AP - A Pennsylvania school district accused of secretly switching on laptop computer webcams inside students' homes is under investigation by federal authorities, a law enforcement official with knowledge of the case told The Associated Press.
The Installer writes with this selection from GizMag: "Walking quadrupeds are being cast to play a major role in the rapidly unfolding age of robotics. The platform promises versatility far beyond that of wheeled-vehicles and will undoubtedly find applications in a wide variety of fields. Not surprisingly, the development of quadrupeds is being driven by the military and DARPA has recently boosted its efforts by awarding Boston Dynamics $32 million for the prototype phase of its Legged Squad Support System (LS3) program. ... LC3 is conceived as an autonomous support pack-robot for ground troops that can carry 400 pounds or more of payload, sustain itself for 24 hours and cover 20 miles in almost any kind of terrain."
CloudCamp Tour India will feature five CloudCamp events over the next eight days, illustrating the the growth of the movement in one of the largest technology communities in the world. India is on the... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 20 Feb 2010 | 1:19 am
MIT's The Tech has the results of a wide-ranging survey of the sex-lives of the university's undergraduates. It's not very scientific (the respondents were self-selected, and 60% of the student body didn't respond), but the charts and commentary are a fun read. I'm particularly taked by the idea of a taboo against "floorcest" (shagging someone whose room is on the same dorm floor as yours).
MIT's The Tech has the results of a wide-ranging survey of the sex-lives of the university's undergraduates. It's not very scientific (the respondents were self-selected, and 60% of the student body didn't... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 20 Feb 2010 | 1:11 am
The New York Times has an excellent investigative piece on the small-town judges of New York State. These judges are elected to office, need no legal training, have no oversight (many don't even keep court... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 20 Feb 2010 | 1:05 am
The New York Times has an excellent investigative piece on the small-town judges of New York State. These judges are elected to office, need no legal training, have no oversight (many don't even keep court records), and have the power to imprison people for up to two years (and some accused have been kept in jail for many more years, waiting for a judge to call their cases), and collect millions in (unaudited) fines and penalties. The system is a shambles, and there have been calls for reform since the 1920s, with no movement to do anything about it, despite racist remarks, blatant violations of law, pursuit of personal vendettas from the bench and other grave misconduct. Judges send abused women back to their spouses ("Every woman needs a good pounding every now and then," quipped Donald R. Roberts, a former state trooper, now a judge in Malone, NY), lock up children, deny accused counsel, find accused guilty without a trial or a plea.
Reading this piece, you get the sense that the reporters struggled to winnow down the list of horrific abuses to fit the space -- the litany of absolutely nightmarish judicial behavior goes on and on and on and on.
And several people in the small town of Dannemora were intimidated by their longtime justice, Thomas R. Buckley, a phone-company repairman who cursed at defendants and jailed them without bail or a trial, state disciplinary officials found. Feuding with a neighbor over her dog's running loose, he threatened to jail her and ordered the dog killed...
In the Catskills, Stanley Yusko routinely jailed people awaiting trial for longer than the law allows -- in one case for 64 days because he thought the defendant had information about vandalism at the justice's own home, said state officials, who removed him as Coxsackie village justice in 1995. Mr. Yusko was not even supposed to be a justice; he had actually failed the true-or-false test...
In Mount Kisco, people who asked for the court's sympathy were treated to sarcasm: Justice Joseph J. Cerbone would pull out a nine-inch violin and threaten to play. Mr. Cerbone phoned one woman and talked her out of pressing abuse charges against the son of former clients, state records show. But it took eight years, and evidence that he had taken money from an escrow account, before the State Court of Appeals removed him in 2004 after a quarter-century in office.
The commission twice disciplined the town justice, Paul F. Bender of Marion, for deriding women in abuse cases. Arraigning one man on assault charges, he asked the police investigator whether the case was "just a Saturday night brawl where he smacks her and she wants him back in the morning..."
In 11 years as justice in Dannemora, in the North Country, Thomas R. Buckley had his own special treatment for defendants without much money: Even if they were found not guilty, he ordered them to perform community service work to pay for their court-appointed lawyers, although defense lawyers and the district attorney had reminded him for years that the law guaranteed a lawyer at no cost.
"The only unconstitutional part," he told the commission before it removed him in 2000, "is for these freeloaders to expect a free ride."
An insightful article from The Telegraph on textual infidelity. ... The technology that has allowed the working day to expand into a 24/7 slog conducted via iPhone and BlackBerry has no less enabled a... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 20 Feb 2010 | 12:58 am
Teresa Nielsen Hayden expertly dissects the latest accusation of plagiarism against JK Rowling, and imparts rather a lot about the publishing industry in the bargain. 1. The plaintiffs haven't paid... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 20 Feb 2010 | 12:48 am
Teresa Nielsen Hayden expertly dissects the latest accusation of plagiarism against JK Rowling, and imparts rather a lot about the publishing industry in the bargain.
1. The plaintiffs haven't paid much attention to other works in the genre.
2. Non-writers think it's the ideas, rather than the execution, that makes a book. They've got that backward.
3. People who aren't accustomed to having a lot of ideas of their own have a very poor grasp of the odds that others might independently come up with the same ideas.
Rowling's being sued for plagiarism again
Wednesday's Dork Tower comic contemplated the possibility of a Warren Ellis alarm clock. I'd buy one, or at least download one for my Android phone! DORK TOWER, Wednesday, February 17, 2010 (via Forbidden... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 20 Feb 2010 | 12:43 am
Hal sez, "Near the end of his long and touching Esquire article about the career and illness of Roger Ebert, Chris Jones writes about Ebert's discovery that somebody (probably Disney) had disappeared the... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 20 Feb 2010 | 12:39 am
Hal sez, "Near the end of his long and touching Esquire article about the career and illness of Roger Ebert, Chris Jones writes about Ebert's discovery that somebody (probably Disney) had disappeared the YouTube videos of his tribute to Gene Siskel on his own freaking show:"
Ebert keeps scrolling down. Below his journal he had embedded video of his first show alone, the balcony seat empty across the aisle. It was a tribute, in three parts. He wants to watch them now, because he wants to remember, but at the bottom of the page there are only three big black squares. In the middle of the squares, white type reads: "Content deleted. This video is no longer available because it has been deleted." Ebert leans into the screen, trying to figure out what's happened. He looks across at Chaz. The top half of his face turns red, and his eyes well up again, but this time, it's not sadness surfacing. He's shaking. It's anger.
Chaz looks over his shoulder at the screen. "Those fu -- " she says, catching herself.
They think it's Disney again -- that they've taken down the videos. Terms-of-use violation.
This time, the anger lasts long enough for Ebert to write it down. He opens a new page in his text-to-speech program, a blank white sheet. He types in capital letters, stabbing at the keys with his delicate, trembling hands: MY TRIBUTE, appears behind the cursor in the top left corner. ON THE FIRST SHOW AFTER HIS DEATH. But Ebert doesn't press the button that fires up the speakers. He presses a different button, a button that makes the words bigger. He presses the button again and again and again, the words growing bigger and bigger and bigger until they become too big to fit the screen, now they're just letters, but he keeps hitting the button, bigger and bigger still, now just shapes and angles, just geometry filling the white screen with black like the three squares. Roger Ebert is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and he's still hitting the button, bang, bang, bang, and he's shouting now. He's standing outside on the street corner and he's arching his back and he's shouting at the top of his lungs.
Matt sez, "With that rocks-for-brains reporter in Boston trying to link campus shooter Amy Bishop's crimes to Dungeons & Dragons, I thought I'd take an opportunity to look at the good D&D; has... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 20 Feb 2010 | 12:29 am
Matt sez, "With that rocks-for-brains reporter in Boston trying to link campus shooter Amy Bishop's crimes to Dungeons & Dragons, I thought I'd take an opportunity to look at the good D&D has done for several writers I know. This is that article.
By the way, I've been a D&D player for almost thirty years now, and have been a happier, more productive person for it."
I haven't played since my early 20s (late teens?) but D&D was an enormously positive influence on my life and imagination.
Jay Lake, the author of ten novels including his most recent, Green, told me that D&D became a big part of his life as boarding school student.
"At boarding school, if you're good and fast with homework, and deeply socially and athletically inept otherwise, there's not a lot to do. I'd been to seven schools in nine years on three continents when I hit Choate Rosemary Hall," said Lake. "I possessed the kind of poor social skills that are almost hip today, but were a recipe for meat-grinder misery in the 1970s when too-smart, too-isolated kids didn't have ready access to the kind of virtual retreats we have today in gaming, programming and online life. Geek culture at the teen level didn't exist yet, except as a special class of victimhood. Combine that with a raging case of clinical depression, and I was a disaster waiting to happen."
Dungeons & Dragons provided a constructive way to pass the time for Lake and his friends.
"The alternate worlds and wild imagination of D&D gave me and my fellow misfits an outlet, and we had dozens upon dozens of hours per week to spend on it. Where else were we going to go? We lived in our high school. Think about that for a minute. Six or eight ferociously bright kids-Choate is one of the most academically competitive schools in the nation-with nothing to do but make things up to amuse one another, and D&D providing the framework."
Although those years have since passed, Lake still credited the game with providing a foundation he has built upon as a successful writer.
"Those three years playing D&D at boarding school did more to ground me in storytelling, plot construction, and sheer, raw imaginative throughput than any other single activity of my life. Today I'm a successful fantasy and science fiction novelist with ten novels and over two hundred short stories in print or on the way. I might have gotten to this point by a different path, but it would not have been the same journey,"
Cisco is betting heavily on the network as the platform. We took a look at the role of the network in the emerging landscape of cloud computing as part one of analysis of "Will One Company be Dominant... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 20 Feb 2010 | 12:00 am
Kelson writes "Have you noticed that there haven't been many updates to Gears in a while? That's because Google has decided to focus instead on similar capabilities in the emerging HTML5 standard: local storage, database, workers and location cover similar functionality, but natively in the web browser. Of course, since Gears and HTML APIs aren't exactly the same, it's not a simple drop-in replacement, so they'll continue supporting the current version of Gears in Firefox and Internet Explorer. I guess this means the long-anticipated Gears support for 64-bit Firefox on Linux and Opera are moot."
MIT researchers are exploring whether a swarm of tiny helicopters outfitted with LEDs could self-organize into a massive flying display "screen." The vision for the nascent Flyfire project is that each... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 19 Feb 2010 | 10:17 pm
MIT researchers are exploring whether a swarm of tiny helicopters outfitted with LEDs could self-organize into a massive flying display "screen." The vision for the nascent Flyfire project is that each of the choppers acts as a pixel to form a dynamically-reconfigurable display.
From MIT's SENSEable City Lab, co-developers of the Flyrire project:
With the self-stabilizing and precise controlling technology from the ARES Lab, the motion of the pixels is adaptable in real time. The Flyfire canvas can transform itself from one shape to another or morph a two-dimensional photographic image into an articulated shape. The pixels are physically engaged in transitioning images from one state to another, which allows the Flyfire canvas to demonstrate a spatially animated viewing experience.
Flyfire serves as an initial step to explore and imagine the possibilities of this free-form display: a swarm of pixels in a space.
Facebook has acquired its third company, Malaysian startup Octazen Solutions. Facebook says this is largely a talent acquisition, according to GigaOm. Octazen has a slightly different story on their home page, saying Facebook acquired “most of the company’s assets and to employ those assets in a different direction.”
Either way, it’s leaving some people scratching their heads. Said one senior engineer at a competing company that we spoke to this evening, “Facebook just bought the web’s most talented and creative scrapers that have gotten around everyones rate limits and detection systems.” Said another person we spoke with this evening who is knowledgeable of Octazen’s product, “Facebook is so sanctimonious about protecting their own user data through Facebook Connect, but Octazen has been scraping user data for years off terms of service and then reselling it.” Both sources asked to remain anonymous.
Facebook, for their part, have not yet responded to our request for comment.
What exactly has Octazen been up to? The company is mostly about above-board contact importing from one service to another – signing in to Gmail from Facebook, for example, to import your contacts there and add them as Facebook friends. Much of this is done via OAuth and APIs, but Octazen is known to dive much deeper for data.
One example – Octazen will sometimes collect and store user credentials directly, and sign into large social networks and other sites as if they were the user, say multple souces. Then they’ll download the address book and social graph. A percentage of your friends on that service might be users of the service (now Facebook) paying Octazen, and you’ll be asked to friend them. But there’s a big question about what happens to the rest of the data as well, and if Octazen is storing a shadow social network in violation of terms of service to recommend user connections down the road. And they may look deeper at data than they should – at email header information, for example, to get a better understanding of who you communicate with the most.
But the most unnerving part of Octazen, say our sources, is the fact that they are very, very good at scraping data at scale without being detected. They may hit a service using lots of different IP addresses, for example, and remain undetected. Octazen could, they say, scrape very public sites like Twitter, where the social graph is on each profile, in a way that Twitter wouldn’t know it’s happening.
In 2007, for example, People were buying and running Octazen scripts to scrape contacts in a very sketchy way: “So we use this toolkit from Octazen to scrape contact lists off of various sites. Our ever eager users (ab)used this feature so much that hotmail blocked us.” The poster found a way to access Hotmail’s API instead of just scraping to get the data, and Octazen responded, saying “Very nice indeed”
Our understanding is that Facebook already uses Octazen to mysteriously determine your long lost friends and suggest that you re-connect with them (leading to scores of emails into our inbox that Facebook is somehow reading emails or otherwise getting data they shouldn’t be).
The big question is why Facebook would need to acquire a company located half way around the world if all they were doing is standard address book imports via OAuth and APIs, or proprietary but well documented protocols like Facebook uses. The implication is that these guys have serious expertise in data gathering at scale that may sometimes be in violation of the terms of service of the sites being harvested.
