[Thanks, Lance]
Filed under: Cellphones
Meizu M8 on sale for $440: buy at your own risk originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 08 Feb 2009 12:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | CommentsEngadget—Meizu M8 on sale for $440: buy at your own risk
[Thanks, Lance]
digg—Top 5 Players/Prospects For This Year's NBA Draft
Consensus seems to be few, if any, break out stars including with underclassmen.
“Let the Good Times Roll” by Guy Kawasaki—The 25 Random Things We Do For The Sake of Facebook
Written by Dan Zak
Narcissism? Pseudo-celebrity? Boredom? Whatever the motivator, Facebook’s “25 Things” lists are surely clogging up your news feed. (Chris Jackson/Getty Images)
1. We have been tagged in a Facebook note titled “25 Random Things About Me.”
2. Update: We have received seven of these alerts in the past seven days from seven different people.
3. This is just another online outbreak of mass self-disclosure and self-importance, like personality e-mail forwards of yore (boxers or briefs? Pacino or De Niro?). Everyone is typing out Random Things this week, and asking — nay, tagging — us to do the same.
4. A friend’s No. 3 Random Thing: “One of my favorite things to do is belt out monster ballads in my car, while pretending that I don’t see people looking at me like I’ve lost my mind.”
5. We are above reading these carefully worded train-of-thought brain dumps, we think. And we’ll make our own list only if we get paid by the item.
6. We read them anyway. Each list amounts to a single-spaced, one-page document enumerating “facts, habits, or goals” about the author.
7. Fact: We are weak.
8. Habit: Checking Facebook every 30 minutes.
9. Goal: To get back to work.
10. So we turn this Facebook mini-phenomenon into work.
11. In the past week, the daily rates of note-creating and friend-tagging have doubled and quintupled, respectively, says Brandee Barker, Facebook’s director of communications. “People of all ages and from all over the world are writing 25 very touching and insightful ‘things’ about their lives and tagging friends in order to share it more broadly,” she says.
12. A friend’s No. 17: “I have pooped my pants more than three times as an adult.”
13. Sociology 101: People use Facebook like this to compete for attention. “Attention is power,” says Michael Stefanone, assistant professor of communication at the University at Buffalo. “You see this in waves, friends contacting friends with this request. It’s self-serving.”
14. Sociology 201: People are supremely comfortable sharing intimate information about themselves in this pseudo-celebrity culture of online social networking, Stefanone says, but “what happens when I can learn about you and you’re not aware of it? These information asymmetries might put people at a disadvantage.” It’s reality TV’s fault, according to his latest study. We believe it. All those on-camera confessions and weirdly personal interviews . . . all of a sudden America knows a little too much about your banal private matters.
15. A former teacher’s No. 11: “I knew I was going to marry my wife when I went over to finally break up with her — and then couldn’t. This, despite the fact that she was looking particularly unattractive that day, and yet I have never seen something lovelier.”
16. We are touched.
17. We feel stupid, getting emotional about something that amounts to a marketing boon for Facebook.
18. We feel misled when we see that many of these Random Things are just comic fabrications, or textual performance pieces.
19. A friend’s No. 5: “I killed John Updike.”
20. Fact: Lung cancer killed John Updike.
21. Maybe this contagion isn’t about self-disclosure; it’s about our obsession with lists. It’s a comfortable format. It’s an orderly way to publicize the Random Things that make us oh-so-special.
22. Once you make a list about yourself, “you’ll suddenly discover an inventory of personal secrets, fears, and desires that flow out effortlessly and surprise you. There you are, big as life, in list form,” according to the book “List Your Self: Listmaking as the Way to Self-Discovery.”
23. Wait a minute. We are more complicated than list form, than pseudo-celebrity! Our journey of self-discovery is not divisible by numbered items!
24. Goal: Not to reduce ourselves to Random Things.
25. Fact: Too late.
digg—'Disgraceful' indeed: Fox crew ambushes NSA whistleblower
NSA whistleblower Russell Tice refuses to appear on the ridiculous O'Reilly Factor, and is ambushed by a know-nothing hack. Video here.
Slashdot—How Do I Start a University Transition To Open Source?
exmoron writes "I work at a small university (5,500 students) and am in a position to potentially influence future software purchasing decisions. I use a number of FOSS solutions at home (OpenOffice.org, Zotero, GIMP, VirtualBox). My university, on the other hand, is a Microsoft and proprietary software groupie (Vista boxes running MS Office 2007, Exchange email server, Endnote, Photoshop, Blackboard, etc.). I'd like to make an argument that going open source would save the university money and think through a gradual transition process to open source software (starting small, with something like replacing Endnote with Zotero, then MS Office with OpenOffice.org, and so on). Unfortunately, I can't find very good information online on site licenses for proprietary software. How much does a site-license for Endnote cost? What about a site license for MS Office for 2,000 computers? In short, what's the skinny on moving to open source? How much money could a university like mine save? Additionally, what other benefits are there to moving to open source that I could try to sell the university on? And what are the drawbacks (other than people whining about change)?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Om Malik—The NYT API: Newspaper as Platform
There’s been a lot of chatter about the newspaper industry in recent weeks — about whether newspaper companies should find something like iTunes, or use micropayments as a way to charge people for the news, or sue Google, or all of the above — and how journalism is at risk because newspapers are dying. But there’s been very little discussion about something that has the potential to fundamentally change the way that newspapers function (or at least one newspaper in particular), and that is the release of the New York Times’ open API for news stories. The Times has talked about this project since last year sometime, and it has finally happened; as developer Derek Gottfrid describes on the Open blog, programmers and developers can now easily access 2.8 million news articles going back to 1981 (although they are only free back to 1987) and sort them based on 28 different tags, keywords and fields.
