The wait is over: Today's POV has launched! Log on today and let your voice be heard around the world. LAKEWOOD, Colo., Aug. 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Today's POV... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 1 Aug 2009 | 4:00 am
(TrendHunter.com) A new website, SkinnyGirlsBigSandwiches.com, has hit the World Wide Web and this peculiar online photo box is dedicated to skinny girls with big sandwiches. SkinnyGirlsBigSandwiches... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Aug 2009 | 3:49 am
So, we've been tracking the progress of Google Chrome on the Mac for a while. The daily builds of Chromium seem to be getting better and better, and close to being ready for prime time. One major thing... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Aug 2009 | 3:46 am
So, we’ve been tracking the progress of Google Chrome on the Mac for a while. The daily builds of Chromium seem to be getting better and better, and close to being ready for prime time. One major thing missing however has been the lack of Adobe Flash support in the browser. Well, don’t look now, but it’s finally working — kind of.
Okay, to be honest, you can’t pause or stop Flash videos on sites like YouTube, but the important part is that when you click on a YouTube link, the videos actually play. That is great. I’m very, very close to using Chrome for the Mac on a daily basis already, and this may have just put me over the edge of at least using it as a secondary browser.
It’s clear that we’re getting very close to a release of Chrome for the Mac that is stable enough for regular web surfers to use. If the team has implemented Flash support, I have to believe that they are close to where they want to be in terms of a general release schedule. Of course, they have already released developer versions of the browser for the Mac, but they encouraged people not to use them. I think soon that mentality may change, and we may see a public beta.
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(TrendHunter.com) Rob Southcott's Totem Cups pay tribute to the first nation's custom of totem pole carving. Intricately done in a tasteful stark white, Rob Southcott's Totem Cups make indecision look... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Aug 2009 | 3:29 am
diegocgteleline.es writes "Valerie Aurora, a Linux file system developer and ex-ZFS designer, has posted an article with great insight on how Btrfs, the file system that will replace Ext4, was created and how it works. Quoting: 'When it comes to file systems, it's hard to tell truth from rumor from vile slander: the code is so complex, the personalities are so exaggerated, and the users are so angry when they lose their data. You can't even settle things with a battle of the benchmarks: file system workloads vary so wildly that you can make a plausible argument for why any benchmark is either totally irrelevant or crucially important. ... we'll take a behind-the-scenes look at the design and development of Btrfs on many levels — technical, political, personal — and trace it from its origins at a workshop to its current position as Linus's root file system.'"
(TrendHunter.com) If you are looking for a place to stash your stuff, these Rob Southcott 'Mustash' furniture pieces are pretty suitable. The 'Mustash' furniture has push release drawers and a branded... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Aug 2009 | 3:09 am
A California scientist disputes a theory that a giant snake that lived about 60 million years ago needed a warm climate to survive.
Mark Denny, a professor of marine sciences at Stanford University, argued the 40-foot-long snake could have regulated its body temperature by coiling up, The Stanford University News reported Friday.
Scientists at the University of Toronto discovered the fossil last year in an open-pit mine in Colombia. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 1 Aug 2009 | 1:20 am
Of twelve competing startups selected to present at Twiistup 6 in Los Angeles, only one would go home with the prestigious trophy, which was, to adhere to strictest journalistic standards of truth-telling... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Aug 2009 | 1:09 am
Koinup: Your Virtual Life While NWN readers and Koinup members selected Drowsy as their favorite SL sim of this Spring and Summer, a region called Wretched Hollow made a strong second showing. Judging... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Aug 2009 | 1:01 am
DUBAI, Aug 1 (Reuters) - United Arab Emirates-based Dana Gas said on Saturday it had made two gas finds in Egypt with reserves totalling an estimated 76 billion cubic feet. Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 1 Aug 2009 | 12:49 am
The video of a couple's awesome dance-number wedding entrance I posted last week featured Chris Brown's song "Forever," used without permission. Instead of suing or having the video taken down, Brown's... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Aug 2009 | 12:47 am
The video of a couple's awesome dance-number wedding entrance I posted last week featured Chris Brown's song "Forever," used without permission. Instead of suing or having the video taken down, Brown's label opted to add a link to buy the track to the page. And made a truckload of money.
So many of the record industry giants are publicly traded companies. Why aren't their shareholders howling for more stuff like this -- which actually makes money -- and less pointless Grand Guignols to extract a couple grand from some hapless teen, alienating a future customer and her family and friends for life?
This traffic is also very engaged -- the click-through rate (CTR) on the "JK Wedding Entrance" video is 2x the average of other Click-to-Buy overlays on the site. And this newfound interest in downloading "Forever" goes beyond the viral video itself: "JK Wedding Entrance" also appears to have influenced the official "Forever" music video, which saw its Click-to-Buy CTR increase by 2.5x in the last week.
So, what does all of this mean? Despite compelling data and studies around consumer purchasing habits, many still question the promotional and bottom-line business value sites like YouTube provide artists. But in the last week, over a year after its release, Chris Brown's "Forever" has again rocketed up the charts, reaching as high as #4 on the iTunes singles chart and #3 on Amazon's best selling MP3 list. We've seen similar successes in the past with partners like Monty Python.
Evan from Toronto's Coach House Books sez, "After three decades in business, indie bookstore Pages Books and Magazines is shutting its doors on August 31, but not without a proper farewell from Toronto... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Aug 2009 | 12:43 am
Evan from Toronto's Coach House Books sez, "After three decades in business, indie bookstore Pages Books and Magazines is shutting its doors on August 31, but not without a proper farewell from Toronto. On Tuesday, September 8, 'Afterword: A Celebration of 30 Years,' will bring together friends and family of Pages to share their stories and images, which we're asking you to submit for consideration for the event."
For the past thirty years, Pages Books & Magazines has been a place where the culturally engaged citizens of Toronto met one another, conspired, fell in love, debated aesthetics and, occasionally, bought books. Skyrocketing rent, not a drop in sales, has forced Proprietor Marc Glassman to close his iconic indie shop at Queen and John streets on August 31, 2009.
We are collecting material to be presented at 'Afterword: A Celebration Of 30 Years', an event presented by Pages Books & Magazines, Coach House Books, Gladstone Hotel, NOW Magazine, Spacing Magazine, and This is Not A Reading Series, to be held at Gladstone Hotel on Sept 8.
What has Pages Books meant to you? Tell us your tale. Do you have photos? We'd love to see them!
SEND YOUR STORIES AND IMAGES TO: my.pagesbooks.story@gmail.com.
These beautiful high-voltage towers in Istra, Russia, near Moscow are the Experimental Grounds for High-Voltage Generation. They still light up and fire streaks of lightning into the night. Creepy... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Aug 2009 | 12:38 am
These beautiful high-voltage towers in Istra, Russia, near Moscow are the Experimental Grounds for High-Voltage Generation. They still light up and fire streaks of lightning into the night.
Sony Online's multiplayer game The Matrix Online is now dead, as of yesterday. But rather than simply announcing that they were pulling the plug and then watching the players dwindle away as D-day approached, Sony decided to work the shutdown into the storyline of the game, changing the game's graphics so that they decayed and crumbled. The last weeks of The Matrix Online were a party, with all players -- past and present -- invited along.
It's a rare institution that contemplates its own orderly demise. Think of all the clubs and mailing lists and communities you've been a part of that have gone out with a whimper, bleeding out by drips, until there's nothing left. Kudos to Sony for giving a proper send-off to a place that so many people had loved and played in.
This week is the last week for The Matrix Online and all former subscribers are welcomed to come back to play one final time before the machines pull the plug for good. The Matrix crashes on July 31st, so be sure to be logged in on that day to be assaulted by pretty much everyone and everything until everyone's RSI is smashed into a tiny, tiny ball.
Sony Online's multiplayer game The Matrix Online is now dead, as of yesterday. But rather than simply announcing that they were pulling the plug and then watching the players dwindle away as D-day approached,... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Aug 2009 | 12:34 am
RobotsDinner writes "Anil Dash has a thoughtful exploration of Apple's notorious devotion to secrecy, and argues that not only is there a limit to its feasibility, but that recent events show Apple has reached that limit already. 'If the ethical argument is unpersuasive, then focus on the long-term viability of your marketing and branding efforts, and realize that a technology company that is determined to prevent information from being spread is an organization at war with itself. Civil wars are expensive, have no winners, and incur lots of casualties.'"
AFP - The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) asked Apple and AT&T to explain the decision to reject an application developed by Google for the iPhone.
Reuters - A China-based cyber attack on Saturday shut down online bookings for a leading Australian film festival, days before a controversial visit by a leading critic of Beijing, organizers said. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 31 Jul 2009 | 11:26 pm
AP - A federal jury on Friday ordered a Boston University graduate student who admitted illegally downloading and sharing music online to pay $675,000 to four record labels.
TAIPEI, Aug 1 (Reuters) - Flagship oil firms from China and Taiwan will explore again for oil and gas in the Taiwan Strait, an ocean channel that separates the two political rivals, from September, an... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 31 Jul 2009 | 10:51 pm
katarn writes "General Fusion is a startup proposing they can create commercially viable fusion using acoustic shock waves, triggered by 220 precisely controlled pneumatic pistons. Their approach is based on a US Naval research concept called 'Linus' and old research done by General Atomics. They feel we now have the high-speed, digital processing capable of pulling off this feat, where decades ago the technology was not available. I think we can hold off on the 'vaporware' claims for a bit; everyone is aware of the horrible track record for turning fusion concepts into reality, but they don't claim to be the first with the idea or that there are not substantial challenges in the way. If nothing else, it is a fascinating concept." Los Alamos National Laboratory has further details on this type of fusion, and longtime LANL researcher Ronald Kirkpatrick did an external assessment (PDF) of General Fusion's plans. Popular Science had a lengthy story about the company a while back. The reason they're back in the headlines now is that they've secured enough funding to begin work on a prototype reactor.
CHICAGO, Aug 1 (Reuters) - Diabetics who took the drug metformin, which makes the body process insulin better, had a 62 percent lower risk of pancreatic cancer compared to those who had never received... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 31 Jul 2009 | 10:02 pm
In case you didn’t notice, Peter Ha was a tad upset when news broke about Fox recasting Futurama. Good news though, a deal has been reached. The original cast is returning after agreeing to the “studio paying more and the actors accepting less” according to TheStar.com. I just hope that Peter can get some sleep now. He’s been a little cranky lately.
eldavojohn writes "A new study has found that game characters tend not to reflect cultural diversity. According to the paper from researchers across four universities (PDF): 'A large-scale content analysis of characters in video games was employed to answer questions about their representations of gender, race and age in comparison to the US population. The sample included 150 games from a year across nine platforms, with the results weighted according to game sales. ... The results show a systematic over-representation of males, white and adults and a systematic under-representation of females, Hispanics, Native Americans, children and the elderly.' The researchers also note that games 'function as crucial gatekeepers for interest in science, technology, engineering and math,' and that without these groups represented properly, 'it may place underrepresented groups behind the curve.'"
Someone called Joester is purporting to show us how to block out gmail ads by using magic words in email messages, such as 9/11 or "suicide." In other words, the ads that appear when your email is catastrophe-free:
...are gone when the email you receive contains trigger words:
But it's not as easy as it sounds. Putting the key words in a signature file doesn't work; the ads return. Also, writes Joester:
If the message runs long google turns the ads back on. However, if you add another "sensitive" word they go off again. After extensive testing I've discovered you need 1 catastrophic event or tragedy for every 167 words in the rest of the email.
Questions remain. What are all the trigger words? How do you avoid scaring the people who receive your emails with your seemingly pointless references to incest and gang rape? More importantly, shouldn't this be more accurately described as a method for helping the people who you email who have gmail avoid ads?
There’s nothing truly special about the Eee Keyboard beyond the fact that Asus did it first. Sure, it took some fancy configuring to get the PCBs, RAM and everything in there, but if you were a dedicated DIY computer guy, you could do something similar. And this guy did — no touchscreen, no wireless HDMI, and it’s not as fast, but hey, it’s a computer in a keyboard!
The creator is Russian and you can get the translated rundown here. From what I can understand, it appears that it’s still a work in progress; heat is a big problem and he’s having to work with different clock speeds to keep it stable. VGA out isn’t exactly state of the art, but it will put an image into a projector. It’s running at 900MHz right now on a Celeron, with a gig of RAM and a 20GB (?) SSD. Better than my keyboard computer.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The Federal Communications Commission is seeking additional information about Apple Inc's decision to reject Google Inc's voice application for the iPhone. Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 31 Jul 2009 | 6:40 pm
Remember that quote from Sony’s CEO about not lowering the price of the PS3 because they’d lose money on every one? Not exactly the truth. In fact, since the statement was made just a few weeks ago, it actually seems that the man was telling an outrageous lie. I mean sure, when it was introduced almost three years ago, it cost a bundle, but according to new Sony statements, manufacturing costs have gone down by nearly three quarters since then. And yet the cost to you hasn’t changed! Weird.
The cost reduction since we introduced the PS3 is very substantial and this is on schedule… About 70 per cent, roughly speaking.