This is obviously just one side of the possible story, albeit based on hard evidence of Octazen’s shady prior practices and via multiple sources. But until Facebook explains this acquisition in more detail, we don’t have much more to go on.
Polish website Moje Jabluszko decided to run a few tests on iPhones to see just how winter temperatures affected the devices. They were particularly interested in whether the moisture indicator—or liquid sensor—located in the headphone jack of an iPhone would turn red—indicating moisture—due to temperature changes.
While their testing may not be entirely without flaws and doesn't account for air humidity in the first place, it does suggest that the liquid sensors are a bit inaccurate and may change color at -11 C instead of the -20 C indicated by the device's specs. Of course, one must keep in mind that condensation may play a large role in all of this.
Entirely scientific testing or not, the point remains that the liquid sensor is intended to indicate spills or dives into water, not a simple winter outing. [Moje Jabluszko via Slashdot]
The picture was snapped by University of Hawaii art professor Peter Kun Frary, who noticed the display outside of a MAC cosmetics store. The amount of time and effort that went into this must have been staggering, and I'm duly impressed. But it's also a reminder that I can make equally amazing effects with a few key strokes and mouse clicks any time I want, thanks to a program that turns 20 today. Thanks, Photoshop. No mostly naked body-painted model in a shopping mall display could ever take your place. [Peter Kun Frary via Neatorama]
Short version: HP’s TouchSmart 600 isn’t the perfect solution for a touchscreen based home computer, but it comes pretty damn close. The TouchSmart system works well as an internet home appliance, but the thing that makes it special is also where it starts to show some problems.
Features:
23-inch touchscreen
Blu-ray playback
Multiple inputs for video devices
Wireless keyboard, mouse, and Media Center remote
MSRP $1479.99 as reviewed
Pros:
TouchSmart interface is fun to use
Perfect for a media appliance
Clean design keeps clutter to a minimum
Cons:
Integrated graphics lack processing power
Appliance style case could hamper repairs
Fingerprints on the touchscreen can be distracting
Full review:
The TouchSmart 600 is one of the next generation of touch screen computer appliances developed by HP. While it’s not the ideal computer for a business or gamer user, it is ideal for a casual user or someone who wants easy access to media, or has a limited amount of space and needs something that can fulfill multiple roles.
The system I reviewed came in a fairly decent configuration, sporting an Intel Core 2 Duo 9600, 4GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GT230. This makes the TouchSmart a fairly capable machine, albeit mainly useful from a media and internet appliance standpoint. It is worth noting, however, that HP recently came out with an upgraded version of the hardware, including a option to select a Core i7 720QM or Core i7 820QM processor.
The part that makes it stand out from other systems is, of course, the touchscreen. HP built a custom interface over the top of Windows 7, and it works really well. The interface allows you to access Hulu, Twitter, Netflix, and a really nice recipe program. For the most part, the Hulu and Netflix interfaces are customized and optimized to work with the touch screen. The Netflix interface is particularly well done, and scrolls by nicely with the flick of a finger. I also (being a photographer) enjoyed the Canvas program. It really takes advantage of the multi-touch functionality, allowing you to shrink, enlarge, drag, and otherwise manipulate your images on the touchscreen. If you move at a slower pace, the screen is about 98% accurate. If you move too fast though, you do lose a bit of accuracy. The screen is responsive, but you do have to be careful not to flick too fast. Running programs in the background will definitely have an impact on the responsiveness.
Cosmetically, the TouchSmart looks good. The black plastic shell fits in well no matter where you want to put it, and the 23 inch screen doesn’t have too much glare, though as you may be able to see in the pictures, it is extremely glossy and reflective. When I first took this machine out of the box, I immediately thought it would be ideal for in a den, dorm room, and even potentially in the kitchen. The TouchSmart comes with a low profile wireless keyboard and a standard wireless mouse. You technically don’t have to use the keyboard or mouse, due to the touchscreen having a keyboard, but don’t expect to be able to type with any speed using the on-screen keyboard. I supposed it’d be fine for Tweets or Facebook updates, but I’d be reluctant to use it for anything more strenuous.
It’s worth noting that the TouchSmart 600 also came with some Microsoft Surface programs, which, while pointless, are quite fun as technical demos. The Globe in particular is nicely executed, using multi-touch to rotate, zoom, and generally manipulate the world.
The bottom line: The TouchSmart 600 is a cool computer. The touchscreen is fun to play with, if not entirely practical for everyone. The custom interface makes it an ideal media platform, and I’d recommend for pretty much everyone except a power user. Casual games work great, but the TouchSmart lacks the computing power needed to run anything too graphically intensive. Prices start at $1049 directly from HP, but you can get it from other retailers at better prices.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a modern arcade. Since I suck at Street Fighter 4 and the like, and most of the games are huge money sinks, I’ve been avoiding them for years now. But I might have to drop by and check out Metal Gear Arcade when it drops, because these VR goggles look totally awesome. Tactical espionage combat in stereoscopic 3D? Yes please.
You can watch a trailer for the game here, where it (briefly) shows the glasses, but that’s not really what it’s going to be like. You’re going to be strapped in with a 5.1 system wrapped around your head, a gun in your hands, and freaking VR goggles on your eyes with the excellent graphics of the latest Metal Gear pretty much fooling you into thinking you’re actually there.
Some people whose names you may know or computers you may have used all had dinner together last week.
Photo above: Apocalyptic shit-disturber John Cusack eats the final grape at the namedrop alpha table, drawing heated commentary from Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who sources say did not get a single grape.
More about the big ideas discussed, after the jump.
John Brockman, in presenting the theme for this 2010 edition of the annual EDGE dinner, wrote:
In the summer of 2009, in a talk at the Bristol (UK) Festival of Ideas, physicist Freeman Dyson articulated a vision for the future. He referenced The Age Of Wonder, by Richard Holmes, in which the first Romantic Age described by Holmes was centered on chemistry and poetry, while Dyson pointed out that this new age is dominated by computational biology. Its leaders, he noted, include "biology wizards" Kary Mullis, Craig Venter, medical engineer Dean Kamen; and "computer wizards" Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Charles Simonyi. He pointed out that the nexus for this intellectual activity — the Lunar Society for the 21st century — is centered around the activities of Edge.
All the scientists mentioned above by Dyson (with the exception of Simonyi) were present at the dinner. Others guests who are playing "a significant role in this new age of wonder through their scientific research, enlightened philanthropy, and entrepreneurial initiative" included Larry Brilliant, George Church, Bill Gates, Danny Hillis, Nathan Myhrvold, Jeff Skoll, and Nathan Wolfe.
The Empower rocking chairs take advantage of kinetic energy to generate power and prolong your gadgets' lives, but you actually have to sit there and rock back-and-forth-and-back-and-forth-and-back-and-oh-my-God-just-let-me-be-lazy-and-charge-something! [Inhabitat]
An anonymous reader writes "The Polish website Moje Jabluszko ran an experiment that proves the poor reliability of the liquid contact indicators (original, in Polish) installed by Apple in the iPhone. They performed three different tests to challenge the LCIs, which they recorded as a movie. They decided to mimic regular usage of the iPhone — meaning, you go outside where it could be cold or warm, then move inside in a building where temperature might be dramatically different, but still within covered conditions. So, they placed the iPhone in its box for one hour outside at -11 C, then moved it inside at room temperature for 24 hours. They repeated the experiment 3 times, and after the third cycle they could show that the LCI located in the audio jack plug started turning red! This is a clear proof that LCIs are not reliable and could turn red while the iPhone has been used under the defined environmental requirements defined by Apple. Here, only the condensing water could have been in contact with the sensor. In other words, even moving in and out during regular winter time will make you iPhone LCI turn red!" (In the tech specs for the iPhone, Apple rates the non-operating temperature range as -20 to 45 C.)
Despite what my co-workers believe, the fact that I live in Northern Nevada does not automatically make me a fan of NASCAR. I am a fan of MarioKart though, and the fact that Nintendo has teamed up with the Number 20 GameStop car for this weekend’s Slater Bros. 300 is pretty darn cool. I wonder though, will the GameStop car be throwing turtle shells or bananas at the other cars?
I'll confess that some of my favorite images come from Fark.com and our Photoshop contests, but sometimes there are these random gems that keep you giggling or staring in awe. Let's see those and please keep things safe for work.
To add an image to a comment, all you have to do is hit the little photo button on the entry box:
From there you can select whether to upload an image or add it from a URL. I recommend just uploading images as it's a bit rude to hotlink someone's images and it doesn't really take you any longer to select an image file from your computer.
For at least the past hour, Netflix has been down. Normally, this wouldn’t be a huge deal since as they note, “Our shipping centers are continuing to send and receive DVDs , so your movies will be processed as usual.” But, increasingly, Netflix is becoming a streaming video service. And while that aspect is up and running on the third-party devices (such as the Xbox 360) that it works on, it’s obviously not working on the web. And given Netflix’s awesome customer service, I bet that means refunds are coming.
As we noted back in August, Netflix sent a message to its subscribers (who were connecting through Xboxes) noting some brief downtime for their streaming service. Along with the message, they were offering a 2% credit to be applied to your next monthly payment if you were affected. You simply had to click on a link to claim the refund (and you could actually do it even if you weren’t affected, if you didn’t mind lying). A couple weeks ago, Netflix sent out the same notice following a similar downtime.
It will be interesting to see what Netflix offers its customers for this downtime, which is obviously much more widespread. As they note on the site right now, “Our engineers are working hard to bring the site back up as soon as possible. We appreciate your patience and, again, we apologize for the inconvenience. If you need further assistance, please call us at 1-866-636-3079.”
Despite my strong disagreement with their decision to agree to Warner’s 28-day window for renting new DVDs, Netflix remains a company that seems to handle customer service exceptionally well (unlike others). Check out this internal presentation too; great stuff.
PC World - Google has finished its acquisition of video-compression-technology vendor On2 Technologies, boosting its efforts in online video. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 19 Feb 2010 | 7:10 pm
Macworld.com - After a hiatus, HP is back in the camera game with its Spring line-up of five new point-and-shoot cameras and three new camcorders. The budget devices mark HP's first big camera announcement since 2007, though the company did release a few cameras as a soft launch at CES in January. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 19 Feb 2010 | 7:00 pm
The web has no shortage of URL shorteners. In fact, there are so many that they’re all kind of blending together and I have no idea where to turn beyond the de-facto one Twitter uses, Bit.ly. But today, a new one has piqued my interest.
ShadyURL (made by Wonder-Tonic) is awesome because well, it creates shady URLs. Rather than focusing on making a URL as tiny as possible to spread on a site like Twitter, ShadyURL takes a regular web address and converts it into something that looks as sinister as possible.
One big fear about URL shorteners is that they obfuscate what may well be harmful websites. Some shorteners, like Bit.ly now check out the links and warn you if they point to a malicious site. ShadyURL doesn’t do that. Instead, it takes what may well be a perfectly normal website and wraps it in a URL that looks like it may point to some nefarious region of the web. You know, sex, murder, drugs, viruses. Again, just awesome.
I always say that you’re never to young to start with your first gadget. This is an example of that theory, taken maybe a little more serious then I would normally consider reasonable. How old do you need to be to have your first MP3 player?
Baby Bidou says you’re old enough at birth. The Baby Bidou is available in pink or blue, and can be preloaded with a Brainy Baby soundtrack for an additional $4. Soundtracks include sleepy, peaceful, cheerful, and happy, and do cost extra. Parents can also load their own music on the Baby Bidou, and select the volume for the child so junior doesn’t accidentally destroy his eardrums listening to “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. The Bidou also has a microphone built it to allow parents to record their own voices, and the volume can be set to fade so as to slowly lower the volume of the sound being played for the child.
The Baby Bidou is priced at $59.98, and currently out of stock on the company website.
PC World - Smartphones are costly investments, but they can save you money, too. Did you know that you can use your phone as a bar-code scanner while you are out shopping? Or that you can find in-store coupons through your phone? Dozens of free applications that can help you save cash are available across the major smartphone platforms. Here are the best of these no-cost, must-have apps. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 19 Feb 2010 | 6:30 pm
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The space shuttle Endeavour sailed away from the International Space Station on Friday after delivering a final connecting hub and an observation deck,... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 19 Feb 2010 | 6:21 pm
Vigile writes "The idea of having a 'Limited Edition' solid state drive might seem counter-intuitive, but regardless of the naming, the new OCZ Vertex LE is based on the new Sandforce SSD controller that promises significant increases in performance, along with improved ability to detect and correct errors in the data stored in flash. While the initial Sandforce drive was called the 'Vertex 2 Pro' and included a super-capacitor for data integrity, the Vertex LE drops that feature to improve cost efficiency. In PC Perspectives's performance tests, the drive was able to best the Intel X25-M line in file creation and copying duties, had minimal fragmentation or slow-down effects, and was very competitive in IOs per second as well. It seems that current SSD manufacturers are all targeting Intel and the new Sandforce controller is likely the first to be up to the challenge."
If you're unfamiliar with head tracking, you'll want to watch this video. Then get excited, because this is one of the first games to use the technology, and it should be amazing. And in 3D no less!