It’s possible that this kind of thing escapes the notice of traditional journalists because it involves programming, and terms like API (which stands for “application programming interface”), and is therefore not really journalism-related or even media-related, and can be understood only by nerds and geeks. But if there’s one thing that people like Adrian Holovaty (lead developer of Django and founder of Everyblock) have shown us, it is that broadly speaking, content — including the news — is just data, and if it is properly parsed and indexed it can become something quite incredible: a kind of proto-journalism, that can be formed and shaped in dozens or even hundreds of different ways.
Doing this with all of the various elements of the news — names, places, events, details — on a large enough basis can reveal hidden patterns or connections that might not only improve an existing story but lead to new and completely unexpected ones. At the moment, only the research departments of newspapers have the tools to do this, but opening up an API the way the New York Times has can put those tools into anyone’s hands, allowing them to pursue projects and avenues that newspaper reporters and researchers might never think of. And from the point of view of the Times as a media outlet and business, it turns the paper into a kind of platform for other services and features. That makes the paper and its content more valuable, and could lead to all kinds of commercial licensing possibilities and partnerships — not to mention being good marketing.
This kind of thinking is at the core of Jeff Jarvis’s book “What Would Google Do?” His main point is that virtually any business can benefit from thinking about making its data more open, allowing others to remix and manipulate it to see what comes out, and then taking advantage of what can be learned from those experiments. All the New York Times is doing is using its article database in the same way that Google uses its map database, or the Google Earth satellite-imagery database — as a foundation upon which other things can be built. The Times deserves kudos for pursuing such a open model rather than locking its articles up and trying to charge people for every view. I have no doubt that they will benefit far more from such an approach in the long run than would ever be possible with a pay-per-view strategy.
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Om Malik—What If It’s Worse Than We Think?
When the financial crisis reached full bloom last fall, it took many technology companies some time before they were able to appreciate the impact it would have on them. This year, we’re seeing the fallout in the form big losses or shrunken profits, layoffs and other signs of retrenchment.
Alongside the pain, however, there’s a sense of optimism — that the worst is over and the tech industry just has to muddle through until the economy recovers. But the worst may not, in fact, be over; Financial Meltdown 2.0 might be lurking around the corner to deliver a second, possibly harsher blow.
The tech world is at a crossroads. But the choice of which road we take isn’t ours. It belongs to the financial markets and the regulators who are still struggling to right them. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is expected to unveil another plan to address the big banks’ bad assets and stop more homeowners from falling into foreclosure. Details of the plan may offer a signpost as to where we’re headed.
Down one road is a scenario described by Cisco CEO John Chambers this week:
“The majority of our customers are guessing 2010 while a smaller group sees the upturn towards the end of 2009. Given the coordinated activities of global central banks and the extremely large stimulus packages that are being implemented in almost all of our major countries, I tend to be a little bit more optimistic than most of my customers.”
The other road isn’t so sunny, and it’s the road we’ll head down if Geithner’s fix doesn’t work and the markets slip into another crisis. Some of the people who saw the banking crisis coming early on are suggesting that course is the more likely one. George Soros argued last week that bank assets are still deteriorating despite the first round of rescue money, a fact evident in bank stock prices. Others, like Eric Sprott, Bill Gross and Mark Faber, are now discussing a depression as if it’s a near certainty.
Not a recession, a depression.
If executives at technology companies are also talking about this, it’s not very audible. Last week’s news focused on new ways of looking at the ocean floor from your computer, or being able track (even stalk) your friends. These are interesting enough innovations, but what are companies planning to do if another crisis hits?
Right now, an economic depression is still far from certain, but the possibility is real enough that companies will need to prepare. What will it mean?
At first, it will favor large, cash-rich companies like Google, Microsoft and Cisco, or any company that can finance itself through its own operations. Others with decent promise but weak cash flows might hope to be bought. VCs will be forced to trim portfolios. Companies that have cut staff to the bone will have to cut more, even at the risk of hurting future growth. But even healthier companies might see their cash flows dwindle over time.
For the past few years, most tech companies have progressed incrementally, tossing out a new feature or a new gadget and seeing what takes root. But an even tougher economy would demand harder questions, rethinking what a company does at the most basic level: Why is your company here? What is it offering and why would someone else want to pay for your stuff?
In short, what would your company look like in a dramatically different economic landscape? To be clear, let me say again that the landscape may not necessarily change. Maybe John Chambers’ optimism will prove to be right. But we have reached a point where we need to at least be asking, what if things are worse that we think?
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MAKE Magazine—Space colony artwork - 1970
Space colony artwork - 1970...
A couple of space colony summer studies were conducted at NASA Ames in the 1970s. Colonies housing about 10,000 people were designed. A number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made. These have been converted to jpegs and are available as thumbnails, quarter page, full screen and publication quality images.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!