I guess the idea is that if you’re the only player in the PS3 game, you don’t need to price your product competitively. And in a way, that’s true. No one else is making PS3s, and Sony repeatedly says Nintendo isn’t a competitor and ignores Microsoft’s lead altogether. So in their mind, they’ve got a monopoly. Why adjust pricing?
If they knew the price would come down, as they felt they did (and as it turns out, they were right), why didn’t they price accordingly back then? Obviously they wouldn’t want to sell a million at a major loss and then see sales trail off as the cost of manufacturing goes down, but they could have handled this better.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc is considering developing new real-time search capabilities, even as it outsources its existing Internet search technology to Microsoft Corp. Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 31 Jul 2009 | 6:10 pm
hugmeplz writes "The third annual Pwnie Awards took place last night at Black Hat in Las Vegas, and a full list of the winners has been posted. 'Most Epic Fail' honors went to the notorious Twitter/Google Apps hack from earlier this month that raised all sorts of questions about cloud computing security. Red Hat got skewered with the 'Mass 0wnage' award, also known as the 'Pwnie for Breaking the Internet,' for issuing a version of OpenSSH that left a backdoor open to hackers. The Linux development team earned 'Lamest Vendor Response' recognition for 'continually assuming that all kernel memory corruption bugs are only Denial-of-Service.' Naturally, Microsoft didn't slip past judges' eyes. Its vulnerability that enabled the Conficker worm to do its thing earned honors as the 'Most Overhyped Bug.' On the more positive side, the Pwnie Awards recognized security pros Wei Yongjun, sgrakkyu, Sebastian Kramer and Bernhard Mueller for accomplishments such as discovering bugs and demonstrating exploits. The Pwnie for Best Song went to Doctor Braid for his song Nice Report. Solar Designer snagged the Lifetime Achievement Award, for among other things, being the first to demonstrate heap buffer overflow exploitation, according to the Pwnie Awards Web site."
First off, I love cars, I own an odd one, and, thanks in part to Make: magazine, I've even raced them a little bit. That's why I've deluded myself into thinking my opinion on this has any relevance here at all. So, if you don't mind, indulge me.
Recently, a study showed that people tended to prefer cars with "angry" faces. Auto designers have known this for a while, as the vast majority of cars available today have "faces" (you know, the front end arrangement of headlights, grille, and shapes that we tend to read like a face) that are at least aggressive, and at most absolutely freaking livid. This is across the board, too-- from entry-level cars to minivans to expensive sports sedans-- they all look like pissed-off turtle robots. There are exceptions, of course, but many of the most notable ones (New Beetle, Mini) are modern updates of vintage designs.
Now, I think there is absolutely a place for aggression, determination, and even a bit of anger in auto design-- some of my favoritecars use this as a major styling inspiration-- it's more about raw power and aggression becoming the default look for all cars that disturbs me.
Personally, the visual character I've always sought out in a car is a certain degree of plucky fun-- something upbeat, capable, but not so damn serious all the time. Now, I don't expect everyone to have the same tastes as me, but there seems to be a growing homogenization in auto design to favor these cars that look like douchebags. The fact that the statement everyone wants to make by the vehicle they drive is one of intimidation and power seems like it's the symptom of something unpleasant going on in our culture.
Maybe someone smarter than me can shed some light on this; I know people want to seem successful and powerful, to some degree, so maybe that's it. I don't think this is the case in all cultures, as Japan seems full of cars so confusingly cute you want to spit. Cars form part of the constant background of our visual lives, so it's worth taking a look at them every now and then and seeing how they make you feel. Lately, when I look around a parking lot, it feels more like I've stumbled into a den of demented robot land-sharks. If I had it my way, the land sharks would still be there, but there'd be a good assortment of other faces out there, some of which would be looking like they just want to chug some 87 octane, go fast and have fun. Oh, and maybe get your ass to work on time.
My, how the tables have turned. Earlier this week, we learned that Apple had suddenly begun to pull third party iPhone applications for Google Voice, citing the unconvincing rationale that they “duplicated” some of the iPhone’s functionality. We then broke the news that Apple had also rejected Google’s own official Google Voice application submitted six weeks prior, sparking a din of complaints from developers and users alike over the arbitrary and possibly anti-competitive restrictions being imposed by Apple. AT&T, too, has been a target of frequent criticism as many of us believe it may have also played a part in the decision. Of course, nobody really knows who is to blame — AT&T has hinted that it was ultimately Apple’s decision, and Apple continues to remain mute on the issue. But now we may get our answers: the Dow Jones newswire reports that The Federal Communications Commission is looking into Apple’s rejection of Google Voice, and has sent letters to AT&T, Apple, and Google to find out what’s going on. We’ve obtained copies of the letters and reprinted them below.
The newswire report notes that this is part of the FCC’s ongoing investigation into wireless handsets and their exclusive deals with carriers. Of course, this all comes years after Google CEO Eric Schmidt sent a letter to the FCC, urging it to adopt open standards that would gives users the freedom to use whichever applications they’d like on their wireless devices, on whichever network they preferred. At the time the suggestions seemed perhaps a bit idealistic, but now it’s becoming clear just how badly they’re needed.
It has been just over one year since Apple released the App Store, and already we’re beginning to see just what can happen when major companies collude to restrict user choice without fear of recourse. As I’ve written before, Google Voice offers a service that innovates in the telephony space in a way that hasn’t been seen for years. But rather than try to improve and offer a better service, Apple and AT&T are doing what they can do to protect their sacred cash cow. But it looks like the government isn’t going to stand for that any longer. With this move, the FCC is showing that it’s not going to let Apple carry its famed culture of secrecy into the telecom space.
FCC Letter to Apple
July 31, 2009
Catherine A. Novelli, Vice President
Worldwide Government Affairs
Apple Inc.
901 15th Street, NW, Suite 1000
Washington, DC 20005
RE: Google Voice and related iPhone applications
Dear Ms. Novelli:
Recent press reports indicate that Apple has declined to approve the Google Voice application for the iPhone and has removed related (and previously approved) third-party applications from the iPhone App Store. In light of pending FCC proceedings regarding wireless open access (RM-11361) and handset exclusivity (RM-11497), we are interested in a more complete understanding of this situation.
To that end, please provide answers to the following questions by close of business on Friday, August 21, 2009.
1. Why did Apple reject the Google Voice application for iPhone and remove related third-party applications from its App Store? In addition to Google Voice, which related third-party applications were removed or have been rejected? Please provide the specific name of each application and the contact information for the developer.
2. Did Apple act alone, or in consultation with AT&T, in deciding to reject the Google Voice application and related applications? If the latter, please describe the communications between Apple and AT&T in connection with the decision to reject Google Voice. Are there any contractual conditions or non-contractual understandings with AT&T that affected Apple’s decision in this matter?
3. Does AT&T have any role in the approval of iPhone applications generally (or in certain cases)? If so, under what circumstances, and what role does it play? What roles are specified in the contractual provisions between Apple and AT&T (or any non-contractual understandings) regarding the consideration of particular iPhone applications?
4. Please explain any differences between the Google Voice iPhone application and any Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications that Apple has approved for the iPhone. Are any of the approved VoIP applications allowed to operate on AT&T’s 3G network?
5. What other applications have been rejected for use on the iPhone and for what reasons? Is there a list of prohibited applications or of categories of applications that is provided to potential vendors/developers? If so, is this posted on the iTunes website or otherwise disclosed to consumers?
6. What are the standards for considering and approving iPhone applications? What is the approval process for such applications (timing, reasons for rejection, appeal process, etc.)? What is the percentage of applications that are rejected? What are the major reasons for rejecting an application?
Request for Confidential Treatment. If Apple requests that any information or documents responsive to this letter be treated in a confidential manner, it shall submit, along with all responsive information and documents, a statement in accordance with section 0.459 of the Commission’s rules. 47 C.F.R. § 0.459. Requests for confidential treatment must comply with the requirements of section 0.459, including the standards of specificity mandated by section 0.459(b). Accordingly, “blanket” requests for confidentiality of a large set of documents are unacceptable. Pursuant to section 0.459(c), the Bureau will not consider requests that do not comply with the requirements of section 0.459.
Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation.
Sincerely,
James D. Schlichting
Acting Chief
Wireless Telecommunications Bureau
Federal Communications Commission
FCC Letter to Google
July 31, 2009
Richard S. Whitt, Esq.
Washington Telecom and Media Counsel
Google Inc.
1101 New York Avenue, NW, Second Floor
Washington, DC 20005
RE: Apple’s Rejection of the Google Voice for iPhone Application
Dear Mr. Whitt:
Recent press reports indicate that Apple has declined to approve the Google Voice application for the iPhone and has removed related (and previously approved) third-party applications from the iPhone App Store. In light of pending FCC proceedings regarding wireless open access (RM-11361) and handset exclusivity (RM-11497), we are interested in a more complete understanding of this situation.
To that end, please provide answers to the following questions by close of business on Friday, August 21, 2009.
1. Please provide a description of the proposed Google Voice application for iPhone. What are the key features, and how does it operate (over a voice or data network, etc.)?
2. What explanation was given (if any) for Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice application (and for any other Google applications for iPhone that have been rejected, such as Google Latitude)? Please describe any communications between Google and AT&T or Apple on this topic and a summary of any meetings or discussion.
3. Has Apple approved any Google applications for the Apple App Store? If so, what services do they provide, and, in Google’s opinion, are they similar to any Apple/AT&T-provided applications?
4. Does Google have any other proposed applications pending with Apple, and if so, what services do they provide?
5. Are there other mechanisms by which an iPhone user will be able to access either some or all of the features of Google Voice? If so, please explain how and to what extent iPhone users can utilize Google Voice despite the fact that it is not available through Apple’s App Store.
6. Please provide a description of the standards for considering and approving applications with respect to Google’s Android platform. What is the approval process for such applications (timing, reasons for rejection, appeal process, etc.)? What is the percentage of applications that are rejected? What are the major reasons for rejecting an application?
Request for Confidential Treatment. If Google requests that any information or documents responsive to this letter be treated in a confidential manner, it shall submit, along with all responsive information and documents, a statement in accordance with section 0.459 of the Commission’s rules. 47 C.F.R. § 0.459. Requests for confidential treatment must comply with the requirements of section 0.459, including the standards of specificity mandated by section 0.459(b). Accordingly, “blanket” requests for confidentiality of a large set of documents are unacceptable. Pursuant to section 0.459(c), the Bureau will not consider requests that do not comply with the requirements of section 0.459.
Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation.
Sincerely,
James D. Schlichting
Acting Chief
Wireless Telecommunications Bureau
Federal Communications Commission
FCC Letter to AT&T
July 31, 2009
James W. Cicconi
Senior Executive Vice President-External and Legislative Affairs
AT&T Services, Inc.
1120 20th Street, NW, Suite 1000
Washington, DC 20036
RE: Apple’s Rejection of the Google Voice for iPhone Application
Dear Mr. Cicconi:
Recent press reports indicate that Apple has declined to approve the Google Voice application for the iPhone and has removed related (and previously approved) third-party applications from the iPhone App Store. In light of pending FCC proceedings regarding wireless open access (RM-11361) and handset exclusivity (RM-11497), we are interested in a more complete understanding of this situation.
To that end, please provide answers to the following questions by close of business on Friday, August 21, 2009.
1. What role, if any, did AT&T play in Apple’s consideration of the Google Voice and related applications? What role, if any, does AT&T play in consideration of iPhone applications generally? What roles are specified in the contractual provisions between Apple and AT&T (or in any non-contractual understanding between the companies) regarding the consideration of particular iPhone applications?
2. Did Apple consult with AT&T in the process of deciding to reject the Google Voice application? If so, please describe any communications between AT&T and Apple or Google on this topic, including the parties involved and a summary of any meetings or discussions.
3. Please explain AT&T’s understanding of any differences between the Google Voice iPhone application and any Voice over Internet Protocol applications that are currently used on the AT&T network, either via the iPhone or via handsets other than the iPhone.
4. To AT&T’s knowledge, what other applications have been rejected for use on the iPhone? Which of these applications were designed to operate on AT&T’s 3G network? What was AT&T’s role in considering whether such applications would be approved or rejected?
5. Please detail any conditions included in AT&T’s agreements or contracts with Apple for the iPhone related to the certification of applications or any particular application’s ability to use AT&T’s 3G network.
6. Are there any terms in AT&T’s customer agreements that limit customer usage of certain third-party applications? If so, please indicate how consumers are informed of such limitations and whether such limitations are posted on the iTunes website as well. In general, what is AT&T’s role in certifying applications on devices that run over AT&T’s 3G network? What, if any, applications require AT&T’s approval to be added to a device? Are there any differences between AT&T’s treatment of the iPhone and other devices used on its 3G network?
7. Please list the services/applications that AT&T provides for the iPhone, and whether there any similar, competing iPhone applications offered by other providers in Apple’s App Store.
8. Do any devices that operate on AT&T’s network allow use of the Google Voice application? Do any devices that operate on AT&T’s network allow use of other applications that have been rejected for the iPhone?
9. Please explain whether, on AT&T’s network, consumers’ access to and usage of Google Voice is disabled on the iPhone but permitted on other handsets, including Research in Motion’s BlackBerry devices.
