:20 pm
BobB-nw writes with this excerpt from Network World: "The US National Telecommunications and Information Administration, scheduled to distribute $4.7 billion in broadband deployment grants over the next 15 months, will count on volunteers to review grant applications. The NTIA, in a document released this week, asks for people to apply to become volunteer reviewers of the broadband grants. The NTIA's broadband grant program is part of $7.2 billion that the US Congress approved for broadband in a huge economic stimulus package approved earlier this year. ... It's 'a little scary' that volunteers will have the power to accept and reject broadband applications, said Craig Settles, an analyst and president of consulting firm Successful.com. Volunteers may have limited expertise, or they may have biases that aren't evident to the NTIA, he said."
Fred sez, "Image search on Google has just become a bit easier and a little less scary: Google officially launched the ability to filter search results using Creative Commons licenses inside their Image Search tool.
Searches are also capable of returning content under other licenses, such as the GNU Free Documentation License, or images that are in the public domain."
Mike sez, "In his closing talk from last month's Reboot conference in Copenhagen, Bruce Sterling guesses at what it will be like to live through the next ten years: 'It is neither progress nor conservatism because there's nothing left to conserve and no direction in which to progress. So what you get is transition. Transition to nowhere.'"
Northeastern University scientists in Boston say they have developed an early-stage, highly accurate cancer-screening technology.
Professor Max Diem, who developed the the procedure, said it can determine within seconds whether a cell is cancerous, precancerous or normal.
The scientists said the technology, for which there is a patent pending, automatically captures a fingerprint of the cell's biochemical composition, which is then analyzed by a computer for abnormalities. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 9 Jul 2009 | 7:44 pm
Matt_dk writes "For the first time in more than a quarter-century, a new space vehicle will begin stacking on a mobile launch platform (MLP) at Kennedy Space Center. The Ares I-X aft skirt, which was mated to a solid fuel segment in the Rotation, Processing and Surge Facility at KSC, rolled over to the 528-foot-tall Vehicle Assembly Building today, where it will be lifted and placed on the MLP in High Bay 3. On that platform, workers will secure the aft booster and continue adding segments of the first stage rocket, the upper stage simulators, the crew module mockup and the launch abort system simulator, taking the vehicle to a height of 327 feet."
No one likes limitations. Though Apple has been opening up more and more of their API with each software update, a good chunk of the functionality is still off limits to anyone outside of their own team of developers. Be it because they’re unstable, unproven, or just outright blacklisted, a number of methods exist that no one but Apple is supposed to use.
Of course, people try to use them anyway. Some (like Google) succeed. Others don’t. The practice of playing with verboten methods is heavily frowned upon - but if a newly discovered private method is any indication, Apple’s at least got a sense of humor about it.
A bit of background, first: As with any good SDK, the iPhone OS has a big huge bundle of documents that outlines every method available to developers - well, besides the secret ones. If no one is supposed to be using them, why tease their existence?
That doesn’t mean that they can’t be found, however. Developers can run a tool called “classdump” while running an application, and it’ll spill the beans on any private methods being used in the application. When Erica Sadun ran a dump on the iPhone 3.0 OS, this little gem popped up:
Sans all the extraneous characters, that method reads, “Yes, it’s us again. Although swizzling and overriding private methods is fun, it wasn’t much fun when your app stopped working. Please refrain from doing so in the future. Okay thanks bye.”
Yeah, it’s silly - but it’s a little easter-egg shout out to anyone looking for the next hush-hush way to give their app that little extra (and totally unauthorized) sparkle. 5 e-points to anyone who manages to work this method into an App-Store-Approved app.
Hello from Albert Hofmann. I understand from media accounts that you feel LSD helped you creatively in your development of Apple computers and your personal spiritual quest. I'm interested in learning more about how LSD was useful to you.
Once Garmin announced the Nuviphone, it was clear they knew the writing was on the wall. The challenge for GPS manufacturers and a handful of portable product makers (like, say, Pure Digital) is what they're going to do now that mobile phones in the U.S. are starting to deliver improved video, photo, audio, GPS, etc.
One approach: do as TomTom does and start making apps for the iPhone and other platforms.
Another approach: keep adding features!
Garmin's nüvi 1490T sports a fairly responsive five-inch touchscreen, microSD slot, picture viewer, and Bluetooth. You're also getting some of the best Garmin has to offer in terms of mapping, including ecoRoute (for hypermilers), traffic alerts, up to 10 saved routes, and lane assist, to name a few. The GPS is great, too: I actually discovered a faster route from my home to the freeway (a route Google Maps has never once suggested).
Best of all, the 1490T is commendably lightweight (7.8 ounces) and extremely thin (0.6 inches thick), presumably to make it easier to pocket, too.*
Unfortunately, the battery life isn't quite up to snuff, at least not for a device intended to be carried wirelessly. On one trip, my fully-charged 1490T lasted just over 2 hours before the "low battery" message came on the screen. Not a big deal if you're in the car, but for a device intended to be carried with you, presumably, everywhere and anywhere, it's certainly something to be aware of.
If you're hoping to take this sightseeing or hiking for any prolonged period of time, I'd argue this is somewhat of a dealbreaker, especially since the 1490T only comes with a USB cable and 12-volt adapter. Thus, if you're out and about and looking to score some juice from a standard wall outlet, you'd need to pocket an adapter &mdash otherwise, you're SOL (three letters that should never come to mind when you think "GPS.").
What's also missing: MP3 player/FM radio, headphone jack, Web browser, camera, and it can't make calls obviously (though it can be paired as a speaker for your cell phone). Sure it could be construed as entirely silly to expect all of these, but for $500, maybe holding my breath for some of these features isn't too much to ask?
*note: I never attached the device to my windshield, mainly because I'm terrified of adding additional blindspots to my car. As a result, I left it sitting either in my lap or on the center console. Easier to grab when exiting, but unfortunately the speaker is in the rear. Thus, I had to choose between viewing the screen and muffling the sound, or forgoing the screen for a reasonable volume. Not a huge deal, but felt worth mentioning here in smaller print.
An anonymous reader writes "Comcast has finally launched its DNS Redirector service in trial markets (Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, Utah, and Washington state), and has submitted a working draft of the technology to the IETF for review. Comcast customers can opt-out from the service by providing their account username and cable modem MAC address. Customers in trial areas using 'old' Comcast DNS servers, or non-Comcast DNS servers, should not be affected by this. This deployment comes after many previous ISPs, like DSLExtreme, were forced to pull the plug on such efforts as a result of customer disapproval/retaliation. Some may remember when VeriSign tried this back in 2003, where it also failed."