CNET News.com—Rumor: The Sony switch to Intel's Larrabee chip
Here's the rumor of the weekend, if not the week: Sony will use Intel's Larrabee chip in its upcoming PlayStation 4.
Lifehacker—Five Best Lifehacker Code Apps and Extensions [Hive Five]
Over the last few years we've had the privilege of releasing exclusive applications, scripts, and extensions that have hopefully boosted your productivity. We've gathered up your favorites here.
Earlier this week we asked you to choose your favorite homegrown Lifehacker tool. After reviewing the fruits of our in-house coders' labor, you nominated your favorites. We've compiled the top five contenders here.
Texter (Windows)
Texter is a robust text replacement tool. At its most basic Texter allows you to assign abbreviations for longer snippets of text you normally use. You can easily set up Texter to turn sig1, sig2, and sig3 into various email signatures or any other block of text that you use with frequency. You can also assign a trigger key, so that the replacement only occurs after you hit the tab key, for example. That way if your trigger for your email signature is sig, it will only activate after you type sig+TAB, but not when you start typing the word significant. Additionally Texter has support for scripting beyond basic text replacement, allowing you assign keyboard commands to your trigger, like tabbing to another cell in a form. For a detailed tutorial on setting up Texter, including scripting, check out the Texter homepage.
Better GReader (Firefox)
If the outpouring of votes for it during our Hive Five Best RSS Newsreaders is any indication, Lifehacker readers love Google Reader. Better GReader is a collection of scripts compiled into a Firefox extension that make life with Google Reader even sweeter. The improvements are numerous, including: maximizing the article display pane, automatically adding new feeds to Google Reader (instead of asking if you'd like iGoogle or Reader); colorization of item headers; the ability to remove unread counts; mark all entries up to the current one as read; enhanced preview, and more. If you love using Google Reader but have a few gripes, make sure to check out the full list of tools in Better GReader to see if it solves your RSS woes.
Belvedere (Windows)
Belvedere is an automated file-management tool. Using Belvedere, you can assign sets of rules to monitored folders for handling the files found there. You can assign rules to move, copy, delete, rename, or even open files based on their name, extension, size, and creation date and more. If you find yourself doing repetitive things on your computer that don't really require your input beyond being the one steering the mouse, it might be time to turn over the house keeping to Belvedere. Everything from cleaning out temporary directories and keeping your download folder from bloating up to organizing your incoming files by type can be accomplished with a few simple rules that will free up a big chunk of your time. Automation is your friend!
Better GMail 2 (Firefox)
Like Better GReader, Better Gmail 2 takes an already awesome service and adds even more features to it. Supercharge your Gmail experience with the Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension and add these handy features: forced encryption (https), modified keyboard macros, inbox count beside favicon, better integration of Google Calendar and Reader with the Gmail interface, attachment icons that represent the actual file type, assistant for easy filter creation, folder style hierarchy on the sidebar, and more. Like all of our "Better XYZ" extensions the large list of features can be toggled on and off on a feature by feature basis so you get only the tweaks you need.
Better YouTube (Firefox)
Better YouTube is a Firefox extension that combines several great YouTube Greasemonkey scripts into one package. With Better YouTube you can enlarge videos, hide user comments, declutter the YouTube viewing page, disable autoplay, and quickly download video itself. Add it to your installation of Firefox to take control of your viewing at the mega-popular video sharing site.
Now that you've see the top five Lifehacker tools that have brought a touch of productivity to the lives of you fellow readers, it's time to vote on which one is the must-have-tool from the Lifehacker stable.
Sound off in the comments below about everything from your unholy love of Belevedere—the automation tool and the charming butler!—to what kind of tool you'd like to see us tackle in the future.
Gizmodo—Negroponte Open Sources OLPC Hardware Design, Invites Copy-Cats [Olpc]
The embattled OLPC program, already reeling from job cuts and salary decreases, is making one final attempt to stay afloat: Open source everything and hope enough companies copy the design to make it profitable.
The news was delivered by OLPC frontman Nicholas Negroponte himself, during remarks at this week's TED 2009 conference.
Blogger Ethan Zuckerman, reporting from TED, said Negroponte hopes the new open source hardware design will be "something that everyone copies."
"Commercial markets will go to no end to stop you. It's sort of a tragedy," Negroponte said. "So the future of One Laptop Per Child is to go 'from uppercase to lower case,' to 'build something that everyone copies.'"
According to Negroponte, the open design will lead to companies worldwide creating 5 to 6 million machines, per month, in three years time. That's a lot of little mean green machines with those weird alien wifi antennas.
And while this technically sounds like more of a licensing deal than true "open source," it will be interesting to see what companies cook up using the OLPC design over the next few years. If it catches on, that is. [Ethan Zuckerman via CNET]
O'Reilly Radar—Four short links: 6 Feb 2009
Today is Waitangi Day in New Zealand, our National Day of Scratching Our Heads and Wondering Whether We Should Scrap This Day and Get Ourselves A Real National Day Instead. Despite the obvious debauchery taking place on such an occasion, I've taken the time to bring you four tasty science, art, mobile, and data links. Have a good weekend!