Request for Confidential Treatment. If AT&T requests that any information or documents responsive to this letter be treated in a confidential manner, it shall submit, along with all responsive information and documents, a statement in accordance with section 0.459 of the Commission’s rules. 47 C.F.R. § 0.459. Requests for confidential treatment must comply with the requirements of section 0.459, including the standards of specificity mandated by section 0.459(b). Accordingly, “blanket” requests for confidentiality of a large set of documents are unacceptable. Pursuant to section 0.459(c), the Bureau will not consider requests that do not comply with the requirements of section 0.459.
Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation.
Sincerely,
James D. Schlichting
Acting Chief
Wireless Telecommunications Bureau Federal Communications Commission
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The jury awarded the record company plaintiffs $675,000 in the Boston trial defended by Prof. Charles Nesson, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum. I was not surprised, since exactly none of the central issues ever even came up in this trial. The judge had instructed the jurors that Mr. Tenenbaum was liable, and that their only task was to come up with a verdict that was more than $22,500 and less than $4.5 million. According to the judge, her reason for doing so was that, when on the stand, the defendant was asked if he admitted liability, and he said 'yes.' The lawyers among you will know that that was a totally improper question, and that the Court should not have even allowed it, much less based her holding upon the answer to it."
Facebook’s legal woes just won’t stop coming. Last November a company called Leader Technologies, which makes business communcation tools, filed suit against Facebook alleging that the social network had infringed on a patent that “relates to a method and system for the management and storage of electronic information.” The case is still ongoing, and it sounds like it has some legs — earlier this week Facebook was ordered by a Magistrate Judge from the District of Delaware’s District Court to give Leader Technologies access to its entire source code. As reported at Law360, Facebook has until the end of this week to hand over a hierarchical map of the source, and has until August 21st to share its entire codebase with the company.
Of course, Facebook is going to fight tooth and nail against this, and is sure to appeal the ruling.
Facebook has given us the following statement regarding the case:
While we respect the magistrate judge’s opinion, we disagree with it on this point and plan to appeal. Generally, this suit is without merit and we will continue to fight it aggressively.
This isn’t the only legal battle Facebook is facing. It’s currently being sued by Power.com over issues related to data portability, as well as by multipleadvertisers alleging click fraud.
You can view Leader Tech’s request to have Facebook reveal its code below:
Reuters - Global handset shipments grew nearly 5 percent in the second quarter, the first quarter- on-quarter growth in 9 months, marking a reversal of course for the struggling market, researchers at iSuppli said on Friday.
PC World - The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has written to Apple, AT&T and Google questioning the rejection of Google Voice and related applications from the iPhone App Store. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 31 Jul 2009 | 5:00 pm
Ever since we assembled a 1.6 MW solar panel installation at our headquarters in Mountain View in 2007, we've been wondering, "Does cleaning the solar panels make them more effective?" We thought it might, but we needed to be sure. So we analyzed the mountains of data that we collect about the energy that these panels produce — after rain, after cleaning and at different times of the year.
We have two different sets of solar panels on our campus — completely flat ones installed on carports, and rooftop ones that are tilted.
Since the carport solar panels have no tilt, rain doesn't do a good job of rinsing off the dirt they collect. (Also, our carports are situated across from a sand field, which doesn't help the situation.) We cleaned these panels for the first time after they had been in operation for 15 months, and their energy output doubled overnight. When we cleaned them again eight months later, their output instantly increased by 36 percent. In fact, we found that cleaning these panels is the #1 way to maximize the energy they produce. As a result, we've added the carport solar panels to our spring cleaning checklist.
The rooftop solar panels are a different story. Our data indicates that rain does a sufficient job of cleaning the tilted solar panels. Some dirt does accumulate in the corners, but the resulting reduction in energy output is fairly small — and cleaning tilted panels does not significantly increase their energy production. So for now, we'll let Mother Nature take care of cleaning our rooftop panels.
Accumulated dirt in the corners of a rooftop solar panel
We've also been crunching numbers on dollars-and-cents; the more energy our panels produce, the sooner we'll be paid back by our solar investment. Our analysis now predicts that Google's system will pay for itself in about six and a half years, which is even better than we initially expected.
If you want to learn more about our solar study, check out these slides showing the effects that seasonality, tilt, dirt, particulate matter, rain and cleaning have on Google's solar energy output. We hope you solar panel owners out there can tailor our analysis to the specifics of your own installation to produce some extra energy of your own!
Image search is an area of intense competition between Google, Yahoo, and now Bing. Today, Google Images added some search options to make it easier to filter a search by color, type (face, photo, clip art, line drawing), and file size.
Most of these filters were available before in advanced search, but now they are available in the left-hand column. (A similar option column was introduced to the main search page in May, 2009). You can choose more than one option to automatically narrow down your search. Another option Google could add is sorting by images with a Creative Commons license. It already does this in its advanced search options, but it is hidden there.
Yahoo and Bing have similar filtering options, Although Google’s color filter is the most advanced. It allows you to sort by 12 different colors, wheras Bing and Yahoo only let you sort by color or black-and-white images. Bing, however, does a better job with related searches, something Google is experimenting with in a slightly different way by actually trying to find And Yahoo has its own set of novel features in image search which Google doesn’t. You can compare the three with a search for “fruit” on Google Images, Yahoo Images, and Bing Images.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Reuters - Apple Inc has released an iPhone software patch to fix a critical software bug uncovered by two independent researchers that make the devices susceptible to secret attacks by hackers. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 31 Jul 2009 | 4:50 pm
SALT LAKE CITY, July 31 /PRNewswire/ -- NexTalk, Inc., the leader in deaf-accessible enterprise telecommunication solutions, has announced that Jeffrey T. Webber and William N. Shiebler have joined President and CEO Todd Wakefield on the company's board of directors, and that Mr. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 31 Jul 2009 | 4:44 pm
AP - Apple Inc. says it has fixed an iPhone vulnerability that lets hackers knock people offline and possibly take over the phones by sending them specially crafted text messages. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 31 Jul 2009 | 4:36 pm
The first Twitpocalypse was one of those events that you’re going to tell your children about one day. I remember where I was when it hit: On my way to Napa Valley with some friends as we heard sirens race by, likely signaling the end of the Twitter world as we knew it.
Okay, it didn’t end up being that bad. But it still was a pain in the ass for many third-party developers, especially the iPhone Twitter app developers, who had to wait in the App Store line like everyone else for their fixes to go through. And now it’s set to happen all over again!
A tweet today from the TwitterAPI account warned that the second Twitpocalypse was closer than people thought. Okay, most people probably didn’t realize that it could occur again, but it can, and it will, and it’s fast approaching.
The current estimate by the API team is that it will occur sometime in the next 60 days, probably at the end of September. They warn that it could happen sooner though.
So what does it mean, and why is it happening? Well, for those that don’t remember, the first Twitpocalypse occurred when the unique identifier for tweets hit 2,147,483,647 — the 32-bit signed integer limit. That number caused some third-party apps to start counting tweet identifiers as negative, screwing them up. This new Twitpocalpyse is similar, only it’s for the 32-bit unsigned integer value of 4,294,967,295.
In case you didn’t already realize it, the fact that this chasm between the two numbers was crossed so quickly once again shows that Twitter is growing very quickly. Though it’s not a 1 to 1 tweet-to-unique ID ratio, that the number will have doubled (an increase of over 2 billion) in just a few months is huge.
So what can you do to prepare yourself? Well the Twitter API team recommends developing your apps to use 64-bit integers, thus increasingly the number of tweets your app can recognize before it hits these integer walls.
But, while here, I have not been able to resist trotting out this very funny puppet video by 1938 Media of sweat-stained Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gone wild, screaming about how he smoked Yahoo (YHOO) in the deal, to every Softie I see.
coondoggie writes to mention that NASA's Green Flight Challenge is offering up to $1.5 million for an aircraft that can hit 200 passenger miles per gallon while maintaining 100 mph on a 200 mile flight. "The Challenge is intended to bring about the development and convergence of new technologies and innovations that can improve the community acceptance, efficiency, door-to-door speed, utility, environmental-friendliness, affordability and safety of future air vehicles, CAFÉ stated. Such technologies and innovations include, but are not limited to, bio-fueled propulsion, breakthroughs in batteries, motors, fuel-cells and ultra-capacitors that enable electric-powered flight, advanced high lift technologies for very short takeoff and landing distances, ultra-quiet propellers, enhanced structural efficiency by advances in material science and nano-technology and safety features such as vehicle parachutes and air-bags."
That’s the word from Deutsche Bank analyst Jonathan Goldberg, who says the smartphone is doing just fine.
“Palm’s stock has underperformed since their earnings announcement last month in the absence of any hard news,” Goldberg wrote in a research note Friday. “We think market fears about return rates, weekly order trends and applications development are off the mark. Our checks continue to point to solid demand and carrier interest.”
According to Goldberg, his checks also indicate that “…Palm has become a healthy momentum stock adding to volatility. Sifting through the noise, however, we believe the key trends are healthy. The August quarter is tracking ahead of our estimates. We think the Street is still underestimating the company’s improved execution and long-term operating leverage.”
By Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
To all the men and women recovering our corrupted files, connecting our BlackBerrys, giving us admin rights when their boss isn’t looking, or simply waiting patiently while we reboot, today is your day.
The last Friday of July is designated System Administrator Appreciation Day, according, naturally, to its official Web site.
“Let’s face it, System Administrators get no respect 364 days a year,” it says. “If you can read this, thank your sysadmin–and know he or she is only one of dozens or possibly hundreds whose work brings you the email from your aunt on the West Coast, the instant message from your son at college, the free phone call from the friend in Australia, and this webpage.” (In case you need help spreading the word, the site has thoughtfully included 13 social-media widgets.)
AP - Student who admitted downloading, sharing music ordered to pay $675,000 to record labels. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 31 Jul 2009 | 4:12 pm
Asus dropped word last week that they would be coming out with the world’s first USB 3.0-capable mobo, and I was itching to make it the basis for my next PC. But then Asus had to go and spoil my dreams by cancelling the P6X58… and why was that again?
Not for any particularly interesting reasons.
God, thanks for clearing that up, Asus! I guess they don’t understand that even the most obscure technical reason would be interesting to the hardware geeks out there (and right here). I have no reason to believe this is the case, but I’d guess that Asus just decided they wanted to make something different, maybe roll out USB 3.0 in a range of products instead of just one enthusiast one.
Whatever the case, it’d still be a while before any devices came out that really even used 3.0, so it’s not like we’re losing out on much here.
1. Who are you?
1. I am the co-founder of Posterous.com. Posterous is the easiest way to publish anything online. You simply send an email to post@posterous.com and attach photos, video, audio, anything at all. We’ll convert everything to a web-friendly format, host it all, and put it online for free. You can send us anything and we’ll make it look good.
2. Facebook, Twitter, or something else and why?
2. I was really into Facebook last year, checking it constantly. I loved seeing friends’ photos and updates. I started using Twitter when I started Posterous.com since it’s so big in the web community. And the more I use it, the more value I find in it. Being able to follow smart people who are normally not accessible is incredibly powerful. I’m not into updating Twitter every time I do something—that’s just weird. But, I love sharing photos and links and ingesting the same from others.
3. Gadget you couldn’t live without (and why)?
3. This is probably your most common answer, but my iPhone. First of all, I’m always on the phone. I haven’t had a landline in 10 years and I’ve always needed tons of minutes each month. But then the iPhone adds so much more. I do use it as an iPod, I do use it for maps, Twitter, and a camera. It really has changed my life in so many ways. I am constantly pulling it out my pocket for so many reasons. The only problem with it is it’s too useful for its own battery life.
4. Most regrettable piece of tech you own
4. I’ve definitely owned some bizarre stuff in the past. A Cross Crosspad. A portable minidisk player. But generally I’m really good about getting rid of bad products on eBay (hopefully before other people figure out they suck so I can get my money back!). So, I don’t have too much old junk lying around the house. I am very proud of my Apple + Mac collection, about 8 computers in all, including a G4 cube that I used in college. I love that machine.
5. If you could wish a gadget into existence, what would it be?
5. Right now I’d love a 15” Macbook Air with 3G. Basically I want a very small, light, thin laptop that’s always connected. The smaller the better.
Bethesda’s third-person shooter, WET, is slated for a September 15 launch on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It’s voiced over by the lovely Eliza Dushku, if that makes a difference to you.
On a mission to find the man that left you for dead, you’ll master the controls that will allow you to create the most incredible fight sequences - limited only by your own imagination. Once you are able to chain together a number of moves, including sliding down ladders, running on walls, jumping and flipping, you will be rewarded with auto-lock and slow motion advantages. Featuring the perfect mix of humor and violence, WET is a third-person shooter experience unlike any other.
PC World - Mozilla's Firefox Web browser has just hit a new milestone, reaching its 1 billionth user download. The big event happened Thursday night, according to the company's official download counter. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 31 Jul 2009 | 3:51 pm
A few months ago when we announced the Search Options panel, we promised that you would soon see similar functionality across our other search properties. Today we are rolling out Search Options for Google Images.
This new feature offers quick access to existing tools, including search by color and image type. Color search will find images that are only in color or only in black and white, or even images that contain a specific color, such as red, pink, or green. Type search is a great way to narrow down your results if you are looking for a specific kind of image, such as a photo, clip art, line drawing or face.