The game should hit Japanese arcades first, but god-willing it'll make its way to the States soon enough. [Konami via Joystiq]
PC World - Apple has increased the cap for downloads over 3G networks on the iPhone from 10MB to 20MB, in what some think is a sign of heavier multimedia content appearing for the upcoming iPad. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 19 Feb 2010 | 6:15 pm
Macworld.com - It wasnât find one of the busiest places on the show floor at last weekâs Macworld Expo. That would be the Mobile Applications Showcase where around six dozen or so iPhone app developers held court, displaying their efforts before a steady parade of Expo attendees. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 19 Feb 2010 | 6:11 pm
InfoWorld - Rhomobile unveiled this week an upgrade to Rhodes, its open source framework for building native applications for multiple smartphone platforms. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 19 Feb 2010 | 5:57 pm
Space shuttle Endeavour has left the International Space Station and is headed home. Endeavour undocked from the practically finished space station Friday night. The two spacecraft and... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 19 Feb 2010 | 5:54 pm
This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label "Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.
Over the last couple of weeks we've been busy adding new functionality to make communicating and sharing with Google Apps easier than ever, whether you use Google Apps for work, for school or at home.
Web clipboard for Google Docs As more and more people are getting work done in the cloud with Google Docs, a common stumbling block has been copying and pasting formatted content between documents, spreadsheets and presentations. On Wednesday we made this a whole lot easier with a web clipboard for Google Docs. Just highlight what you want to copy, select from the web clipboard menu, move to your other Google Docs window and choose what you want to paste from the web clipboard menu. Your pasted content will retain its original formatting so you don't have to spend time reformatting.
New saving buttons in Google Docs One of the most frustrating things about using traditional software is losing your work if something unexpected happens before you remember to save. Google Docs helps solve this problem by frequently saving your latest changes automatically. Still, we've heard from people that they want that extra reassurance that autosave is happening, and to be able to manually save their work more easily. New saving buttons in Google Docs do just that. The buttons let you know when your document is fully saved, in the process of being autosaved or has unsaved changes that haven't been picked up by autosave yet. Now, if there are unsaved changes the "Save now" button is clickable.
Google Buzz Last week we launchedGoogle Buzz, a new way to start conversations about things you find interesting, like photos, videos, webpages or whatever might be on your mind. Buzz lets you share right from Gmail, or from your mobile phone. You can connect other sites you use like Twitter, Picasa, and Google Reader, and you can post buzz privately or publicly. Since we released Google Buzz, we quickly made a number of improvements based on input from users, and we're committed to keep improving it. Individuals can use Google Buzz now, and we plan to make it available to businesses and universities using Google Apps within a few months.
Google Apps Script for Google Sites Google Apps Script lets you create programmatic interactions between a whole variety of Google services including contacts, calendars, email, finance data, spreadsheets and more. Businesses often use scripts to automate repetitive processes. Last week, we added Google Sites to the list of products that you can control with scripts. Now, instead of manually updating the content in a site, you can use Google Apps Script to automatically populate pages in your site with calendar data, contact information and data from the other services that work with Google Apps Script. Scripts can even add attachments and be used to update the sharing preferences for your site.
Who's gone Google? With 3,500 employees, Lincoln Property Company is one of the largest property management firms in the United States. Recently, Lincoln Property made the decision to switch to Google Apps from their complex and costly Novell Groupwise email infrastructure. Not only will they save an estimated $200,000 per year, they'll finally be able to equip every single employee with email, instant messaging and calendars — not just the 950 desk-based workers who previously had email access.
Hope you're enjoying the latest round of new capabilities, whether you're using Google Apps with friends and family, with work colleagues or with classmates. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.
Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager
But it's not all about being silly. The #whitenoise regulars give great advice to anyone in need. (Though heads up, sometimes you'll face some sarcasm before the truly good advice comes.) They even discuss deep bra-related issues.
Speaking of staying on your toes and watching out for sarcasm, #fakerumorthursday is a great weekly tradition in #whitenoise. Even when it causes panic with things like this:
In ever demanding response to using Sausages for stylii in Korea (and possibly elsewhere), Apple will announce next month that they too will create edible stylii made of meat. It will be extra shiny, and will never expire thanks to a new nano-polymer-bots. It is, however, expected to cost $199 for the 8 stick pack, and $399 for the 8 stick pack with international flavorings.
Scary, but I suppose it's a nice way to get out the energy after a lazy #wednesdaybookclub meeting and before celebrating pancake-centric holidays.
Those are some of the fun discussions going on this week, but I can't end this without sharing my favorite part of #whitenoise which is one commenter's crazy #mondayvent. Yeah, sometimes he pokes fun of us all, but after sharing pictures of himself in a dress, I'd say he's earned it.
We're proud of our comment system and commenter community. A great display of the sheer insanity and brilliance of the gals and boys who make it so wonderful is our open forum, #whitenoise. From Whitenoise is a regular feature to show the best of the best and the weirdest of the weird.
The secret to a great cocktail, most connoisseurs would agree, has something to do with the ice, the liquor, the glass — and the bartender.
But what if the bartender is not a warm-blooded human with a sympathetic ear, but rather a cold, soulless machine made of pistons, valves and servos?
At a bar in San Francisco, a group of artists, engineers and tinkerers sought the answer with their creations: robots designed specifically to pour out a nice drink.
The booze-making bots included an all-mechanical, lever-operated robot; a Cosmobot with a rocket-shaped body; and Barnold, who is “strong and big, just like Arnold.”
“We really just like robots and cocktails, and both together seemed like the perfect thing,” said Simone Davalos, one of the organizers of the Barbot 2010 event. “There is no real aim for world-changing, paradigm-shifting technological achievement, at least not from our perspective, but who knows? Lots of amazing things have happened over cocktails.”
From cosmos to appletinis, these robots measured, mixed and poured out drinks that were precisely assembled. And those droids were mesmerizing to watch.
As for the drinks themselves, having sampled drinks from almost all the robots, my verdict is that the robots still have a long way to go. The cocktails taste just a little too clinical. There’s a missing ingredient in there. Could that be the human touch?
The Corpse Reviver
Even a humble cocktail robot can be an engineering marvel. The imaginatively named Corpse Reviver is a cleverly designed robot that’s completely mechanical.
“It’s all levers and linkages,” said Benjamin Cowden. who created the robot.
The Corpse Reviver has four levers that are attached to four bottles arranged in a circle. To make yourself a drink, place a glass at the center and pull the first lever. This pushes the attached bottle up, then tips a measured pour of a little more than an ounce into a bowl-shaped holding container. Do the same with the two other levers, and finally pull back on the fourth to release the stopper and push the liquid from the holding container into a second chamber that’s full of ice. A few seconds later, the drink is in the glass.
“This is my favorite robot in this room,” said Lillian Fritz-Laylin who had come to check out the event . “It’s interactive on multiple levels. It’s not just ‘push a button and walk away.’ And the drink was really good.”
Cowden designed the entire mechanism and sketched it out on a 2-D design program. All the parts for the robot have been custom laser-cut. And it’s the attention to details that really make this a winner. For instance, once a lever is pulled and the bottle tips out its pour, a hydraulic damper and spring mechanism make sure it slowly and steadily returns to its original position.
Here’s what he recommends for good low-light shots. For the record, Benson uses a Canon 1D Mark III, with the 24- to 105- millimeter lens. For low light, he goes to Canon f/1.2L 50-millimeter 1.2. But the following tips should work even if your camera, and lenses, are not quite as awesome as his.
Use program (P) mode to get best results and capture detail in every corner.
Don’t set ISO at the very top. Don’t go beyond 1000 because it gets noisy.
Don’t trust autofocus in a dark situation — it takes too long to make up its mind.
When shooting a very important shot, use manual focus — especially in the dark.
Don’t use flash. You lose a lot of humanity with flash.
Film is unreliable. Digital frees up your brain from all the technical stuff
Most importantly, according to Benson, is not to be afraid. “You’ll be surprised just how good your photos will be. I’ve just been awakened to see what digital cameras can do in low-light. Be brave about it.”
Apple has begun removing apps containing “overtly sexual content” from its App Store, according to developers.
Multiple developers independently reported on Thursday that they received a letter from Apple stating that apps containing sexual content were no longer allowed due to complaints from customers:
The App Store continues to evolve, and as such, we are constantly refining our guidelines. Your application, Wobble iBoobs (Premium Uncensored), contains content that we had originally believed to be suitable for distribution. However, we have recently received numerous complaints from our customers about this type of content, and have changed our guidelines appropriately.
We have decided to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store, which includes your application.
Thank you for your understanding in this matter. If you believe you can make the necessary changes so that Wobble iBoobs (Premium Uncensored) complies with our recent changes, we encourage you to do so and resubmit for review.
Sincerely,
iPhone App Review
Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
Pornography has played a confusing role in the history of the App Store. When Steve Jobs introduced the App Store in June 2008, porn was at the top of the list of content that would not be allowed in apps. However, a few apps containing nudity have snuck into the App Store in the past, only to be pulled by Apple later. Ever since, apps containing only partial nudity (e.g. “Beautiful Boobs,” or “Asian Boobs”) have appeared in the App Store.
Apple as of Friday has removed a number of apps containing partial nudity. However, Apple still appears to be in the process of removing them, as a quick search in the App Store still reveals some of these apps (as pictured to the right).
One of the apps that remains is Playboy. Alex Miro, owner of the iPhone app reviews blog Krapps, questioned whether the ban would also apply to big publications who print photos containing sexual imagery such as Playboy or Sports Illustrated, since it might hurt Apple’s relationships with publishers who were planning to produce magazine apps for the iPad.
“Let’s see if they have the balls to remove Playboy, Sports Illustrated, Maxim or Hooters,” he said. “Those need to be taken down.”
alphadogg writes "Windows 7 contains a 'SoftAP' feature, also called 'virtual Wi-Fi,' that allows a PC to function simultaneously as a Wi-Fi client and as an access point to which other Wi-Fi-capable devices can connect. The capability is handy when users want to share music and play interactive games. But it also can allow on-site visitors and parking-lot hackers to piggyback onto the user's laptop and 'ghost ride' into a corporate network unnoticed."
While this means a bit more policing for networks meant to be locked down, it sounds like a good thing overall. Linux users, meanwhile, have had kernel support (since 2.6.26) for 802.11s mesh networking, as well as Host AP support for certain chipsets.
Short version: A competent, but unremarkable keyboard. If you like Microsoft keyboards, spend the extra cash for the fancier and cooler X6.
Features:
Anti-ghosting (press as many keys at one time as you like)
Six programmable macro keys with switchable profiles
Backlit keys
Media controls
Calculator button!
Pros:
Big and solid
Anti-ghosting is good to have, even if you don’t notice it
Cons:
Media keys launch Windows Media Player
Only one color of backlight and two brightness settings
No USB ports
Full review:
What we have here is… well, a normal keyboard, basically, with some macro and media keys. The trouble is, if you’re the type of gamer who uses macros a lot, you probably want a little more keyboard than this offers. There are lots of options out there, including the unique and cool Sidewinder X6, which I liked a lot.
Functionality is as you see: some macro keys on the left there, which are useful in all the situations you’d expect, and the configuration thereof works just fine, though it’s extremely spartan. There’s a nice long list of handy commands you might want to use, something which developers often fail to include.
The media keys worked out of the box with Winamp, though irritatingly if Winamp is not open, pressing the Play/Pause button will launch Windows Media Player. You can’t disable that, unfortunately; there’s no option to select another default player. I’m not sure I dig the layout, either.
Doesn’t that seem a little weird to you? I think play should be in between previous and next track, though that may just be me. But why is mute attached to the play controls cluster? Shouldn’t it be over with volume up and down? Not a big deal, obviously, but if you could choose between a keyboard that has them laid out in an intuitive way, and one that didn’t, which would you choose? Right, me too.
Lastly, for a gaming keyboard, it sure doesn’t have any extra connectors, like USB or audio. That’s kind of an important part of a gaming keyboard, and really, I just realized that the X6 has the same problem, as well as a similar media key layout. Well, consider this criticism retroactively applied to that thing as well.
Conclusion
Like so many devices in the crowded “gaming enthusiast hardware” field, the X4 is simply outmatched by the competition, which is too close in price to warrant a downgrade. Microsoft’s own X6, for instance, can even be found for cheaper than the X4, and it certainly offers a cooler feature set. Logitech and Razer also offer compelling alternatives for similar prices. Sorry, X4, but there’s just too much good stuff out there.
Product Page: Sidewinder X4 Keyboard
Former Boing Boing guest blogger and Howtoons co-creator Saul Griffith says:
We just finished a huge project in collaboration with Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams - Seeing the Future: A Visual Communication Guide - which is a 20 drawing/inventing guide that teaches kids/adults how to get those big ideas down on paper. Please pass it along; we would love this to get to as many kids (and big kids) as possible.
So you want your neighbors to think that your house is an impenetrable fortress, but you don’t really feel like shelling out the hundreds of dollars needed to buy actual security cameras? Maybe you’re seen those other fake surveillance cameras in stores, but you want something that moves, damnit. Well here you go: the Hammacher Schlemmer panning Faux Security camera set.
I suspect that generally speaking, if you shop from Hammacher Schlemmer, you’re not going to need to buy a fake security camera. Going fake however, can be quite expensive. The FauxCam has a blinking LED, and a built in motion sensor that moves to follow the person in the target area. So if you’d rather have all the insecurity and none of the protection, you can buy this product for $59.95. Personally, I’d say buy a real security camera for about the same price.
Catch all the skiing, boarding, skating, hockey and curling on the web, live from Vancouver — regardless of your time zone! There’s streaming video from official sources, and unofficial options as well.
IRVINE, Calif., Feb. 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Resources Global Professionals, a leading multinational provider of professional services and the operating subsidiary of Resources Connection, Inc. (Nasdaq: RECN), will present at the Robert W. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 19 Feb 2010 | 3:56 pm
Interviews with superpowered individuals -- some crime fighters, some criminals -- make up the meat of this graphic novel. Stunning imagery by 45 different artists skins the project. Leave a comment for your chance to win a copy of Forty-Five.
