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Bijoué: Audio Technica’s diamond-shaped speakers
Weighing just 105g, the Bijoué speakers is sized at 78×74×37mm. Audio-Technica doesn’t try to attract geeky female buyers just with the design and size but with a functional hook as well: when opening up the diamond speaker, users will find a small mirror behind the lid. In Japan, Audio-Technica plans to sell the Bijoué/AT-SPF30 on June 16 in six different colors: black, brown, white, silver, golden and the inevitable pink (price: $30). If you’re interested but live outside Japan, I suggest contacting import/export specialists Geek Stuff 4 U.
Source: CrunchGear | 24 May 2010 | 4:21 am IPhone 4G, Also Available in White?
Is this a white iPhone? The photos come from Chinese-language site Apple Pro, and have lit up speculation across rumor sites that Apple will have a white-faced version of its expected new iPhone 4G when launched next month. It makes some sense: the current iPhone comes with a choice of black or white backs, so why not offer a choice of faceplates, too? Apple may well do this, but I don’t think these photos have much to do with a real iPhone. They are either prototypes or – more likely – good old Chinese knock-offs. The biggest giveaway is the presence of screw holes in the base of the metal frame. Those were found in the Gizmodophone, but are not seen in the more recent, and better finished, iPhone 4G shown off by Vietnamese site Tinhte. Also, what’s going on with the extra slot above the phone earpiece? Is it real? Who knows. At least, though, there are some mysteries left for Apple to reveal at the expected iPhone 4G launch event on June 22nd. iPhone 4G with his face black and white brothers [Apple Pro via Apple Insider] 
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 24 May 2010 | 4:02 am Open source innovation on the cutting edge (InfoWorld)InfoWorld - Open source doesn't innovate -- so goes the old saw. Proprietary software vendors, including Microsoft, would have you believe the open source movement has produced nothing but knockoffs of existing products and cast-off code that couldn't cut it in the free market.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 24 May 2010 | 4:00 am Kid's mirror affirmationIn this YouTube clip, "Jessica," an adorable kid, wakes up full of beans and spends 49 glorious seconds enumerating all the awesomeness in her life before the bathroom mirror. If this doesn't make you happy, you are dead inside (especially as she opens her rant with "Look, I can be a SHARK!"). Jessica's "Daily Affirmation" (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)  Source: Boing Boing | 24 May 2010 | 3:40 am Kid's mirror affirmationIn this YouTube clip, "Jessica," an adorable kid, wakes up full of beans and spends 49 glorious seconds enumerating all the awesomeness in her life before the bathroom mirror. If this doesn't make you...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 May 2010 | 3:40 am Last Week's Top Five PostsSecond Life the Beautiful: Sam Lowry's Latest Machinima is Patriotic Paen to the Meaning of the Metaverse Should We Call SL-Unique Art and Creativity "Virtualist"? Second Life Avatar Survey Results: Majority...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 May 2010 | 3:38 am Memoir of Lando Calrissian's toady Lobot"I, Lobot:" being a fictional memoir of a day in the life of Lobot, the Star Wars spear-carrier with the wraparound head-computer who toadies for Lando Calrissian.I, Lobot: A Day In The Life of Lando Calrissian's Assistant Source: Boing Boing | 24 May 2010 | 3:37 am Memoir of Lando Calrissian's toady Lobot"I, Lobot:" being a fictional memoir of a day in the life of Lobot, the Star Wars spear-carrier with the wraparound head-computer who toadies for Lando Calrissian. 6:30 a.m: Wake up, unplug head from charger...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 May 2010 | 3:37 am Typhoid adware hijacks LAN, inserts ads into uninfected computers' browsersSecurity researchers at the University of Calgary have identified a new malware they call "Typhoid." Typhoid impersonates the wireless router on your local network, effecting a man-in-the-middle attack that allows it to insert ads into the browsing sessions of all the other, uninfected users on the LAN.Danger in the Internet Cafe? New Computer Security Threat for Wireless Networks: Typhoid Adware Source: Boing Boing | 24 May 2010 | 3:33 am Typhoid adware hijacks LAN, inserts ads into uninfected computers' browsersSecurity researchers at the University of Calgary have identified a new malware they call "Typhoid." Typhoid impersonates the wireless router on your local network, effecting a man-in-the-middle attack...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 May 2010 | 3:33 am Google Android 2.2 Froyo Arrives for Nexus One - Techtree.com
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 24 May 2010 | 3:33 am Best Philippine Speculative Fiction 2009: online anthologyCharles Tan sez, "I'm editor of The Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler. I've just released The Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction 2009, an online anthology that reprints sixteen stories written...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 May 2010 | 3:26 am Best Philippine Speculative Fiction 2009: online anthology
Charles Tan sez, "I'm editor of The Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler. I've just released The Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction 2009, an online anthology that reprints sixteen stories written by Filipino authors. Contributors include Dean Francis Alfar, Yvette Tan, Kenneth Yu, and Gabriella Lee.
In addition to the stories being available online, readers can also download ePub and PDFs of the anthology at the download page."
Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction 2009 Source: Boing Boing | 24 May 2010 | 3:26 am A tribute to Martin Gardner - Times Online
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 24 May 2010 | 3:24 am Ireland's largest ISP begins disconnecting users who are accused of piracyEircom, Ireland's largest ISP, has decided to snuffle up to the entertainment industry's hindquarters and become the first European ISP to actively practice "3 strikes": if you are accused (without proof)...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 May 2010 | 3:21 am Ireland's largest ISP begins disconnecting users who are accused of piracyEircom, Ireland's largest ISP, has decided to snuffle up to the entertainment industry's hindquarters and become the first European ISP to actively practice "3 strikes": if you are accused (without proof) of three acts of copyright infringement, they will take away Internet access from your entire household for a year.Ireland is the first country in the world where a system of "graduated response" is being put in place. Under the pilot scheme, Eircom customers who illegally share copyrighted music will get three warnings before having their broadband service cut off for a year.Eircom to cut broadband over illegal downloads (Thanks, David!) Source: Boing Boing | 24 May 2010 | 3:21 am Alberta principal vetos kilt at graduationHamish Jacobs is a graduating high-school student in Alberta, Canada. In deference to his Scottish heritage, he proposed to wear a kilt to the graduation ceremony, but the principal has rejected this proposal as being "inappropriate." Evidently, principal Mark Beazer is unfamiliar with the formal attire of other nations, and people in Scotland are up in arms over the issue.Me, I say that school graduations should have the same dress-codes as science fiction conventions: "Wear anything you like, but remember, 'no costume is NO COSTUME.'" Provided you wear at least a modest cache-sexe or equivalent garment, you're clothed, and if you want to come as a superhero, a medieval blacksmith, a steampunk inventor, a tuxedoed gent, or a tentacled horror, that's great too. Just remember: it's not a skirt. The last man what called it a skirt got kilt. No kilt at graduation, school tells Alberta teen (Thanks, Mom!) (Image: Tennant Kilt, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from tineyho's photostream) Source: Boing Boing | 24 May 2010 | 3:15 am Alberta principal vetos kilt at graduationHamish Jacobs is a graduating high-school student in Alberta, Canada. In deference to his Scottish heritage, he proposed to wear a kilt to the graduation ceremony, but the principal has rejected this proposal...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 May 2010 | 3:15 am Facebook chief's privacy pledge - BBC News
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 24 May 2010 | 3:11 am Father's Day Gadget and Gear GiftsFORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., May 24 /PRNewswire/ -- Father's Day shopping is often fraught with stress and uncertainty as many ponder how to please dear old Dad in a new, unique and compelling way.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 24 May 2010 | 3:06 am Bridgepoint Education to Present at Bank of America Merrill Lynch Services ConferenceSAN DIEGO, May 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Bridgepoint Education, Inc.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 24 May 2010 | 3:00 am HP and Alcatel-Lucent Deliver Unified Communication and Collaboration SolutionsPALO ALTO, California and PARIS, May 24, 2010 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- HP and Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today announced they will provide new communication solutions, allowing clients to easily adopt and deploy Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) to drive greater organizational value. Building on the companies' global alliance, this agreement enables HP and Alcatel-Lucent to deliver and market end-to-end UC&C solutions to clients. These solutions use the convergence of telecommunications and IT to transform the way customers use UC&C services. "Clients want an open, holistic approach to services delivery that maximizes their investment in UC&C," said Gary M.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 24 May 2010 | 2:59 am Roubini Does Viewer Mail on MaherSource: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 May 2010 | 2:57 am Viral Video: Other TV Finales (That Were Much Better Than "Lost") [BoomTown]
While the ending of ABC’s “Lost” got all the attention last night, many were dissatisfied with the ending, which seemed to suggest the castaways were all dead the the whole time. Which does make sense for the convoluted television series, since it started with a plane crash. But here’s videos of BoomTown’s favorite TV finale endings, including my personal fave from HBO’s “Six Feet Under.” (The image above is the last one from “M.A.S.H.,” by the way, which was one of the most watched, but way too weepy for me.) Seinfeld (it was about nothing!):Friends (perfectly simple):The Sopranos (Tony was whacked!):The Mary Tyler Moore Show (the classic classy ender):Six Feet Under (they all die–eventually):Source: All Things Digital | 24 May 2010 | 2:52 am Electric car runs over 1,000 km without recharge, shatters previous record
One of the biggest problems that stands between electric vehicles and becoming mainstream is limited battery life. But there has been some progress in that area lately: the Japan Electric Vehicle Club [JP], a civic group based in Tokyo, announced today a Mira EV customized by the group traveled exactly 1,003.184 kilometers without a recharge. The club shattered its own record from last month when another electric vehicle drove 555.6km (345 miles) from Tokyo to Osaka on a single charge. The new record was made possible by driving the car at a driving course in Shimotsuma, Japan, which is apparently the world’s longest. Powered by a Sanyo lithium-ion battery (built by assembling 8,320 cylindrical lithium-ion batteries), the car ran for 27 and a half hours at around 40km/h on average. The club had a team of 17 people at the course who took turns at the wheel. It will ask the Guinness World Records to officially recognize the drive soon.