We've also revamped our size search. In addition to choosing from commonly searched-for sizes, now you can search for an exact image size or any image larger than a certain size. You can find images of practically any size, including 70 megapixels or more.
The new layout makes it faster and easier to combine and toggle between options. It also makes it easier for us to add additional image search options in the future, so keep your eyes peeled. Just click "Show options..." in the blue bar on the search results page to try out any of these tools.
Posted by Ken Dauber, Software Engineer, and Nate Smith, Associate Product Manager
Sabre Runner writes to mention that a new British start-up, Aesir, has acquired the assets of a defunct drone company and is working on evolving a working model from several prototypes of "flying saucer" drones. "Aesir's first prototype, named 'Embler' [...] demonstrates the so-called 'Coanda effect,' where air speeds up as it 'sticks' to a curved surface. Aesir's drones take advantage of the Coanda effect to direct air down, away from the drone, boosting lift. Aesir doesn't appear to have any paying customers yet — and is reportedly bankrolled by a single investor."
The group talked about the initial deal Microsoft offered Yahoo last year to buy Yahoo outright, the complicated nature of this new deal, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo walking away from the search fight rather than engaging, how this was the worst of the deals that Microsoft had offered so far, the Bartz/Ballmer reaction, what this means for Microsoft versus Google now, and the possible antitrust implications of all of this.
Watch the part of the show that featured the discussion below.
And here’s the transcript:
CHARLIE ROSE: Microsoft and Yahoo! announced yesterday a partnership in the search and advertising business. Under the deal, Yahoo!`s websites will be powered by Microsoft new search engine, Bing. Yahoo! will get 88 percent of the ad revenue from searches on its sites for the first five years. With the partnership, the two hope to take on Google, which currently commands about 65 percent share of the U.S. market. The agreement follows Microsoft`s failed takeover bid for Yahoo! and shows the continuing importance it is placing on search.
Joining me now from Redmond, Washington, is Nick Wingfield of the “Wall Street Journal.” Here in New York with me, Steven Levy of “Wired” magazine and Erick Schonfeld, co-editor of TechCrunch blog. I am pleased to have all of them here.
Nick, tell me how this deal happened, first.
NICK WINGFIELD: It started last year with the CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, making an unsolicited bid for close to $48 billion to acquire Yahoo!. Never happened, Yahoo! resisted the offer. It fell apart.
Fast forward to about January. Yahoo! has a new CEO, Carol Bartz, and Microsoft and Yahoo! start talking about a more limited deal, not a full-blown acquisition, in which Microsoft basically take over the search operations, handle the search operations on Yahoo! in exchange for some value. And the deal went through all sorts of fits and starts, and finally arrived at the deal you described a moment ago.
All of this being designed to improve Microsoft`s fairly poor position in search right now, which is a highly lucrative market, the online advertising market that accompanies search, and one that Microsoft really has not had much success in on its own.
CHARLIE ROSE: Is this a good deal for just Microsoft or good deal for Microsoft and Yahoo!?
NICK WINGFIELD: Well, the shareholders of both companies seem to think it`s a better deal for Microsoft than it is for Yahoo! The stock of Microsoft went up a bit yesterday and up a bit today. Yahoo! is down.
One of the problems Yahoo! has is that they had sort of almost set expectation that they were going to get a big check, a multi-billion dollar check from Microsoft in exchange for a deal of this sort. And that didn`t end up happening. Instead, what Yahoo! is getting is very high percentage of the ad revenue from advertising sold on searches that Microsoft delivers. So, both parties argue that it`s better for Yahoo! to get this, because they`re getting more — a bigger chunk of the share of ad revenue on an ongoing basis, but there is no big upfront check, and that seems to disappoint people.
CHARLIE ROSE: So, what`s the judgment of people who are looking at it in terms of whether Yahoo! would have been better to take the original deal that Ballmer offered or take the deal they have now?
NICK WINGFIELD: Well, I don`t think there`s any question that Yahoo! shareholders would be better off if they had accepted the original $48 billion deal. I don`t know what Yahoo!`s latest market capitalization is, but they`re down a lot.
So, I don`t think Microsoft, though, regrets not acquiring all of Yahoo! I think they`re fairly happy with the position that they`re in. They also have managed to improve their own home-grown search engine, which is now called Bing, and have started to inch up a little bit in market share. So I think Microsoft probably comes out a little bit ahead here, but still, both parties argue that Yahoo! is going to thrive as well because they no longer have to invest in search, so they can be a lot more profitable.
CHARLIE ROSE: Is this going to work?
STEVEN LEVY: It has a lot of hurdles. I think the upfront money really isn`t the key to Yahoo! The key is, Yahoo! is disbanding their search team, their engineering, and disbanding the team which built their advertising engine to sell ads on search. Now, these happen to be some of the most important aspects of engineering at a company there. And really, if Yahoo! wants to be a top Internet company, it has to have the engineering chops to keep doing that.
So, it`s going to miss out on that. And it will save money by not hiring — having those people to pay, but those are the people you want in your company.
Also, this deal is a little complicated. Yahoo! actually is going to sell some of these ads to the premium customers. A lot of customers, those in the long tail, they just go on the website and buy the ads just straight there like you buy something from Amazon. But a big customer needs someone to work with them and tell them what words to buy. It`s very complicated in how much to bid, because these things are all done by bids. And Yahoo! is doing that part, and Microsoft has the technology, which means those people who work for Yahoo! are really going to have to go back and forth to Redmond and talk to a lot of people to be familiar with how that works there. So there`s a little complication in how they`re going to be able to do that, which is going to make it a little more difficult for Microsoft`s big task, which is to take on Google and build up its ad share to something beyond even what it has combined with Yahoo!
CHARLIE ROSE: Did Bing make a difference here at all, the fact that Bing has gotten — the Microsoft search engine has gotten good reviews?
ERICK SCHONFELD: I think Bing made a big difference, because Yahoo! was in a tough position. It was seeing market share eroding from the top, from Google, and now the prospect of market share erosion from the bottom, from Bing. Bing has only been out for two months, but it`s made a little bit of a gain in share, .4 percent. Is that going to last over time? Who knows. But Yahoo! didn`t want to find out. Right?
And the big problem here is that Yahoo! really — they kind of walked away from the most interesting fight on the Internet right now, which is search. And they handed it over to Microsoft for less than any of the previous deals that were on the table. The four real deals that were on the table going back to the $45 or $48 billion offer in February of 2008, the revised search deal that Microsoft offered, which included $8 billion to buy 16 percent of Yahoo! and $1 billion payment for the search part of the business. The Google deal that got squashed, that guaranteed $800 million in revenues.
This deal was the worst of all the deals. And as Steve mentions, the deal introduces a lot of complexity, right? So now you`re going to have Yahoo! sales people selling Microsoft`s search product. So Yahoo! sales people already have enough problem talking to Yahoo! engineers. Now they have to talk to Microsoft engineers. And what if something goes wrong? Who are they going to yell at? Are the Microsoft engineers going to like that, being yelled at by Yahoo! sales people?
CHARLIE ROSE: Nick, you`re in Redmond. What does this do for Steve Ballmer?
NICK WINGFIELD: Well, it gives him a real fighting chance in a market that he said is strategic to the company. They have about 8.4 percent market share on their own with Bing. With Yahoo!`s market share, they could go to 30 percent of shares — 30 percent of searches in the U.S., and that`s significant.
Now the question is, does it decline from there? Can they increase it? If they do that, you know, how much money do they make off of it? Because of course, Microsoft is losing money in its Internet search business right now. But they just want to gain the share. They argue once they gain the share, they get eyeballs. Search is a scale business, that they will start to improve the quality of the search, because they can do all sorts of things, make ads more relevant. And if they do that, they think they can have a flywheel effect and start really eating into Google`s share.
The other thing that this lets them do is, Google is not only strong in search with 65 percent plus share, but Google is also moving into these other areas that are quite threatening to Microsoft. They`re using their profits in search to get into operating systems, into online applications that are free, that threaten these cash-cow businesses like Office and Word and Excel. And they just recently announced that they`re going to be doing an operating system for laptops. They already have one for mobile phones. And I think Microsoft wants to gain share in search in part to help alleviate that threat.
CHARLIE ROSE: And what about the leadership of Yahoo!? Carol Bartz?
STEVEN LEVY: Well, she felt she had to do something. But I think in this case, by targeting the search team and taking it away, some people wonder whether that`s going to really take the glue, which keeps her portal together there.
The search that Yahoo! did had, you know, about three times the size of what Microsoft search, mainly because so many people come to Yahoo! and they search there. So it really was an opportunity for Yahoo! to grow out there and do more.
She says this is going to enable them to concentrate on the other things that they do. But having a very strong search team and engineering that comes with that search, and with the really complicated engineering you have to do to be able to sell ads on searches, that`s very complex. And you know, for reasons we can get into, it really helps if your share grows. Not having that, those engineers aren`t going to be able to filter through the rest of the company to help you do these other things there. If you look at the team now, gee, what are they going to do? It`s going to take well over a year for this to come to fruition with this deal there. So if I`m working as an engineer for Yahoo! now, what`s my future?
CHARLIE ROSE: That`s — and losing talent is the big issue so much, because they`re creating the new software and building on the old.
STEVEN LEVY: And who is one of the most talented people at Microsoft, the one they all talk about there, is Qi Lu, the guy who came from Yahoo!, and went to Microsoft. He`s now the big technology leader, the bright guy who is leading Microsoft search.
CHARLIE ROSE: All right. What about AOL? What`s going to happen to AOL?
ERICK SCHONFELD: So, I think AOL is a great example here, because you`ve got Tim Armstrong, who came from Google, who is now the new CEO of AOL, and he took what was really a hobbled company, and is taking it in a new direction, away from the sweet spot that Google or Yahoo! or Microsoft already dominate in. He`s hiring hundreds of journalists, which as you know from your Politico piece, that you know, they are very, very valuable assets. And is kind of creating — that`s just one part of his business — is creating this sort of new newsstand online. And is doing a lot of interesting things.
And so why didn`t Carol Bartz do that? Why didn`t she double down? You can make the argument that you know, ultimately she had to do something, because she doesn`t have Microsoft`s Windows money and she doesn`t have Google`s search money. So ultimately search is an expensive game and maybe she has to get out of that business, ultimately.
But Microsoft needs her search volume. Why not double down, invest in search, and get a better deal down the line? Or merge with AOL when they become public?
CHARLIE ROSE: Speaking of one final issue, anti-trust, Nick. Is Google worried about anti-trust ramifications of its market share? Will this deal be subject to anti-trust implications, questions?
NICK WINGFIELD: Well, Google is I think worried, yes, about their future in anti-trust. In this particular case of Microsoft and Yahoo!, they argue that together they have 30 percent of the market, compared to Google`s 65 percent. And so they think they are going to have a pretty strong case with the anti-trust regulators. They are definitely going to face some tough scrutiny. They`re prepared, I think, to really fight with Google, but it`s unclear what Google is going to do. There was some talk today at this Microsoft meeting I was at of Google employing sort of third-party advocacy groups to fight the deal. But Google really is the big gorilla here. So it`s a little challenging for them to make an argument that this is going to be anti-competitive. Google has…
(CROSSTALK)
STEVEN LEVY: There`s a really delicious irony here, because last year, when there was the threat of Microsoft buying Yahoo!, Google wanted to make a deal with Yahoo! for the search. It was not on the scale of this, and Microsoft complained about it, and said to the Justice Department, successfully argued that, hey, we can`t do this, because Yahoo! would end its search team. There would be less competition in there. Guess what?
CHARLIE ROSE: They`ll take over their search team. Yes.
Is there a feeling with the search — Bing getting good marks and now this deal, that Microsoft is back and that Microsoft can deliver a lot more than people, or may be much stronger than people assumed it was, say six months ago, when the effort to buy Yahoo! came to nothing?
NICK WINGFIELD: Well, there definitely is a feeling that they are on an upswing in terms of the quality of their products. Windows 7 is coming out, which they hope will erase the sort of disdain of Windows Vista, which was a very troubled operating system for them with some technical problems. Bing is doing well. They have done some innovative stuff in games. But they`ve also got some real challenges. For example, some people think that they have placed too much emphasis on search and neglected mobile phones. They have a pretty poor offering there. And Apple`s got the iPhone and others are doing very well in that category. So they`ve got some big challenges in other areas as well.
ERICK SCHONFELD: Microsoft no doubt is better off today in search than it was before. But we shouldn`t overestimate what their advantage is. Even if they have 30 percent of the search market share, they don`t have 30 percent of the revenues, because they`re giving 88 percent of that back to Yahoo!
CHARLIE ROSE: Exactly. Nick Wingfield, “Wall Street Journal” here. Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch and Steve Levy from “Wired,” thank you all.
END
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
It doesn’t look like much, but if it does its job right, and you really love to speed, it may pay for itself after a few close calls with the Highway Patrol. I was just on a road trip and the radar detector we had was not entirely reliable — but for less than $30, you can’t expect too much. This thing, though, is supposed to detect potentially harmful police radiations up to 13 miles away.