Simmeh writes "Microsoft have posted screenshots and details on their upcoming 'web browser choice screen.' Requirements include being in Europe, and having Internet Explorer set as your default browser. It comes with a few surprises, as the software automatically unpins Internet Explorer from your taskbar, and offers 11 alternative browsers."
Earlier this week we told you guys that Windows Mobile 6.5 was going to stick around after Windows Phone 7 hits the masses. It would even take on a new name — Windows Phone Classic. With everyone sticking around and playing nice at this party, you’d think that maybe current WinMo 6.5 handsets might get a little Windows Phone 7 love. Sorry to burst your bubble.
By Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Tiger Woods may have more atoning to do with Elin Nordegren, but a preliminary pulse-taking online suggests that at least some of his fans are coming around.
The golf star apologized Friday for his infidelity and the ensuing sex scandal, and according to Zeta Interactive, a New York digital-marketing firm that measures online reputations, that helped boost his ratings.
As of 2:30 p.m. ET, about three hours after his televised press conference, the positive rating for Mr. Woods had increased to 68 percent, up from 51 percent, Thursday morning.
His remarks, which included his admission that he cheated and an apology for “irresponsible and selfish behavior,” lifted him above other celebrities with positive ratings in the 50s, such as Michael Vick (55 percent) and Lindsay Lohan (52 percent). He’s now ahead of David Letterman (61 percent) and Jay Leno (57 percent).
"Not all is worth cheering about as Adobe turns 20," writes reader adeelarshad82, who excerpts from a story at PC Magazine's Security Watch: "Researcher Aviv Raff has found a problem in ADM (Adobe Download Manager) and the method through which it is delivered from adobe.com. The net effect of the problem is that a user can be tricked into downloading and installing software using ADM without actual consent. Tonight Adobe acknowledged the report and said they were working on the issue with Raff and NOS Microsystems, the company that wrote ADM."
Earlier this week we told you guys that Windows Mobile 6.5 was going to stick around after Windows Phone 7 hits the masses. It would even take on a new name — Windows Phone Classic. With everyone sticking around and playing nice at this party, you’d think that maybe current WinMo 6.5 handsets might get a little Windows Phone 7 love. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Microsoft Mobile Communications Business Director Aaron Woodman told CNET Asia, “I don’t know if any Windows Mobile 6.5 device today meets those specifications.” It sounds like your average Microsoft move: if you want the new software, you’ll also have to get new hardware because your old junk just isn’t gonna cut it, baby.
The new handsets are getting primo parts such as Qualcomm’s 1GHz Snapdragon processor (no Tegra, sorry). WinPho 7, being a fresh OS and more intensive than its predecessors, will undoubtedly need hardware resources that most 6.5 devices just don’t have, but don’t fret. Unlike everyone staying on Windows XP when Vista came out, upgrading to WinPho 7 out of WinMo 6.5 is definitely a move in the right direction. WinMo 6.5 is going to stick around for enterprise and developing countries, so unless you’re tied to the OS for those reasons, I’m sure you wouldn’t mind ditching your current 6.5 handset for a shiny new WinPho 7 device when it comes out.
Barence writes "How good — or bad — are fake iPhones? PC Pro blogger Steve Cassidy has a friend who paid £25 ($40) for an 'iPhone' in a bar, and he's got the photos and full lowdown of what's inside this not-so smartphone. The phone looks convincing enough from the outside, with a genuine-looking backplate, but things start to go wrong when you switch it on. What's a "Java" and "WLAN" App button doing on the screen? And how about that Internet Explorer icon? It's like you're handling an artefact from an alternate history, dropped in via a spacetime wormhole. It has dual SIM handling, too, and came with a bizarre auxiliary battery festooned with warnings about not pressing a button mounted on the front of the top-up device."
Google has won approval to enter the speculative energy trading business. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued an order Thursday giving the company the authority to buy and sell wholesale electricity just like a utility.
Presumably, Google (GOOG) will use it to keep energy costs down by hedging power consumption against market movements. But as I’ve noted here before, the authorization also gives Google the ability to “act as a power marketer, purchasing electricity and reselling it to wholesale customers.” And the company has established a subsidiary called Google Energy. But Google insists its ambitions don’t extend beyond its own energy needs. As spokesperson Niki Fenwick told me in January, “[this] does not signal our intent to operate as a retail provider of electricity.”
I suppose not. After all, while Google doesn’t operate any power generation or transmission facilities. Well, not yet, anyway.
It’s no secret that we consider the PR industry, for the most part, the bane of our existence. They’re just under too much pressure to get results, and when we don’t do what they want (write about their clients), things turn ugly. And before things turn ugly, we get spammed. By phone, by Twitter, by Facebook, by email, by mail and by fedex. Some PR firms will lie, cheat, manipulate and then just smear your reputation to get what they want.
Today something new happened though. It wasn’t a PR firm we went to battle with, it was a press release distributor – prMac. I know these guys well, because for the last year and a half they’ve sent me an average of 15 emails a day, sometimes far more. Each email contains a useless press release that someone paid them to spam out to the media. As far as I know, not one of these emails has ever turned into a story.
Most PR emails come from a human, and it’s easy to just reply and tell them to stop if it becomes annoying. The more streamlined operations that spam stuff out at least give us an opt out to get off their dreaded mailing list. But not prMac – none of their emails have an opt out.
If I were prMac, I would have seen this and either kept on spamming, or quietly taken techcrunch emails off their list. But that didn’t happen. Instead, they got angry. Really pissed off, actually.
First came a comment to that image of the spam, saying “Claims it’s spam, but OPTED IN to the service. The reason for the duplicates is TechCrunch provided two email addresses.”
Then a barrage of emails (sort of ironic). One said in part, and I’m not kidding, “prMac is an OPT IN service for the media. We’re not spammers. We set up your account for you, only for your convenience and under your behalf…”
Yep, they followed a statement that they are opt in only and that they aren’t spammers with an admission that they set up our account for us “only for your convenience” (and certainly not at our request).
Unpleasant words were exchanged over the course of ten or so more emails. prMac forwarded an email from 2008 where they cajoled a CrunchBase staffer into giving up our emails to start the whole process. I noted that I had no way of stopping the barrage, and kept pointing out that a simple opt out in each email would have been so…legal of them.
But by far the most perfectly absurd comment came from prMac in one of their last emails, where they said to me “…you seriously need to take some diplomacy lessons my friend. The smart ass remarks aren’t assuaging me one iota, and only making a situation worse than it didn’t even have to be.”
Indeed. And since I want to become a better person, I’ve enrolled myself in a course on how to be diplomatic with spammers who don’t want to let go. Hopefully, I’ll handle the situation with more finesse next time.
In the meantime, though, the whole PR profession really needs to get a grip. We aren’t here to do their bidding. We serve our readers. At least, the readers we like. And our community. If they want to be part of that community, they need to lose the sense of entitlement and chill out on the aggressive marketing a little bit.
I would have been quite happy just venting on Twitter earlier today and eventually setting up an email filter to remove anything that came from them. But we’re only human. And this tirade of angry emails (just now yet another one from them popped into my inbox – “If your receiving distributions from us were such a problem, when didn’t you bring this up long before?? It’s not like we started doing this yesterday.”) was a little too aggressive and a little too much. So now I’ve vented more fully.
Haven’t caught all of the Gadgetell news this week? Here’s your chance to catch up on this week’s top 10 articles!
Gadgetell Review: Motorola DROID from Verizon Wireless ” Recently, I have had some time to check one of the latest Verizon smartphones, the Motorola DROID running Google Android 2.0. This is the first time I had used the Android platform and I was pleased with the…” MORE »
Google makes nearly $500 million a year because of domain typos ” If you ever end up at Panodra.com instead of Pandora.com, you may be putting a few extra pennies into Google’s piggy bank. That’s because of typosquatting, the deliberate registration of a popular domain’s misspelling. Knowing that people often make typos when going to websites - like spelling…” MORE »
Verizon will soon allow unlimited Skype calling over 3G ” When Verizon announced that it would be holding a joint press conference with Skype at Mobile World Congress we essentially knew that Verizon would be more friendly toward the VoIP service. Verizon and Skype have announced that Verizon will now allow those…” MORE »
Microsoft Turtle super-phone breaks cover. Only 4GB of memory? ” According to the FCC filing, Sharp has built a new phone that approximates the rumored Turtle design. Sharp built the Sidekicks for Danger back in the day and the suggestion here is Sharp is again building phones for Danger, now…” MORE »
Samsung S8500 Wave photos surface on the net ” Photos of Samsung S8500 “Wave” have just emerged all over the web. The Wave is Samsung’s first phone which features the all-new Bada operating system with Touchwiz 3.0. It measures at only 10.9mm thin, and sports a 3.3” AMOLED capacitive…” MORE »
Google Buzz abandons auto-following in favor of auto-suggesting ” We’ve got to admit that Google Buzz’s auto-following model is really crappy. I’ve had some random eBay sellers (I bought some stuff from them a long time ago) auto-following me on my Google Reader ever since I activated Buzz. Sure, in…” MORE »
Verizon may announce Skype phones at MWC ” If the report over at Business Week were to be believed, Verizon may very well be announcing new Skype-supported phones at the Mobile World Congress on Tuesday. Verizon announced that they will be holding a…” MORE »
We first wrote about Shit My Dad Says, the Twitter account a 20-something-year-old guy set up to tweet out bits of wisdom from his 73-year-old father, back in August. By November, the account had already landed creator Justin Halpern a TV deal. And today, it has now landed him William Shatner to star in it.
The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Shatner has agreed to star in the show as the father, and because of it, the show has been greenlit to shoot a pilot episode. It’s not yet clear when it will air, but when it does, it will be on CBS. The creators of Will & Grace are executive producing the show for Warner Bros. TV alongside Halpern and Patrick Schumacker, both of whom wrote the script for the pilot. Both Halpern and Schumacker used to write for the TV and movie blog Screen Junkies.
On Twitter, Shit My Dad Says continues to rise in popularity. By the time we wrote about it in August, the account already had over 100,000, but by November (the time of the TV deal), it was well past 700,000. Now, it has over 1.1 million followers and you can expect that to keep rising when the show airs.
Of course, how well the show can translate a Twitter account remains to be seen. After all, it will be on network television which means no swearing — a large part of what makes Shit My Dad Says tweets funny. In fact, of just the last 10 tweets the account has sent out, 8 of them would have to be altered to make it onto TV (7 feature “fuck” or “shit” and 1 features “dicks,” which CBS probably won’t like either). But I’m sure Shatner will find a way to make even a show called Stuff My Dad Says humorous.
Guvera's upcoming music service will offer free streams and downloads using a novel approach: funneling music into branded areas using a complex algorithm that obviates the need for users to sit through ads. The catch: a velvet-rope policy limiting the service to the first 100,000 users.
Welcome to this week’s Who’s on Crack, Gadgetell’s lump sum of odd moves in tech for the past week. This week, the action was in Barcelona as the big guns showed off their stuff at the Mobile World Congress, possibly the biggest mobile phone event of the year. This week’s nominees are:
Microsoft gets all classy
Flash is the devil
Verizon and Skype get cozy
Google Buzz: the first punch line of 2010?
Microsoft pulls a Coke and a smile?
It turns out the announcement of the death of Microsoft Windows was premature. This week, Microsoft announced Windows Phone 7 Series. Gone is the Windows Mobile name, as it became associated being old, out-moded and out of touch, a lot like my Dad. Microsoft says they’ll still offer Windows Mobile 6.5 lineage but will call it Windows Phone Classic.
Classic? Really? Years ago, Coke reformulated and launched New Coke. It was horrible, so they had to back pedal and quickly reissued Coke Classic to hold onto marketshare while assuring users this wasn’t the crappy new Coke they were trying to push on us. Flash forward to today and now Microsoft goes the Classic route. Am I the only one with a bad taste in my mouth?
I’d much rather watch a YouTube video of Microsoft Phone team going “Office Space” on the Windows Mobile source code with bats in an abandoned field. Now that would be a PR move.
Flash is el diablo
Flash is the opposite of motor oil, the opposite of Red Bull, and was likely coded by the devil. That is, according to Steve Jobs whose personal quest to kill off popular Adobe Flash reared its head again. Our Andrew Kameka reported, “Jobs made the comment to writers at the Wall Street Journal amid claims that Flash is “buggy” and old school technology that’s no longer relevant in today’s landscape. Uh, yeah, the software that powers more than 80 percent of the web’s video content, countless games, and major news websites is no longer relevant according to Jobs.”
Is Flash really that bad? Would it really take a 10 hour battery life down to a puny 1.5 hours? The best part is, how does Steve know this? He obviously had a prototype built with Flash so he could access most of the web. It’s not good enough for us, but for him, he probably has Apple had to test this theory as it’s designers surely wanted to play with most websites, 80% of which have Flash on their sites. $5 says he’s got 16 of these Flash-running iPads stashed around for a full 24 hours of Flash playback. Sweet.
Verizon and Skype get engaged.
This week, Verizon announced it will work with Skype and offer the service over it’s broadband network to smartphone users. Our Shawn Ingram says,“Verizon and Skype have announced that Verizon will now allow those who possess certain smartphones to call anyone over Skype on the 3G network. That could have easily been inferred from the announcement of the press conference, though it couldn’t be seen that Verizon would allow for unlimited Skype calling over the 3G network.”
This is great news right? Well yes, but users will still have to pay for a voice connection. Even if Skype is your main gig, you’ll still be signing up and paying for some minimum monthly voice minutes. The door is now open for a data only network. T-Mobile, Sprint? What do you guys say, how about a data only plan for Skype and data fanatics? The network of the geek!
Google Buzz - the first punch line of 2010?