Netflix is adding another partnership to their stable. Sony is coming aboard, planning to offer Netflix as a movie-streaming service for its Bravia line of Internet-capable high definition TVs, as well as their older TVs that are compatible with the “Internet video link” module.
Sony hasn’t done anything too earth-shattering on their own in the digital field lately, so this move at least shows they still want to stay in the game, even with rivals. And Netflix is certainly continuing to expand their market, little piece by little piece. No, this isn’t going to knock any major new numbers their way in terms of new subscribers, but when other services are streaming on a box, they want their name there as well. Previous deals for Netflix have included partners like Microsoft, TiVo, Samsung, LG, Vizio, and more.
The Sony Internet Link for their Bravia TVs first showed up as a $300 box. Ouch. Then it began being built into some of the later TVs. So, this fall, if you have a Bravia box, or an Internet-ready Bravia TV, and a Netflix account, you are good to go to stream any movie from the Netflix library. This does include HD movies by the way.
Guess who is missing from this brand spanking new Sony/Netflix partnership? The PS3. The reason being that Microsoft’s XBox 360 is still the exclusive loved-game-system of Netflix, although that romance surely won’t last in it’s monogamy forever. After that, I’d expect some courting to be going on with Sony and Nintendo. Well, we can always hope.
“Because the keypad is arranged at both sides of the touch screen, key input can be easily performed while viewing an image displayed on the touch screen.”
You see, kids, there comes a time when you’ll want to operate a touchscreen phone, but need to see the entirety of the touchscreen while you type. Nothing allows this like Samsung’s crazy newly patented keyboard concept which, pictured above. Well, except for slide-out QWERTY keyboards. And clamshell QWERTY keyboards. And any other sort of physical hardware keyboard ever made.
We’re not quite sure how you’d use this new keyboard - at least, we can’t think of any way that wouldn’t make it feel like it’s about to break. We’re also not sure why there are so many friggin’ keys on each side. Regardless, we can only hope Samsung does something nifty with it.
In Jerusalem, an art collective called O*GE has a neat installation that consists of giant solar-powered low-wattage LED flowers. It's a joint effort with Israel's electric company to promote alternative energy. The flowers, which include lotuses and tulips, are made of steel wires and laser-cut glass. Pretty!
Let's say you're a blogger. You've just returned from a trip to New York City, and you're writing a post on New York landmarks. You want to illustrate your travel guide with an image — as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. It's easy to find images of New York online. But you want to make sure that you don't use images without the permission of their owners, and you can't afford licensing fees for professional photographers.
Today, we're launching a feature on Image Search to help you find images that you can use for free, while respecting the wishes of artists and creators. This feature allows you to restrict your Image Search results to images that have been tagged with licenses like Creative Commons, making it easier to discover images from across the web that you can share, use and even modify. Your search will also include works that have been tagged with other licenses, like GNU Free Documentation license, or are in the public domain.
This feature also helps artists who want their images to be discovered and reused across the web — on their own terms. Creative Commons licenses allow artists to specify the ways others may use their work. Artists can license their images for general reuse, or for noncommercial reuse only. They can also decide whether or not to grant people the right to modify or remix their images. Once they've chosen to make their work available online under these terms, Google Images helps people start to find and use it.
To enable this feature, go to our advanced image search page. Under the "Usage rights" section, you can select the type of license you'd like to search for, such as those marked for reuse or even for commercial reuse with modification. Your results will be restricted to images marked with CC or other licenses. Once you confirm the license of the image and make sure that your use will comply with the terms of the license (such as proper attribution to the image's owner), you can reuse the image. Some of you may already see these options, and we'll be rolling this feature out to everyone throughout the day.
There's some fine print, of course. This feature identifies images that are tagged with licenses that authorize reuse. You'll still have to verify that the licensing information is accurate. We can help you take the first step towards finding these images, but we can't guarantee that the content we linked to is actually in the public domain, or available under the license.
We believe that we've made it easier for people to find images they can use while helping artists who've made their images available under these licenses to gain exposure for their work. So try it out, and let us know what you think.
Posted by Lance Huang and George Ruban, Software Engineers
Doctors may soon use devices like this to obtain precise measurements of hand muscle strength. Developed by bioengineering students at Rice University, the unit promises to present docs with actual hard data that will lead to swifter diagnoses, especially carpal tunnel syndrome. (Many health practitioners currently opt for the more subjective, manual tests like when a doc grabs your hand and asks you to push back.)
Known as PRIME (Peg Restrained Intrinsic Muscle Evaluator), the unit has just has three main components: "pegboard restraint, a force transducer enclosure and a PDA custom-programmed to capture measurements."
In a five-minute test, a doctor uses pegs to isolate a patient's individual fingers. "You wouldn't think it works as well as it does, but once you are pegged in, you can't move anything but the finger we want you to," Miller said. A loop is fitted around the finger, and when the patient moves it, the amount of force generated is measured. "PRIME gets the peak force," Xu said. "Then the doctor can create a patient-specific file with all your information, time-stamped, and record every single measurement.".
Friggin’ nuts. If you wish to live a long life, you should never drive a car over 100 miles per hour. But remotely controlling a vehicle at blazingly fast speeds sounds pretty rad. That’s the idea behind Nic Case’s Schumacher Mi3, who holds the world record for fastest R/C car with a max speed of 161.76 mph.
How the heck did he do that? For one, installing a gyroscope-based steering-correction system normally used in R/C helicopters. Also, you’ll notice the car looks like a wingless jet. That’s because it kind of is: To give his Schumacher some extra mph oomph, Case added an 11-horsepower R/C motor as well as a 12-cell battery pack — normally used in R/C airplanes. And to keep the car from flying off the track, Case crafted a carbon-fiber chassis to generate enough aerodynamic downforce, and he engineered an all-wheel drive system to increase traction.
As you might have guessed, this isn’t a cheap hobby: Building the car cost Case $4,000 and six months of his life. Still, that’s a pretty amazing feat.
Mario, Sonic, … Rolando?! Gaming purists: DON’T FREAK OUT. I’m not implying that HandCircus’s phenomenal Rolando series is equivalent to the gaming franchise behemoths, Mario or Sonic. But, I will say that Rolando 2 is as compelling a reason to buy an iPhone as Super Mario 64 once was to buy the N64. Rolando 2: The Quest for the Golden Orchid (iTunes Link) is an addictive, replayable instant classic that anybody can pick up, play, and enjoy. With simple, intuitive controls, a brilliant physics engine, and eye-pleasing visuals, Rolando 2 will turn your iPhone into a mobile hypnotist. Launch the app, click “start,” and next thing you know 3 hours have passed and you’re still hunched over on your iPhone.