The RedLine from Escort also does all the other luxury radar detector things — for instance, it cloaks itself from radar detector detectors, and radar detector detector detector detectors as well for all I know. I think that’s right. The cops won’t be detecting this thing any time soon, anyway.
It’ll detect pretty much any frequency and display it, and also detects “safety warning messages,” which I don’t really understand. It’ll even detect voltage fluctuations from the car. It seems like a nice piece of kit, but brother, $500 is a lot of ducats to be paying these days when you can get most of the functionality for a tenth of the price. Strictly for enthusiasts only, I guess.
Before computers became small, cheap, and reliable enough for this purpose, people still had the desire to stand in front of armoire-sized cabinets, stare into a glass panel, and pretend to do things they normally didn't do, like kill aliens, drive like a madman, or work in a junkyard. The way they did these things was with wonderful, complicated electromechanical arcade games.
These electromechanical games are incredible contraptions, using every kind of trick-- projections, spinning drums, remotely articulated models, whirring discs, mirrors, lights-- to give the illusions of speed, action, explosions, distance, and more. Looking at them, it's amazing they worked so well in such a high-abuse public environment. These are real engineering gems, long gone, and very rare now. Luckily, there's a bunch of videos out there, since stills really don't do these justice: Speedway, Hill Climb, Invaders, Haunted House. Enjoy!
I have a secret to tell you. I’m a fan of the Fast & Furious franchise. Actually, the second one sucked really badly. But I’m not reviewing the fourth installment in the riveting saga here, just the Blu-ray iPhone app.
So, is the app everything it’s cracked up to be? Well, it delivers on what Universal said it would do and nothing else. It’s a pretty weak feature/app, but it’s a start. Flipping through various cars and seeing little tidbits about each is fine. To sift through the five cars you simply shake your iPhone/iPod Touch or use the virtual controls and you’re golden. There’s a “Build a Car” mode that lets you customize a Dodge Charger, but when it’s all said and done, you can’t see the fruits of your labor on the device itself.
While I’m unimpressed with the first Blu-ray iPhone app, I have to give Universal big ups for finally pushing one out. It’ll be interesting to see what Universal and the other studios manage to cook up in the future.
Where do thoroughbred race horses go when they retire? The best of them go stud, and one of the best stud farms going is Darley, in the Kentucky bluegrass country.
NEW YORK and SHENZHEN, China, July 31 /PRNewswire-Asia-FirstCall/ -- China
Digital Communication Group (OTC Bulletin Board: CMTP), a manufacturer and
distributor of battery components in China, today announced that it will
release its operating results for the second quarter in early August.
Management will conduct a conference call and simultaneous webcast to discuss
second quarter results and future outlook on August 6, 2009.
"We look forward to updating our shareholders on China Digital's recent
developments," said Fushun Li, CEO of China Digital. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 31 Jul 2009 | 3:00 pm
Jeremy A. Hansen writes "Bruce Schneier gives us an update on some ongoing cryptanalysis of AES. 'Over the past couple of months, there have been two new cryptanalysis papers on AES. The attacks presented in the paper are not practical — they're far too complex, they're related-key attacks, and they're against larger-key versions and not the 128-bit version that most implementations use — but they are impressive pieces of work all the same. This new attack, by Alex Biryukov, Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, Dmitry Khovratovich, and Adi Shamir, is much more devastating. It is a completely practical attack against ten-round AES-256.' While ten-round AES-256 is not actually used anywhere, Schneier goes on to explain why this shakes some of the cryptology community's assumptions about the security margins of AES."
Alright Motorola, I’ve got to hand it to you. After seeing the Morrison rock that DayGlo Playskool look (and let’s not forget that hideous black and purple Rival), we were all a little worried that all you guys had forgotten all about a little concept called “subtlety”. Alas, as it turns out, our fears were misplaced: pictures of Motorola’s latest (and classiest) Android to date have been leaked, and boy are they a sight to behold.
Thanks to the guys over at Motofan.ru, we can now see that none of the design cues that characterized the Morrison have made it over to the new device, codenamed “Sholes”. Gone are the gaudy colors and rounded edges; the Sholes sports a more streamlined, industrial aesthetic. Something about the phone’s shape is reminiscent of the classic RAZR, which isn’t exactly out of left field since Motorola spent the last five years running the RAZR’s design into the ground.
Appearance aside, the Sholes looks to bring a lot to the table feature wise. Among other things, the Sholes sports:
a 3.7 inch touch display, running at 480 x 854
256 MB of RAM
512 MB of storage (expandable up to 16 GB)
5 MP camera with autofocus
Integrated GPS/WiFi/Bluetooth 2.0
From what the Motofans have dug up, the Sholes will be (after a quick name change, we’re assuming) headed to Verizon for its stateside release. What’s really interesting is when the launch is supposedly set to go down: they have it pegged for October 9th, just shy of the possible U.S. release date of HTC’s Hero for Sprint. It looks like the Summer Smartphone Wars may be spilling over into the fall, but hey- we’re certainly not complaining about it.
Crunch Network: TechCrunchobsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
The push towards building a “smart grid” of electricity networks has experts warning about the security risks of equipping homes and businesses with new devices that enable two-way communications with utility companies. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 31 Jul 2009 | 2:46 pm
Which countries are the worst greenhouse gas emitters? Now you can see for yourself on this handy Google Map created by a department of the UN and Google. The map shows changes in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 to 2006. Green is good (a decrease in emissions) and purple is bad (an increase).
So who are the worst offenders? Topping the list is Sweden! The country has managed to increase its emissions by 110 percent over that time period. So much for Nordic purity. Following Sweden is Turkey (with a 103 percent increase) and Canada (with a 55 percent increase). Yes, Canada. What is it with these northern countries?
You’d think the U.S. would top the list, but it is actually only the tenth worst country with a 14 percent increase in emissions (still well within purple territory). It is kind of embarrassing that Russia is greener than we are. But at least we are better than Canada (and Sweden).
Or are we? The map itself lets you drill down into the data to find out. You can sort by industry, type of emission (CO2, CH4, N2O, etc), or year, and if click on a country it gives you a detailed breakdown of emissions by economic sector and other variables. For instance, over the 1990 to 2006 time span, Russia has actually seen a 29 percent decrease in emissions, but if you look at just 2006, Russia starts getting pretty purple, and rises to the No. 3 worst emitter. And the USA rises to No. 1.
Hey, we’re No. 1!
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
LOXAHATCHEE, Fla., July 31 /PRNewswire/ -- IntegraScan announced today the launch of a new criminal background check initiative designed to help America's school system ensure the safety of students. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 31 Jul 2009 | 2:35 pm
Go and update your iPhone! 3.0.1 is out and it fixes the SMS vulnerability that's been whipped up into a security frenzy over the last couple days. Hopefully we'll be hearing less about how impregnable Apple's OSes are after this little event.
Years from now, people will look back on the year 2009 as the year A) Apple lost the goodwill of a sizable chunk of the Internet audience; and B) when a high school kid sued Amazon because it remotely deleted an illegal copy of 1984. The kid is suing because he annotated the copy of the book, and now is without said notes. So of course, sue right?
First, the backstory. Amazon recently remotely deleted an authorized-to-be-sold copy of George Orwell’s 1984 from the Kindle. People freaked out because, whoa, who knew Amazon could remotely delete books from my Kindle? (Not “my” Kindle, mind you—I don’t have that kind of money!) Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, admitted that the company’s handling of the situation wasn’t very elegant, even though it refunded everyone who bought the book. He also said it’d never delete another book again.
Enter Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old high school student from Michigan. He’s suing Amazon (rather, the law firm representing him is suing) in order to “help set a precedent so that Amazon doesn’t do this again.”
The lawsuit is also seeking monetary relief for people who lost work. The notes Gawronski took are now also useless.
Am I callous in thinking this kid should just get on with it? He’s not exactly Nelson Mandela.
By Tiernan Ray, Blogger, Barron’s, Tech Trader Daily
It was a strange quarter for solar panel maker First Solar (FSLR) last night. The company reiterated its forecast for 2009 revenue, which was probably expected, but it also beat Q2 revenue, leaving some disappointed with the lack of upside for the rest of the year. Moreover, the big issue on the call, the decision by the company to offer rebates in Germany is paradoxical given that it was $84 million in revenue from Germany, analysts say, that helped the company beat Q2 expectations. Do the rebates signal a continuing threat of price erosion and stalled customers as First Solar competitors cut their prices?
RIM’s 1.1 update to its Blackberry App World has made it more like the Apple App Store. The update includes a free and a paid top downloads list and new categories and sub-categories. Also, customers can now sort search results by Newest, Highest Rated, Price (lowest/highest), Developer (alphabetical), or Application Name (alphabetical). For those of you who need to temporarily remove apps for any reason, the update provides app archiving to an SD card or the BlackBerry’s internal memory - archived apps maybe reinstalled at any time. If you are a new BlackBerry customer, you can download the update at Mobile.BlackBerry.com or BlackBerry.com/AppWorld. If you are a current user, you will be notified via an alert icon on your BlackBerry App World icon. Some of these updated features may seem pleasingly new to Blackberry users, but will be quite familiar to Apple users.
Once again, the iPhone is safe for text messaging. Apple on Friday distributed iPhone OS 3.0.1, a point release to the operating system that addresses a security vulnerability that could have allowed a malicious hacker to seize control of an iPhone with an unusual SMS text message.
The flaw was first demonstrated Thursday. “This is serious. The only thing you can do to prevent it is turn off your phone,” security researcher Charlie Miller said of it earlier this week. “Someone could pretty quickly take over every iPhone in the world with this.”
Well, not anymore, as Apple (AAPL) was quick to note. “This morning, less than 24 hours after a demonstration of this exploit, we’ve issued a free software update that eliminates the vulnerability from the iPhone,” said an Apple spokesperson. “Contrary to what’s been reported, no one has been able to take control of the iPhone to gain access to personal information using this exploit.”
ADiamond writes "There is no Wi-Fi allergy. The English DJ claiming a Wi-Fi sensitivity, chronicled earlier, was a PR stunt to promote his new album. It would appear that the stunt was highly successful, appearing in multiple high-profile media outlets like The Sun, The Telegraph, and Fox News. The article at Ars goes on to discuss the evidence, or lack-thereof, of electromagnetic spectrum sensitivity."
The federal government’s “cash for clunkers” program has been highly popular and may provide a much-needed boost for the nation’s ailing auto industry, but it will do little to cut fuel consumption, according to a Reuters analysis.Congress is working to extend the program after the original $1 billion in funding dried up sooner than expected, resulting in the program’s suspension.The “Cash for clunkers” program, allows Americans to trade in their gas-guzzling vehicles for more fuel-efficient cars, was originally expected to run until September 30.The program “has proved to be a highly successful vehicle marketing tool," Tim Evans, energy analyst for Citi Futures Perspective in New York, told Reuters. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 31 Jul 2009 | 2:10 pm
This article at National Geographic gives a good gist of what's going on: apparently, regular old blue food coloring, like the stuff you find in Gatorade or M&Ms, has been found to reduce spinal cord trauma and inflammation, leading to at least a partial reversal of paralysis, at least in some mice. And, unlike other treatments, there's no toxic effects.
And the best part? They turned blue! Now there's hope for anyone hoping to both regain use of paralyzed limbs and a desire to look like a really cold guy in a cartoon.
For a four-week period, I’m awarding one Leatherman Freestyle CX to the Gadget Lab reader whose comment best contributes to this site.
This week’s winner is “heroisum,” whose comment on the potential of an Apple tablet adds the hope that tablets will help save magazines and newspapers from extinction. “We need something that can replicate an actual page of content — design cues included,” heroisum writes.
That’s a debatable point, to be sure. And heroisum wins for “comment of the week” not because we agree, but because this is a thoughtful, personal comment that advances the argument.
The prize is a Freestyle CX (above), one of the smallest tools Leatherman makes. It’s got a pair of pliers and a hard, 154CM stainless steel blade, and that’s about it. It fits nicely in your pocket, feels good in your hand and looks cool. Thanks very much to the Leatherman company for donating these as prizes.
There are two more weeks, so keep those comments coming. And as a reminder, here’s Gadget Lab’s comment policy.
"We're here today to announce the death of comments."
That's what JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux said in his opening remarks at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp earlier this month. He went on to unveil ECHO, JS-Kit's new take on how conversations should be happening around content on the web. And today, we're going to try a limited test of this new system on the TechCrunch Network.
To reiterate, this is just a test that will reside under only this post for the time-being, so let us know what you think.
While at first glance, the comments you see below this post may look like a slight variation of any other commenting system, the reality is much different. Sure, a part of ECHO is made up by what we think of as traditional comments, that is, comments you fill out on a particular article and post to it. But the majority of the content in this commenting area will actually be populated from sources all around the web talking about this piece of content.
What is the Everio X GZ-X900? Is it a pocket camcorder like a Flip? Is it a fully-fledged video camera? Is it a YouTube-uploading device? Is it a hybrid of all of these - and more?
This new Everio is basically a compact video camera that records at full 1920×1080 1080i resolution at 24Mbps in its highest setting. It can take 9-megapixel still images and records directly to an SD/SDHC memory card. It weights 300 grams (.66 pounds) and has a 2.8-inch color screen.