It’s true, the folks you email are not necessarily your friends. Google learned the fact this week as they pushed out Google Buzz to users. Our Cheng Hung put it well, “We’ve got to admit that Google Buzz’s auto-following model is really crappy. I’ve had some random eBay sellers (I bought some stuff from them a long time ago) auto-following me on my Google Reader ever since I activated Buzz. Sure, in a way, it’s quite convenient because you don’t have to spend time setting up, but things gets bad when it starts to auto-follow people you don’t intend to follow.”
It is rare to see a “F. you, Google” post become popular enough to make it to Techmeme. The author had her abusive ex-husband get auto-followed on Buzz and too much info was handed over. Google’s made some big steps to quickly stomp this out, but whoa man! Buzz is now making it into the mainstream language as a verb describing things go very wrong. For example, “Robert is really going to Buzz up Gadgetell’s right sidebar by following one of my suggestions.” You’ll find yourself more and more ways to use Google’s whoops-a-daisy in daily conversation. Enjoy it.
jasper_amsterdam writes "The Daily Mail has a story about a study looking into women's preference for men. More specifically, about how women say they want one kind of man, but really want another. From the article: 'Most women claim to be attracted to tall, dark and handsome men, but a new study has revealed that facial stubble and a geeky personality are their biggest secret turn-ons. Despite complaining that it looks unkempt and feels rough to touch, the unshaven look on a man is actually a turn-on for 41 per cent of women. A slightly geeky personality came second, proving that women really do like a guy who knows their stuff when it comes to technology. A hairy chest was voted third, followed by a man who loves to read or cries at a soppy film.'"
I'm breaking my own informal rule and writing about yet another cool MIT innovation this week. After finding out about this off-roading wheelchair prototype, I think you'll forgive me. Amos Winter is a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering who founded ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 19 Feb 2010 | 2:34 pm
, Inc. (Jumbo), a Miami-based freight forwarding company owned by defendant Gonzalez-Neira, were indicted on charges of conspiracy, 18 U.S.C. section 371, violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), 50 U.S.C. sections 1701-1706, and smuggling electronic goods from the United States to Paraguay, 18 U.S.C. section 554. The indictment also seeks the forfeiture of an amount equal to the value of the electronics that were illegally exported. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 19 Feb 2010 | 2:28 pm
An anonymous reader writes "Will pico-projectors become standard equipment on mobile phones, the same way that digital cameras have become? The jury is still out on user acceptance — after all, only four mobile phones use pico-projectors today — but if they get small and cheap enough, mobile phone makers are going to install them. There are four vendors today — Microvision, National Semiconductor, 3M and Texas Instruments — but only TI has design wins in cell phones already on the market. And at the recent Mobile World Congress, TI showed a smaller digital light processor (DLP) chip that fits inside even the slimmest mobile phones, and which it claims is cheap enough to become standard equipment. A lot of us never use the camera in our phones now — would you use a pico-projector if it was built into your phone?"
Macworld.com - Apple CEO Steve Jobs, author J.K. Rowling, former Vice President Al Gore, entrepreneur Richard Branson, and Nintendo Entertainment general manager Shigeru Miyamoto all have something in commonâÂÂand IâÂÂm not talking about the size of their disposable incomes. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 19 Feb 2010 | 2:25 pm
It’s not every day that the solution to a worldwide “unexplained” mystery appears on prime time television—especially not in service of advertising potato chips. But a new television ad campaign from Pringles shows a group of fun-loving teens making crop ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 19 Feb 2010 | 2:24 pm
Last night, we reported on a new restriction that was being applied to Apple’s App Store: no more applications with “overtly sexual content”. At this point, the exact nature of that ban is unclear. But it’s a policy shift that may alarm many developers — even those whose applications have nothing to do with sexy content.
First, a little background: we’ve seen numerous reports about applications that have been pulled from the App Store for featuring sexual content, but there are still plenty of apps that have names like “Magic Boobs”. I reached out to Apple PR to ask if they’d enacted a sweeping policy change that could affect many applications, or if they were only removing a handful of applications with especially explicit content. This morning an Apple spokesperson sent back a response. It doesn’t have any answers:
“Whenever we receive customer complaints about objectionable content we review them. If we find apps that contain inappropriate material we remove them from the App Store and request the developer to make any necessary changes to their apps in order to be distributed by Apple.”
I’ve asked Apple to further clarify their stance — does this only apply to applications that have received complaints? Do they have any plans to specify what exactly makes an application too sexy for the App Store? I’ll be surprised if they get much more specific.
Now, it’s true that many of these “sexy” applications were little more than spam, featuring titillating titles, perhaps a handful of sexy photos, and little else. There were some applications that included more functionality, but it’s safe to say that the average quality of the applications on the App Store has almost certainly improved because of the new ban. But it’s still a disturbing move on Apple’s part.
Most worrying is that “sexy” applications were already blocked at one point until Apple specifically changed its policies to begin letting them in. It was only a little over a year ago that the words “Boobs” and “Booty” in an application’s description weren’t allowed. But Apple made the conscious decision to lift that ban. In effect, Apple sent a message to developers that on a platform where the rules are nebulous and anything innovative is risky, these applications were safe. Now it’s changing its mind.
Since the App Store first launched in July 2008, Apple has gradually loosened restrictions on what kinds of applications it would approve. In December 2008, it started approving “humor” apps like iFart and Pull My Finger, as well as an NC-17 rating for adult applications. And over the last year, it began allowing more and more sexy applications — it even began offering parental controls with the iPhone 3.0 software update to help parents keep what their kids accessed in check.
Now Apple is moving in the other direction, and it’s setting a scary precedent. It’s showing that it’s comfortable throwing out applications that developers have spent their time and money building, without even bothering to give them advance notice. It’s one thing to have an application get denied when it’s first submitted — it’s another thing entirely to have the rug pulled out from under you once your app has thousands of downloads and customers. Is Apple going to start blocking apps like Qik if it builds its own live streaming service? Are iFart’s days numbered? Could Apple simply ban all NC-17 rated applications because too many parents complain?
And then there’s an entirely different issue: censorship. Apple is now one of the world’s largest gatekeepers to content, with a store that encompasses music, video, applications, and soon, books and magazines. And it’s shown before that it’s a totally inconsistent hypocrite when it comes to which content it’s willing to sell. Have exposed breasts in an R rated move? Sell it! Jiggling boobs in a silly iPhone application? Banned. Apple previously blocked an iPhone application that allowed users to access the Kama Sutra. What happens if it gets too many complaints about iTunes making it too easy to purchase books and magazines with sexual content?
It’s getting to be a mighty dangerous place out there for DS pirates. Several months ago, Nintendo decided to sue a few of the big DS hacking companies out there, and although that ended up causing a major boost to those companies’ sales, it looks like the big N is starting to crack down on resellers too.
GadgetGear (no affiliation with yours truly) was selling the R4 flash cartridge, which can be used to backload homebrew apps, games, and of course pirated ROMs onto your device. The key word there being was, since Nintendo has successfully sued the bejeezus out of them, resulting in hundreds of thousands in damages being paid, and of course an agreement not to sell the forbidden product.
Well, it’s all part of the great circle of life in hacking products:
In this case the hardware makers are revising the path the cards take to get to modders’ hands. They can shut down legit operations in a place where there are laws, like Australia, but what about a shady eBay store or e-tailer that works from a location where Nintendo has no jurisdiction?
Do you know how hard that headline was to write? So hard!
Anyway, scientists at Imperial College London found a form of degradable polymer made of sugar which would, in theory, allow you to add your plastic bottles to your compost pile and watch them degrade into happy, healthy plantfood.
The plastic is made from tree and plant glucose and… here, I’ll let them explain it.
The degradable polymer is made from sugars produced from the breakdown of lignocellulosic biomass, which comes from non-food crops such as fast-growing trees and grasses, or renewable biomass from agricultural or food waste.
My question is whether you could feasibly eat the bottles after you were done with them. I would totally do it, too, at parties and stuff.
The past couple of days have seen some brouhaha over location privacy issues. Please Rob Me brought up the potentially troubling issue of tweeting out your location updates (and Foursquare responded). But actually, Google is doing something that’s perhaps even creepier.
While their Google Location Alerts feature is not new (it started beta testing in November alongside location history), the amount it is being used seems to be increasing. And it’s freaking some users out. For example, we received two emails yesterday forwarded to us from users who have no idea why they were getting email notifications about friends’ locations. And they have every right to be confused, because they didn’t sign up to get them.
You see, Google sends you these alerts automatically if your Google Latitude contact opts in to them. Again, to be clear, you get these alerts if your contact opts in to them. As Google explains it on the site:
Alerts are sent to both nearby friends if they are sharing their location with each other, even if only one of them has enabled alerts.
Now, you may opt-out of these emails, but you have to visit the site to do that.
So what do these emails look like? Like this:
Subject: Location Alert: Peter XXXX was nearby!
Google Location Alert
Peter XXXXX (XXXXXX@gmail.com) was within 800 meters of you in San Francisco, CA at 7:15 PM. Check Google Latitude to see where Peter is now.
While I’m a firm believer in the future of location, and believe that many of the privacy issues being raised now will eventually blow over as it becomes more commonplace, these alerts seem pretty creepy to even me. Especially because they are opt-out.
And they’re actually a little weirder. As Google explains:
You received this alert because you’ve shared your location with Peter using Google Latitude, and they have chosen to send Location Alerts when Latitude friends are nearby. Location Alerts are only sent when your friend is at an unusual place during a given time of the week based on their location history, filtering out routine locations such as a daily commute. Peter also received this alert.
So you actually only get these alerts when your contact is in an “unusual place.” That makes some sense, since getting these alerts all the time would be beyond annoying. But obviously that “unusual place” may be a place Peter doesn’t want you being alerted about. Yes, he can opt-out of sharing that location, but the problem is that Latitude is always on, and most people forget (or simply don’t care) to turn it off.
Google has caused quite a stir over the past couple of weeks by making many of the features of Buzz opt-out (even auto-friending, which they had to change). Obviously, opt-out helps drive usage, but it also annoys and creeps users out. And I can’t think of a better example then a user automatically getting an email with someone’s location that they didn’t ask for.
By Loretta Chao and Juliet Ye, Reporters, The Wall Street Journal
“War of Internet Addiction,” the 64-minute machinima film about a battle with government Internet controls that has become an Internet sensation in China, remains unblocked, but its creator, Corndog, says that wasn’t always the case.
Bells ring out as the hero and his comrades combine forces to defeat the villain in “War of Internet Addiction.”
The network engineer from Beijing, who says he is in the “post-1980″ generation, as people in their 20s are currently known in China, finally agreed to answer some questions. He said his video was removed from Chinese Web sites Youku.com and Sina.com when it was first posted in January, but it has since been restored. Even with that blip, the video has been viewed at least several million times. According to online video Web site Tudou.com, where he first published it, the video was viewed two million times within three days on the site.
Corndog also explained that the movie’s main character, Kan Ni Mei, whose name is made up of the characters “see you sister,” was the leading character in earlier films made by his team, including one for which he won an award at a film festival held by Tudou, and that the name has no significance. He declined to give his own real name, though.
Mechanical fireflies could help create a new kind of 3-D display, say researchers at MIT.
Standing in for the bioluminescent beetles will be LED-fitted, remotely controlled micro-helicopters that can be choreographed electronically to display shapes and images as they hover in midair. The project, called Flyfire, would use RC helicopters similar to the toys sold at the mall today.
“Each of the helicopters then acts as what we call a smart pixel,” E Roon Kang, the MIT research fellow who is leading the project, told Wired.com. “By controlling their movement, we can have the pixels flying through the air.”
The idea is almost all theoretical now since it is in its very early stages, says Kang. Researchers at MIT’s SENSEable City Lab and Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems (ARES) Lab are jointly developing the idea.
In traditional displays, pixels are static and arranged on a flat surface. Finding a way to make truly three-dimensional displays has been a frequent subject of research, but few practical solutions have emerged despite decades of effort.
The MIT researchers are betting that if each pixel can be made to hover in space and can be controlled reliably, they can create a giant 3-D display.
Ultimately the project would be a step in the direction of “smart dust” — the idea that computing devices will be extremely small, somewhat self-contained, and pervasive, says MIT.
The canvas made by little lighted helicopters can show either a two-dimensional image or a 3-D shape.
Currently researchers are trying to design these little helicopters that will serve as the smart pixels. Kang says the team is looking at microcopters with four rotors as a possible vehicle.
Simple as the idea may seem, creating an army of microcopters poses some significant technical challenges. For instance, each of these little devices will have be self-stabilizing. That means as they hover, they will have to maintain their co-ordinates with extreme accuracy for at least a few minutes.
Another problem lies in being able to reliably control thousands of these microcopters.
“Today we are able to simultaneously control a handful of micro-helicopters but with Flyfire, we are aiming to scale up and reach very large numbers,” says Emilio Frazzoli, head of the ARES Lab in a statement.
Flyfire is being conceived as a installation in a large public place, where the pixels can recharge every few minutes and then perform in space. So far, the team has performed simulations to show the idea at work and hopes to start designing the actual devices soon.
Check out MIT’s video explaining how the Flyfire idea will work.
LED-fitted, remotely controlled micro-helicopters can be choreographed electronically to display shapes and images as they hover midair, say MIT researchers.
LED-fitted, remotely controlled micro-helicopters can be choreographed electronically to display shapes and images as they hover midair, say MIT researchers.