- Add Art -- a clever Firefox adblocker hack to replace ads with art work. The selection of art is curated and updated regularly. (via Tim on Twitter)
- Yahoo's Key Scientific Challenges -- Yahoo! offers money and access to PhD students whose projects fall into these categories. For example: "Meaningful Instrumentation: Activity and interaction data are logged by most application and devices as a matter of course. Most logging protocols foreground system operations for debugging and optimization. However, what forms of device instrumentation and from these what kinds of metrics best reflect user experience of the internet across different devices and applications? What does a human centered, internet logging and data analysis paradigm look like? What new forms of "experience logging" are emerging?"
- Golden Age of Cellphones (Tim Bray) -- this post is almost a month but I've kept the tab open to see whether I still believe it. I do. We're seeing the door open to mass adoption of cellphones that fail to suck (even though the mobile phone market dropped 12% in Q4 2008, smartphones grew) and the more open the device in your hand, the better chance there is that something good for the user can be made.
- Personal Data Integration (Toby Segaran) -- another oldie but goodie, this one from 2008. Toby pulled contacts from phone calls, email, contacts, social networks, etc. and built a visual representation of who he talks to and how often. His friend groups show up as clusters, which leads me to wonder how much of the pain of building groups in social networking apps could be replaced with simple observation and analysis ("you talk to these people who talk to each other, what would you like to call this group?").
CNN.com—Nearly 100 killed in Australia bushfires
The death toll from the wildfires in southeastern Australia has risen to 84 as thousands of firefighters battle to contain the flames. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has announced the creation of a $6.7 million relief fund to assist more than 600 families that have lost homes to the blaze.
digg—Most Popular Twitter Clients Revealed
The micro-messaging service Twitter became popular in part due to the thousands of different ways to post and view Tweets…but what are the most popular ways to share your Tweets with the world?
Engadget—RIM's BlackBerry Storm shows its cheaper side on Amazon
Verizon's BlackBerry Storm is getting a little kick in its pricing courtesy of an Amazon rebate-free rebate. The deal here is that the infamous touchscreen BlackBerry is now $99.99 on a two-year stint, no rebate paperwork, no mailing things anywhere, just shell out cash, get phone, call people. Verizon has a buy one get one free thing going on right now, so if you're looking for two Storms for the price of one -- and that one is still $199 -- you can head on over to see them. Everybody happy now?
[Via geardiary]
[Via geardiary]
Filed under: Cellphones
RIM's BlackBerry Storm shows its cheaper side on Amazon originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 08 Feb 2009 11:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | CommentsThe Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)—Livin' on the edge with optimized, beta Firefox builds
Filed under: Internet Tools, Open Source, Beta Beat
Do you feel the need... the need for speed? With more and more of our computing lives taking place via our web browsers, eking out even a slight performance improvement for Firefox or Safari (or a similar reduction of resource demands; I'm looking at you, Flash Player) can improve the user experience noticeably. One way to improve browser performance, if you've got the chops and the time, is to compile the open-source browser of choice yourself, with all the tweaks for the specific processor platform you're using.Web guru Neil Bruce Lee has offered the performance-hungry Firefox user the choice of G5 and Intel optimized versions of the 3.0 release; now, for those who want to live completely on the far side, Chris Latko has rolled out an Intel-optimized build of the beta Firefox 3.1 (Shiretoko) browser. With the architecture-specific tweaks Latko made, along with the inclusion of the TraceMonkey Javascript native compiler, this is the screaming-est version of Firefox ever to grace an Intel Mac screen... but be wary, it's going to be less stable than an official release, and many of your favorite plugins may not work (best to disable them all in the 3.0x version, then enable one at a time in the beta build to make sure they play nicely).
Don't roll the Firefox way? There's a bleeding-edge choice for you too: WebKit nightly builds, based on the most current code that goes into future versions of Safari. Again, you should see a boost in speed and possibly a corresponding decrease in stability, so tread with caution.
If you're running an optimized browser build, share your experiences with us below.
Thanks Chris!
[Hat tip: Mac.Blorge]
TUAWLivin' on the edge with optimized, beta Firefox builds originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 08 Feb 2009 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Gizmodo—LG Arena KM900 Combines iPhone-Inspired Interface With Touch-Based 3D Cube [Cellphones]
We teased the LG KM900 about unabashedly copying the iPhone earlier this month, but maybe we should scale that back a bit. New info leads me to believe the interface is more SUSE than Apple.
Sure, those incredibly similar menu icons are still there at the bottom, but that spinning cube is more Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop than iPhone. Novell's been spinning their Linux desktop OS like a cube-shaped top for years, and this S-Class cube interface from LG reminded me of it today.
Says LG of their cube:
A cube-based layout provides four customizable home screens for direct access to all features. Music, movies, pictures and more are within reach, thanks to intuitive, touch-based 3D menus. The rich 3D graphics give S-Class a life-like look that makes it natural and easy to navigate.
Of course, that spinning, natural and "easy to navigate" 3D cube might not perform quite that way when the phone is loaded up with apps, music and other memory-hogging info, but we'll know for sure when this guy officially launches at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on February 16.
[TechCrunch—Nokia Shaping Up To Launch Its Very Own App Store?
Our sister site MobileCrunch may be convinced that not every company needs an app store, but for Nokia to launch a central platform for distribution and sales of micro-programs developed for the Symbian OS, it would make a whole lotta sense.