So you want to record at 1080i, eh? Well you’d better have a huge SDHC card because the max you can record is three hours on a 32GB model. A 4GB one can hold 20 minutes at UXP resolution and 2 hours at EP resolution (1920×1080i @ 5Mbps).
This brings us to the question: do we as a species need to record at 1080i? No. We do not. There are precious few ways to use this full HD content except for direct TV playback but, god bless us, we’ll die trying.
The camera is fairly idiot proof and small enough to fit in a pocket or purse. It is about as big as two Flip HD cameras laid end-to-end. The styling pays homage to leather and brushed steel and Konica Minolta lens hides deep inside the case and offers shake reduction and 5X zoom. Interestingly you can actually watch the lens go absolutely nuts inside the camera when you look into the hole to the lens assembly.
In terms of image quality you’re going to see quite a range. The camera really fails in low light. The pictures are grainy and the video is grainier. However, in bright light or sunlight you get amazingly crisp video and images. This is a large trade off and something party-goers may want to consider.
This is a real image taken in partial sunlight. This image is indicative of what you’ll get in anything but full light.
Another interesting feature is the “High Speed Recording” mode which records at 600, 200, and 120fps. This, in essence, allows you to create slow-motion movies. Again, we fall into the low-light trap. This sample footage was taken directly under a desk lamp.
The camera uses JVC’s Laser Touch menu system which consists of a side slider and a set of buttons under the screen. This is not a touchscreen device.
It also records using JVC’s dreaded MTS format. This format should import seamlessly into iMovie and other movie-making software but it requires a bit of conversion.
Then there are few other problems. The device has no mic input, a fairly important addition to something that could presumably take high quality video. This thing is halfway between a high end camera and a toy yet JVC seems to keep nudging towards the latter.
I recorded this video review with the Everio X and the original footage was quite sharp. However, after enough fiddling it became exactly what you see here: YouTube junk. Although we recorded at high quality we learn the real problem with cameras like these - they’re a bit head of their time.
How much would you pay for what is essentially a compact camera that records in HD? $399? $599? Try $999.
Bottom Line
Overall I like the Everio line and am impressed with the amount of power stuffed into such a small package. However I’d be hard pressed to recommend this camera over something like the Kodak Zi6/Zi8 or even any of JVC’s superior HD-based cameras. This is an interesting experiment and if you can overlook the limited storage space and seemingly odd low-light recording issues this may be a contender. For everyone else, I’d look elsewhere.
OCALA, Fla., July 31 /PRNewswire/ -- Verteks Consulting today announced it has won ShoreTel's Customer Satisfaction Excellence Award for ShoreTel's Fiscal Year 2009, ending June 30. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 31 Jul 2009 | 1:55 pm
China Unicom will work together in China, pushing Apple’s 3G version of iPhone mobile phone is basically a fact, recent testing of the iPhone a mobile phone, from a number of subtle characteristics that should be showing the upcoming Unicom is the first iPhone mobile phone.
The iPhone introduction onto the back of the phone are all in simplified Chinese characters, and the iPhone mobile phone is the U.S. version of English words, Hong Kong and Taiwan are Chinese traditional characters version.
In addition, iPhone mobile phone which shows a boot Unicom interface; in a 3G signal, the upper-left corner of the “China Unicom 3G” message.
A scientist's life at the northernmost "town" on Earth isn't all fighting off polar bears and nasty birds. There are also dance parties and Norwegian specialty cocktails, according to one NASA researcher.
An innovative laser-imaging technique could save taxpayers $15.5 million during the building of the Virginia-class submarine, U.S. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 31 Jul 2009 | 1:43 pm
Wile E. Coyote might not have been able to catch up with the roadrunner on the Saturday morning cartoons, but one Texas AgriLife Research scientist has had no problems.Dr. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 31 Jul 2009 | 1:20 pm
The FCC finishes off the summer with 18 hearings on its national broadband plan, each with a different focus. If you are a fan of the net and want to save money on your summer travel plans, be citizenly by staying home to watch net neutrality and digital divide hearings.
We've been getting requests from various citizens to feature their respective cities in our new Geek Weekend feature on CrunchGear, so when a request came in for the Twin Cities, John asked me to write it up and I thought, "Oh, great. More work." "Perfect! I'm from Minneapolis! I know where geeky stuff is located!"
Background Info: The Twin Cities denotes the capital city of St. Paul, MN and the larger, more cosmopolitan city of Minneapolis, MN. Together the two cities are home to roughly 2.5 million people.
There's always been a friendly little rivalry going on between the two cities, with some people from Minneapolis viewing people from St. Paul as more blue-collar and rough-around-the-edges, while some from St. Paul think people from Minneapolis are yuppies. I've lived in both cities and they're both nice places. Overall, the rivalry is pretty silly, but it's there. Look hard enough in any city, though, and you'll find both a-holes and nice people. No different in the Twin Cities. Everyone's pretty nice, overall, though.
By sticking flies in a virtual-reality flight simulator, scientists are tracking how the insects manage to process visual images more than four times faster than humans. The researchers hope their results will improve visual-processing systems for flying robots.
By Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
The future of the cash for clunkers program is in doubt, but consumers should remain wary of fraudulent sites that claim to be associated with it.
The Federal Trade Commission has issued a consumer alert noting that only one Web site, Cars.gov, is the official destination for the Car Allowance Rebate System. Other sites, particularly ones that ask for personal information, should be avoided since they might be a front for identity-theft efforts.
“You do not need a voucher and you are not required to sign up or enroll in this program,” says the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration, which operates the rebate program, in a frequently asked questions page.
Overfishing threatens many species but a combination of steps could turn that around, two groups long at odds with each other said.
Marine ecologists and fisheries management scientists worked together for two years and published their findings Friday in the journal Science.
The researchers agreed solutions to overfishing lie not only in management techniques but also in the political will to apply them, even if it initially causes economic disruption, said a release from the U.S. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 31 Jul 2009 | 1:12 pm
Changes in the head shape and overall size of rodents has been linked to human population density and climate change, a Chicago researcher said.
The size and head shape of rodents has shifted substantially during the last 100 years, with some larger and some smaller, Oliver Pergams, a researcher at the University of Chicago said in a statement released Friday.
Pergams studied 1,300 specimen rodents from museums around the world, including Chicago's Field Museum and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
He then compared specimens from sparsely populated islands to those from the mainland, where human populations were denser. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 31 Jul 2009 | 1:08 pm
Susan Blackmore, author of the excellent book The Meme Machine, has suggested that beyond genes and memes, there is a new evolutionary "replicator" on the scene. She doesn't have a name for it, but it's related to the difference she sees between memes and digital information. From New Scientist:
Memes work differently from genes, and digital information works differently from memes, but some general principles apply to them all. The accelerating expansion, the increasing complexity, and the improving interconnectivity of all three are signs that the same fundamental design process is driving them all. Road networks look like vascular systems, and both look like computer networks, because interconnected systems outcompete isolated systems. The internet connects billions of computers in trillions of ways, just as a human brain connects billions of neurons in trillions of ways. Their uncanny resemblance is because they are doing a similar job.
So where do we go from here? We humans were vehicles for the first replicator and copying machinery for the second. What will we be for the third? For now we seem to have handed over most of the storage and copying duties to our new machines, but we still do much of the selection, which is why the web is so full of sex, drugs, food, music and entertainment. But the balance is shifting.
College students in Waco, Texas, are experimenting with a $50,000 printer designed to handle 5-foot-wide bolts of cloth, Baylor University officials said.
The unusual printer is one of two owned by U.S. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 31 Jul 2009 | 1:02 pm
The upcoming title pairs real recipes with Wiimote waggling and fun mini-games. The goal: Give cooking-challenged gamers a heaping helping of culinary knowledge.
Apple Inc is responding to a security flaw in its iPhone devices that was uncovered by security experts on Thursday.On Friday, Apple announced it would be releasing a patch for a security threat involving SMS messages on the smartphone.On Thursday, experts Charlie Miller and Collin Mulliner at the Black Hat 2009 security conference revealed the threat that could allow hackers to hijack iPhones or knock the device from the network completely using a series of text messages.An Apple spokesperson said the company would be releasing the new patch on iTunes on Saturday."We will be communicating to customers both through the website and proactively," the spokesperson told BBC News."We always recommend our customers update their iPhone with the latest software and this is no different."Left unpatched, the security flaw could allow hackers to send a series of SMS messages to iPhones that would allow them access to the phone’s applications.Users would not be able to see the malicious code embedded in the messages, which makes the potential for attacks more dangerous.Experts were able to exploit the flaw on iPhones across four networks in Germany as well as AT&T’s network in the US, according to BBC News."Someone could pretty quickly take over every iPhone in the world," said Miller. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 31 Jul 2009 | 12:50 pm
The British High Court defies Sting and Peter Gabriel, finding that extraditing the Gary McKinnon to the United States for trial is "a lawful and proportionate response to his offending."
Firefox has reached its billionth download mark since it was first introduced in 2004.The Mozilla Foundation announced the billionth download of Firefox, its free open-source Web browser on Friday.Firefox’s download counter began approaching the billion-download mark on Thursday. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 31 Jul 2009 | 12:35 pm
Apple has released a minor software update for iPhone, patching a security flaw revealed just yesterday.
Security researchers Charlie Miller and Collin Mulliner on Thursday revealed a memory corruption bug that could be easily exploited by crashing an iPhone with a series of invisible text messages, which would then enable a hacker to hijack the device. From thereon, a hacker could control all the functions on the iPhone — most alarmingly, he could send more text messages to hijack even more iPhones.
The researchers demonstrated the SMS security hole at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. They also demonstrated the flaw by sending an attack to crash a CNET reporter’s iPhone.
On Friday morning, Apple released iPhone OS 3.0.1. Available through iTunes, the update “Fixes SMS vulnerability,” according to its description.
“We appreciate the information provided to us about SMS vulnerabilities which affect several mobile phone platforms,” an Apple spokeswoman said in a phone interview with Wired.com. “This morning, less than 24 hours after a demonstration of this exploit, we’ve issued a free software update that eliminates the vulnerability from the iPhone. Contrary to what’s been reported, no one has been able to take control of the iPhone to gain access to personal information using this exploit.”
Apple moved even faster than necessary to fix the problem: Miller told Wired.com it took him two and a half weeks to discover the exploit. A hacker “really smart and lucky” could take a few days to replicate the attack, but that’s unlikely because “not many people in the whole world” have these skills, he said.
“Still, it just takes one bad guy a couple of weeks, and every iPhone could be attacked,” Miller told Wired.com in a phone interview.
Nonetheless, Jonathan Zdziarski, another iPhone security researcher, said he felt Miller sensationalized the problem with this stunt. He noted that many devices have vulnerabilities “in the wild” that nobody has exploited, and it’s unlikely a hacker would’ve devoted much energy to replicating Miller’s SMS attack, because there isn’t much to gain beyond annoying iPhone users.
“Every time we find a bug it’s been there for a year or more,” Zdziarski said. “At the very least it’s been six months, maybe longer.”
Miller acknowledged that the iPhone’s SMS weakness has probably existed for years; he first discovered the flaw in iPhone OS 2.0, which launched in 2008.
“The problem has been in the phone for year, but no one’s known about it,” he said in a phone interview Thursday. “Now that it’s out in the open, [Apple] can fix it.”
A rare tumor called primary central nervous system lymphoma was two times more likely to be found in blacks ages 20 to 49 than whites, U.S. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 31 Jul 2009 | 12:23 pm
That’s the word from agency Chairman Julius Genachowski, who says he’s concerned not just with the competitive ramifications of carrier-exclusivity deals, but with their tendency to limit customer access to top smartphones. “There are markets in the country where if you wanted an iPhone, if you wanted a Pre, you just couldn’t get it–from anyone,” Genachowski told Bloomberg. “So one question is, is that consistent with broad consumer interests?”
Vermont residents and those living in the rural areas of other states who can’t use the iPhone because AT&T (T) offers only roaming coverage there would likely say the answer to that question is no. But AT&T, Verizon (VZ) and other Tier 1 wireless carriers disagree. They claim exclusive handset deals are beneficial.
“The popularity of the iPhone and its innovative features and applications…has provoked an unprecedented competitive reaction,” James Cicconi, AT&T’s senior vice president of external and legislative affairs, wrote in a letter to the Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee. “Exclusive handsets have provided U.S. consumers the most advanced devices in the world at distinctly affordable rates. By allowing a carrier and a manufacturer to share the enormous risks and costs of bringing an inventive but unproven new device to market, exclusive arrangements both quicken the pace of technological advancement and incentivize the carrier to offer even greater handset subsidies to its customers.”
Verizon argued that point as well in a recent letter to Congress’s Telecommunications Subcommittee. “Exclusivity arrangements promote competition and innovation in device development and design,” the company said. “We work closely with our vendors to develop new and exciting devices that will attract customers. When we procure exclusive handsets from our vendors we typically buy hundreds of thousands or even millions of each device. Otherwise manufacturers may be reluctant to make the investments of time, money and production capacity to support a particular device.”