Published by ngmoco, Rolando 2 is a simple 2D puzzle platformer. You move the “Rolandos,” which are circle-shaped creatures of varying sizes and abilities, by tilting the iPhone left or right. Your goal is to guide all of the Rolandos to the end of the level. The controls function perfectly. The tilting works better than using a D-pad or a joystick. You swipe the screen to make the Rolando jump, and can select multiple Rolandos by dragging your finger over them. Sometimes, you need to interact with your environment, and that involves a simple swipe, tap or drag of your finger depending on what you’re trying to do. Everything is easy peasy. That’s what makes this game so brilliant: as soon as a human develops motor skills, it can play Rolando 2 on the iPhone.
Fortunately, the game isn’t just made for 2-year-olds. The gameplay is diverse and constantly evolving. Like Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii, Rolando 2 constantly feeds your appetite for more. Had enough with rolling around like a ball? OK, meet Major Cardigan: a Rolando that sticks to walls. Sick of defying gravity? Fine, here’s a Rolando that can float like a hot air balloon. Done with Rolandos? Screw you! Kidding; no problem at all: shoot your enemies with this bow and arrow. Every few levels is a new feature, character, gizmo or environment that makes the game different, fresh and exciting.
The puzzles are complex enough to, on occasion, require two or three passes before you can beat a level. However, there are only two levels in the entire game that gave me any trouble at all, so I wouldn’t declare this as a challenging game. I was expecting it to be a bit more difficult than it was. But then I realized that isn’t what the game is about. Rolando 2 follows the same theory that Sonic or Mario do: make the gameplay so damn fun that it doesn’t matter if the levels are easy.
Onto the graphics: I wouldn’t say they are quite on par with the best of the iPhone. BUT, it doesn’t matter: the artwork is clever and lively. Aesthetically speaking, the environments come together in a dazzling array of images, effects and characters. Drawn in a cartoon-style, Rolando 2 uses vivid colors and eye-popping designs to delight your eyes.
Another feature I loved (and should be in every game) is iSave. If you get interrupted (read: you get caught playing on your iPhone at work), you can go back into Rolando and it remembers exactly where you are. It doesn’t just take you back to your last save point, it literally starts the game right where you left off. With the short levels of Rolando, this isn’t THAT critical, but still an incredible feature that is executed perfectly.
And you get a helluva lot for $10: 46 levels over four worlds (though I could barely tell there were 4 worlds; seemed like every level was distinct enough!) A bazillion enemies, 12+ characters, and the best part: Rolando 2 is expected to come out with 20 FREE add-on levels (as the original did). On top of all that, there’s 3 different “challenges” within each level. Try to grab all of the crystals (think: coins in Sonic) for one challenge. Or, complete the level within a specific time (not easy at all). In a few levels, you can save only a portion of the Rolandos to advance, but come back and try to save all of them to beat the third challenge. In most average games, I don’t buy into the “replay a level you’ve already beat for extra points” aspect. But, Rolando 2 is different. Case in point: while writing this review alone, I got distracted four five times to try and beat a time challenge. It is just that addictive.
If there’s one knock on the game, its the social networking aspect. I just wasn’t into challenging my friends to beat a level with more points than me. And maybe I’m just old school, but why the hell would I develop my own Rolando 2 avatar. I tried it, obviously, but quickly lost interest: I guess I just loved playing the game too much to bother with that crap.
The Rolando series is the closest thing to a console-defining franchise that the iPhone has. Unlike Super Monkey Ball or The Sims 3, this game is an iDevice exclusive. (Don’t say Tap Tap Revenge: one game placed in 50 different apps doesn’t count as a franchise). Unlike most of the other great iPhone games, this is the iPhone’s first venerable franchise exclusive. We’ve already written about the iPhone is causing Sony and Nintendo to freak out. Well, the Rolando series is a big reason why. And it isn’t over yet: ngmoco has already announced that a Rolando 3 will be coming in November. I’m almost as excited for that as I am Harry Potter. Trust me: that says something.
What we like:
Overall User Experience. All games should be this simple. Never once did I need to search for a help button or was I frustrated because I couldn’t get the game to do what I was supposed to do. It’s like the classic Apple user experience: in a game!
Every level is different. HandCircus makes game-developing look easy: they created 46 kick-ass levels, and each of them seems like it comes with its own new trick to keep you enthused the whole way through.
The rest. Solid graphics, addictive gameplay, iSave, an intriguing storyline, what-you-get-for-the-price, FREE levels to come, engaging puzzles.
What we don’t like:
Why does every game now have to have a freakin social networking aspect? Just like every corporation thinks that setting up a Facebook account means they’ve met their Web 2.0 obligations, iPhone game developers seem to think there’s a requirement to have social networking in all of their games. It’s not a burden to me, and I guess some people use it, so its not a real drawback, per say. Nonetheless, it was worth a rant.
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The way I see it, there are really only 3 types of people who need rugged phones:
Army folk
Contractors and construction workers
People who get angry when they drink
Do any of those (#3) sound like you? The new Nokia 3720 Classic might be perfect for you.
Launching later this summer at right around $175 bucks (€125), the 3720 Classic is spec’d to handle water, dust, vibration, and drunken, verbal beratings. Like all beat’em-up phones, it’s pretty simple hardware: 2.2″ screen, 2 megapixel camera, microSD support, and an LED flashlight thrown in for good measure. So go ahead: Drink up, throw it at a wall, and see what happens. Take pictures.
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The Dutch Master features stem and pedals from Brooklyn Machine Works, maker of high-end, indestructible parts. The Brooks saddle and the Dapper Dan grips, both leather, provide unparalleled feel and an authentic patina. The BMX Crankset is complemented by front and rear drum breaks from Sturmey Archer, and the shock-absorbing Schwalbe "Fat Frank" cruiser tires provide smooth-rolling, urban-friendly traction and durability.
The wheels are hand-built in Brooklyn with Swiss DT spokes, and the rear wheel is equipped with bike pegs, so that you can carry (at least) one of your posse home at the end of the night.
Each of the 25 limited edition bikes will sell for $1560.00. Don't leave 'em on the street, folks!