And if what Eldar Murtazin, editor of Mobile-review.com (both blogs are in Russian) writes is true, then that’s exactly what the Finnish juggernaut in mobile is going to launch at the upcoming Mobile World Congress. I concur with Engadget who says launching an application portal/store is a logical step to take for any mobile handset maker these days, but if Nokia is in fact going to launch one it will be worth taking a look at, and not only from a consumer or developer standpoint.
According to UnwiredView, this is what Murtazin wrote in Russian:
At first glance, for now, the app portal looks so so, there is some confusion. But they are trying, polishing it and a lot has changed for the better in a matter of days. A right step in a right direction… And the distribution and revenue sharing model between app makers and Nokia looks very attractive.
At this point, this is nothing but a rumor, but such a move would definitely make sense and Muzartin is known to have strong insider connections in the mobile industry so this isn’t just a random thought from a blogger.
It’s worth noting in this context that Nokia now fully owns Symbian Limited, but contributes the mobile operating system and S60 software to the Symbian Foundation, which is readying its official launch with a slew of members from the industry, including Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG, Sharp and dozens more. There’s also an active community site for Symbian developers already in place, so they wouldn’t be creating an ecosystem from scratch.
Then again, as someone pointed out in the comments of the Engadget post, Nokia already has a couple of half-baked portals for mobile software, e.g. Mosh, Download! and Software Market, so it’s unclear what would happen to those or how they would be able to morph these sites as well as the N-Gage platform for games into one single application store.
We’ll find out more about Nokia’s plans at the Mobile Word Congress, which is being held from 16 to 19 February in Barcelona.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
digg—John McCain's manager arrested for child molestation
Under investigation is Jeffrey Claude Bartleson, 52, who was arrested Jan. 29 and then re-arrested Wednesday after a campaign worker in the McCain office told police she believed Bartleson molested one of her sons.
hack a day—Plexi cliffhanger for trackmate
If you’ve ever wanted to play with tangible tracking systems quick and cheap, you might be interested in this super quick tracking surface for trackmate. Trackmate is open source software for physical object tracking. Making a surface for it isn’t that hard in the first place but this one is probably the easiest. All you really need is some Plexiglas, some c-clamps and a web cam. The whole thing packs into a backpack or over the shoulder bag. This would be perfect for live performances.
Boing Boing—Studio 360 goes to Japan
(Photo: artist Erina Matsui, interviewed by Lisa for her piece)
Lisa Katayama says:
In November, I went to Tokyo with the producers of Studio360 to work on an hour-long radio show about Japanese art and culture. It aired February 7 on NPR, and has tons of great content based on our reporting there — a visit to suicide forest, a peek into the world of depressed youth, wisdom from travel writer Pico Iyer, as well as interviews with local poets, designers, and architects. I produced my own segment about three provocative, successful young female artists whom I thought would be vocal feminists. But interestingly, when I asked them to explain the deeper meaning behind their work, they said there was none. Later, in New York, I met an artist who told me that she, too, grew up painting provocative women in Japan, but she only realized she was a feminist when she went to art school in the US and was encouraged to think about the hidden meaning behind her work. The audio segments and some awesome video clips that the highly talented Studio360 producers made are all up on their web site.
Studio360 in Japan via TokyoMango
Lifehacker—IYHY Strips Websites Down for Fast Text Browsing [Web Utilities]
IYHY is a web-based service that acts as a text-only proxy, stripping down websites for faster load times.
Like previously reviewed page minimizersBareSite and Finch, IYHY returns just the basic text of the site you plug into it. With Lifehacker.com and and news.google.com as our test sites, though, IYHY beat the two previous sites hands down for clarity and condensation. Formatting is cleaner, no images were mistakenly thrown back into the mix, comments were still visible, and with IYHY there were no annoying [IMAGE] tags scattered throughout the stripped content. For mobile browsing or surreptitious reading at the office, IYHY does a suberb job stripping all non-text elements from a site. There is no login required for the basic proxy service, but with a free account you can save your most frequently accessed sites to save some time—and your thumbs.
Gizmodo—Samsung NC10-11PBK Special Edition Boosts Battery Life, Price Tag [NetBooks]
Samsung's leap into the 10-inch netbook arena, represented in physical form by the glossy NC10, is receiving a "special edition" hype injection. There is some substance here, however, mostly in the area of battery life.
The battery boost arrives courtesy of a higher capacity 6-cell battery, capable of nearly nine and a half hours of runtime, Samsung says. Other additions to the NC10 line include a user-requested larger trackpad and what is perhaps the bane of laptops and netbooks these days: a glossy screen.
The special edition NC10 is $50 more than the original, checking in at $500. Pre-order only for now, and no new pics of the trackpad update or the smudge-loving screen. [Amazon via Portable Monkey - Thanks, Peter!]
Slashdot—$2 Billion For Broadband Cut From Stimulus Bill
pdabbadabba points out a CNN report on changes to the planned economic stimulus bill (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 [PDF]) that will remove the $2 billion allocated to broadband development. The changes also eliminated smaller amounts allocated to NASA, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, and the National Science Foundation. $16 billion in school construction funding was removed, as well as another $3.5 billion for higher education construction. A variety of environmental projects were also cut or reduced (half of the $7 billion set aside for energy-efficient federal buildings, half of the $600 million for hybrid federal vehicles), and over $8 billion in health-related provisions are gone. The bill will likely go to vote in the Senate on Tuesday.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
TechCrunch—ShopIt Acquires Triana Global, Launches Ad Network For Social Networks
ShopIt, a social commerce platform that enables people to set up an online store and sell goods through a variety of social networking services, has finished integrating its recently acquired Triana Global publisher network and relaunching it as ShopIt Media, another social advertising platform.