Source: CrunchGear | 24 May 2010 | 2:51 am Magnifying Public Installations - Michael Antrobus' 'Hello Stranger' Brings People Together (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) If you saw the 'Hello Stranger' installation while walking down the street one day, I'm sure you too would stop curiously and snap a few pictures. The abstract interactive objects do...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 May 2010 | 2:31 am SMIC and Virage Logic Expand Partnership to Offer Virage Logic's IP on SMIC's 65nm LL ProcessFREMONT, Calif. and SHANGHAI, May 24 /PRNewswire-Asia/ -- Virage Logic Corporation (Nasdaq: VIRL), the semiconductor industry's trusted IP partner, and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC; NYSE: SMI and SEHK: 0981.HK), the leading foundry in China, today announced the expansion of their longstanding partnership to include the 65-nanometer (nm) low-leakage (LL) process technology.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 24 May 2010 | 2:30 am Video: Sprint EVO 4G rooted nearly two weeks before it’s released
Sure, the EVO 4G might not be seeing its official nationwide release until June 4th — but since when do silly matters like release dates bother the Android hacking community? Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>
Source: CrunchGear | 24 May 2010 | 2:20 am Video: Sprint EVO 4G rooted nearly two weeks before it’s released
Sure, the EVO 4G might not be seeing its official nationwide release until June 4th — but since when do silly matters like release dates bother the Android hacking community? To make a short story shorter: one of the EVO 4Gs given away at Google I/O ended up in the mitts of a trio of hackers. Armed with nothing but a few hours to kill and a bit of elbow grease (and presumably, some beer), they managed to crack this thing wide open nearly two weeks before it’s even available to the general public. The lads responsible aren’t release details of the hack just yet, presumably to prevent last minute patches (not that we really have to worry about quick patch work.. it is Sprint we’re talking about, after all)
Source: MobileCrunch | 24 May 2010 | 2:19 am Frank Drake Returns to Search for Extraterrestrial LifeYou can't keep a dreamer down. Extraterrestrial hunter Frank Drake returned to Green Bank last week to recreate his famous observations with one of the largest radio telescopes in the world.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 24 May 2010 | 2:13 am Anti-Bloating Beer Campaigns - Skol Blowfish Ad Shows the Brew is Bloat-Friendly (VIDEO)(TrendHunter.com) The Skol Blowfish commercial is the perfect way to convert female beer drinkers over to Skol. The ad focuses on the bloating nature of beer in general, and uses men and women puffing...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 May 2010 | 2:11 am VimpelCom Ltd. to Release Pro Forma First Quarter 2010 Operating Results and Selected Financial Data on Wednesday, May 26, 2010AMSTERDAM and NEW YORK, May 24 /PRNewswire/ -- "VimpelCom Ltd." ("VimpelCom" or the "Company") (NYSE: VIP), a leading international provider of telecommunications services, today announced that it will webcast the conference call on pro forma first quarter 2010 operating results and selected financial data on Wednesday, May 26, 2010, at 4:30 pm CET, (10:30 am US ET). The conference call will be hosted by Alexander Izosimov, President and Chief Executive Officer, VimpelCom Ltd.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 24 May 2010 | 2:06 am Nova Announces Multi Million Dollar Orders From a Leading FoundryREHOVOT, Israel, May 24, 2010 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Nova Measuring Instruments Ltd.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 24 May 2010 | 2:06 am Fibre-Optic Cables Will Drive the Fixed-Line Telecoms in Sub-Saharan Africa, Says Frost & SullivanCAPE TOWN, South Africa, May 24 /PRNewswire/ -- Sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest fixed-line penetration rate in the world. Incumbent operators mainly attribute this to low investments in copper-wire network infrastructure in the past.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 24 May 2010 | 2:00 am Top 25 Global Financial Institution Selects Brainware for Mailroom AutomationASHBURN, Va., May 24 /PRNewswire/ -- Brainware, Inc., the leading provider of intelligent data capture and enterprise search solutions, is pleased to announce that one of Europe's largest and most trusted financial institutions has chosen Brainware Distiller to automate sorting and classification of millions of financial documents per year.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 24 May 2010 | 2:00 am 72 Year Old Caretaker Finally Retires Thanks to a Winning JackpotGIBRALTAR, May 24, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- We all dream of a happy retirement, but few people spend their lives working as a hospital caretaker and afford it.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 24 May 2010 | 1:59 am The Great Escape: Intergalactic Travel is PossibleImagine a space faring civilization hurtling between galaxies, propelled by the gravitational energy of a black hole, and having resources for supporting a population of several billion.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 24 May 2010 | 1:57 am TechCrunch Disrupt: The Whole Event (And More) Streaming Live On TC
In a few short hours the starting gun will be fired for the very first TechCrunch Disrupt conference. Over 1500 attendees have registered to join us in New York for a three day program of keynotes and panels featuring some of the most disruptive names in technology, plus the startup battlefield where 22 would-be disruptive companies will compete head to head for the Disrupt Cup (and $50k in cash). The buzz on Twitter speaks for itself – #tcdisrupt is the conference that everyone is talking about. But if you can’t make it to NYC, we have some great news: we’ll be live streaming the entire event right here, beginning at 8:30am Eastern (5:30am Pacific). But at Disrupt, ‘live streaming’ doesn’t mean we’re just pointing a camera at the stage. Oh no. For a start, there will be three cameras broadcasting all the action from the main stage. But also, during the gaps between sessions, and over the lunch and coffee breaks, our own Evelyn Rusli will be hosting a series of exclusive backstage interviews with judges, speakers, panelists and contest participants. We’ll also be covering all the action from start-up alley and the conference hallways, plus highlights of the after-parties and a few extra surprises that are too awesome to spoil here in advance. Joining Evelyn, expect to see a star-studded line-up of TC writers and editors on screen throughout the day(s). All in all, that’s nine hours of live and uninterrupted Disruption each day, for three days. In fact we’re expecting the live stream to be so great that even those lucky enough to be at the conference will still want to watch the coverage back when they get home. Which luckily they will be able to do as every single panel, keynote, start-up battlefield session, backstage interview and awesome surprise will be available to watch again on demand, minutes after each one ends. AND for those of you who aren’t on Eastern Time, we’ll be re-running the best of the conference overnight too. Of course, all of this impressive programming requires some equally impressive technology. And for that we’re eternally grateful for the support of our broadcast partner, Livestream. Livestream has sent a full crew – plus a ton of technology – to Disrupt to ensure that you don’t miss a moment of the action. We couldn’t have done any of this without them, particularly CEO Max Haot and Head of Production, Otto Cedeno. Speaking of people we couldn’t have done this without – this seems like a perfect time to give credit to producer Sophia Kittler who will be coordinating over 27 hours of video over the next three days, and also to Evelyn Rusli who will be in the studio for most of that time. Sophia and Evelyn have been working their assess off these past days and weeks, in addition to their day jobs preparing for the imminent launch of TechCrunch TV. I’m nominally the ‘creative director’ – whatever that means – of the on-screen programming, but really it’s Sophia and Evelyn who have done all of the hard work – both creatively and logistically. Kudos to them both. One final thing: you too can be part of the Disrupt TV action simply by ensuring that you use the hashtage #tcdisrupt when you tweet about the event. We’ll be picking our favourite tweets and scrolling them across the bottom of the screen throughout the conference. We’ll do our best to read some of them out on air too. Ok – that’s all until 8:30am. Stay tuned!      