If you're going to play golf on a huge piece of property that soaks up water, fertilizer and electricity &mdash without growing food or anything tangible &mdash you might as well do something to make yourself feel better about it.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about the “real time web” or the “social web,” and how through services like Twitter and Digg search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing are becoming less relevant in finding up to date information. A few search engines have noticed this and have begun to produce real time results in line with social networking sites. Having to travel to the websites to view them defeats the purpose, which is why OneRiot is releasing an open API.
OneRiot is a real time search engine that crawls Twitter, Digg, and other social networks to find the most up to date (or second) information for searches. The API will allow OneRiot’s searches to be embedded in any number of applications, whether they be web apps or Twitter/social network desktop clients. The API will allow for realtime search results which functions similar to Twitter’s search, but there’s also what OneRiot calls PulseRank, which is an algorithm for “PageRank for the realtime web.” Possibly more interesting is the fact that it also has a trending topics list, which not only covers Twitter, but Digg and other social sites as well, which can prove interesting. What makes it nice is that, at least as of this writing, there are no hastags that don’t really mean anything (hashtags are both a blessing and a curse, and can be annoying at times).
OneRiot’s API release comes just after Twitter announced that it has a total of over 11,000 apps built with its API, which is quite impressive. If OneRiot can get into at least half of them, it would surely be good for them. While the merits of a real time search engine can be greatly argued, it must be at least better than Twitter Search. With Eventbox and bDule integrating OneRiot today, it’s certainly a start.
BREAKING NEWS: The Touch Pro 2 is coming to T-Mobile! Oh. Wait. We already knew that? Alright, lets try this again.
BREAKING NEWS: The T-Mobile Touch Pro2 will come in a box! Bam. Go ahead - try and find that little detail on any other site. You can’t.
For the sake of proving that the Touch Pro2 does indeed come in a box, TmoNews has taken the handset through the ceremonial box removal process. They’re calling it a “partial” unboxing as whoever snapped the shots didn’t bother to splay out the accessories - but considering that this thing doesn’t drop for another month, getting one to unrobe is still an impressive feat.
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Brando's $10 Soft Solar Chocolate Calculator comes in three flavors, er, colors: dark, coffee, and strawberry. If you buy one for a Valentine, I suggest also throwing in the white chocolate keyboard.
A game developer that's been tirelessly evolving what they hope to be the most all-encompassing soldier sim doesn't exactly sound like typical indie fare, argues columnist Jim Rossignol, but their indie-style ambition is there and is typified by their latest, Arma II. See as proof: the collection of videos Rossignol includes in his column, which may be some of the most spectacularly hyper-real Offworld has ever seen, with gratuitous 200 v. 200 plane low-flying dogfights, suicidal jet pilots, and tanks v. chicken battles.
That indie spirit continues elsewhere as the creators of World of Goo and Henry Hatsworth return to their roots and re-launch the Experimental Gameplay Project with disco-dancing Robotron games (above) and surprisingly compelling generative evolutionary worm sims, with more new games to come every month.
Lets face it: battery life on the Pre is pretty terrible. Unless Palm sends out an update with a note reading “Oh, damn, sorry guys - we forgot to turn off the ‘Battery destroyer’ toggle in the firmware before we shipped this thing”, we don’t see it getting anything but marginally better over time. If you’re struggling to make it through the work day without your Pre tapering off, your best bet is probably to get an extended battery.
Generally, extended batteries are physically larger than their baby-sized brethren, so an extended battery cover is needed as well. None of today’s most popular smartphones would really be served well by getting chunkier, so that’s bad news. Fortunately, my friends, the Lithium-Ion fairies have smiled upon you. Through some process which can surely only be described as sorcery, battery manufacturer Seidio has managed to pack a 1350mAh battery into the same exact shell Palm usually fills with 1150mAh. It’s only a 17-18% boost - but if that gets your handset through the work day, it might be more than worth the $50 bucks they want.
Google’s Chrome OS announcement is stirring up the internet, but the lack of solid information has left a gap into which any rumor can whirl and be whipped into speculation.
Exhibit A: ChromeOSLeak.Wordpress.com, a site set up today to post supposed screen shots of Chrome OS in action. Or rather, not in action. The anonymous author claims to work for a company that supplies parts for Acer laptops, and “a Google Rep visited the Acer team to install and quickly show off some of the features of the Google OS in development.”
Our tipster was invited in by Acer to view a demo, after which everyone but him left the room. Sensing an opportunity, he grabbed four shots of the computer, left switched on and unattended by the “Google rep”.
We have a few problems with this. First, take a look at the Google logo. The colors are all wrong. Except on special occasions when Google put a custom version of its logo on the front page, the Google colors always run the same, with the initial G in blue. Same for the Chrome browser logo.
As if that weren’t enough, there’s the interface itself. Although the writer stressed that this is a very early, stripped down build, it still seems rather odd-looking. The bar at the bottom, which looks more like the top bar of a regular window, is supposed to work like the OS X Dock. The blue blob, cut from the heart of the Chrome logo, acts like the Windows Start Menu.
Finally, if our author is important enough a supplier for Acer to invite him to a secret meeting, surely he’s not going to risk sneaking these shots out, especially as there is no gain (anonymous, remember) and everything to lose (a presumably very good job). We call fake. What is real, though, is the Apple-like level of fever surrounding this OS. There’s a gnawing hunger for information, and for now it looks like people will do anything to fill it. See the rest of the pictures below.
The launch of the BlackBerry Tour on Verizon (and Sprint) will commence this coming Sunday, July 12. And to mark the occasion, Verizon has sent out a full “feature and spec” sheet for the Great White North device. Don’t ask me why, but they did. So, in case you were wondering about the Tour, please feel free to read on.