Like many others, Triana Global claims to have been one of the first ad networks that started focussing on monetizing facebook applications after the social networking service started opening up for outside developers with the launch of Facebook Platform back in May 2007. Its biggest competitors are Adknowledge (which recently picked up both Cubics and Lookery Ads), Social Media, Offerpal Media and Appssavvy.
The service has managed to stay largely under the radar since its launch, and even when they started guaranteeing floor CPM rates of $0.15 and $0.08 CPC rates on standard banner sizes for new developers joining the network they seem to have gotten the silence treatment and were also downright criticized for developing their own Facebook apps besides acting as a social advertising network. It didn’t help that Triana Global claimed to have hundreds of applications in their network, which they later expanded to other social networks like MySpace, hi5 and Bebo, but never published a portfolio or customer reference list.
Either way, apparently the company was acquired by ShopIt in October 2008, and that startup is now relaunching the service as ShopIt Media, essentially providing a way for their users (1 million according to the company) to market the products they have for sale across a multitude of social communities. New publishers are being wooed with a 80% revenue share for all campaigns on Facebook, Ning, MySpace, hi5, Bebo and Orkut that are kicked off in February.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
digg—The Worst Contracts Throughout Baseball History
Ah … the folly of baseball owners and their big piles of cash. The MLB at its finest...
digg—Official-looking Kindle 2 pictures and pricing leak out
We're not going to call it official yet, but a bunch of very real-looking Kindle 2 press images just hit the tubes, and we've got to say we're pretty convinced. Although the device itself looks basically the same as in those previously-leaked shots we saw back in October, there are some surprises in store.
digg—Future Tech May Reduce Bird-Plane Collisions
Aggressive radar, flashing lights, and reflective coatings built into planes may prevent bird strikes like the one that likely led to last month's "miracle" Hudson River landing.
Engadget—LG Arena (KM900) pops official, brings along 3D S-Class UI
[Via UnwiredView, thanks Staska]
Filed under: Cellphones
LG Arena (KM900) pops official, brings along 3D S-Class UI originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 08 Feb 2009 10:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Commentsdigg—Auto-Tune: Why Pop Music Sounds Perfect
Why do pop vocals suddenly sound perfect--or intentionally imperfect? The force behind both trends is an ingenious plug-in called Auto-Tune, a downloadable studio trick that can take a vocal and instantly nudge it onto the proper note or move it to the correct pitch. It's like Photoshop for the human voice.
digg—Slumdog Millionaire Child Actors Underpaid, still in slums
This is one of the most hyped movies in years. It struck me as truly sad to learn that two of its child stars were dramatically underpaid for their roles, are still living in horrific slum conditions, and have even been told that they will not get any more money until they are 18 and stay in school the whole time! A bit colonial, no, Danny Boyle?
digg—Huge Tornado Crosses Over I-70 Near Quinter, Kansas, USA
23 May 2008. Photographer and videographer: William T. Hark
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)—Foxmarks brings free bookmarks syncing to Safari
Filed under: Software, Freeware, Internet Tools, Leopard
Foxmarks, the popular bookmark syncing service for Firefox, has now come to Safari. The service is designed to make it easy to keep your browser bookmarks synced when using different computers, by linking each browser to your own online repository. It was previously limited to Firefox, but the most recent version now includes support for Safari as well as Internet Explorer on Windows.
While Safari users have previously been able to sync instances of Safari on different Macs with MobileMe, Foxmarks allows you to sync not just Safari on different Macs, but all three supported browsers (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer) on both PCs and Macs. So, for instance, if you're one of those poor folks forced to use a PC at work, Foxmarks will keep your Firefox bookmarks there synced with your home Mac's copy of Safari.
Unsurprisingly, Firefox is still the best supported of the three. For instance, password syncing is only supported on Firefox. And, as of yet, the Windows version of Safari is not supported. Nonetheless, if you want to get your bookmark sync on, the newest version of Foxmarks looks like a winner.
The Foxmarks plugins are free downloads from Foxmarks; the Safari version is Leopard-only.
[via jkOnTheRun]
TUAWFoxmarks brings free bookmarks syncing to Safari originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 08 Feb 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Gizmodo—Pentax Rebate Knocks $100 Off Entry-Level K2000 DSLR Kits [Dealzmodo]
A nice little $100 rebate and a two-year warranty boost are being applied this month to the Pentax K2000 entry-level DSLR and the K20D, respectively. This Dealzmodo expires February 22.
According to a release over at TechCrunch, the rebate is applied across all three K2000 kits:
The K2000 flash kit is dropping down to $600 and that includes the K2000 body, smc DA L 18-55mm F3.5-5.6 AL lens and the AF200FG Auto Flash. A two-lens kit for the K2000 is going for $649.95 and includes the aforementioned 18-55mm lens along with the smc DA L 50-200mm F4-5.6 lens. There's a single lens kit (18-55mm) for $549.95 and the body itself is $499.95.