Source: TechCrunch | 24 May 2010 | 1:44 am Astronauts need a last inspection of Atlantis - The Associated Press
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 24 May 2010 | 1:41 am BYO Linux Router To Australia's Fibre NetworkAn anonymous reader writes "Run a Linux router to connect your ADSL service but worried about what will happen when the Australian Government rolls out fibre broadband to your house or business? Worry no more. It turns out that customers on Australia's new National Broadband Network will be able to run their own homebrew Linux router to connect to the network and route traffic any way they please."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 24 May 2010 | 1:38 am The Digital Download Is Dead [Voices]By Farhad Manjoo, Technology Columnist, Slate.com While the iPod has come to symbolize the digital music age, it’s iTunes that’s allowed Apple to control the musical marketplace. iTunes has a nice interface, it’s easy to learn, and it’s ubiquitous—it ships with every Mac, and it’s one of the most downloaded Windows programs around. Other companies may make great phones and music players, but they don’t have the desktop software to sync your music, apps, and photos. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 24 May 2010 | 1:33 am My Contrarian Stance on Facebook and Privacy [Voices]By Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media The essence of my argument is that there’s enormous advantage for users in giving up some privacy online and that we need to be exploring the boundary conditions – asking ourselves when is it good for users, and when is it bad, to reveal their personal information. I’d rather have entrepreneurs making high-profile mistakes about those boundaries, and then correcting them, than silently avoiding controversy while quietly taking advantage of public ignorance of the subject, or avoiding a potentially contentious area of innovation because they are afraid of backlash. It’s easy to say that this should always be the user’s choice, but entrepreneurs from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg are in the business of discovering things that users don’t already know that they will want, and sometimes we only find the right balance by pushing too far, and then recovering. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 24 May 2010 | 1:29 am When Do You Throw a CEO’s Privacy Under the Bus? [Voices]By Robert Scoble, Blogger, Scobleizer It’s interesting that lots of people who really don’t like Facebook’s privacy don’t get mad when journalists and bloggers put into public view Steve Jobs’ emails to them. Today I got an email from Mark Zuckerberg, CEO/founder of Facebook. I am not going to be the one to put that into public view until he gives me permission to. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 24 May 2010 | 1:19 am Ballmer on Facebook Privacy: Zuckerberg One of "Good Guys" [Voices]By Todd Bishop, Writer, Tech Flash Google (GOOG) and Facebook are the ones grappling with high-profile security and privacy problems these days, but Microsoft (MSFT) has been there before, many times, and the issues were clearly on Steve Ballmer’s mind during a talk this past week on the company’s Redmond campus. And he was in no mood to gloat. “With all of the opportunity and all of the things we’re excited about, and all of the things being created, and all of the world’s challenges, we do have to be mindful and work hard to not create more new challenges than we solve,” said the Microsoft CEO, referring to the broader industry, after raising the subjects of security and privacy during the discussion with a small group of reporters, bloggers and university professors. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 24 May 2010 | 1:12 am Astronauts need a last inspection of AtlantisThe Atlantis astronauts have some surveying work ahead of them, now that they're flying free of the International Space Station. The six shuttle astronauts will pull out their newly...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 May 2010 | 1:10 am Maker Faire - hands-on geek festival - San Francisco Chronicle
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 24 May 2010 | 1:08 am Rich Folks Tend to Have Diverse Social Networks [Voices]By Casey Johnston, Contributor, Ars Technica If a new study is to be believed, socioeconomic well-being may stem not from working hard or going to a good college, but from how diverse your contacts are. After processing data from the UK’s communication network and an index of economic prosperity, researchers think that financial success may rest at least in part in how different the members of your network are from you and each other. Research on the relationship between social networks and job prosperity is not new. Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 24 May 2010 | 1:07 am Scientists Succeed in Creating Synthetic Cell - San Diego Business Journal
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 24 May 2010 | 1:04 am REFILE-Norilsk CEO says may sell off Stillwater stake(Corrects Reuters instrument code for Norilsk in first paragraph)Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 May 2010 | 1:02 am Gracenote Powers Smart Drive App for the iPhone With Streaming Music Identification TechnologySource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 May 2010 | 1:01 am CrunchGear Week in Review: Cowboy Busker Edition
Here are some of last week’s stories: What’s the deal with Red Dead Redemption?
Source: CrunchGear | 24 May 2010 | 1:00 am Pac-Man Celebrates 30th Anniversary [Voices]By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal It’s been 30 years since the introduction of the arcade classic Pac-Man — a game that became an icon of the 1980s and succeeded in bringing videogames to new segments of players. The game, created by a Japanese company called Namco, was originally titled Puck Man when it was released in Japan in May of 1980. The character does look more like a hockey puck than … whatever a pac is … but the name was changed to Pac Man for the U.S. introduction that fall. It became such a phenomenon that Pac-Man is now the most recognizable videogame character and is known by 94 percent of American consumers, according to the Guinness World Records Gamer’s Edition. (Pac-Man just barely beats out Mario of Super Mario Bros., which has 93 percent recognition.) Read the rest of this post on the original site Source: All Things Digital | 24 May 2010 | 1:00 am UPDATE 1-BP slashes oil capture estimates for Gulf spill* Cost of response rises to $760 mln from $625 mln last week (Adds details, background)Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 May 2010 | 12:57 am UPDATE 1-Chloride FY profit beats views, mum on EmersonLONDON, May 24 (Reuters) - British power protection company Chloride said it has started the new year with a record opening order book after reporting a full-year profit at the top end of expectations...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 May 2010 | 12:36 am The "Lost" Endings You Didn't See [MediaMemo]If you’re one of the ones who stuck with “Lost” for six whole seasons, then last night’s finale was kinda sorta what you expected, right? Here are some other options, via Jimmy Kimmel’s post-finale special. A little disappointing that there’s no Bobby Ewing dream season reference here, but whatever. And if the YouTube link here goes dead, let me know and I’ll try to find you another one. Source: All Things Digital | 24 May 2010 | 12:35 am SK Energy to run lower emission cracker from OctSEOUL, May 24 (Reuters) - South Korea's SK Energy said on Monday it planned to run from October a new cracker with capacity of 40,000 tonnes per year (tpy) employing advanced catalytic olefin techology...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 May 2010 | 12:30 am Printing Objects Is A Snap With MakerBots (Video)
Now, for under $1,000 you can print your own objects in 3D. Just take a look at how it’s done in this video, which I took over the weekend before Disrupt got started. We had a Hackathon with about 300 engineers who came to cobble together software and hardware products in 24 hours. Among them was Zach Hoeken of MakerBot Industries. His MakerBot is making an open-source toilet holder (which may not be something the world really needs, but it sure does look cool). The MakerBot can print almost any small object from a design file on your computer: open-source toilet holders, open-source bottle openers, human figurines. It prints it out in layers of plastic. The designs are open-source, allowing anybody to manufacture them without paying a royalty. People share their 3D designs on Thingiverse. Come on, you know you want one.      