· USB Port: enables charging and high-speed data synchronization via USB “A” to micro-USB “B” cable
· Power Adapter: +5V DC / 500 mA AC power adapter with interchangeable location specific plugs
· Battery: 1400 mAh removable/rechargeable cryptographic lithium cell
· Battery Life:
o Talk time: five hours
o Standby time: 14 days
· Keyboard: 35-key backlit QWERTY and Trackball navigation
· Display: High-resolution HVGA+ (480 x 360 pixels), 2.4” color, TFT LCD. Supports over 65k colors
· Voice:
o Input/Output integrated speaker and microphone
o Hands-free headset-capable
o Bluetooth® headset-capable
o Integrated hands-free speakerphone
· Ringtones: 32 polyphonic – MIDI, .mp3
Bluetooth Capabilities (version 2.0)
· Supports mono/stereo headset, hands-free, phonebook access profile (PBAP), serial port profile supported, Bluetooth stereo audio (A2DP/AVCRP), and DUN
Stay in Touch
· Send and receive text and picture messages (SMS and MMS)
· Enhanced Web Mail for AOL® Mail, Gmail™, Windows Live™ or Yahoo!® Mail
· Open document and graphic attachments including JPEG, Adobe® PDF and Microsoft® Word, Microsoft® Excel® and Microsoft® PowerPoint® files
· Edit Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint files
· Instant messaging capabilities with Windows Live™ Messenger, Google Talk™, Yahoo!® Messenger, AOL® Instant Messenger™ or ICQ® applications built specifically for BlackBerry smartphones
· Social networking for BlackBerry smartphones – customers can access Facebook® for BlackBerry® smartphones; Flickr™ Photo Uploader for BlackBerry® smartphones; and MySpace® for BlackBerry® smartphones
Entertainment On The Go
· Media Player – Customers can watch videos and listen to music
o Supported video formats: MPEG4 H.263, MPEG4 Part 2 Simple Profile, H.264, WMV
o Supported audio format support: MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA, WMA ProPlus Bluetooth
o Built-in video recording
· Camera with Geo-Tagging capability – allows customers to take photos with a 3.2 megapixel camera* with image stabilization, auto flash, auto focus and 2x digital zoom. Date, time and location stamp geo-tag supported by camera, BlackBerry Maps and Flickr
· BlackBerry® Media Sync – allows customers to sync their desktop music files with their BlackBerry® smartphones
· Mobile Streaming – allows customers to access videos, music or even sports and news clips from Web sites built for mobile streaming
· BlackBerry App World™ – customers can personalize their BlackBerry® smartphones with games, social networking, and personal productivity applications
Business Ready
· For small- to medium-sized businesses, Hosted BlackBerry® services and BlackBerry® Professional Software are designed to offer affordable solution options. For large organizations, BlackBerry® Enterprise Solution is designed to provide advanced security features and enterprise-grade functionality.
* A BlackBerry Tour without a camera will be available to enterprise customers. This version does not come with the 2 GB microSD card pre-installed or the stereo headset.
Verizon Wireless Features
· V CAST Music with Rhapsody – customers can choose from more than 4 million songs to download over the air; get the master copy of the songs on their PCs; and sync favorite tracks, albums and playlists from their PCs to their phones using a USB cable
· VZ NavigatorSM-capable – customers can get audible turn-by-turn directions to more than 15 million points of interest and share the directions with others and BlackBerry Maps
· Visual Voice Mail to help customers prioritize their messages
· Mobile Broadband Connect-capable – allows customers to use the device as a modem to connect to Verizon Wireless’ high-speed network with a qualifying Nationwide plan
Crunch Network: TechCrunchobsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
Microsoft’s new entry in the search game Bing is still climbing the charts and now owns position #13 on the most popular websites in the US. According to Compete.com, Bing has surpassed Twitter, CNN and Digg in visitors leveraging a decent marketing campaign that combines offline and online components. Could Bing be a real player?
Maybe. David Pogue of the New York Times espouses how successful Bing is at sifting through the data to bring you what you probably are searching for. “Once you hit Enter, however, you can’t help noticing Bing’s more concerted effort to get you answers faster. To minimize the clicking, the hunting, the dead ends.” Pogue ends his comparison piece with, “if you value your time, you should give Bing a fling.” Pogue does point out that Google is ensconced in our habits and has more than enough time to respond, but respond it must.
Want to see for yourself what all the Bing hubbub is for yourself without missing your Google? Try Bing vs Google. This cool site gives you one search box but then brings you to a split screen with Bing on the left and good old Google on the right. The results are interesting and honestly have me thinking I might use this full time as it gives me the best of both worlds at the moment. It is fun and feels experimental; who doesn’t love an experiment?
Can Bing really give Google a run? Search is always in flux and this war is far from over.
Hey, LG. Didn’t you get the memo? The one that said ”12 megapixels is enough? In a real camera? We guess not.
LG now joins Samsung in the “prestigious” 12 megapixel telephone category with its prototype Louvre, which we presume is named for the Paris museum and not the slatted wooden door. The portable telephone also incorporates a high-definition video camera, recording 1280 x 720 pixels at 30fps.
As if that weren’t enough, the Louvre (an internal codename) also manages ISO 3200, although we’re extrememly skeptical that this will amount to any more than a number on a spec sheet somewhere. We suspect that amplifying the amount of information received on a camera phone sensor to achieve such an optical “volume, the equivalent of cranking it up to 11, will be noisier than a Spinal Tap concert. There is at least a decent Schneider-Kreuznach lens on front.
Finally, LG has thrown in its “innovative” S-Class Touch UI, a clone of, well, just look at the picture. The Louvre is, according to LG “a concept model only however, and as such there are no confirmed plans to bring it to market.” You can be sure we’ll see something with this stupid circuitry inside, though.
Scott Amron, friend of Gadget Lab and serial-innovator, has come up with yet another why-didn’t-I-think-of-that invention: The rather painful sounding Split-Ring Key-Blank.
The key blank, which can be taken to your locksmith and cut to fit your locks, incorporates its own keyring: Instead of a tiny hole, you get a more-or-less standard split-ring, the kind found on most keyfobs. Yes, the idea is great, and you only need one per bunch as you can slip on all your boring old, stick-in-the-mud conventional keys onto this one.
The other thing that sets Scott’s ideas apart from many others is that he actually brings them to market and sells them — no tantalizing CGI mockups here. The split-ring keys can be bought for a very reasonable $7 a pair, and if you really like the product, you may like to buy the company. Scott is selling a 30% stake in the “Split Ring Key Blank Intellectual Property”, although we’d guess that would be a little more than $7.
Google’s announcement of the Chrome OS yesterday was, although far from cryptic, lacking in information. Simple, fast, Linux-based and netbook-capable was about all we got from the blog post.
Google has tossed another tidbit our way in the form of a list of partners. Here’s the block quote:
The Google Chrome OS team is currently working with a number of technology companies to design and build devices that deliver an extraordinary end user experience. Among others, these companies include Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.
This is interesting, and not just because of the netbook makers in there. Google’s list includes some manufacturers of the essential internals for netbooks and notebooks alike: Qualcomm makes wifiWi-Fi cellular chips, Texas Instruments makes everything from ARM processors to tiny projectors, and Toshiba not only makes notebooks but also a lot of the gubbins inside.