In some cases, perhaps. Though I doubt Apple (AAPL) and Research in Motion (RIMM), maker of the BlackBerry, feel that way these days. If there’s reluctance anywhere, it’s reluctance on the part of carriers like AT&T, which can’t bear the thought of losing its exclusive on the iPhone, without which it will face defections and slowing growth.
SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif., July 31 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- VirnetX Holding Corporation (NYSE Amex: VHC) announced today that the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division, issued its patent claim construction, or "Markman" Order ("Markman Order") in the ongoing patent infringement action between VirnetX Inc. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 31 Jul 2009 | 12:14 pm
What happens when you take the Samsung OmniaPro, improve its keyboard and the general look of the device, then strip it of its smartphone OS? You get the Verizon Rogue.
For those looking for the smartphone package without the smarts, it’s a nice piece of kit. That QWERTY keyboard looks downright delicious, it’s got a nicely sized AMOLED screen, and the autofocus on that 3 megapixel camera should make your on-the-go shots slightly less craptastic. It’s got everything we’d want in Samsung’s first mid-range Android phone — except, well, Android.
Oh well - if you’re not the sort of person to get hung up on an OS, PhoneArena says you ought to be able to grab this guy come August 15th.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Two lucky readers will get media access to the San Francisco music festival, plus Kodak Pocket HD cameras to capture the action. Tell us why you deserve the prize package, and you could become an honorary Wired.com videographer.
Scientists have discovered that honeybees warn each other of dangerous flowers that might be harboring predators in wait.This warning system was found by planting dead bees on flowers and observing how other bees respond to the sign of danger. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 31 Jul 2009 | 11:53 am
The US Department of Defense is investigating the use of social networking sites to ensure that posted material does not waste bandwidth or reveal crucial guarded information.The Pentagon has already begun using the popular networking sites Facebook and Twitter. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 31 Jul 2009 | 11:47 am
The recession in online advertising, which began in the first quarter of 2009, continued into the second. Every quarter we keep track of the combined advertising revenues of the four largest Web advertising companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL), which together represent the lion’s share of all online advertising revenues and is a decent proxy for the market as a whole. In the second quarter of 2009, their combined global ad revenues were $7.864 billion, down 3.4 percent from a year ago.
In economics, a general rule of thumb is that two down quarters marks a recession. Last quarter saw the first annual decline in advertising revenues of 2.1 percent. And the annual decline this quarter got a little worse. However, on a sequential basis compared to last quarter, it is actually pretty much flat (but still down 0.18 percent). So we now have two down quarters on both an annual and sequential basis.
Will this recession continue into the current quarter, or did we just witness a fundamental “reset”, as Steve Ballmer likes to call it. What that implies is that advertising revenues have been reset to a lower level from which they can once again grow. We’ll see what happens in the third quarter, but anecdotally I am hearing from advertising startups that the worst is behind us.
This may be wishful thinking, of course. But barring any new economic catastrophe, the advertising levels of the past two quarters seems like the new floor. But how long will it take to get up off that floor?
These numbers represent global advertising revenues, and include network revenues paid to affiliates through AdSense and Yahoo’s ad network. Google’s licensing revenues for Google Enterprise Apps have been stripped out. For the other companies, we include only the advertising portions of their online revenues as reported in their quarterly earnings statements.
Below is a table with all the numbers:
Online Advertising Revenues (in millions)
4Q07
1Q08
2Q08
3Q08
4Q08
1Q09
2Q09
Google
$4,758
$5,086
$5,185
$5,352
$5,504
$5,331
$5,336
Yahoo
$1,590
$1,572
$1,587
$1,563
$1,594
$1,383
$1,378
Microsoft
$860
$840
$840
$770
$866
$721
$731
AOL
$620
$552
$530
$507
$507
$443
$419
Total
$7,828
$8,050
$8,142
$8,192
$8,467
$7,878
$7864
Sequential Growth Q/Q
2.84%
1.14%
0.61%
-7.00%
-0.18%
Annual Growth Y/Y
8.21%
-2.10%
-3.41%
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Oh, the Internet. How mysterious it is. Packed from e-window to e-wall with “experts”, 95% of whom have no clue what they’re talking about. Then there’s that other 5% who, to some extent, do have an idea of what they’re talking about. Unfortunately, the endless torrent of falsities (bored kids making up Apple products, bored creepers misrepresenting the fact that they have male bits) on the internet have given the masses such a pessimistic thick skin that anything even remotely dubious is declared as false.
Such is the case with a claim by xda-dev member atomixpaintball. He’s been claiming since April — long before most of us gave a damn about the Hero, mind you — that the HTC Hero was coming on October 11th. Dubious? Sure. On one hand, it’s just some dude on a forum. On the other, his story (that he’s part of a wireless content development firm) isn’t absurd, the date makes sense, and 3+ months is a lot of time to waste over faking something as trivial as a launch date. Hell, most of the guys who spend a week making a fake render will admit it after a day or two. Rather than giving up and disappearing, he’s come back with an (admittedly simple) image reiterating the October 11th launch.
The pin on our finely tuned lie detector isn’t moving in the slightest; whether the information he has isn’t necessarily true, he certainly believes it is.
Also worth noting are the currently undetailed BlackBerry Aries and the apparently Android-based Samsung Q. Not a whole lot to go on there - but we’ll keep an eye out.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Researchers are concerned that butterfly populations may be in decline, possibly signaling a worsening environment, The Associated Press reported.Butterflies are known to be sensitive to changes in their habitats."When you see the absence of butterflies, you know something is wrong," said Jerry Payne, an entomologist on a recent counting expedition to Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge, about 70 miles south of Atlanta. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 31 Jul 2009 | 11:25 am
Like an aspiring indie band, the Cybraphon has many instruments, plays them on an irregular schedule, likes to have an audience around it — and obsesses over comments on its blog, the number of friends it has on Facebook and how many fans follow it on MySpace.
The difference is that it is a handcrafted musical robot and one whose emotion meter swings from delirium to desolation based on its online popularity at any given moment.
“The Cybraphon has an almost egotistical desire for fame,” says Simon Kirby, one of the creators of the robot.
When the needle hits rapture, the Cybraphon’s built-in orchestra of mechanized acoustic instruments clang in harmony to belt out an upbeat tune. But without online attention it slips into dejection and spews out a sad melody.
Three U.K. based artists — Kirby, Ziggy Campbell and Tommy Pheron — built the robot over eight months using a £5,000 grant. It’s a mechanical marvel that stuns with its attention to detail and construction. An antique wardrobe houses more than 60 robotic components including musical instruments such as cymbals and an organ as well as electronic parts including a PC and a controller. Kirby and his colleagues first created a sketch of what they wanted and then sourced the parts from antique stores, junk shops and donations.
The Cybraphon’s emotions are accessible via a Twitter feed but also appear on a on a 100 year-old galvanometer housed in the wardrobe (pictured above).
Kirby says the Cybraphon is devised as a “tongue-in-cheek comment on people’s obsession with online celebrity.” And it is almost Julia Allison-esque in its quest for atttention. The device scours the web all day looking for mentions of itself and tracking how many friends it has on Facebook and MySpace.
“It is happy when it feels its popularity increases but is miserable if it is being ignored,” says Kirby.
The musical instruments inside the wardrobe include an Indian classical instrument called a Shruti box, an organ and cymbals. But they had to be tweaked to play on their own. The team attached a motor-driven crank to the drives of the Shruti box and modified it with 13 robotic servos. The organ was retro-fitted with robotic keys while a fan pumps air through it. Cybraphon includes 12 chimes that are struck by suspended solenoids and percussion instruments that are hit by beaters attached to motors. A custom made vinyl record is cued to play through antique brass gramophone horns.
The Cybraphon also has infra-red based motion detectors to sense when there are people around it. It then comes alive, playing the music that is driven by its current mood.
“The Cybraphon is switched on all the time but it really wakes up when someone walks up to it,” says Kirby.
The brain of the system is a Macbook Pro notebook hidden inside one of the drawers of the wardrobe. “That, a few Arduino boards and lots of wire,” says Kirby.
The computer runs software written in Python and MAX/MSP to monitor the web and update Cybraphon’s emotions according to its rate at which its popularity is changing. “The software takes email alerts from Facebook, Google and so on, processes them and compares the current activity to that in the last 24 or 48 hours to calculate the rate of change,” explains Kirby.
But no matter how much attention the Cybraphon gets, it always eventually slips into depression, says Kirby. That means online attention could cheer up the Cybraphon in the short term but once the initial excitement dies down, the robot is disillusioned. “We modeled it on an insecure, egotistical band,” he says.
Though the Cybraphon’s current mood is accessible via Twitter, and you can follow it on Facebook or MySpace, its music is not available online. However, you can watch a demo video of it below.
“A streaming feed, although perhaps a nice idea, is possibly too literal,” says Ziggy Campbell, one of the creators of the Cybraphon. Regular bands don’t stream live performances all day long and neither does Cybraphon. It keeps things more exclusive.”
The Cybraphon will be shown at the Inspace gallery in Edinburgh during the Edinburgh Art Festival in August.
Campbell says the Cybraphon’s continued existence amuses him. “Bands by their very nature tend to be volatile and prone to implosion,” he says. “I’m surprised that the Cybraphon, a highly neurotic beast with some questionable electrical wiring, hasn’t hit self destruct yet. ”
A robotic musical band housed in an antique wardrobe scours the internet to determine its online popularity, then plays music depending on how much attention it has been receiving from its followers.
Whoa! This week was filled with enough hints the tech world has given up on sobriety altogether. This week saw far too much insanity for one column, so here are my favorites:
David Pogue hates voicemail
Palm Pre ads hurting sales?
Google Voice gets everyone riled up
NuviPhone finally where?
Voicemail is killing David Pogue.
Distinguished New York Times writer David woke up one sunny July morning, stumbled downstairs for some coffee and looked out over his backyard thinking, “Who can I pick a fight with?” The answer that returned to him was “Voicemail.” David is picking a fight with the 15 seconds canned carrier instructions on how you should wait for the beep. Easy, boy.
The reasons behind David’s charge at windmills is two fold: crazy and sane. The crazy and here, I’ll just quote David, “Good heavens: it’s 2009. WE KNOW WHAT TO DO AT THE BEEP.”
I am not so sure. Heck, my grandparents still don’t leave me voicemail with these instructions. I am not sure what would happen if the instructions went away - they’d just start speaking at some random point?
The sane part is “we’re PAYING for these messages. These little 15-second waits add up–bigtime. If Verizon’s 70 million customers leave or check messages twice a weekday, Verizon rakes in about $620 million a year.” Rather insane right? That is a big chunk of change for being told.
David’s rail against the carriers hasn’t gotten too far yet. Most carriers are referring them to the complaint department where he’ll go shoulder to shoulder with the women from the down the street who claims the cell phone tower is spying on her. You might think his street cred would lift him above the common nutjob, but no.
Palm Pre gets all feminine product-like
“Does it know you’re crazy? Of course, it does, sir.” Um. Yeah. If your nationally aired commercial references this line, perhaps you should call in another agency. This pasty-gal gives me the willies and could probably sell me some feminine hygiene products. The biggest question is who let her out of the asylum long enough to hit up a Sprint store (or was it a Best Buy for $99 - whoops!).
Quick comparison:
iPhone: Apps, Apps and more Apps. Look at all these freaking apps!
BlackBerry: All this stuff lives in your phone.
Samsung Instinct: We mop the floor with the iPhone.
Palm Pre: I need professional help and my phone knows it.
Palm keeps surprising me. Just when I think they’re going to turn the corner (Pre headed to Verizon in early ‘10, AT&T too?), they push a spokesperson that appears to be off of her meds.
Apple steps in brouhaha over Google Voice
We all know the walled garden Apple operates for the iPhone is bizarre at best. For those of us with non-jailbroken iPhones, we take that on faith. However, when Google gets turned down for its Voice application (and all other third party Google Voice apps), something changed inside a bunch of us. We are pissed.
There can’t be that many Google Voice users yet, right? Is it Google Voice represents some freedom from carrier tyranny? AT&T really doesn’t have that much to lose on this, do they? Does Apple? So why the blackball? AT&T says to look to the Apple and of course, Apple is saying nothing.
The lost opportunity? Palm Pre. Imagine in the thick of this, Palm raises their hand and shouts, “Hey, we’ve got an app for that.” It would be a viral marketing coup, a “wow” moment, a real chance to show how things are going to be different with Palm. No, they just keep giving us pasty-crazy-lady.
We do, however, get a third party Palm Pre app for Google Voice with zero marketing support from Palm or Sprint. Robert Nelson gives us the deets: “As of now, there has not been any mention as to when we can expect a final App Catalog version which means that in the meantime, this will have be downloaded and installed using the .ipk file. Still, at least the Pre has a Google Voice option available.”
Palm, come on. Here is a golden opportunity to shine your light on something that slaps Apple in the chops, and a whole lot of bloggers willing to help.
Nuviphone finally here - as long as “here” is somewhere in Taiwan.
Rats! Clever, Garmin. After they started to build a GPS phone, got help from Asus, and then announced they’d launch, who would have guessed it would hit up Taiwan first? Taipei is a swinging place (try the snakeblood) but they get Nuviphone first? The US/Europe version won’t be here until sometime in the second half of 2009. What gives?