Source: TechCrunch | 24 May 2010 | 12:19 am Innovate!100 Semi-Finalists to Pitch in Milan on May 28th and Stockholm on June 1st(TM) assessment methodology, and the G/Scores from the Milan and Stockholm Slams will be aggregated with the results from over 20 other Innovate!2010 Pitch Slam events being held this year to determine the Innovate!100Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 24 May 2010 | 12:00 am Innovate!100 Semi-Finalists to Pitch in Milan on May 28th and Stockholm on June 1stSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 May 2010 | 12:00 am PRESS DIGEST - New York Times business news - May 24May 24 (Reuters) - The following were the top stories in the New York Times business pages on Monday. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 23 May 2010 | 11:02 pm TABLE-Ohki -2009/10 group forecastCONSOLIDATED EARNINGS ESTIMATES (in billions of yen unless specified)Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 23 May 2010 | 11:00 pm UPDATE 1-DBS makes partial retreat from Islamic banking* Islamic Bank lost $77.1 mln last year on $725 mln in assetsSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 23 May 2010 | 10:46 pm Military Appoints General To Direct Cyber WarfareAn anonymous reader writes news from The Guardian, excerpting: "The US military has appointed its first senior general to direct cyber warfare – despite fears that the move marks another stage in the militarisation of cyberspace. The newly promoted four-star general, Keith Alexander, takes charge of the Pentagon's ambitious and controversial new Cyber Command, designed to conduct virtual combat across the world's computer networks. He was appointed on Friday afternoon in a low-key ceremony at Fort Meade, in Maryland."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 23 May 2010 | 10:44 pm Two weeks before WWDC, Apple and Google engage in game of Frogger (Appolicious)Appolicious - Steve Jobs reportedly took time away from running Apple and serving as Disney's largest individual stakeholder this weekend to send email replies to strangers.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 May 2010 | 10:21 pm The Third Disruptive Wave #tcdisrupt
Tomorrow morning we’ll kick off our most ambitious event to date, TechCrunch Disrupt, in New York. The event is sold out, but we’ll have tens of thousands of people also tuning in to the livestream of the three day event. If you’re not attending, watch that livestream from the comfort of your office, living room or wherever it is that you people spend your time. There are some things happening at the event that you don’t want to miss. We’ve called the event TechCrunch Disrupt, but we weren’t thinking about the name as a theme for this particular event. It’s our go forward brand name for our three-times-a-year launch and tech conferences. And yet, as I have conversations with the launching startups and the amazing speakers lined to to talk at Disrupt, it’s become clear to me that we are indeed in a massively disruptive moment. And by moment I’m not talking about a generation or a decade. I’m talking about things happening right this moment in time. These conversations are why, for the first time, I am extremely nervous to go on stage tomorrow morning. Until the last few days it hasn’t crystalized for me. It’s sort like when you’re getting the flu and you feel the symptoms come one by one. Stomach ache, no problem. Headache, ouch. Cold sweat – uh oh, I’ve caught something. The “symptoms” I’ve noticed are only there because I’ve been sitting down with these people – leading entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and others – and just listening to what they have to say. Putting it all together in my head. Discounting for bias. And after all that, what they are saying is making a lot of sense to me. You are going to hear a lot over the next three days about how our world is changing in a fundamental way. It’s easy to think about what’s happening now as just a further evolution of the Internet era. But the disruption from this change is more profound than that. Before I dive deeper, here’s a taste of what I’m talking about. Venture capitalist John Doerr, who is arguably the most successful venture capitalist of all time, told me this during our briefing call for Disrupt:
That was said by a man who’s firm has invested in Google. And Amazon. And AOL, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Flextronics, Genentech, Intuit, Lotus Development, LSI Logic, Macromedia, Netscape, Quantum, Segway, Sun Microsystems, and Tandem, among many, many others. Zynga. The fastest growing business Kleiner Perkins has ever invested in. First thing tomorrow John Doerr is going to outline why he thinks that is happening. He’ll talk about the Third Wave. The First Wave was personal computers and the wave of disruption that caused. The second wave was the Internet, ditto. We are now, says Doerr, in the Third Wave. What exactly is the Third Wave? It’s the tectonic shifts we’re seeing in mobile platforms (read his post here about the iPad), the social graph (particularly Facebook), and online commerce. All of these things are related and being accelerated by each other (Facebook is the largest mobile application, Zynga leverages Facebook and also stokes Facebook growth, Groupon is social/flash commerce, etc.). Yuri Milner, who is second on deck on tomorrow morning’s agenda after John Doerr, made sense of all this to me over lunch yesterday. Milner is investing in the fastest growing consumer Internet companies, and he’s doing it more aggressively than anyone else. He has stakes in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. His method is fascinating and we’ll be diving deeper into it tomorrow. But what shocked me into realizing that Doerr is very, very right and that real disruption is happening right now wasn’t the how he invests, but why he invests, and in who. Why is he so confidently investing hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in companies at multi-billion dollar valuations? The Internet was a tremendous business accelerator, he says, but Facebook is another accelerator on top of that. Zynga’s Farmville grew to 75 million users just a few months after launching last year, and the company went from near zero revenue a year ago to hundreds of millions of dollars today. It wasn’t that Zynga invented the killer game (every single Zynga game was copied from someone else, in fact). It’s that CEO Mark Pincus understood better than anyone else how to leverage that Facebook accelerator and ride that tsumani. And when I asked him what Groupon, his third U.S. investment, has to do with the Facebook accelerator effect? He says that they grew so incredibly fast simply by advertising on Facebook. Groupon tweaked and tweaked their model endlessly until they got it right – they felt real traction. Then they turned on the advertising. And what worked wasn’t television spots or Google ads. It was Facebook. That must be freaking Google out right about now. It’s also the cornerstone of my belief that we are entering into the Age of Facebook. At no point in history has such a large number of people interacted so intimately with anything. Facebook’s half a billion monthly visitors is probably far more meaningful (although not yet as lucrative), as the nearly 1 billion people who visit Google each month. The depth of interaction with Facebook is unprecedented. And it explains a lot of the privacy hysteria we’re all going through with them right now. Ok, Back To Earth The Third Wave is happening, but that doesn’t mean that Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, Twitter and a few others are the only winners, or even the biggest winners. Facebook may have created a monster that it simply cannot control, for example. The social graph, over time, may well become more of a federated model with many players. Listen closely to what both Milner, a Facebook investor, and Doerr, who isn’t, have to say about that tomorrow. But those are just the historical details about who wins and who loses. The shift is happening right now. Groupon is blowing away Amazon’s early revenue and profit milestones by a scary factor, for example. Don’t think Amazon isn’t looking at Groupon with the same wary eye Google uses on Facebook. And when you look at the world in this way – a Third Wave – it becomes easier to understand the strategic moves by the incumbents from the Second Wave. Yahoo is fleeing, looking for a warm place to hide. AOL is BFFing Facebook. Facebook is trying to set up the chess board so that they win all of this in the long run. And Google is standing toe to toe with Facebook and will not be backing down any time soon. Meanwhile, the only mobile platforms that matter even a smidgen right now are the iPhone and Android. And that war looks too much like the Windows/Apple wars in the 80s over dominance of the personal computer. There is so much creation going on around us. With that comes destruction, too. Nobody dies quietly in an all out war.      
Source: TechCrunch | 23 May 2010 | 10:05 pm May 24, 1883: Brooklyn Bridge OpensA woman's work is never done: The great bridge must be finished.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 May 2010 | 10:00 pm Inside Foursquare: Checking In Before the Party StartedBefore Foursquare was, well, anything, it was arguably just another interesting idea that might or might not have gained any traction. Here is an inside look at the making of the red-hot startup from its earliest days based on unprecedented access and 60 hours of interviews.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 May 2010 | 10:00 pm Protecting Biodiversity: The Cost of InactionIn order to save the world's fisheries, we have to acknowledge that some fish may be worth more to us alive than on our plates, economists say.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 23 May 2010 | 9:28 pm It’s Not Just Twitter And Facebook. Disrupt Is An App Platform, Too.