Los Baños, Philippines: In the last fifty years, the Philippines has more than tripled its rice yield, while the world average rice yield has increased only about 2.3 times.Despite being criticized as a poor rice producer because of its status as the world's biggest rice importer, the Philippines has actually done remarkably well in raising its rice yields from 1.16 tons per hectare in 1960* to 3.59 tons per hectare in 2009**.In 2009, Philippine rice yields were actually lower than the previous two years due to the damage done by the tropical storms "Ondoy" and "Pepeng". Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 19 Feb 2010 | 1:18 pm
Reuters - Microsoft Corp's assault on search engine leader Google Inc took a major step forward on Thursday as U.S. and European regulators cleared the software company's search partnership with Yahoo Inc.
ATLANTA, Feb. 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Numerex Corp. (Nasdaq: NMRX) invites all interested parties to participate in a conference call led by Stratton Nicolaides, Chairman and CEO and Alan Catherall, CFO on Thursday, February 25, 2010 at 9:00 A.M. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 19 Feb 2010 | 1:09 pm
If you’ve jailbroken your iPhone or iPod touch with little to no regard for the law, maybe it’s time you reconsider your evil ways. Apparently, jailbreaking your iDevice will get the cops on your back if you’re not careful.
Not knowing any better, a fellow who goes by the name of hotrod1964 (whom we shall call Mr. Hotrod henceforth) on Twitter says he made the mistake of walking into an Apple Store armed with a jailbroken iPod touch. According to Mr. Hotrod, after showing the iPod touch to an employee, insanity ensued. When he popped into the store to kill some time, he was apparently accosted by an Apple Store employee who was trying to get him to buy an iPhone. Good ol’ Mr. Hotrod said he would “have no intention of paying for an iphone [sic] if apple [sic] is going to handcuff me.” Bravo! Fight the Man!
The word “handcuff” there might have triggered a chain of events because the next thing you know, the manager was accusing Mr. Hotrod of shenanigans! “I was informed you have an ILLEGAL iTouch,” said the manager and ended up calling the police!
When the cops finally arrived, they were luckily of the more sensible variety. The police told the Apple Store that no laws were being broken and there really was no reason for them to be there.
Was this just an attempt by the evil corporation to confiscate a device which was being used in a matter not intended? Perhaps it was just a case of overreacting or incompetent employees? Maybe this story was all made up! What do you think?
A young man by the name of Dave Osborne built an interesting project called SWASAlert, a super-speedy weather severe alert service that supplies super fast weather alerts via Twitter and SMS. The easiest way to try it is to pop over here and select your city. You’ll then receive instant emergency weather updates straight into your TweetStream.
Weather seems to be overlooked in the hyperlocal news world so projects like this, however oddly constructed, are an important addition to the mash-up ecosystem. Osborne recounted the genesis of his product thuswise:
I had a friend in Minnesota complain to me about a year ago that the tornado warning got to him about the same time that the tornado did, and he asked why nobody had developed a faster system. We checked into it and the only valid claim we could verify was Superfeedr which was about 15 minutes for fetches. this was the primary impulse or inspiration to build our system.
What we have here, then, is a good, old-fashioned mash-up. Osborne makes most of his money now from advertising and deals with about $1000 or so in costs to keep up the service and the timely feeds.
This is obviously not for everyone – I suppose if you live in a high traffic tornado area, this would be great, but for the rest of us “34 degrees and it may snow later” is enough of a weather report for the whole day. However, airplane pilots and the weather-obsessed may find SWASAlert quite useful.
DELRAY BEACH, Fla., Feb. 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- WikiLoan, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: WKLI), a financial social network today announced that it has signed a definitive 2 year agreement with SDI Distributors NJ, Inc. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 19 Feb 2010 | 12:53 pm
Report identifies technical steps to help US downsize the arsenal, prevent spread of atomic bombs and keep stockpile safe and secureThe American Physical Society (APS), the world's leading organization of physicists, has released a report identifying technical steps that will help the U.S. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 19 Feb 2010 | 12:36 pm
Image 1: The MODIS instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite caught an impressive visible image of Gelane on February 19 at 09:45 UTC (4:45 a.m. ET) that clearly showed the eye of this Category 4 cyclone. Credit: NASA MODIS Rapid Response Team Image 2: The AIRS instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite captured Gelane on Feb. 19 at 4:41 a.m. ET (09:41UTC). Even Gelane's eye is visible in this infrared image, and it's surrounded by very high, powerful thunderstorms with cloud tops as cold as -63F. Credit: NASA/JPL, Ed Olsen Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 19 Feb 2010 | 12:34 pm
The Vancouver games are in full swing by now, so it's time to check out one of the venues that led the city to boast its Olympics would be the "greenest games ever." The Vancouver Convention Centre, formally the Vancouver ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 19 Feb 2010 | 12:32 pm
Recent Internet attacks against Google’s email service have been pinpointed to two prominent schools in China, according to a story published by the New York Times late Thursday. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 19 Feb 2010 | 12:25 pm
Part of me feels like saying, “LG Arena! Last stop, AT&T!” After all, this handset has been announced well over a year ago and it’s been available in other countries for quite some time. Of course, if you’ve been keeping up you’ll know that Best Buy is getting the Arena very soon for a modest price with a contract. Need a reminder for the perks and features that come with this phone?
The Arena is going to come packed with AT&T’s Mobile TV, which includes ABC, Comedy Central, ESPN, NBC, MTV and a whole lot more. I suppose that’s good news for you TV junkies. It’s also capable of HSDPA 7.2Mbps, but that won’t concern anyone for a while since AT&T’s network can barey handle 1.5Mbps on speedy handsets like the iPhone 3GS.
LG has slapped on its S-Class 3D user interface to make navigation a little prettier. It has a 3-inch WVGA display and it can shoot DVD quality videos. If you want to pick one up at AT&T, it’s $199.99 with a two-year contract after a $50 mail-in-rebate. I say you just pick one up at Best Buy for $50 less without the hassle of rebates.
Sprint has long needed an edge in the wireless market, and a few months from now it will finally get one: A smartphone designed to run on its 4G WiMax network (Clearwire) with data speeds up to 10 times faster than 3G. Originally expected at market in the second half of the year, the device is evidently now being prepped for launch in the first half.
No word yet on what sort of smartphone we’re talking about here, although the Supersonic, an Android device HTC is rumored to be building, seems like a good candidate. With Sprint’s 4G service currently available in only 27 U.S. markets, whatever device the company debuts will have to be dual mode 4G/3G, and it’s my understanding that the Supersonic fits that bill.
In any event, the acceleration of Sprint’s 4G phone strategy is exciting news for the carrier, which has a lot riding on it. As Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said during the company’s last earnings call, Sprint is looking to “make a lot of hay” with 4G.
“Internally we call 2010 the year of 4G,” Hesse said. “Its going to be the year that we’re the only game in town and it’s a combination of we need to get more markets turned up and we need to get a better device lineup and then we think we can really start to show some sizable progress in that regard.”
With rival Verizon (VZ) planning to go live with its own LTE-based 4G network later this year, he had better hope so.
As technology evolves, players can expect increasingly rapid game updates and on-demand gaming that's not tethered to a traditional console. In fact, some of them already do. A report from the DICE Summit in Las Vegas.
Could the same armor that protects Lindsey Vonn and Bode Miller also prevent serious injury among other Winter Olympics athletes? Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 19 Feb 2010 | 11:55 am
A suburban Pennsylvania school district shuts down a webcam surveillance program on 2,300 school-issued laptops. A lawsuit filed by attorneys for students claims the program, installed to help recover missing laptop, was used to spy on a student at home.
Scientists discover clues into human diseases by studying dolphins in a changing oceanA panel of governmental, academic and non-profit scientists speaking today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) unveiled research suggesting that diseases found in dolphins are similar to human diseases and can provide clues into how human health might be affected by exposure to contaminated coastal water or seafood."Dolphins and humans are both mammals, and their diet includes much of the same seafood that we consume. Unlike us, however, they are exposed to potential ocean health threats such as toxic algae or poor water quality 24 hours a day," said Carolyn Sotka of the NOAA Oceans and Human Health Initiative and lead organizer of the session. "Our ecological and physiological similarities make dolphins an important 'sentinel species' to not only warn us of health risks, but also provide insight into how our health can benefit from new medical discoveries.""Marine animal and ecosystem health are connected to public health and well-being," said Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D., undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator. "NOAA is committed to better understanding these connections and building the partnerships necessary to have healthy oceans, including healthy dolphins."NOAA is the principal stewardship agency responsible for protecting dolphins in the wild and supports a network of national and international projects aimed at investigating health concerns. A few of these case studies highlighted today at AAAS illustrate how studying disease processes, or pathologies in dolphins, could lead to future prevention or treatment of some diseases in humans. Equally important is the knowledge gained with regards to overall population health, which can lead to improved management and science-based guidelines to mitigate disease outbreak in both people and animals.Unprecedented Contaminant Levels in Coastal Dolphins Warn of Potential Health Risks Researchers from NOAA and its partner institutions recently discovered that bottlenose dolphins inhabiting estuaries along the Georgia coast have the highest levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) ever reported in marine wildlife. The term PCB encompasses a suite of persistent contaminants that have been banned in the United States since the late 1970s due to documented adverse health effects. The extraordinarily high levels of PCBs measured in the dolphins, a maximum concentration of 2900 parts per million, may be suppressing their immune function.The unique signature of the PCB compounds found in these dolphins is consistent with contaminants of concern at a Superfund site near Brunswick, Ga. Scientists are equally concerned about the high PCB levels in dolphins sampled near a marine protected area approximately 30 miles from Brunswick. This suggests that the contaminants are moving along the coast through the marine food web."When we received the lab results for the Georgia dolphins, we were alarmed by the contaminant levels and set out to investigate how these heavy chemical burdens were affecting their health," states Lori Schwacke, Ph.D., with NOAA's Center for Oceans and Human Health at the Hollings Marine Lab and co-lead investigator on the team.Last August, the team conducted a dolphin 'capture-release medical physical' on this population and found decreased levels of thyroid hormones, elevated liver enzymes and indications of suppressed immune function.A pilot study is being undertaken by the National Center for Environmental Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to examine potential environmental contaminants in residents of nearby coastal communities. The researchers are investigating whether coastal dolphin populations and human communities sharing the same seafood resources experience similar exposures.Dolphins May Offer Clues to Treating Diabetes in HumansResearch conducted in part by the non-profit National Marine Mammal Foundation (NMMF) has uncovered evidence that bottlenose dolphins may be the first natural animal model for type II diabetes. Further study of their genome may elucidate a possible treatment for a disease that accounts for an estimated 5 percent of all human deaths globally, according to the World Health Organization. These studies have found that healthy dolphins appear to readily turn on and off a diabetes-like state as needed. This "switch" mechanism is likely driven by the dolphins' very high-protein and very low-carbohydrate fish diet. Analyses have revealed that a fasting mechanism in dolphins may trigger a series of changes in serum chemistries that matches those seen in humans with diabetes."While some people may eat a high protein diet to help control diabetes, dolphins appear to have developed a diabetes-like state to support a high protein diet," according to Stephanie Venn-Watson, Ph.D., director of clinical research for NMMF. "Shared large brains that have high blood glucose demands may explain why two completely different species - humans and dolphins - have developed similar physiological mechanisms to handle sugar."Additional evidence collected from this study shows that humans and dolphins may share similar chronic disease outcomes associated with diabetes such as insulin resistance, hemochromatosis (iron overload) and kidney stones.Model for Epilepsy Discovered from Marine Exposure to Toxic AlgaeNOAA researchers found that for the first time exposing laboratory animals to a toxin produced by blooms of microscopic ocean algae can induce seizures and eventually lead to epilepsy in almost all of the animals tested. Establishing this novel linkage of oceans and health offers a new perspective to researchers and clinicians studying human epilepsy.Working with the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, Calif., and other partners, scientists initially suspected a marine environmental cause of epilepsy by studying marine mammals and other wildlife with seizures that washed up on California beaches over the past decade.The seizures were found to be caused by exposure to domoic acid, a neurotoxin produced by the Pseudo-nitzschia australis alga. After realizing that some sea lions were stranded with seizures when there were no harmful algal blooms, researchers started to believe that domoic acid poisoning may have progressed to chronic epileptic disease.Chief of Harmful Algal Blooms & Analytical Response at NOAA's National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, John Ramsdell, Ph.D., conducted laboratory experiments to validate the field observations seen in sea lions. His research team exposed laboratory rats to domoic acid at levels similar to what a sea lion or dolphin might ingest in the wild by eating contaminated fish."Within six months of the initial exposure, 92 percent of laboratory rats tested developed epileptic disease that worsened over their lifetime," said Ramsdell. "The domoic acid itself is not directly causing the epilepsy, but triggers a brief period of seizures that leads to changes in the brain, resulting in spontaneous and reoccurring seizures, the hallmark of epilepsy."The type of epilepsy in the rat model resembles human Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, as confirmed by at least one human case traced back to eating mussels contaminated with the domoic acid toxin.This research could provide important insight into how dolphins and other species, including humans, respond to domoic acid poisoning. Stranded dolphins with high domoic acid levels do not survive long enough for treatment and study. It is possible that the acute initial poisoning may lead to sudden death; however, these new findings indicate those animals that survive an initial bout of seizures are likely to develop neurological disease with changes in behavior and increasing severity of spontaneous seizures. This new information can help guide future research and emergency response efforts during the next harmful algal bloom event.Dolphin Viruses May Have Human Health ImplicationsA team of researchers and veterinarians from the Marine Animal Disease Lab at the University of Florida have discovered at least 50 new viruses in dolphins, the majority of which have yet to be reported in any other marine mammal species."We know that the ocean harbors a huge diversity of viruses; but we have very limited knowledge as to which viruses dolphins are susceptible to and how they develop the disease," said Hendrik H. Nollens, Ph.D., research lead of the UF team. "By studying dolphin viral ecology, we learned more about how viruses infect human and land animals. This research could lead to preventing outbreaks of disease."One of these viruses, the human papillomavirus, was found to be common in bottlenose dolphins and likely represents the first natural model of papillomavirus outside the human species. Commonly known as HPV in humans, the virus has historically produced great health risks including cervical tumors or cancer in women, especially women with multiple types of the papillomavirus. This new study shows that while dolphins also host multiple types of papillomaviruses they don't appear to get cancer, only genital warts. Further research into the genome of this virus in dolphins may help understand, manage and prevent cervical cancer in humans.Thirteen additional RNA-based viruses that cause intestinal disease and encephalitis in humans have also recently been discovered in dolphins, whales and other marine life. Much like West Nile, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and influenza, RNA-based viruses have the ability to quickly adapt, rapidly mutate and jump from animals to people, posing potential threats to public health. Another virus identified in the dolphins had incorporated part of a similar human virus into its DNA make-up, making it a very probable candidate to infect humans.These cases and the two other studies presented at AAAS today highlight the role of dolphins as important sentinels of ocean and human health. Teri Rowles, Ph.D., NOAA's lead veterinarian, and Director of NOAA's Marine Mammal Health Stranding and Response Program, said, "The effect of viruses, toxic algae, contaminants and other stressors on dolphins may pose a risk to populations through decreased survival rates, impaired reproduction and increased risks to catastrophic epidemics. Active surveillance and investigations of these threats by NOAA and partners is critical to conserve and protect marine mammals, the ecosystems in which they live, and public health." ---Image 1: The Georgia Dolphin Health Assessment capture-release study provides information on the health of the wild dolphin population that inhabits estuaries along the Georgia coast. Credit: Brian Balmer, Sarasota Dolphin Research ProgramImage 2: A dolphin is prepared for release after undergoing a veterinary exam and being fitted with a VHF transmitter tag. Lead veterinarian, Dr. Forrest Townsend, conducts a final check before releasing the dolphin near Brunswick, Ga. Credit: Todd Speakman, NOAA Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 19 Feb 2010 | 11:40 am
Steve Jobs has thrown in a last-minute bid for being on crack in tech, claiming that if the iPad had Flash on it, battery life would decrease from 10 hours to 1.5 hours. Jobs made the comment to writers at the Wall Street Journal amid claims that Flash is “buggy” and old school technology that’s no longer relevant in today’s landscape. Uh, yeah, the software that powers more than 80 percent of the web’s video content, countless games, and major news websites is no longer relevant according to Jobs.