As each day sees GPS navigation applications hit up the big phones, the Nuviphone becomes less unique. TeleNav’s got some nifty fleet tracking options for businesses so what is going to sell the Garmin entry? What was once unique and exciting has quickly become outmoded and outdated. If only we could roll the clock back and get the Nuviphone out there when no touchscreen phones had GPS navigation. What once had press and analysts cheering now is met with a shrug and a smirk. To paraphrase Ferris Bueller, “(tech) moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and take a look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
SAN JOSE, Calif., July 31 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Atmel(R) Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML) will hold a conference call Monday, August 3, 2009 at 2 p.m. PT to discuss the Company's second quarter 2009 financial results. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 31 Jul 2009 | 10:49 am
By Pui-Wing Tam, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Jobless workers in Silicon Valley are giving up on the region’s dominant technology industry and trying to switch to other fields, as the area’s unemployment rate spikes above the national and state average.
Job centers and community colleges across the region are reporting a surge in enrollment of out-of-work techies, with many looking to move into other industries. While data on the shift are scarce, the trend is evident at ProMatch, a government-funded organization in Sunnyvale, Calif., that helps unemployed professionals network, retrain and land new jobs.
Since the start of the year, ProMatch has seen its ranks swell from 180 attendees to its maximum capacity of 225, says Connie Brock, who helps run the group.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
In the history of the company, there's only been one Nintendo-published game that has been overtly about "fighting and fucking": GameCube game Animal Leader (Cubivore in the states), and it's the subject of Margaret Robertson's latest One More Go column, where she peers into Nintendo's heart of darkness and prods at some of the company's more whitewashed ugly truths (see: the true relationship between Mario Bros' Bowser and Peach).
Everyone’s favorite torrent site (if only for the interesting news they provide) looks to be in quite a bit of trouble again. It just can’t seem to catch a break—it’s as if every organization with a ton of copyrights finds it necessary to sue the site. Last time it was the amalgamation of organizations that sued the site for various copyright infringements. This time the suit comes from Dutch antipiracy group BREIN.
While the last suit ended in a decision that the founders had to pay $3.6 million and serve a year in jail, the new sentence in a way isn’t as nice. The Dutch court has given the trio a €3 million fine, and a ten day deadline to shut off all Pirate Bay traffic in and out of the Netherlands. For each day after the ten days, they are fined another €30,000.
The response from The Pirate Bay’s founders? They had no idea the court case was even going on. They’re asking for an appeal with actual legal representation. That seems reasonable. If my website was ordered by a court to block traffic from a whole website, I’d also want an actual representation in the court.
There’s a good chance this might end up in a long, prolonged battle between the court and Pirate Bay, or it could end as quickly as the last suit. Either way, things aren’t looking good for The Pirate Bay. The negotiations with Global Gaming Factory X aren’t even working out all that well. That’s not to say The Pirate Bay won’t bounce back from all of this, torrent sites have a tendency to do so, but that doesn’t make things look any better for the site.
In Brief: The Loop Pointer is cheaper than Logitech's MX Air, which uses the same technology, and it gets the same job done: high-precision wireless mousing that doesn't need a surface. If you have an application at hand needing something like this, such as couch browsing, you won't be disappointed. Impulse buyers, however, will find that the whole idea isn't the convenience its cracked up to be.
Hillcrest Labs' Loop Pointer is a wireless pointing device that works with PC, Mac and Playstation 3. You hold it in your hand and wave it about, like a Wiimote.
Placed so they can be hit with the thumb, the $100 Loop Pointer has a two mouse buttons, a scroll wheel, and a "mute" button so that you can lay it down without moving the pointer. It comes with a 30-ft RF dongle that plugs into a USB port, and requires two AA batteries. Thoughts follow.
• It looks like a sci-fi ray gun. Pew pew! It's a little smaller than a CD, and weighs about the same as a large mouse.
• It requires no fancy software: plug it in on PC or Mac and it just works. Thank you.
• If you're used to the Wiimote, you'll find tracking very smooth and accurate. Hitting specific points isn't too hard, but you won't be whipping across-screen to precise points like you can with a mouse.
• There's a small "dead zone" to ignore hand tremors.
• Though it's fun to play casual shooting games with it, that's probably the only gaming it's good for.
• You can also get it running with AppleTV and Kodak home theaters players.
Once the plucky underdog in the browser battle, Mozilla’s Firefox is today the second most popular browser worldwide, after Internet Explorer.
Since it was first released in November 2004, the browser has succeeded not just in dislodging Microsoft’s (MSFT) IE from its dominant market position, but in proving that an open-source project can become a widely used consumer application. Now, it is fast approaching its billionth download and is likely to hit that milestone this afternoon.
As of this writing, Mozilla’s Firefox Download Counter is showing 999,935,615, with upward of 20 downloads every second. Though that number is for downloads-to-date, not active users, it’s still an impressive one and says a lot about the mindshare Firefox has managed to capture in a relatively short time against a rival that’s bundled with the most ubiquitious operating system on the planet.
As Mozilla CEO John Lilly told me this morning, “It’s a billion votes–a billion intentional decisions–for people to take control of how they interact with the Web. We–the whole Mozilla community, really–are really proud to have been part of building a product that’s been downloaded so many times, but more importantly, we’re all proud to have helped people take more control over their online lives by making intentional decisions.”
UPDATE: Mozilla tells me Firefox hit the one billion downloads mark at 7:47 am PDT/10:47 am EDT.
Below, Lilly and Mozilla chairman Mitchell Baker in an interview with Walt Mossberg at our recent D7 conference:
A new add-on for Firefox has been released and it is one that will make accessing any of your favorite Google properties a little easier. First things first, yes you could simply add these items to your standard bookmark toolbar, but that said, GButts does add some convenience not to mention save some space if you use the dropdown menu option.
To begin with, you will need to install and then configure the GButts add-on. It should also be noted that GButts does require Firefox 2 or later. Once you have it installed, the configuration is quick and easy. You will have the option to display GButts in either a toolbar or dropdown menu form. If you choose the toolbar option, you can then set it to display horizontally or vertically. Additionally, you also have the option to set the tab behavior and have the Google services open in either a new tab.
In terms of services, the list of available options does appear to be full. It has everything from Gmail to Books, Bookmarks, Calendar, Feedburner, Health, Maps, Image Search, News, Reader, Voice and even YouTube.
Basically, you just choose the services that you use and want displayed in the toolbar or dropdown and then you are all set. Overall this seems to be a convenient way to access your Google apps, which is especially nice for me considering Google appears to be taken just about everything over. I now use them for email, phone, news and much more.
This is the Axixa, and here in Barcelona, we need it. The ceramic, water-stain shaped device is a public urinal. It even comes in pee-yellow.
Public urination is a big problem in my hometown: hordes of drunken tourists, all filled up with nowhere to go. Bars won’t let you use the restrooms unless you are a customer, there are almost no public toilets (a few porta-potties at the beach is about the size of it), and because the locals have some taste, there aren’t even many branches of McDonald’s, the default public bathroom for much of the world.
The Axixa is a design by Mexican Miguel Melgarejo, and could be deployed cheaply and easily on any city wall. Inside there is a traditional U-bend water trap leading to a drainage pipe. The outside could actually be any shape, but a yellow streak of piss seems appropriate enough. But would people use them? If you are desperate enough to pee in the street anyway, we doubt you’d be too embarrassed to use the Axixa instead. I just hope that the local government sees this and turns the design from concept into reality.
“I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in!” So said the rather nasty wolf to the Three Little Pigs, right before eating two of the poor little porkers. These foolish creatures chose to build their houses from sticks and from straw. The idiots. But could a puff of air really topple a house, even one made of old hay? Jem Stansfield, last seen using a vacuum cleaner to scale a building, decided to find out.
The video shows a Vortex Cannon, which fires out a pulse of spinning air at 200mph. When slowed down with a high-speed camera, you can see a ring hurtling towards the hastily constructed houses. This ring is in fact a 200mph cloud, formed from moisture condensed from the air itself.
So, how did the piggies’ homes fare? Poorly, I’m afraid. The cannon even manages to blow the brick house in, wiping the smug look off that last little pig’s pink face and resulting in an unexpected third course for the wolf.
We think we’ve just seen the perfect hackintosh machine. This little iiView A2 netbook, from the Singapore manufacturer of the same name, will ship with a copy of Vista and be eligible for an upgrade to Windows 7. But the tiny machine looks so much like a mini-MacBook Air that it’s begging to have OS X forced onto it.
Inside, it’s just another netbook: Atom 1.6GHz processor, 320GB HDD, and Intel’s 945 chipset. Outside, things start to get a little more interesting. A 12.1-inch screen is larger than you normally find on a netbook, running a 1280 x 800 pixel resolution. The usual VGA-out is replaced by mini-HDMI, and the mic and headphone jacks are combined, just like a MacBook. Stranger still, these ports are hidden inside a flap, also like the Air. The price for this white MacBook clone is a reasonable $470, and it even has a removable (six-cell) battery.
The only thing that needs to be known is will it hack? Some netbooks are better than others as FrankenMac projects. We’re looking forward to seeing just how compatible the A2 might be. And one more thing: The otherwise annoying Flash-based site plays the five digit tune from Close Encounters. Dork-tastic!
FROM GAMERTELL - Robert Hall’s Fear Clinic is the first online horror series. Find out what will be so creepy in this interviews with the cast and director… MORE »
Apple’s Time Capsule is a fantastic idea. Even if you don’t use the rather gimmicky and feature-lacking Time Machine backup service, a networked hard drive that “just works” is incredibly handy. But, as with most Apple accessories, they’re expensive. Up until today, $500 for a 1TB drive and a router in the same box was rather steep, especially as there are plenty of cheaper, non-Apple solutions.
Apple has partially fixed this, and both Time Capsules have doubled in storage for no price increase. Now a 1TB model will cost you $300, and a 2TB box $500. That’s still rather a lot, but if you were buying a one terabyte unit anyway, you just saved $200.
The details on two yet-to-be-released Sony Readers have been revealed courtesy of leaked user manuals. The new devices are the PRS-300 and the PRS-600 an although we do not have any release or pricing information, we can tell you that they manuals are dated for July 2009. That said, it seems safe to believe that unless Sony throws something really special in to make these models stand out, they are going to have to be competitively priced in regards to the Kindle 2 and Kindle DX.
The PRS-300 will have 440MB of internal memory with no option for external storage and a five-inch display. The PRS-600 will also have 440MB of internal storage, however it will have an SD card slot for additional storage and a slightly larger 6-inch display.
Additionally, both the PRS-300 and the PRS-600 will be available in red, silver and black. Finally, and this is unfortunate, nothing was mentioned in regards to any built-in wireless connectivity.
Sadly, DIYer Iwan Roberts has posted very few details on the making of these wonderful coconut headphones (or coco-cans, as we like to call them), but we can infer plenty from the picture.
Iwan made these custom headphones for a friend (“Do not want to see them go”, he says) from a couple of coconut halves, a pair of what looks like Panasonic’s already excellent RP-HTX7 retro-monitors, and a whole lot of twine. We’re sure they sound great, but better, they’re probably the best smelling pair of headphones ever.
Watch out, Flip, Kodak’s in town, and he’s a’gunnin’ for ya. Kodak’s new Zi8 pocket video camera comes in at $20 less than Flip’s Ultra HD and manages to beat it in almost every way. The Kodak shoots 1080p, the Flip just 720p. The Kodak has built-in image stabilization (electronic, not physical), a microphone socket and an SD card slot for adding up to 32GB of memory (although it ships without a card in the box and just 128MB internal memory). The Flip doesn’t. The Kodak even has ther Flip’s trademark flip-out USB plug and snaps five megapixel stills.
In short, if you were thinking of buying a Flip Ultra HD, you should be taking a long look at the Kodak instead. Heck, Kodak even hired a designer this time and made the camera look nice, something the company hasn’t done for a while. $180, available September.
The Cybraphon also has infra-red based motion detectors to sense when there are people around it. It then comes alive, playing the music that is driven by its current mood.
Everyone’s favorite torrent site (if only for the interesting news they provide) looks to be in quite a bit of trouble again. It just can’t seem to catch a break—it’s as if every organization with a ton of copyrights finds it necessary to sue the site. Last time it was the amalgamation of organizations that sued the site for various copyright infringements. This time the suit comes from Dutch antipiracy group BREIN.
Once the plucky underdog in the browser battle, Mozilla’s Firefox is today the second most popular browser worldwide, after Internet Explorer. 
Watch out, Flip, Kodak’s in town, and he’s a’gunnin’ for ya. Kodak’s new Zi8 pocket video camera comes in at $20 less than Flip’s Ultra HD and manages to beat it in almost every way. The Kodak shoots 1080p, the Flip just 720p. The Kodak has built-in image stabilization (electronic, not physical), a microphone socket and an SD card slot for adding up to 32GB of memory (although it ships without a card in the box and just 128MB internal memory). The Flip doesn’t. The Kodak even has ther Flip’s trademark flip-out USB plug and snaps five megapixel stills.
My, how the tables have turned. Earlier this week, we 
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For a four-week period, I’m awarding one Leatherman Freestyle CX to the Gadget Lab reader whose comment best contributes to this site.
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That's what 
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