Facebook, Twitter, and other places people gather, socialize and share, have turned out to be ideal app platforms. At TechCrunch Disrupt, we’re taking this trend offline. Disrupt is our media and technology conference starting tomorrow. Check out our amazing agenda. And yes, we will sell tickets at the door. Disrupt-as-platform started yesterday with our developer-packed Hack Day and Scrapyard Challenge, whose winners—including a team that built an app to play Super Mario Brothers by blinking—will be returning to Disrupt to demo to the 1,500-strong (and still growing) crowd on Wednesday. Disrupt will continue as a platform tomorrow during the show, with a load of interactive apps and experiences designed to engage our guests—from apps to help the audience vote for the best startups onstage and in the Startup Alley to geo-mobile games based that can only be played by attendees . I’m going to call out the sponsors specifically who’ve thrown a lot of energy, talent and moolah at making Disrupt their platform. SecondMarket is turning our audience into a quasi-secondary market for a few hours each day during our Startup Battlefield competiton. They’ve created an audience-voting app that will tabulate real-time voting by simulating a marketplace. If you like the startup you see, you buy their stock. If you don’t, you sell it. Prices rise and fall based on audience action. At the end of each round of demos, the results determine the audience-choice vote. Cool, huh? SCVNGR is using their geo-mobile game to turn Disrupt into a treasure hunt of sorts. If you complete enough challenges, you win a TC Disrupt badge—and one winners gets an iPad. It will be interesting to see whether this transforms the usual coffee-swilling, networking vibe into a dash for points. Twilio is setting up an SMS-based system to vote for your favorite startup, from among the early-stage startups exhibiting throughout the venue in Startup Alley. The crowd’s favorite joins our onstage Battlefield. Friends Around has a mobile app that combines their ‘Nearby’ and ‘Chat’ features to help you meet people at the conference, identify a secret code and be entered into a raffle for a grand prize. For more info go here and download the app here. Knight News Challenge is fishing for innovative folks shaking up the news business at Disrupt. They are hosting an interactive lunch entrepreneurs in media, news, publishing and related fields. And they’re distributing $25 million to the top news innovators. uGallery is turning our venue, a gutted Merrill Lynch office, into an art gallery of sorts with cool and edgy NYC-themed canvasses. The chic-but-affordable art startup will be onsite, in case your startup needs transformation from a cubicle farm into, well, a cubicle farm with nice art. See you at Disrupt!      
Source: TechCrunch | 23 May 2010 | 9:04 pm Good-Bye to Privacy? (PC World)PC World - New Yorker Barry Hoggard draws a line in the sand when it comes to online privacy. In May he said farewell to 1251 Facebook friends by deleting his account of four years to protest what he calls the social network's eroding privacy policies.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 May 2010 | 9:03 pm Large Irish ISP To Enact "Three Strikes" Rule For Copyright ViolationSqueeonline writes "One of the biggest broadband providers in Ireland will make the country the first in the world (according to broadsheet newspaper, the Irish Times) to introduce the 'three strikes' rule. 'EIRCOM WILL from today begin a process that will lead to cutting off the broadband service of customers found to be repeatedly sharing music online illegally. Ireland is the first country in the world where a system of graduated response is being put in place. Under the pilot scheme, Eircom customers who illegally share copyrighted music will get three warnings before having their broadband service cut off for a year.' ... The mechanism by which it operates was challenged in the courts by the Data Protection Commissioner. Apparently, IP addresses do not constitute 'personal information.' Personally, I use filesharing all the time, but I use it to download large open source Linux ISOs. How will Eircom legally differentiate between that content, and the content that some ragamuffin may be downloading illegally, without infringing privacy laws?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 23 May 2010 | 7:50 pm Tech giants scramble for foothold in mobile ads - USA Today
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 23 May 2010 | 7:02 pm Zynga And 7-Eleven Strike Branding Deal, 10% Of The U.S. Now Playing FarmVille
In total there will be more than 30 branded items in store, ranging from cups, bottles water, a signature ice cream and more. Consumers will be able to connect back to the social games by using their product redemption codes for limited edition 7-Eleven goods within FarmVille, Mafia Wars and YoVille. This revenue share deal stemmed from the recent launch of Zynga gift cards in 7-11 stores. The campaign will begin on June 1 and will last for six-weeks. Zynga says this partnerships represents a way for Zynga to bring its brand to the masses offline. And the company released a new stat showing that 10% of the US is playing FarmVille and 80% of its players are engaging every day with either FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and YoVille. While Zynga is still tied to Facebook for now, the gaming company has made it abundantly clear that it still plans to maintain its independence as a business, through its Zynga Live project and other avenues. This branding and promotional partnership should certainly help to make its brand more of a household name. Information provided by CrunchBase      
Source: TechCrunch | 23 May 2010 | 6:58 pm An Inside Look At Facebook Questions, The Next “Killer App” Of Facebook
When word first got out that Facebook was working on a question & answer service, the immediate reaction was that it would a “Quora killer.” That’s an obvious and sexy statement to make since Quora was built by former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo and engineer/manager Charlie Cheever. And it’s even more sexy since Benchmark invested in the service at a $86 million valuation (and it’s not out of private beta yet). But Blake Ross, the Facebook employee (with quite the illustrious history of his own) behind the project quickly poured water on those fires — on Quora, naturally. So what is Facebook Questions? If it’s not a Quora-killer, is it an Aardvark (recently purchased by Google) eater? Or is it something else? Only those lucky enough to have access to the very limited test know for sure. So we got the story from one of them. Sid Yadav, a Facebook users in New Zealand, has been using Facebook Questions within his Facebook social circle for the past month or so. His take-away? It could be “the next killer app of Facebook,” he says. He also confirms that it feels different from Quora because it “seems to be more intimate/fun/terse than intellectual/useful/detailed.” Here’s his full run-down in his own words — complete with pictures of what it looks like. Notably, you’ll see that “Questions” has been added to left-column of Facebook, where many of Facebook’s main functions lay. Yes, this is going to be a big product. Here’s Yadev:
     
Source: TechCrunch | 23 May 2010 | 6:52 pm Mr. Coke, Drug LordParts of Jamaica are under a state of emergency as cops go after the world's most aptly-named drug lord. [BBC]Source: Boing Boing | 23 May 2010 | 6:17 pm Digital trash can made out of paper
I don't read Spanish, unfortunately, but apparently you can download, print, and make your own paper digital trash can at the designer's web site. via Designboom
Fragmentation vs. Obsolescence In the Android Ecospherewhisper_jeff writes "Engadget has an interesting article up discussing whether or not Android is fragmenting. While the article discusses the concept that it may be more about handsets becoming obsolete at a dramatic pace rather than the OS fragmenting, it also begins by noting that there are currently five different versions of Android on the market, which implies there is a notable degree of fragmentation. Regardless of it being fragmentation or handsets becoming obsolete to new feature sets in a terribly short period of time, I believe this development cycle could turn casual consumers away and hurt Android's chances at long term mainstream success."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 23 May 2010 | 5:40 pm Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Wii) - CNET
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 23 May 2010 | 4:50 pm Toyota Robot Violinist Wows At Shanghai Expokkleiner writes "The Shanghai World Expo got a special treat this past week in the Japanese pavilion, when Toyota's famed violin-playing robot thrilled the crowd with a rendition of the Chinese folk song Mo Li Hua (jasmine flower). The bipedal artificial violinist hasn't been seen much since its debut back in 2007. Now we have footage of the Toyota bot playing Mo Li Hua in Shanghai as well as its original rendition of Pomp and Circumstance from 2007."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 23 May 2010 | 4:36 pm Mark Twain's autobiography to be finally published, 100 years after his deathGoodblood sez, "Just before he died, Mark Twain stipulated that his autobiography should only be published 100 years after he died, and that's now. Exciting!"ZOMG. Want to read right now! After keeping us waiting for a century, Mark Twain will finally reveal all (Thanks, GoodBlood!) (Image: Mark Twain picture from Appleton's Journal July 4, 1874, Wikimedia Commons) Source: Boing Boing | 23 May 2010 | 3:54 pm Cardboard homebrew irising mechanism More scenes from a book-tour: Boing Boing reader Jason Baker saw this morning's post on the homebrew irising peephole mechanism, so he banged up this awesome facsimile out of cardboard and hot glue and fishing line and pushpins and brought it to today's signing at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, NC (thanks to all the awesome folks who turned out!). Tomorrow, I head to NYC: Books of Wonder (May 26, 6PM); Brooklyn's Powerhouse Books (May 27, 7:30); and McNally Jackson (May 28, 7PM). The tour wraps in Toronto on June 4 with an event at the Merril Collection at 7PM. ( Full tour schedule) Reminder: There's plenty of libraries and schools and such that are hoping you'll donate a copy of For the Win to them! Source: Boing Boing | 23 May 2010 | 3:48 pm Do Build Environments Give Companies an End Run Around the GPL?Malvineous writes "I have two devices, from two different companies (who shall remain nameless, but both are very large and well known), which run Linux-based firmware. The companies release all their source code to comply with the GPL, however neither of them include a build environment or firmware utilities with the code. This means that if you want to alter the free software on the device, you can't — there is no way to build a firmware image or install it on the devices in question, effectively rendering the source code useless. I have approached the companies directly and while one of them acknowledges that they are not fully GPL compliant, due to other license restrictions they cannot make their build environment public, and they do not have the resources to rewrite it. I have approached the FSF but their limited resources are tied up pursuing more blatant violations (where no code at all is being released.) Meanwhile I am stuck with two devices that only work with Internet Explorer, and although I have the skills to rewrite each web interface, I have no way of getting my code running on the devices themselves. Have these companies found a convenient way to use GPL code, whilst preventing their customers from doing the same?"