The Adobe vs. Apple battle has intensified in recent weeks due to the iPad’s glaring limitations by not having Flash support, but Jobs has taken to dismissing Flash and downplaying its importance. The latest shot at Adobe’s software is a bizarre claim that isn’t backed up by evidence. It’s obvious that Apple hasn’t considered loading Flash onto the iPad, so where did they get the idea that Flash would miraculously take away 90 percent of its battery life? And on the remote chance that this claim is true, Flash is obviously not as taxing on other devices, so the real problem lies with Apple in this scenario.
The irony of Jobs statement that Flash would kill the iPad is that he made those comments to the Wall Street Journal, a news source whose website is dependent on Flash for video and slideshows. Jobs was essentially telling one of the world’s largest and most-respected news outlets that their website sucks and will continue to suck on the iPad unless they and thousands of other websites ditch Flash.
Environmental sampling – high sensitivity particle analysis: strengthening the nuclear safeguards regimeNuclear safeguards also include environmental sampling to verify the absence of undeclared nuclear activities. The JRC provides the safeguards authorities with experimental evidence by analyzing micron-sized particles in dust material; hence, enabling the detection of a single uranium particle among millions of ordinary dust particles.Sample collection and analysis of environmental particles is a key means of control and verification (figs.1-3), as these tiny particles reflect the nature of the work at a nuclear installation and especially reveal the enrichment of uranium, in the range from depleted up to weapons grade.These techniques have proven to be effective for safeguards measures and are a cornerstone in the implementation of IAEA's Additional Protocol, which gives the Agency complementary inspection authority.To further strengthen this activity, the JRC and Euratom Safeguards have decided to jointly establish a high-sensitivity particle analysis laboratory.Its core facility will be a large geometry – secondary ion mass spectrometer (LG-SIMS) for trace analysis of aerosol particles. It will allow the detection speed and sensitivity of nuclear material to be increased by at least a factor of ten. The minor isotopes of uranium will become accessible, which is important for identifying the source of the material.In addition, the LG-SIMS instrument will play a key role for research projects to strengthen safeguards particle analysis and the production of certified particle reference materials, which will allow other laboratories to improve their analysis. The new laboratory is a crucial element to move towards in-depth characterization and nuclear forensics of micro-particles.Nuclear forensicsTogether with the verification of the absence of undeclared nuclear activities, nuclear forensics techniques are increasingly applied in safeguards. JRC is a key player in this field and is working on a co-authored follow-up report to the recent APS (American Physical Society) and AAAS study on "Nuclear Forensics: Role, State of the Art, and Program Needs". It will focus on the need of international work to improve nuclear forensics, both on sample libraries and databases and on sharing best practices, tools, and technologies.A nuclear forensics example: shedding light on Germany's first nuclear programJRC's experience is vast in this domain and it has carried out various nuclear forensic investigations in recent years. It has examined material detected in 2009 at a scrap metal yard near Rotterdam (The Netherlands) and two samples dating back to the first German nuclear project, shortly after the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938.From these two samples, JRC found out that the first one (a uranium metal cube), originated from Werner Heisenberg's experiments and was produced in late 1943 from uranium ore of the "Joachimsthal" mine in the Czech Republic. The second one (a uranium metal plate) originated from the work of Karl Wirtz (a close collaborator of Heisenberg) and was produced from the same uranium ore but during different production batches in the mid 1940s.JRC-ITU analyzed a large number of parameters providing information on the production date and material's properties. The results will be published and will provide experimental evidence on the history of the material in the context of Germany's first nuclear program.Accountancy verification of nuclear material at reprocessing facilitiesLast but not least, accountancy verification of nuclear materials is also one of the basics of nuclear safeguards. The Joint Research Centre operates two on-site laboratories at the European reprocessing plants in La Hague (France) and Sellafield (UK) - which will celebrate their 10th anniversary this year - on behalf of Euratom safeguards.The JRC also supports the IAEA in the operation of the on-site laboratory at the Rokkasho reprocessing facility in Japan. In addition, it has provided scientific and technical support to this International Agency for over a quarter of a century, with over 50 scientists and technicians working on more than 25 projects.Training for nuclear security Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 19 Feb 2010 | 11:33 am
How do we as a society imagine our future? With social and natural environments changing, often quickly, it's difficult to imagine how our society might look a generation or more into the future. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 19 Feb 2010 | 11:30 am
Even at $200,000 a ticket, the lines for a suborbital ride into space may soon be growing longer. The U.S. government is proposing to spend $75 million over the next five years to send science experiments -- and presumably scientists ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 19 Feb 2010 | 11:29 am
By Lauren Goode, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Investors hungry for Yelp shares might have to dine elsewhere for now.
Jeremy Stoppelman, the co-founder and chief executive of the user-generated reviews site, said Thursday that it is unlikely to issue an initial public offering for “several years.”
Yelp “will definitely not go public this year,” he said. “2011, who knows? But why rush out the door if I can avoid it?”
There has been speculation about Yelp’s IPO prospects–and those of Silicon Valley companies in general–in recent months.
Venture-capital firm Elevation Partners invested in the company last month after it walked away from a Google (GOOG) offer worth more than $500 million.
Mr. Stoppelman declined to comment on the discussions with Google but said the newest round of private financing will allow Yelp to “grow the way we want and work on the things we say we’re going to work on.”
Image Caption: This blind lobster with bizarre chelipeds belongs to the very rare genus Thaumastochelopsis, previously known only from four specimens of two species in Australia. The specimen collected during AURORA 2007 from about 300m is a new species. Photo Tin-Yam Chan (National Taiwan Ocean University, Keelung)/Census of Marine Life Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 19 Feb 2010 | 11:05 am
Now this is a telephone survey I’d love to answer, and I bet many of you would too: Cablevision, the Long Island-based cable operator, has been polling subscribers and asking them how much they’d like to pay for various channels.
Among the most surprising set of questions to consumers: “Do you watch broadcast TV?” If customers responded yes, then they were asked how much they would pay for Fox, or ABC, in particular. The multiple choice offered was: pay nothing, 50 cents, or one dollar? Customers were also asked if they’d be upset to lose either of those channels entirely….Cablevision customers were also asked if they mostly watched shows on cable or on broadcast TV and how upset they’d be to lose particular cable services.
As Claire Atkinson notes, Cablevision’s (CVC) likely aim here is gather ammunition for license fee battles like the one it just had with Scripps (SNI) over the Food Network and HGTV. And the one it is about to have with broadcasters like News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and Disney’s (DIS) ABC.
But it would be fascinating for the rest of us to see just how much value cable customers really assign to various channels.
The conventional wisdom among the kinds of people who read this site is that TV watchers only care about a few channels and are willing to do without the others. Using that logic, the argument goes that the cable industry should embrace “a la carte” pricing instead of the package deals it promotes now–or risk getting eviscerated by Internet video.
Maybe. My suspicion is that most TV watchers like a lot of the channels they have–maybe not all six versions of ESPN, but at least a couple dozen different networks–and would be loath to give them up, which real a la carte pricing would require.
For instance, ESPN currently gets something like $4 for each subscriber, but only about 25 percent of cable subs actually watch the network. So in an a la carte world, Disney would end up charging something like $16 per ESPN customer to keep its revenue steady. ESPN is at the top of the food chain, but still, you can see how an a la carte bill could jump up fairly quickly.
In any case, I don’t think we’re going there anytime soon. In the meantime, I’d love to see that polling data. What do you say, Cablevision?
A new concept vehicle earns money for its driver instead of guzzling it up in gasoline and maintenance costs. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 19 Feb 2010 | 10:34 am
You never know what you're going to see on your way to work, but nobody expects a scene from "Jumanji." Commuters in Atlanta late Thursday afternoon must have done a double-take when a zebra trotted by their cars on a ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 19 Feb 2010 | 10:31 am
Before I begin…a point of clarification—I do see a difference in ripping and burning a DVD you purchased as opposed to downloading and burning an illegal copy of a DVD.
That said, the above image represents why I choose to make pirate (rip and burn) copies of my DVD’s. Simply put, it becomes a much nicer viewing experience. I can put the movie in and it just plays. Of course, ripping and burning also prevents me from having to buy multiple copies of DVD because one of my kids scratches it.
Bottom line, I do not download illegal copies, but still choose to rip and burn just so I can put a movie in and have it start before I grow old or get bored.
I swear I didn't make up that title as a fat joke. Honest. Last Saturday, Kevin Smith (the writer and movie director) launched a series of angry messages on Twitter directed at Southwest Air. According to Smith, he had taken ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 19 Feb 2010 | 10:24 am
If you haven't heard about this new Web site yet, pull up a chair. Because you might make the next list of "new opportunities" of empty homes available for pilfering. A new Web site, called PleaseRobMe.com, pulls information from social ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 19 Feb 2010 | 10:23 am
Short Version: The Kempler & Strauss W Phone watch is a great idea. It's a compact, unlocked GSM phone that makes a great conversation piece and is fun - if a bit maddening - to use. Can it ever be your "first phone?" Absolutely not, but at $199 unlocked you can't get a GSM phone - at least one stuffed inside a watch - for much cheaper.
At what point do you consider something “unreasonable”? Let’s say you’re pulled over while speeding—do the police have the right to search your mobile phone? And let’s say they do, and they find other verboten material on the phone? Should you also be on the hook for that, on top of your speeding ticket? It’s a pretty important debate, and it’s one that going on right now.
A judge in San Mateo county, in California, is in the midst of a just such a case. A man there went to buy 30 BlackBerry phones, something that piqued the curiosity of the store clerk. The clerk called the police, and he was arrested on charges of felony identity fraud. His iPhone was confiscated, too,
There’s a case going on right now in California where a man was arrested at a store for felony identity fraud. His phone was later confiscated and searched by police without a warrant. There’s really no law on the books that says police can or cannot search your phone during an arrest. Some people make the case, “Well, if the police can search you wallet, then why shouldn’t they be able to search your phone?” What if you password protect the phone—do the police have the right to crack the password?
I think the overall issue when you deal with the intersection of high technology (let’s just consider your mobile phone to be “high technology”) and law is that law simply hasn’t evolved to the point where it adequately takes technology into account. Let’s say there’s a law that covers wire taps on phone lines—does that cover mobile phones? What about Skype, or instant messages? IRC? Message boards? Can a police officer sit outside a café while running something ettercap, capture you planning some sort of bank heist, then arrest you on the spot?
I actually had this conversation with an Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney at CES. The gist is, yeah, law simply doesn’t take into account of all the complexities of today’s technology. Let’s say you’re brought to court by the one of the record labels, and you try to argue your case in front of a 70-year-old judge who wouldn’t know the difference between “upload” and “download” if his life were on the line. It’s going to take quite a while before people with more than a basic understanding of technology are sitting on courtroom benches.
Eighty clay figures depicting both animals and humans have just been excavated in Northern Ghana, according to information provided to Discovery News by the University of Manchester. Tim Insoll of the university, along with Ghana's Benjamin Kankpeyeng, led the project. ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 19 Feb 2010 | 9:47 am
Microsoft will begin rolling out its “No Browser Left Behind” scheme in Europe next week, offering Windows users a choice of Web browsers, as stipulated by its antitrust settlement with the European Commission.