This looks to us like the Goog is getting serious about compatiblity issues, as well as teeing-up some partnerships to make sure its new OS actually arrives on some computers. It isn’t the same desperate situation as that of Android, where almost no handsets are available more than a year after the OS was revealed. For phones, you need to convince a carrier to load up the OS. With Chrome, us nerds at least will be able to download and install it ourselves. Google Chrome OS - FAQ [Google Chrome Blog] See Also:
This Nikon product roadmap for the coming year is either the real deal or a fanboy fantasy. Bubbling up onto the internet through a fissure in the Czech forum Grafika On-Line, the document supposedly originates in the UK from an anonymous source at a company that provides Nikon UK with IT services.
The huge 37 page document details Nikon’s planned releases until the end of 2010. It’s copied and pasted below for your perusal, but here’s a quick list.
2009
Nikon D3000
12.3MP
7 AF points
ISO 200-3200 extendable to 6400
3.5fps
Video unknown
Nikon D300s
12.3MP
7fps
HD video (1080p .mov h.264, 24fps)
CF and SD cards slots
920,000 pixel LCD screen
D700x
24.5MP
5fps
HD video (1080p .mov h.264, 24fps)
Plus a bunch of new lenses, mostly updating older classics with new G-version, the ones that come without an aperture ring, and adding internal autofocus motors to work with lower end models. These will be:
AF-S Nikkor 24 to 135 mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR
AF-S Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VR II
AF-S Nikkor 35 mm f/1.4G
AF-S Nikkor 85 mm f/1.4G
Then, 2010. Here come the big ones:
Nikon D4
15.7MP (more sensitive and with less noise)
Up to 16fps with “double exposure”
ISO 200-12800 (plus extended range)
61-point AF
1080p video at 30fps
CLS control (although no flash is mentioned)
Nikon D400
13.8MP (more sensitive and with less noise)
8fps
Up to 12fps with “double exposure”
ISO 200-6400 (plus extended range)
61-point AF
1080p video at 24fps
Nikon D4x
30.2MP
ISO 100 - 6400
6fps
1080p video at 30fps
Plus lenses for 2010
AF-S Nikkor 14 to 28 mm f/3.5-4.5G ED
AF-S Nikkor 120 to 450 mm f/4.5-5.6G ED VR
AF-S Nikkor 300 mm f/4G VR
Nikkor AF-S VR 400 mm f/5.6G
AF-S Nikkor 70 to 240 mm f/3.5-4.5G VR
AF-S Nikkor 105 mm f/2G DC
AF-S Nikkor 24 to 85 mm f/4G VR
AF-S DX Nikkor 60 to 95 mm f/2G VR
AF-S DX Nikkor 17-60 mm f/2.8G VR
The oddities here are the video modes. 24p (p for “per” second in this case) is the preferred speed for pros as it matches film. It seems odd, then, the the top end D4 would run at 30fps and the cheaper bodies at 24p.
That the pixel-count has hardly jumped is a good thing, and shows that limiting the D3 and D700 to “just” 12MP hasn’t hurt sales.
Both the D4 and D400 have an unexplained “Double Exposure” feature on the list. This, combined with mentions of double histograms in this mode, hints at an in-camera HDR capability. It looks like the cameras will snap two pictures in quick succession and combine them to make one image with a huge exposure latitude. This would be the first time we have seen this in a DSLR. We have seen this in the Pentax K7. (Thanks to everyone who pointed this out).
Another interesting addition is the promise of “The possibility of the electronic image projection or additional information to the entire area of a large viewfinder”. This would, we presume, act like the frame-blocking of the D3, which crops out the edges of the viewfinder when using a DX lens, or like the overlay of a grid on the viewfinder screen on the same camera. A live, in-finder histogram? Yes please.
It all seems to be pedestrian enough to be real, with some genuine puzzlers thrown in there — like the dual histogram — to add authenticity. I’m going to say that this is looks legit. We’ll start to see if this is true in August, when the first prediction - the D300 - should appear.
One thing is notable by its absence, though: the D800, or updated D700. That makes me happy, as I won’t be getting upgrade envy anytime soon. Full list, copied and pasted from the forum, below.
August 2009: introduction
Nikon D3000,
D300s,
AF-S DX Nikkor 17 to 65 mm f/3.2-4G ED VR
Nikon D3000: Effective pixels: 12.3 million … Image Sensor Cleaning, Image Dust Off reference data ….
[S] 4.288 x 2.848 … pentamirror … 95% coverage … 0.78x magnif. …. Compatibility AF-S and AF-I …
1 / 4000 p. 30 … p. 3.5 fps … 420-zonal RGB sensor …
Auto modes (auto, auto [flash off]), Advanced Scene Modes (Portrait, Landscape, Child, Sports, Close up, Night portrait, Night landscape, Party / Indoor, Beach / snow, Sunset, Dusk / dawn, Pet portrait, Candlelight, Blossom, Autumn colors, Food, Silhouette, programmed auto with flexible program (P), shutter-priority auto (S), aperture-priority auto (A), manual (M)
Exposure compensation + -5 EV in 1 / 3. Exposure bracketing - not known, ISO 200 - 3200, steps 1 / 3, N-1 Lo, Hi +1 (?)
AF MultiCAM 380 (* new) - 7 focus points, 1 cross type, AF-S, AF-C AF-A, M + electronical rangefinder,
AF area mode: Single point, dynamic area, car area
Live View focus - contrast - detect AF, face priority
Movie - not known!
Active D-Lightning: Auto or Off
Internal flash sm. number 17/56 at ISO 200
LCD monitor: 2.7-in, 230 to-dot … FIXED
HDMI - N
Battery: EN-EL9a
124 x 92 x 62 mm, 480 g.
Nikon D300s - differences from the D300:
Continuous high-speed mode: 7 fps, without batterygripu, 8.5 fps with batterygripem, 14-bit mode included
1 Release mode addition: Self-timer + MUP
2200-pixel RGB sensor
LCD monitor: 920 to-dot, 2.9-inch, Výklopný
Enhanced contrast detect AF
Enhanced phase detect AF: new 2,200-pixel RGB sensor cooperates with 3D Tracking, Auto-Area AF-C is dynamic area,
flashing auxiliary section plus focusing direction “display in the viewfinder with the” user-control “change of direction
The new processor speeds up AF and significantly increases the quality Movie mode as compared to the D90 and D5000,
Movie - mode: 1920 * 1080 at 24 fps Quicktime MOV, H.264 codec
3.1-fold compared with the cache memory D300
795 g
Extra High Lightning D-mode
AF Fine Tuning enhanced: -30 to 30 for the near focus distance, infinity, the shortest and longest focal length
CF + SD slot
…. I do not see a price anywhere!