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Source: Slashdot | 23 May 2010 | 3:34 pm BP Prepares Complex "Top Kill" Bid To Plug WellshmG excerpts from the International Business Times: "Government and BP officials are hopeful after extensive preparations, but are not guaranteeing that a complex attempt early this week to cap an uncontrolled underwater oil spill from a well in the Gulf of Mexico will be successful. The so-called 'top kill' procedure that oil major BP is tentatively scheduled to attempt on Tuesday involves plugging up the well by pumping thick 'drilling mud' and cement into it. While it had been attempted on above ground wells, it has never been tried at the depths involved with this spill, nearly 5,000 feet below the surface."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 23 May 2010 | 2:30 pm PAC-MAN rules!We've been overwhelmed — but not surprised :) — by the success of our 30th anniversary PAC-MAN doodle. Due to popular demand, we’re making the game permanently available at www.google.com/pacman.Thanks to NAMCO for helping to make this wonderful collaboration happen. Enjoy! Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience    
 Source: The Official Google Blog | 23 May 2010 | 2:13 pm Clock Ticking to AT&T Fee Hike - PC World
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 23 May 2010 | 2:07 pm Clock Ticking to AT&T Fee Hike (PC World)PC World - AT&T announced that it is raising its early termination fee (ETF) for smartphones (a.k.a. the iPhone) from $175 to $325 effective June 1. That gives businesses that are current AT&T subscribers, but seriously considering paying the ETF to switch--especially if the speculation is true that Verizon may soon have the iPhone as well--just one week to decide before it gets much more costly.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 May 2010 | 2:06 pm With AdMob Out of the Way, Is Google Set to Buy Invite Media? [MediaMemo]
Industry sources believe Google (GOOG) is close to a deal for Invite, a three-year-old “demand side platform” designed to help buyers navigate high volume display advertising exchanges — like the one Google launched last year. A deal has supposedly been in the works for some time, and one theory is that Google has been waiting for the AdMob saga to conclude before moving forward. Estimates for a price are all over the map, ranging from $60 million to $100 million. The caveat: Google’s name has been linked to various DSPs for several months. “We have not entered into any agreement with any company,” Invite CEO Nat Turner told me via e-mail this afternoon. “I’ve honestly heard similar rumors about every other company in the space, so I don’t put too much credence in what people are saying these days.” A Google spokesman declined to comment on “rumor and speculation”. Whether or not it makes sense for Google to buy Invite or any other DSP depends on who you talk to. Some people think a DSP is a natural compliment to Google’s AdX unit, since it makes it easier for big ad holding companies to funnel money into the exchange. But others argue that since the point of a DSP is to let buyers work with multiple exchanges — like the one that Yahoo (YHOO) operates and the one Microsoft (MSFT) is testing — it makes no sense for buyers to use a tool owned by the industry’s biggest player. If anything, it makes much more sense for an ad buyer like Publicis’ Vivaki unit, which uses both Invite and Google’s exchange, to snap up Invite, they argue. Turner and his cofounders started the company when they were still undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania; the company has offices in Philadelphia and New York City. Investors include Comcast’s (CMCSA) venture arm and First Round Capital. Invite had previously considered selling to Omniture last summer, but that deal went away after Adobe (ADBE) purchased the analytics company. I’m told the proposed price for that deal was $17 million. Meanwhile Google shows zero signs of slowing down its M&A binge, which began last summer. Last week the company announced two deals in addition to AdMob: The search giant said it intended to buy Global IP Solutions for $68 million, and announced that it had purchased Simplify Media a few months ago. Source: All Things Digital | 23 May 2010 | 2:05 pm What’s the deal with Red Dead Redemption?
Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption came in the mail on Tuesday, and my first course of action was to call the Ron and Fez Show on Sirius XM. “Hey, guys, I see your names in the credits. You rock!” Calling the show and talking to East Side Dave (by the way, SAVE DAVE) and Ron was the highlight of my week. Well, it was the highlight of my week until I was able to pop the disc into my 360 (it’s also available for the PS3). As I told Ron on the air, Rockstar knows how to make a good video game. A really good video game, in fact.
What’s pretty funny about Red Dead Redemption is that I’ve seen it derisively referred to as nothing more than Grand Theft Auto IV in the Wild West. You know, as if GTA IV is a bad game! Was the hype surrounding that game warranted? I don’t know. What I do know is that it was a fine, fine game in a world filled with (polluted with?) generic modern warfare shooter after generic space marine shooter. There’s more to GTA than running over pedestrians and robbing hot dog vendors. Play the missions, let the story develop, and you’ll say to yourself, “There’s actually a pretty great script and some solid voice acting here.” Rockstar (along with BioWare) is the best in the business in that regard. It’s 1911, and the old ways of the West are dying; its days of being “wild” are drawing to a close. That’s not good news for the game’s main character, a well-dressed ex-crook named John Marston who’s forced to track down one of his old running buddies for the increasingly powerful federal government. (I feel like I’m channeling Rush Limbaugh or that other bozo with “increasingly powerful federal government.”) You approach your destination, from parts unknown, on a train straight out of “There Will Be Blood,” eavesdropping on the conversations of an old woman who speaks of bringing “civilization” to the area and a young woman who asks her father to reconcile Christianity’s many contradictions. This will not be a light day at the office. Your train pulls up to a small town in the middle of nowhere, and off you go.
This sandbox-style game takes place in a literal sandbox: dirt and broken down rocks comprise the majority of the scenery, and cacti and other rubbish-looking plant life remind you that you’re not “back east” anymore. It’s a big sandbox, too, and as believable as Liberty City, with cross-map trips taking upwards of 10 minutes on horseback. Small towns—nothing more than a couple of shacks and a saloon—rise out of the nothingness and offer you a place to have a drink, buy guns and ammunition from a vendor voiced by noted gun nut Anthony of Sirius XM’s Opie and Anthony, gamble with local miscreants, and rest/save your game. Nowhere near a town? With a few button presses you’ve made a campfire, where you can save your game and fast-travel to a waypoint. Don’t fast-travel too often lest you diminish the game’s sense of scope. Exploration is vital, as it’s the only way to find and kill local fauna, whose hides you can collect and later sell. You already know how to use the map; it’s identical to GTA IV’s. Letters hover over it, located on the lower left-hand side of the screen, and point to mission-giving characters. You visit these characters, obtain a mission, complete the mission, then go on another mission until you move onto the next mission-giving character. This moves the story along, in short, well-acted cinematics—again, like in GTA. You’ll have noticed a pattern by now. Mid-mission checkpoints are more frequent, thank heavens.