And so, beginning on Feb. 22, Windows users in the U.K., France and Belgium will be presented with a ballot screen offering them an opportunity to swap out Internet Explorer for one of 11 other browsers from rivals like Mozilla, Apple (AAPL), Opera and Google (GOOG).
“The browser choice screen software update will be offered as an automatic download through Windows Update for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7,” Microsoft (MSFT) Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner explained in a blog post announcing the move. “The software update will be installed automatically, or will prompt you to download or install it, depending on which operating system you are running and your settings for Windows Update.”
Once that’s done, users will be shown a ballot screen offering the option of installing one of the listed browsers, learning more about them or postponing the browser choice to a later time. Simple enough–assuming that automatic updates is enabled and that they actually care about browser choice.
If that’s the case, many probably dumped IE for an alternative long ago, right?
Anyway, as I said, a limited ballot screen rollout begins next week with full-scale deployment across the rest of Europe a week later, potentially reaching some 170 million PCs. It will be interesting to see how many of them end up switching to a new default browser.
FROM APPLETELL - This week is all about IM since we finally saw the release of Meebo. But even if IM isn’t your cup of tea, I have you covered with this week’s list. MORE »
For men looking to have some sort of forewarning of their girlfriend or partner’s “time of the month,” PMSBuddy has got you covered. PMSbuddy’s iPhone app allows users to track the menstrual cycles of the women in their lives in the hope of notifying men and helping them cope with the dreaded PMS (premenstrual syndrome) and its effects.
As ridiculous as it sounds to a woman, the service is currently being used by over 100,000 people worldwide, via an iPhone app, a website and Facebook widget. PMSBuddy is launching a new version of its iPhone app that will offer push notifications of upcoming PMS and the the ability to locate flower shops near you (via GPS). PMSBuddy will also be rolling out similar applications for Android and Blackberry phones.
And PMSBuddy is expanding to other verticals. The startup will soon be launching Fertility Buddy, which allows women to track when they are ovulating to increase (or decrease) the likelihood of conception. Similar apps to PMSBuddy include MyMate and iAmAMan.
Just recently, Google announced Google Googles, an augmented reality-like software where you can point your Android-based smartphone camera to an object and it will tell you what that object is, be it a book, a landmark, or even translation of a foreign language.
Fresh out of Google Mobile Labs, the Google Shopper works pretty much like Goggles, except that the Shopper focuses on, well, shopping. When you point your camera to a product, it searches the web for that product and returns price lists, reviews, specs and more. It can also scan for barcodes if you ever need a more specific search. Let’s say you don’t have the product with you but you want to search for it, you can use Voice search to tell your Android smartphone to search it for you. It is also possible to store your search history, favorites and even share your favorite products with your friends via Twitter, Gmail, Facebook and various other instant messaging clients.
Head over to the Android Market and search for “Google Shopper” to get the latest release! You can also scan the QR code below this post to download the app.
Turfgrass management can create more greenhouse gas than plants remove from atmosphereDispelling the notion that urban “green” spaces help counteract greenhouse gas emissions, new research has found – in Southern California at least – that total emissions might be lower if lawns did not exist.Turfgrass lawns help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and store it as organic carbon in soil, making them important “carbon sinks.” However, greenhouse gas emissions from fertilizer production, mowing, leaf blowing and other lawn management practices are similar to or greater than the amount of carbon stored by ornamental grass in parks, a UC Irvine study shows. These emissions include nitrous oxide released from soil after fertilization. Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas that’s 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, the Earth’s most problematic climate warmer.“Lawns look great – they’re nice and green and healthy, and they’re photosynthesizing a lot of organic carbon. But the carbon-storing benefits of lawns can be counteracted by greenhouse gas emissions,” said Amy Townsend-Small, Earth system science postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the study, forthcoming in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.The research results are important to greenhouse gas legislation being negotiated. “We need this kind of carbon accounting to help reduce global warming,” Townsend-Small said. “The current trend is to count the carbon sinks and forget about the greenhouse gas emissions, but it clearly isn’t enough.”Turfgrass is increasingly widespread in urban areas and covers 1.9 percent of land in the continental U.S., making it the most common irrigated crop.In the study, Townsend-Small and colleague Claudia Czimczik analyzed grass in four parks near Irvine, Calif. Each park contained two types of turf: ornamental lawns (picnic areas) that are largely undisturbed, and athletic fields (soccer and baseball) that are trampled and replanted and aerated frequently.The researchers evaluated soil samples over time to ascertain carbon storage, or sequestration, and they determined nitrous oxide emissions by sampling air above the turf. Then they calculated carbon dioxide emissions resulting from fuel consumption, irrigation and fertilizer production using information about lawn upkeep from park officials and contractors.The study showed that nitrous oxide emissions from lawns were comparable to those found in agricultural farms, which are among the largest emitters of nitrous oxide globally.In ornamental lawns, nitrous oxide emissions from fertilization offset just 10 percent to 30 percent of carbon sequestration. But fossil fuel consumption for management, the researchers calculated, released almost as much or more carbon dioxide than the plots could take up, depending on management intensity. Athletic fields fared even worse, because – due to soil disruption by tilling and resodding – they didn’t trap nearly as much carbon as ornamental grass but required the same emissions-producing care.“It’s unlikely for these lawns to act as net greenhouse gas sinks because too much energy is used to maintain them,” Townsend-Small concluded.Previous studies have documented lawns storing carbon, but this research was the first to compare carbon sequestration to nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide emissions from lawn grooming practices.The UCI study was supported by the Kearney Foundation of Soil Science and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.---Image Caption: Amy Townsend-Small, Earth system science postdoctoral researcher, found that management of urban "green" spaces can emit more greenhouse gases than the plots take in and store. Photo by Steve Zylius / University Communications Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 19 Feb 2010 | 7:07 am
Image Caption: Despite identical genes and a shared environment, only some mutant nematode embryos develop a gut, which appears violet in this photomicrograph. Credit: Arjun Raj and Scott Rifkin Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 19 Feb 2010 | 7:02 am
Anonymous sources close to the investigation into the attacks, which targeted dozens of American corporations, tell the New York Times they originated at Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School. The former boasts one of China’s top computer science programs; the latter has been known to train computer scientists for the Chinese military and reportedly has ties to Baidu, the dominant search engine in China.
While the implications of these findings seem obvious, insiders differ on what they really mean. Some suspect the schools are being used as a cover for Chinese government operations. Others speculate that they’re being used to hide intelligence operations run by a third country. Still others wonder if there’s no government involvement here at all, speculating that the attacks are criminal in origin and were intended to steal intellectual property from American tech firms.
Regardless of which scenario seems most plausible, it’s important to remember that just because the attacks have been linked to IP addresses at these schools’ networks doesn’t mean they necessarily began there.
Asked about the possibility the attacks originated at his school, a professor of Web security at Jiaotong’s School of Information Security Engineering said it was certainly possible.
“I’m not surprised,” the source told the Times. “Actually students hacking into foreign Web sites is quite normal. I believe there’s two kinds of situations. One is it’s a completely individual act of wrongdoing, done by one or two geek students in the school who are just keen on experimenting with their hacking skills learned from the school, since the sources in the school and network are so limited. Or it could be that one of the university’s I.P. addresses was hijacked by others, which frequently happens.”
Image Caption: Side-blotched lizards have three color morphs with different mating strategies, but in some populations only one morph occurs. This male lizard is from an all-orange population in the Warner Mountains in northeastern California. Photo by Ammon Corl. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 19 Feb 2010 | 6:20 am
What works in the U.S. can work here, too–it’s a tenet held by many entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in India and other emerging regions of innovation. While not everything should be duplicated, one small Indian firm believes it can apply the model employed by Y Combinator, a Mountain View, Calif.-based business accelerator and seed fund.
Founded in 2007, Morpheus holds four-month business accelerator programs where it works with 20 very early-stage companies, taking a four to eight percent equity stake in exchange for advice, mentoring and business connections.
Now the firm, made up of three partners with entrepreneurial experience, will also invest capital in these start-up companies, the same way that Y Combinator does. The firm has raised a small fund of about $250,000 from unnamed high-net-worth individuals for the next two incubator sessions and will seek to add on further funding.
Sure Google may have recently released a shiny new web app for Google Voice users on webOS, but that does not mean everyone wants to use a web app. Sometimes a dedicated app seems a little nicer, which was the case with the gDial Pro app that was available for both the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi. Yup, I said was the case because the gDial Pro app is no longer available in the App Catalog.
The app was pulled voluntarily by the developer due to “circumstances beyond our control” which made them realize they were “not going to be able to provide a reliable service.” According to a statement on the official gDial Pro Facebook page;
“We have decided we would rather pull the plug now than have users continue to experience disruptions due to various changes outside of our control.”
It seems that Google has recently made some changes to the Google Voice API and those changes mean that the new Google Voice requirements are not compatible with the restrictions that are currently found in the Mojo SDK and webOS.
I have been testing a Pre Plus and Pixi Plus recently and this was the first app that I checked out upon launching the App Catalog. Unfortunately the app is no longer there for others to check out. But on a slightly positive note, the developer did leave a hint that the app could make a return. Of course, for that to happen we would need to see some changes first. We can only hope.
Wikipedia has a pretty useful list of countries by number of mobile phones in use, which shows that Japan (with around 100 million users) is the No. 7 in the world. The market is largely controlled by mobile carriers NTT Docomo, KDDI au and SoftBank Mobile but seemed big enough to offer enough room for a number of smaller competitors, too.
Yesterday, however, a company called Willcom (one of said smaller players) announced it had to file for bankruptcy. The reason: With just $54 million in capital, Willcom managed to amass a whopping $2.2 billion in liabilities. It’s the biggest bankruptcy ever in Japan’s hyper-competitive mobile industry.
Willcom, best known in Japan as a PHS provider, has continuously lost subscribers to the country’s big three carriers in recent months, which means the bankruptcy didn’t come as a big surprise. The company won a license to provide high-speed wireless web connections in 2007 but didn’t have the money to properly develop the service.
It currently has 4.3 million customers in Japan, while market leader Docomo has 56 million (KDDI au: 31 million, SoftBank: 22 million).
Willcom is 60% owned by American private equity firm Carlyle Group (which paid $330 million back in 2004 for the stake), while Kyocera holds 30% and KDDI holds another 10% of shares. Willcom is now said to be seeking support from the Japanese government, SoftBank and a local private equity firm called Advantage Partners.
MIT's The Tech has the results of a wide-ranging survey of the sex-lives of the university's undergraduates. It's not very scientific (the respondents were self-selected, and 60% of the student body didn't respond), but the charts and commentary are a fun read. I'm particularly taked by the idea of a taboo against "floorcest" (shagging someone whose room is on the same dorm floor as yours).
And several people in the small town of Dannemora were intimidated by their longtime justice, Thomas R. Buckley, a phone-company repairman who cursed at defendants and jailed them without bail or a trial, state disciplinary officials found. Feuding with a neighbor over her dog's running loose, he threatened to jail her and ordered the dog killed...
1. The plaintiffs haven't paid much attention to other works in the genre.
Wednesday's Dork Tower comic contemplated the possibility of a Warren Ellis alarm clock. I'd buy one, or at least download one for my Android phone!
Ebert keeps scrolling down. Below his journal he had embedded video of his first show alone, the balcony seat empty across the aisle. It was a tribute, in three parts. He wants to watch them now, because he wants to remember, but at the bottom of the page there are only three big black squares. In the middle of the squares, white type reads: "Content deleted. This video is no longer available because it has been deleted." Ebert leans into the screen, trying to figure out what's happened. He looks across at Chaz. The top half of his face turns red, and his eyes well up again, but this time, it's not sadness surfacing. He's shaking. It's anger.
Facebook has acquired its third company, Malaysian startup 
Despite what my co-workers believe, the fact that I live in Northern Nevada does not automatically make me a fan of NASCAR. I am a fan of MarioKart though, and the fact that Nintendo has teamed up with the 
From there you can select whether to upload an image or add it from a URL. I recommend just uploading images as it's a bit rude to hotlink someone's images and it doesn't really take you any longer to select an image file from your computer.
The web has no shortage of URL shorteners. In fact, there are so many that they’re all kind of blending together and I have no idea where to turn beyond the de-facto one Twitter uses, 
I always say that you’re never to young to start with your first gadget. This is an example of that theory, taken maybe a little more serious then I would normally consider reasonable. How old do you need to be to have your first MP3 player? 
So you want your neighbors to think that your house is an impenetrable fortress, but you don’t really feel like shelling out the hundreds of dollars needed to buy actual security cameras? Maybe you’re seen those other fake surveillance cameras in stores, but you want something that moves, damnit. Well here you go: the Hammacher Schlemmer panning Faux Security camera set. 
Google has won approval to enter the speculative energy trading business. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission 
It’s no secret that we consider the PR 
We first wrote about 
The past couple of days have seen some brouhaha over location privacy issues. Please Rob Me brought up the potentially 
Sprint has long needed an edge in the wireless market, and a few months from now it will finally get one: A smartphone designed to run on its 4G WiMax network (Clearwire) with data speeds up to 10 times faster than 3G. Originally expected at market in the second half of the year, 
Short Version: The Kempler & Strauss W Phone watch is a great idea. It's a compact, unlocked GSM phone that makes a great conversation piece and is fun - if a bit maddening - to use. Can it ever be your "first phone?" Absolutely not, but at $199 unlocked you can't get a GSM phone - at least one stuffed inside a watch - for much cheaper.
Microsoft will begin rolling out its “No Browser Left Behind” scheme in Europe next week, offering Windows users a choice of Web browsers, as stipulated by its antitrust settlement with the European Commission. 
The 
Sure Google may have recently released a shiny new web app for 