AF-S DX Nikkor 17 to 65 mm f/3.2-4G ED VR:
- Lightweight zoom middle class at an affordable price for use with the new D300s with other Nikon DX cameras,
2 ED and 2 aspherical members, 72 mm filtrov thread, enhance contrast-detect AF-S mode (??!)
October 2009: presentation
Nikon D700x,
AF-S Nikkor 24 to 135 mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR
AF-S Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VR II
AF-S Nikkor 35 mm f/1.4G,
AF-S Nikkor 85 mm f/1.4G
Nikon D700x - differences from the D700:
effective pixels: 24.5 million … Image Sensor Cleaning, Image Dust Off reference data ….
[S] 6.048 x 4.032
Continuous high-speed mode: 5 fps without batterygripu, 6.5 fps with batterygripem
1 Release mode addition: Self-timer + MUP
2200-pixel RGB sensor
LCD monitor: 920 to-dot, 2.9-inch, Výklopný
Enhanced contrast detect AF
Enhanced phase detect AF: new 2,200-pixel RGB sensor cooperates with 3D Tracking, Auto-Area AF-C is dynamic area,
flashing auxiliary section plus focusing direction “display in the viewfinder with the” user-control “change of direction
Movie - mode: 1920 * 1080 at 24 fps Quicktime MOV, H.264 codec
AF-S Nikkor 24 to 135 mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR:
lightweight and affordable zoom with high image quality, 77mm filtrov thread, 610 g, 7 rounded blades diaphragma,
3 aspherical and 2 ED members, enhance contrast-detect AF-S mode
AF-S Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VR II
revised lens for maximum optical performance in the digital FX zrcadlovkách Nikon,
VR II for up to 4 stops, filtrov thread 82 mm, 1530 g, Nano - Crystal Coat, enhance contrast-detect AF-S mode
AF-S Nikkor 85 mm f/1.4G:
top portrait lens with SWM focus and Nano - Crystal Coat, enhance contrast-detect AF-S mode
Q1/2010: performances:
AF-S Nikkor 14 to 28 mm f/3.5-4.5G ED:
77 mm filtrov thread!, Enhance contrast-detect AF-S mode
AF-S Nikkor 120 to 450 mm f/4.5-5.6G ED VR
VR II for up to 4 stops, 82 mm thread filtrov, 1480 g, enhance contrast-detect AF-S mode
Q2/2010 time:
Nikon D4,
Nikon D400
Nikon D4 - new features:
effective pixels: 15.7 millions, FX sensor completely new design with maximized by increasing the sensitivity of more than 1 EV
as “ultra-fast pixel register cache”, which allows to double the frame rate or increase dynamic range, including
effective aid noise reduction with natural lodging details.
[S] 4.852 x 3.234
Continuous high-speed mode: FX & DX mode 11 fps, 16 fps mode FX with a double-exposure with the phase detection AF & mirror up 8/sec.,
DX mode 18 fps with a double-exposure
FX & DX DR enhanced double-exposure mode: 5 fps for dNEF (* new) JPEG, and without the composition, 3 fps for the car, the JPEG
DR enhanced double-exposure mode: Auto, manual setting of time for both the ISO and exposure in “M”,
in the “A”, “S” and “P” mode with a semi-double exposure corrections in the range of + -5 EV in the range of 1 s. and 1 / 8000 p. and ISO 200 - 6400
Format dNEF,
ISO 200 - 12800, Lo-1, Hi 2
100% Viewfinder, 0.78x magnification, integrated hledáčková magnifying glass for the DX cropping
Integrated sensor management Nikon CLS
Movie - mode: 1920 * 1080 at 30 fps
Multi-CAM 4500: 61-point AF, Auto / User Drive dynamic AF-C, intelligent co-operation with 2200-zónovým 3D Color Matrix meter
to achieve the elusive success of autofocus, the possibility of combination with contrast-detect AF final doostřením
for specific uses. The possibility of the electronic image projection or additional information to the entire area of a large viewfinder.
Dual histogram for the double-exposure mode. Highlite map.
Nikon D400 - new features:
effective pixels: 13,8 millions, DX sensor completely new design with maximized by increasing the sensitivity of more than 1 EV
as “ultra-fast pixel register cache”, which allows to double the frame rate or increase dynamic range, including
effective aid noise reduction with natural lodging details.
[S] 4.550 x 3.034
Continuous high-speed mode: 8 fps, 10 fps with BG,
12 fps with a double-exposure phase detection AF & mirror up 6/sec.,
14 fps with BG to double-exposure with the phase detection AF & mirror up 7/sec.,
ISO 200 - 6400, Lo-1, Hi 1
Movie - mode: 1920 * 1080 at 24 fps
Multi-CAM 4500 DX 61-point AF, Auto / User Drive dynamic AF-C, intelligent co-operation with 2200-zónovým 3D Color Matrix meter
to achieve great success autofocus.
Screening of additional information across a large area of the viewfinder.
Dual histogram for the double-exposure mode.
Q3/2010 time:
AF-S Nikkor 300 mm f/4G VR
Nikkor AF-S VR 400 mm f/5.6G
AF-S Nikkor 70 to 240 mm f/3.5-4.5G VR
AF-S Nikkor 105 mm f/2G DC
AF-S Nikkor 24 to 85 mm f/4G VR
AF-S DX Nikkor 60 to 95 mm f/2G VR
AF-S DX Nikkor 17-60 mm f/2.8G VR
Nikon Coolpix P1DX
Compact camera with DX 12.3 MPx sensor.
Hours outbreaks distance from 28 to 85 mm, f/3.5-5.6 speed, stabilization sensors,
2.9-inch LCD for the 920-dot, Výklopný, head-up viewfinder, the internal flash
Telepředsádka 1,8 x
Q4/2010 time:
Nikon D4X - new features:
effective pixels: 30.2 millions, FX sensor completely new design with maximized by increasing the sensitivity of more than 1 EV
as “ultra-fast pixel register cache”, which allows to double the frame rate or increase dynamic range, including
effective aid noise reduction with natural lodging details.