When I played the game at PAX East a few weeks (months? I’ve lost all track of time) back, one of the things the friendly Rockstar rep highlighted was the horse mechanics. I’m almost certain that’s the first time I’ve written the phrase “horse mechanics.” There’s nothing to it: you tap A to get the horse going, then hold A to keep steady the pace, steering all the while with the Left Stick. When in town you hitch your horse to a handy hitching pole—the horse will wait for you. Or, if out in the middle of nowhere, hitting Up on the D-Pad causes you to whistle out for the horse, which shows up a few moments later. It’s all very Zelda-like, an observation that rather pleased the Rockstar rep. There’s no harm in being compared to Zelda. Aiming is less frustrating than it’s been in past Rockstar games. You whip out your gun with the Left Trigger. The default mode lets you free-aim with the Right Stick, but if you pull the Left Trigger while near, say, a bad guy’s head, the aiming reticule automatically locks on. Then you pull the Right Trigger. Then the bad guy dies. It’s all very poetic. In my view this is Rockstar saying, “Look, there’s no way in hell you’re going to have any sort of precision while aiming with the 360 controller, so let’s just automate the process for you as much as possible.” (There is, of course, a fully manual mode if you’re a crazy person.) Rockstar should be given credit for trying (and trying… since the days of GTA III for the PS2) to figure out how to make aiming with a controller as painless as possible, but let’s face facts: no control scheme will ever better a mouse and keyboard. This is not up for debate. Perhaps a PC version is warranted? The game looks good on the aging 360 hardware, but I wouldn’t mind seeing the visual bump with a modern day video card and processor. The multi-player? I know that it exists, but I haven’t put in the time to write about it. My guess is that if you got a kick out of GTA IV’s multi-player mode then you’ll probably feel right at home here. A few more things come to mind. One is that Rockstar seems to have perfected this particular type of gameplay experience. That is, going from person to person, doing mission after mission, developing a story along the way that’s better than much of what’s coming out of Hollywood these days—Rockstar has that on lockdown. For how much longer will that appeal, I wonder? The second is that Rockstar’s virtual worlds are the most convincing in gaming today. Red Dead Redemption’s lands aren’t as densely populated as Liberty City, but every single inhabitant has something on his or her mind, and will, if given the opportunity, talk your ear off. Voice actors not currently affiliated with BioWare (because they already know this) take note: this is how lines are supposed to be delivered. I’ve recently been playing through Halo 3 and I can, at times, feel my kidneys cringe in embarrassment at some of the dialogue. So bad.
How do I end this? I guess by saying the game could be Rockstar’s best effort yet. So if that appeals to you…
Source: CrunchGear | 23 May 2010 | 2:00 pm Copernicus Reburied As HeroCasualFriday writes "Mikolaj Kopernik, AKA Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer whose findings were condemned by the Roman Catholic Church as heretical, was reburied by Polish priests as a hero on Saturday, nearly 500 years after he was laid to rest in an unmarked grave. On Saturday, his remains were blessed with holy water by some of Poland's highest-ranking clerics before an honor guard ceremoniously carried his coffin through the imposing red brick cathedral and lowered it back into the same spot where part of his skull and other bones were found in 2005."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 23 May 2010 | 1:27 pm Android apps for Memorial Day Weekend and the summer beyond (Appolicious)Appolicious - Memorial Day Weekend marks the start of the summer season, so why not celebrate? There are a few Android apps that will get you in the holiday spirit, whether you’re commemorating the day itself, or going on a shopping spree.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 May 2010 | 1:19 pm Sprint shares could rise on 4G phone: Barron's (Reuters)Reuters - Shares of Sprint Nextel could rise to about $6 a share, helped by the introduction of a mobile phone that works on the carrier's new high-speed network, according to business weekly Barron's.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 May 2010 | 1:13 pm The Next-Gen iPhone shows up in all white – think it’s real?
Once the leaks start, they just don’t stop. After the first (and massive) leaks regarding the fouth-gen iPhone made their way out, more and more shots have been unearthed. As of late, however, a new variation has been poking its head up: a white-faced model. While a few different shots have made their way out over the past few days, these ones are easily the clearest and most complete we’ve seen so far. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>
Source: CrunchGear | 23 May 2010 | 12:58 pm The Next-Gen iPhone shows up in all white – think it’s real?
Once the leaks start, they just don’t stop. After the first (and massive) leaks regarding the fouth-gen iPhone made their way out, more and more shots have been unearthed. As of late, however, a new variation has been poking its head up: a white-faced model. While a few different shots have made their way out over the past few days, these ones are easily the clearest and most complete we’ve seen so far. Note that the face on the white model doesn’t seem to be pushed on completely. Apple’s been offering black/white options since the iPhone 3G, though the face is black in both models. What do you think? Real? Not real? All I know: if this is real, I’m going to carry the white model. I’ll carry it hard. (Though I’m not even sure what that would entail.) [Source: Apple.pro]
Source: MobileCrunch | 23 May 2010 | 12:57 pm As Mammoths Died Out, Earth ChilledAs massive grazing animals were killed off by early human hunters, methane levels dropped, contributing to a chilling planet.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 23 May 2010 | 12:46 pm HP Confirms Slate To Run WebOSKilrah_il writes "After HP bought Palm a few weeks ago, many rumors emerged regarding the new parent company's plans to further expand the scope of devices running WebOS. Now it appears that at least one of the rumors is true: The Slate will be running WebOS. 'Today an HP exec has confirmed that the company is developing a WebOS tablet which should be available by October.'"
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Source: Slashdot | 23 May 2010 | 12:22 pm 57 Ancient Egyptian Tombs with Mummies UnearthedThe oldest tombs date to around 2750 B.C. during Egypt's first and second dynasties.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 23 May 2010 | 11:56 am Unveiled: The TechCrunch Disrupt Cup
The countdown to the official launch of TechCrunch Disrupt in New York is down to the last several hours. Things kick off Monday morning at 9 am EST with Charlie Rose and John Doerr, and we run from there for three days. Half of the event is a startup launch battlefield where 22 new companies and products will show their stuff to the world for the first time on stage. Startups are eliminated over three rounds until we have a “final four” for best of show. Eventually an overall winner will be chosen. The winner receives a cash prize of $50,000, although that has paled in importance to the massive press and user awareness that the companies will get from their time at Disrupt. But we’ve also decided to add another award into the mix – The TechCrunch Disrupt Cup. This is a 16 inch tall sterling silver cup trophy weighing in at nearly six pounds – more than five pounds of pure silver. It holds 15 pints of your favorite beverage. Like the Stanley Cup in hockey, this is an award that the winner will only be able to keep until someone else wins it. In our case, for 3-4 months until the next TechCrunch Disrupt (which will be in September 2010 in San Francisco). Winner’s names will be engraved onto the trophy and it will be handed down from winner to winner over the coming years and, hopefully, decades. We will have replicas of the trophy made for the winners to keep forever as well.
After a very long search for the perfect Trophy Cup, we found it and bought it. We’ve had the initial engraving removed by Jeffrey Herman, the founder and executive director of the Society of American Silversmiths. The Disrupt Cup will be re-engraved with the TechCrunch Disrupt master logo next week. Until then, we’ve slapped a TechCrunch Disrupt sticker on it. If you’ve been to our annual Crunchies event you know we like to give crazy awards away. We’re hoping the Disrupt Cup will be an exciting award for Disrupt startups to aim for. And for those winners, we hope that it serves as a good luck charm extraordinaire. You’ll see lots of pictures of the Disrupt Cup over the next few days. Now you know the story behind the award.      
Source: TechCrunch | 23 May 2010 | 11:40 am Future Mario, Twitter Demographics And Worst Phone Ever Win The #TCDisrupt Hackathon
Our esteemed judges include Soleio Cuervo, Chad Dickerson, Tarikh Korula, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Shervin Pishevar, Don Dodge, Cyan Banister, Tom Igoe and our own Michael Arrington. The winners are FutureMario, Twitter Demographics, and Worst Phone Ever. Future Mario is an application that allows you to play the Super Mario Brothers with voice, by blinking your eyes, and by tracking your eyes. Twitter Demographics mashes up Tweets with geolocation and demographic data. So if you search for a specific keyword on the application, you can see the percentage of Twitterers who Tweeted about the keyword within certain income ranges and even by political party. Worst Phone Ever searches for baseband crashes on your desktop, uploads them, and saves them to a database. The results are tabulated and added to the total, eventually leading to a detailed class-action lawsuit. Runners up include an iPad suction holder and Mr. Stabby, a robotic concoction made by the folks from NYC Resistor. Also check out ZDNet’s coverage of the event.      