Crave cameras that look like they were assembled from discarded Stormtrooper parts? This could be the deal you're looking for. Move along! [TechCrunch]
digg—Lesbian Sues Hospital Over Denied Access To Dying Partner
As her partner of 17 years slipped into a coma, Janice Langbehn pleaded with staff to let her into the woman's hospital room. Despite legal proof of guardianship and "power of attorney," Langbehn and the couple's three adopted children were not recognized as family and denied access until eight hours later -- just as the last rites were performed.
Slashdot—DAM Pops Energy Star's Bubble
Martin Hellman writes "Last month we discussed a major problem with the EPA's Energy Star program. A Sony TV that was advertised to draw less than 0.1 watts in standby mode was actually drawing 15 watts — 150 times the stated value. A lack of information in the user manual and a poor response from Sony led me to suspect the problem was with the Electronic Program Guide feature, but a lack of information in the User Guide and a lack of response from Sony made it impossible to be sure — or to turn off the EPG. At current prices, that power consumption cost me about as much as a subscription to TV Guide magazine! The EPG was not as free as the on screen instructions would have you believe. Now, Device Guru reports on the resolution of that issue. As suspected, the problem was with the EPG, and there is a way to turn it off — now documented in that story. The problem is probably not unique to Sony or TVs that claim Energy Star compliance (devices are self-certified by the manufacturers!), so picking up a power meter is likely to have a good return on investment. As a result of this waste of power, the EPA is planning for future versions of the Energy Star requirements to limit the amount of time a TV can spend in Download Acquisition Mode (DAM) as the time for acquiring the EPG is known."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
digg—New World Wolves and Coyotes Owe Genetic Debt to Dogs
In a bit of genetic sleuthing, a team of researchers has determined that black wolves and coyotes in North America got their distinctive color from dogs that carried a gene mutation to the New World.
digg—Jellyfish protein helps regrow joint cartilage
Mucin, a protein extracted from Nomura's jellyfish, has proved highly effective in regrowing cartilage in joints, scientists in Japan claim.
CNN.com—Tough choices for America's hungry
It's hard to look for a job when your stomach is rumbling. Walter Thomas started skipping meals when his savings were running out and his cabinets were almost empty. He didn't want to turn to food stamps, but eventually applied for aid. With the economy in meltdown, Thomas is not alone. In October, more than one in 10 people -- about 31 million -- were using food stamps, according to the government.
CNN.com—U.S. soldiers killed while disabling Afghan bomb
Two U.S. soldiers were killed while trying to disable a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan Sunday, a local journalist at the scene told CNN.
digg—Apple Rejects Obama Trampoline iPhone App, Leaves Us Puzzled
Video game developer Swamiware was surprised to see its latest iPhone app rejected by Apple, and so are we. The application was a harmless game that let you select a known U.S. politician (both republicans and democrats) and have him/her jump a virtual trampoline.
digg—Bangkok will be submerged by 2030
“Right now, nothing is being done,” says Meteorologist Smith Dharmasaroja, head of Thailand’s National Disaster Warning Center. “And if nothing is ever done? Bangkok will be flooded.” By 2030, Bangkok will lie under 1.5 meters (5 feet) of seawater, Smith says. He is calling for a massive dike spanning the Gulf of Thailand, a $2.8 billion project.
digg—Video Game Characters that Look Like David Bowie
As a celebration of all things Bowie, and a tribute to the video game characters that have clearly taken inspiration from his undeniable fashion sense and stylish flare, we present this humble feature -- the top ten video game characters that look like David Bowie!
Slashdot—OpenDNS To Block and Monitor Conficker Worm
Linker3000 writes "According to The Register, OpenDNS plans to introduce an new service that will prevent PCs infected with the Conficker (aka Downadup) malware from contacting its control servers, and will also make it easy for admins to know if even a single machine under their control has been infected by Conficker: 'Starting Monday, any networks with PCs that try to connect to the Conficker addresses will be flagged on an admin's private statistics page. The service is available for free to both businesses and home users.' With the amount of trouble this worm has caused, perhaps this is a good time to take a look at OpenDNS if you haven't done so already."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Engadget—Acer Aspire One D150 with N270 previewed, now available for US pre-order
[Via iTech News]
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Filed under: Laptops
Acer Aspire One D150 with N270 previewed, now available for US pre-order originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 08 Feb 2009 08:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | Email this | CommentsThe Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)—App Store: "Demo" no, "Lite" yes
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Apple, iPhone, App Store
Our dear friend Erica Sadun has outlined one of Apple's more sticky App Store policies over at Ars Technica. There's been a lot of customer pressure, as we've said before, to put "try it" versions of apps on the App Store, and quite a few developers have done exactly that, by releasing a "Free" or "Lite" version of the paid app along with the real thing. But Apple has some pretty strict rules about doing so: every app on the store needs to be fully functional and stand on its own. You can leave out some levels of your game, for example, but you can't put a timed limit on it or remove features that are central to the app itself.Of course, there's a grey area there -- what features are central to the app, exactly? But Erica boils it down to words: putting "Lite" or "Free" in the title are fine, but releasing "Demo" or "Beta" versions are not.
It's too bad Apple hasn't fleshed this out more -- everything we've heard about how people are buying these apps shows that if customers have a chance to try the app, they're much more likely to spend money on it later on. But right now, developers have to keep up two different versions, and they have to dodge the pitfalls of deciding what goes in each one, while keeping them both "fully functional."