[S] 6.736 x 4.490
Continuous high-speed mode:
FX 6 fps, 10 fps with a double-exposure phase detection AF & mirror up 5/sec.,
DR enhanced double-exposure mode: Auto, manual setting of time for both the ISO and exposure in “M”,
in the “A”, “S” and “P” mode with a semi-double exposure corrections in the range of + -5 EV in the range of 1 s. and 1 / 8000 p. and ISO 200 - 6400
Format dNEF,
ISO 100 - 6400, Lo-1, Hi 1
Movie - mode: 1920 * 1080 at 30 fps
Before we continue to get all hyped up on Google Chrome OS, we must remember that it is not going to be available until the second half of 2010, which means we still have a year to wait and at this point we only have a few facts in regards to features.
That said, over on the official Google Chrome Blog, a few details about the companies that Google will be working with have been unveiled. Given that, I am slightly more interested—at least in learning more.
Anyway, according to the list, it looks like Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Toshiba have been named as partners so far. Basically, it looks as what I would have expected given the push to be on netbooks, with the notable exception of Dell and Intel. Of course, I am sure this list could still be added to in the future.
And finally, yes, Google Chrome OS will be free (and no I have not read anywhere that it is going to be ad-supported).
“Yes – Google Chrome OS is an open source project and will be available to use at no cost.”
If you visit Barcelona, Spain, don’t drink the tap water. Depending on which part of town you are in, water from the faucet either tastes of chlorine, gives you cancer, or both. This is why almost everyone buys giant eight-liter (541 tablespoons) bottles of water and drags them up the stairs of their seven-story, elevator-free apartment buildings.
Moving forward, any smartphone that joins Sprint’s lineup will be expected to have built-in Wi-Fi. I cannot say this latest tidbit is all that bad of an idea.
Amazon’s Kindle now does sheet music. It seems like the perfect match, especially if you choose to read it from the oversized Kindle DX.
Back in June of last year, 
An interesting tidbit from today’s 
Well it appeared to be signed and sealed when news 
The Data Portability wars just got a little more interesting. 
Oh, Nokia N97. I wanted to touch you from the first time I Iaid eyes on you. You seemed like everything I wanted in a handset. You'd be the phone that surmounted the shortcomings of every smartphone before it. You were to be the mobile masterpiece. At least, I thought you were.
I've had the Nokia N97 for roughly 3 weeks now. Usually, we push out our reviews after just a week or so with the device - but I just couldn't bring myself to sit down and review this one. Why? Because I thought I was missing something. There just had to be something I was overlooking - some setting, some application, just something that would earn this handset its pre-allotted spot in my pocket.
I wasn't missing anything.
Oh, Nokia N97. I wanted to touch you from the first time I Iaid eyes on you. You seemed like everything I wanted in a handset. You'd be the phone that surmounted the shortcomings of every smartphone before it. You were to be the mobile masterpiece. At least, I thought you were.
I've had the Nokia N97 for roughly 3 weeks now. Usually, we push out our reviews after just a week or so with the device - but I just couldn't bring myself to sit down and review this one. Why? Because I thought I was missing something. There just had to be something I was overlooking - some setting, some application, just something that would earn this handset its pre-allotted spot in my pocket.
I wasn't missing anything.
Taking place tonight in Seattle is 
World of Warcraft players are a notoriously picky bunch. They know what they like, what they don’t like, and have absolutely no issue with telling you exactly how they feel. Loudly, and with many, many petitions and forum postings. And that’s just the basic game. When you get into modifications, you’re into a whole new ballgame. And just making sure you have the most up to date software installed can turn into a major undertaking. 
Just two weeks after blocking most all Google services, China has blocked Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube (which had already been sharply restricted) following ethnic violence and civil unrest there. In the province where 140 people have been killed and 800 injured in clashes between Uighurs and authorities, the government cut mobile phone service and internet access.
Microsoft’s new Bing Internet search engine may have exceeded the growth of its rivals in June, but it didn’t do much for the company’s overall share of the search market. Bing grew faster than Yahoo, Google and Ask.com during the month, its percentage of U.S. searches going from 3.4 percent in the first week to 6.63 percent by the last. 
Earlier this morning 
Netflix is adding another partnership to their stable. 
Mario, Sonic, … 
Fortunately, the game isn’t just made for 2-year-olds. The gameplay is diverse and constantly evolving. Like Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii, Rolando 2 constantly feeds your appetite for more. Had enough with rolling around like a ball? OK, meet Major Cardigan: a Rolando that sticks to walls. Sick of defying gravity? Fine, here’s a Rolando that can float like a hot air balloon. Done with Rolandos? Screw you! Kidding; no problem at all: shoot your enemies with this bow and arrow. Every few levels is a new feature, character, gizmo or environment that makes the game different, fresh and exciting.
Onto the graphics: I wouldn’t say they are quite on par with the best of the iPhone. BUT, it doesn’t matter: the artwork is clever and lively. Aesthetically speaking, the environments come together in a dazzling array of images, effects and characters. Drawn in a cartoon-style, Rolando 2 uses vivid colors and eye-popping designs to delight your eyes.
And you get a helluva lot for $10: 46 levels over four worlds (though I could barely tell there were 4 worlds; seemed like every level was distinct enough!) A bazillion enemies, 12+ characters, and the best part: Rolando 2 is expected to come out with 20 FREE add-on levels (as the original did). On top of all that, there’s 3 different “challenges” within each level. Try to grab all of the crystals (think: coins in Sonic) for one challenge. Or, complete the level within a specific time (not easy at all). In a few levels, you can save only a portion of the Rolandos to advance, but come back and try to save all of them to beat the third challenge. In most average games, I don’t buy into the “replay a level you’ve already beat for extra points” aspect. But, Rolando 2 is different. Case in point: while writing this review alone, I got distracted 
The Rolando series is the closest thing to a console-defining franchise that the iPhone has. Unlike Super Monkey Ball or The Sims 3, this game is an iDevice exclusive. (Don’t say Tap Tap Revenge: one game placed in 50 different apps doesn’t count as a franchise). Unlike most of the other great iPhone games, this is the iPhone’s first venerable franchise exclusive. We’ve already written about the 
There’s been a lot of talk recently about the “real time web” or the “social web,” and how through services like Twitter and Digg search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing are becoming less relevant in finding up to date information. A few search engines have noticed this and have begun to produce real time results in line with social networking sites. Having to travel to the websites to view them defeats the purpose, which is why OneRiot is releasing an open API.
Google’s announcement of the Chrome OS yesterday was, although far from cryptic, lacking in information. Simple, fast, Linux-based and netbook-capable was about all we got from the blog post.