Source: TechCrunch | 23 May 2010 | 11:35 am Scientific R&D At Home?An anonymous reader writes "I'm currently on the cusp of getting myself a new hobby and making some investments. There are a few areas that interest me greatly, from playing with EEG/ECG and trying to put together a DIY sleep lab, to astronomy, etc. I'm somewhat hesitant to get into these fields because (despite the potentially short-lived enjoyment factor) I'm not convinced they are areas that would lend themselves to making new discoveries in the home and with home equipment, which is what I'd really like to do. I've also read quite a number of articles on 'bio hacking,' and the subject seems interesting, but it also seems futile without an expensive lab (not to mention years of experience). What R&D hobbies do Slashdotters have that provide them with opportunities to make interesting discoveries and potentially chart new territory in the home? Do such hobbies exist?"
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Source: Slashdot | 23 May 2010 | 11:20 am 'To Measure the Oil, Measure the Methane'Questions about how much oil has been spilled in the last month by the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion could be answered if scientists move quickly to measure the plumes of dissolved methane gas drifting around the Gulf of Mexico, ...Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 23 May 2010 | 11:00 am Customers' revenge: Cable providers to play nice (AP)AP - For far too long, cable customers fumed as they waited in vain for the cable guy to show up. When he did come, sometimes it took multiple visits to fix outages. Some customers grappled with billing mistakes that took months to resolve. And cable prices went up every year.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 May 2010 | 10:48 am Summary Box: Web portal helps digital-age vets (AP)AP - THE OFFERING: Warrior Gateway is a free site designed to help young veterans find services in an environment they are comfortable in: the Internet.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 May 2010 | 10:45 am Web portal Warrior Gateway helps digital-age vets (AP)AP - For young veterans returning from duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, the process of re-entering society can be daunting, especially if they have been injured or have struggled with mental health problems.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 May 2010 | 10:45 am Complain about your dropped iPhone calls… with science
The site is worstphoneever.com and it searches for baseband crashes on your desktop, uploads them, and saves them to a database. The results are tabulated and added to the total, eventually leading to a detailed class-action lawsuit.
Source: MobileCrunch | 23 May 2010 | 10:27 am Complain About Your Dropped iPhone Calls… With Science
The site is worstphoneever.com and it searches for baseband crashes on your desktop, uploads them, and saves them to a database. The results are tabulated and added to the total, eventually leading to a detailed class-action lawsuit.      
Source: TechCrunch | 23 May 2010 | 10:26 am Buy.com sold to Japanese e-commerce site for $250 million
Rakuten, a company that runs the largest Japanese e-commerce site, has agreed to purchase Buy.com for a quarter of a billion dollars. The purchase was made with the intention of making Rakuten’s marketplace a viable competitor with e-commerce juggernauts eBay and Amazon. Since the site’s inception in 2000, Buy.com has grown to over fourteen million customers worldwide. Buy.com is currently the largest seller on eBay selling half of its products directly, while the other half are sold through e-commerce businesses using their online store. “We’ve had a strong partnership with eBay and we believe we’ll continue to have a strong partnership with eBay,” said chief executive of Buy.com Neel Grover. Hiroshi Mikitani, founder and chief executive of Rakuten feels that Rakuten has a more to offer as an e-commerce site when compared to its competitors. Sellers can create their own marketing campaigns, design their shops and communicate directly with their customers. In addition, Rakuten offers a gaming initiative which rewards shoppers for shopping through the site’s points program. Your move eBay/Amazon. Read [NewYorkTimes] Full Story » | Written by Tarun Kunwar for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 23 May 2010 | 10:00 am Chrome-To-Android Extension: Awesome, Deadly
Everyone is talking about the ability to push Android apps (and eventually music/media) to your devices — and rightly so. But also useful is this link push ability. For example, if you looking at a page on your computer than you want to take on the go (something I do all the time), you can now just use a Chrome extension and with one click, it automatically appears on your phone. And it’s even more useful with maps. If you’re looking up an address in Google Maps on your computer, you can click the extension and it will automatically push it to your Android device — and open it in the Maps app. This sort of reminds me of the television show 24. Jack Bauer is constantly telling Chloe O’Brien to send stuff to his phone — and magically it always seems to appear in seconds. With this, that would actually be possible. Of course, there’s a downside to this too. Imagine a friend or co-worker is at your computer where you have the extension installed. They could easily push you any page. Porn, Rickrolls, etc — imagine the possibilities! Watch it in action with both a link and a map below. If you have Android 2.2 (and if you don’t yet, be patient, it’s coming) go to the Chrome-to-Phone Google Code page for instructions on how to make this work. Basically, you just install a Chrome extension and an Android app and you’re good to go. This all works because it syncs through your Gmail address over AppEngine. Update: Pastefire (which we covered in January) does something similar for the iPhone. But again, the Android way is using something Google specifically built-in to Android 2.2.      
Source: TechCrunch | 23 May 2010 | 9:45 am Complain about your dropped iPhone calls… with science
We just saw a great product at the TC Disrupt Hack Day. It’s basically a class action lawsuit generator against AT&T that uses your actual call drop data to tabulate how many times your phone crashed and how many times you’ve been generally hosed by AT&T. The site is worstphoneever.com and it searches for baseband crashes on your desktop, uploads them, and saves them to a database. The results are tabulated and added to the total, eventually leading to a detailed class-action lawsuit.
It’s still pretty rough right now but it’s nice to see your worst fears about dropped calls in black and white. The uploader app works only under OS X now (you can manually upload from Windows) and requires a bit of knowledge about log paths and such, but it grabs all of your logs, scans them, and adds up downtime. Obviously thoere are a few privacy issues with sharing your logs, but why not early-adopt in the mass lawsuit space?
Source: CrunchGear | 23 May 2010 | 9:45 am Economic Changes Needed To Save The Natural WorldA key UN report on biodiversity will recommend major changes such as company fines to help save the planet’s species and protect the natural world.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 May 2010 | 9:00 am Want Android 2.2 on your Nexus One? Try thisSection: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile, Web, Google
One clever individual managed to find the Android 2.2 Froyo .zip file on Google servers and posted it to the public. If you are running a Google Nexus One “non-rooted stock ERE27 system” then you can simply download the file off the Google server and run it on your Nexus One. In case you have a stock Nexus One that has never been rooted, you can still run Android 2.2 using a method explained here. In case you decide to install the latest Android software, proceed with caution and only do so if you know what you are doing. Feel free to let us know how it works in the comments below. Read [XDA Forums] Download [Google] Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 23 May 2010 | 8:00 am Rare Black Rhinos Moved To The Serengeti32 critically endangered East African black rhinos are set to be flown from South Africa back to their habitat in Tanzania’s Serengeti Park, and so far 5 have made it as of Friday.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 May 2010 | 6:55 am Oil Washing Into Louisiana WetlandsFrustration mounts as BP says their next attempt to stop the leak in the Gulf of Mexico won't happen until Tuesday.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 23 May 2010 | 4:48 am
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6:30 a.m: Wake up, unplug head from charger.
Typically, adware authors install their software on as many machines as possible. But Typhoid adware comes from another person's computer and convinces other laptops to communicate with it and not the legitimate access point. Then the Typhoid adware automatically inserts advertisements in videos and web pages on the other computers. Meanwhile, the carrier sips her latté in peace -- she sees no advertisements and doesn't know she is infected ¬- just like symptomless Typhoid Mary.
The issue has stirred up a whirlwind of debate, with Mr. Jacobs's story recounted in the Scottish Sunday Mail and on a Facebook page, launched by a family friend, that has attracted nearly 1,900 comments. One compares Mr. Jacobs's plight to that of an Ottawa high school student who had to fight to bring a gay partner to his Catholic prom. Another howls: "This is PUBLIC school not a MORMON one."
Warning: Long post ahead. If you just want the trailer, it’s this – “Everything is changing. Again.”
The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language
left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.
There’s a fascinating history behind this trophy as well. It was created by the 
The 
One of the cooler, subtle things that Google showed off at Google I/O was its new Android Cloud to Device Messaging service that’s a part of Android 2.2. The “don’t call it Push Notifications” service allows you to automatically send links from your computer to your Android device.