TUAWApp Store: "Demo" no, "Lite" yes originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 08 Feb 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
digg—The girl who got Peter Sellers' 5m - and she never even met
She's not his daughter - she never even met the Closeau star. But this dressed-down student has still inherited his fortune.
CNN.com—German bishops: Holocaust denier must go
Germany's Catholic bishops are calling for the expulsion of a former bishop, recently brought back into the church by Pope Benedict XVI, after new reports that he denies the Holocaust.
CNN.com—French toxic ship ends global odyssey
A ship laden with toxic substances is due to arrive in northeast England for recycling Sunday, ending an odyssey that has seen it turned away from at least three other countries.
Slashdot—Nvidia Is Trying To Make an x86 Chip
Slatterz writes with a story from PC Authority which says that "Word has reached us that Nvidia is definitely working on an x86 chip and the firm is heavily recruiting x86 engineers all over Silicon Valley. The history behind this can be summarised by saying they bought an x86 team, and don't have a licence to make the parts. Given that the firm burned about every bridge imaginable with the two companies who can give them licences, Nvidia has about a zero chance of getting one."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
digg—Stars Form At Record Speeds In Infant Galaxy
When galaxies are born, do their stars form everywhere at once, or only within a small core region? Recent measurements of an international team provide the first concrete evidence that star-forming regions in infant galaxies are indeed small - but also hyperactive, producing stars at astonishingly high rates.
digg—More people call Kellogg's about Phelps than Salmonella
Kellogg's hotline (800-962-1413) says: "If you would like to share comments regarding our relationship with Michael Phelps, please press 1...If you are calling about the recent peanut butter recall, please press 2." Kellogg's made a bad call about American's maturity on marijuana policy. Now, with a boycott, they know it. Will they retract?
MAKE Magazine—Making red wine vinegar and best of CRAFT
Red wine vinegar is really easy to make at home. All you need is some leftover red wine, some water, red wine vinegar mother, and a few tools. You can look for red wine vinegar at your local homebrewing shop, but mine was out, so I ordered it online. It's basically "live" red wine vinegar which contains the bacteria Acetobacter, which eats alcohol and turns it into acetic acid, the tangy flavor we know as vinegar. This project appears as an article in CRAFT, Vol. 9 by Alastair Bland, which you can preview in our Digital Edition.
Subscribe to the CRAFT Podcast in iTunes, or download the mov, mp4, or iPhone/Android video of this project.
Get the PDF of this project and then check out CRAFT: 09 for more great projects!
Here are some of my favorite posts from this week on the CRAFT blog:
- Bent Objects Horrific Yarn Sculpture
- 2009 Tokyo International Great Quilt Show
- Checkin In: Dev Khan's Inspired Wirework and Lapidary
- Papermode: Hand-Stitched Boxes and Cards
digg—CIA say UK terrorists are biggest threat to US
Barack Obama has been warned by the CIA that British Islamist extremists are the greatest threat to US homeland security.
Joi Ito's Web—Dubai and learning about the unknowable
As I read The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and a draft of Joshua Ramo's new book, I notice a common theme in many of the good books that I'm reading. Most significant events are not predictable. "Education" and at the notion that we actually understand the world causes us to be unprepared for the unpredictable. Science, which makes a great attempt at trying to make the world appear predictable, is really a rough approximation of things so that our simple minds can try to grasp the complex world around us. It also remind me of Science in Action by Bruno Latour which I wrote about years ago which argues that scientific facts are really a product of a very social and political process and isn't really a kind of channeling of mother nature as it might appear to be.
In The Way of Zen, Alan Watts has a wonderful explanation of how western science and philosophy and words themselves take the unknowable "void" and turn them into "rigorous" and "understandable" abstractions of the world which can't really be described by science or words. In a way, everything we write or argue is a version of the "assume a frictionless surface" or as Joshua says in his book, "imagine a spherical cow" jokes about physicists failing at describing solutions to real-world problems. All of our theories are very incomplete models of the real world and the only way to really get close to understanding the real world requires a kind of "unlearning" and a connection with the real world at an intuitive and an "uneducated" level.
Immersion and mindfulness are really important ways to see things that you normally don't see. I think it was Thich Nhat Hanh who said that a monastery is not a good place to learn to meditate because anyone can meditate in a monastery. (This might have been the Dalai Lama... I can't find the reference right now.) It is through learning mindfulness and meditation when there is chaos, suffering and pressure, that we really learn.
In a way, part of the reason for my moving to the Middle East was that while I continue to learn in any environment, days that I spend in the US or Japan tend to be mostly similar to previous days and relatively predictable, pushing me towards the somewhat typical mode of feeling in control or knowledgeable about what's going on.
What I find fascinating (and stressful) is that every day I spend in the Middle East is completely full of surprises and pushes me closer and closer to the understanding that I really don't understand anything. Sort of the pure idiot mode. In a way, I've become more aware and much more mindful of everything. One effect of this is that I less and less fear of the unpredictable and the unknown and unknowable.
I'm still really at the beginning of my immersion process, but chatting with everyone about my experiences in Dubai and reading some of the books that I brought with me helped me tie together some of these thoughts and reflect so I though I'd share. ;-)
