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Oblong's g-speak Brings "Minority Report" Interface to Life
- tracheopterix writes "Oblong Industries, a startup based in LA has unveiled g-speak, an operational version of the notable interface from Minority Report. One of Oblong's founders served as science and technology adviser for the film; the interface was an extension of his doctoral work at the MIT Media Lab. Oblong calls g-speak a 'spatial operating environment' and adds that 'the SOE's combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984.'" The video shown on Oblong's front page is an impressive demo.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Massive Martian Glaciers Found
- Kozar_The_Malignant writes "Scientific American is reporting that 'data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter point to vast glaciers buried beneath thin layers of crustal debris.' Data from the surface-penetrating radar on MRO revealed that two well-known mid-latitude features are composed of solid water ice. One is about three times the size of the City of Los Angeles. This certainly makes the idea of establishing a station on Mars far more plausible."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How To Find a Mobile Games Publisher?
- n01 writes "In the last few months of my spare time, I've been implementing an abstract strategy board game (that I invented) along with a decent AI. The game resembles TwixT in that it is also a connection game, and could be played without the need for a cellphone or computer. The implementation on the Java 2 Mobile Edition platform will soon be finished, with only some minor usability and sound issues to fix. While I enjoyed working on the game (actually more than on my day job as a programmer) I would still like to earn some money from selling the game, so I can work more on such projects in the future. What experiences have Slashdot readers had with selling their applications/games for mobile phones? With which publisher will I have the broadest audience and achieve the highest earnings? Would you try to publish the game both as a mobile game and a traditional board game?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Resurrecting the Mighty Mammoth, Cheaply
- somanyrobots writes with an interesting followup in the New York Times to the earlier-reported substantial reconstruction of the woolly mammoth genome: "Scientists are talking for the first time about the old idea of resurrecting extinct species as if this staple of science fiction is a realistic possibility, saying that a living mammoth could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million. The same technology could be applied to any other extinct species from which one can obtain hair, horn, hooves, fur or feathers, and which went extinct within the last 60,000 years, the effective age limit for DNA." (The Washington Post article linked from the earlier post was much more skeptical, calling such an attempt "still firmly the domain of science fiction." The New York Times article, while describing the process in similar terms, also calls attention to recent advances in sequencing DNA, as well as recoding DNA for cloning.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Unix Dict/grep Solves Left-Side-of-Keyboard Puzzle
- destinyland writes "For decades, people have been asking this brain teaser: 'What's the longest word you can type with only the left-hand letters on a keyboard?' The answer is supposed to be 'stewardesses,' but grepping the standard dictionary that ships with Unix reveals a much better answer. There's nearly 2,000 shorter words that can typed with only the left hand — including one word that's even longer. (The article also quotes a failed novel attempt using nothing but words typed on the keyboard's left side.)"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Kaminsky Bug Options Include "Do Nothing," Says IETF
- netbuzz writes "Meeting in Minneapolis this week, the Internet engineering community is debating whether to aggressively fashion and apply fixes for the so-called Kaminsky bug in the DNS discovered this summer, or to simply let its threat stand as motivation for all to move with greater speed toward DNSSEC, which is considered the best long-term security solution. Problem with the latter approach is that DNSSEC has been in the works for a decade already, no one is confident it will be universally embraced, and the Kaminsky flaw is causing real problems today.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Search For the Tomb of Copernicus Reaches an End
- duh P3rf3ss3r writes "The Associated Press reports that after 200 years of speculation and investigation, the tomb of Nicolaus Copernicus has been found. Although the heliocentric concept had been suggested earlier, Copernicus is widely thought of as the father of the scientific theory of the heliocentric solar system. The positive identification was made by comparing the DNA from a skeleton's teeth with that from hairs in a book known to have belonged to Copernicus. A computer-generated facial reconstruction is said to also bear a resemblance to contemporary portraits of the scientist."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Apple DMCAs iPodHash Project
- TRS-80 writes "Apple has sent a DMCA takedown notice to the IpodHash project, claiming it circumvents their FairPlay DRM scheme. Some background: Apple first added a hash to the iTunesDB file in 6th-gen iPods, but it was quickly reverse-engineered. They changed it with the release of iPhone 2.0 and a project was started to reverse the new hash, but weren't successful yet. My guess is Apple used the same algorithm as FairPlay for the new hash, so Apple could use the DMCA to prevent competing apps like Songbird and Banshee from talking to iPods/iPhones. BTW, don't tell Apple, but the project uses a wiki, so the old page versions from before the takedown are still there."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Network Neutrality — Without Regulation
- boyko.at.netqos writes "Timothy B. Lee (no relation to Tim Berners-Lee), a frequent contributor to Ars Technica and Techdirt, has recently written 'The Durable Internet,' a paper published by the libertarian-leaning CATO institute. In it, Lee argues that because a neutral network works better than a non-neutral one, the Internet's open-ended architecture is not likely to vanish, despite the fears of net neutrality proponents, (and despite the wishes of net neutrality opponents.) For that reason, perhaps network neutrality legislation isn't necessary — or even desirable — from an open-networks perspective. In addition to the paper, Network Performance Daily has an interview and podcast with Tim Lee, and Lee addresses counter-arguments with a blog posting for Technology Liberation Front."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Lessig, Zittrain, Barlow To Square Off Against RIAA
- NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's case in Boston against a 24-year-old grad student, SONY BMG Music v. Tenenbaum, in which Prof. Charles Nesson of Harvard Law School, along with members of his CyberLaw class, are representing the defendant, may shape up as a showdown between the Electronic Frontier and Big Music. The defendant's witness list includes names such as those of Prof. Lawrence Lessig (Author of 'Free Culture'), John Perry Barlow (former songwriter of The Grateful Dead and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), Prof. Johan Pouwelse (Scientific Director of P2P-Next), Prof. Jonathan Zittrain (Author of 'The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It'), Professors Wendy Seltzer, Terry Fisher, and John Palfrey, and others. The RIAA requested, and was granted, an adjournment of the trial, from its previously scheduled December 1st date, to March 30, 2009. (The RIAA lawyers have been asking for adjournments a lot lately, asking for an adjournment in UMG v. Lindor the other day because they were so busy preparing for the Tenenbaum December 1st trial ... I guess when you're running on hot air, you sometimes run out of steam)."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Study Recommends Online Gaming, Social Networking For Kids
- Blue's News pointed out a report about a study sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation which found that online gaming and social networking are beneficial to children, teaching them basic technical skills and how to communicate in the Information Age. The study was conducted over a period of three years, with researchers interviewing hundreds of children and monitoring thousands of hours of online time. The full white paper (PDF) is also available. "For a minority of children, the casual use of social media served as a springboard to them gaining technological expertise — labeled in the study as 'geeking out,' the researchers said. By asking friends or getting help from people met through online groups, some children learned to adjust the software code underpinning some of the video games they played, edit videos and fix computer hardware. Given that the use of social media serves as inspiration to learning, schools should abandon their hostility and support children when they want to learn some skills more sophisticated than simply designing their Facebook page, the study said."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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CRTC Rules Bell Can Squeeze Downloads
- pparsons writes "Bell Canada Inc. will not have to suspend its practice of 'shaping' traffic on the Internet after a group of companies that resell access to Bell's network complained their customers were also being negatively affected. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission today released a decision that denied the Canadian Association of Internet Providers' request that Bell be ordered to cease its application of the practice to its wholesale customers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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MIT and NASA Designing Silent Aircraft
- Iddo Genuth writes "Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics recently won a contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to design quieter, more energy efficient, and more environmentally friendly commercial airplanes. The two-million-dollar contract from NASA is just an initial step in bringing green technologies to the sky."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Spider Missing After Trip To Space Station
- Garabito writes "A spider that had been sent to the International Space Station for a school science program was lost. Two arachnids were sent in order to know if spiders can survive and make webs in space, but now only one spider can be seen in the container. NASA isn't sure where the other spider could have gone. I, for one, welcome our new arachnid overlords."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Studios Sue Oz ISP Over Allowing Piracy
- Da Massive writes "Leading Hollywood film studios Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and Disney Enterprises are suing Australia's second largest ISP, iiNet, saying it's complicit in the infringement of their copyrighted material. According to a statement of claim, 'the ISP knows that there are a large number of customers who are engaging in continuing infringements of copyright by using BitTorrent file sharing technology.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Sun updates NetBeans with PHP support
- Version 6.5 of the open-source NetBeans IDE has support for the PHP scripting language and a preview of Python support. Sun Microsystems on Wednesday introduced a version of the open-source NetBeans integrated development environment IDE, with expanded support for web and Java software development. The...
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Mozilla to end support for Firefox 2
- Stability and security releases for the browser will end next month, despite ongoing problems with Firefox 3 The Mozilla Foundation is planning to end support for the Firefox 2 browser in mid-December, despite the persistence of significant flaws in the most-recent version of the popular browser. ...
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Mobile industry calls for RFID payment push
- The GSM Association has called on manufacturers to build technology for contactless payments into their handsets by the middle of next year The GSM Association has called on phone manufacturers to build RFID technology into handsets from mid-2009, in a bid to kick start the mobile-payment industry. ...
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Greening the data center
- Rising costs of energy - along with limited availability of energy in some areas  are forcing the IT industry to take a new approach in designing and managing data centers, says IBM's Christopher O'Connor. Commentary--Energy efficiency is a significant global issue today, and is expected to be even...
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Jaquar chases Roadrunner for fastest supercomputer
- Two systems, including one based on x86 chips, have become the first ever to break the petaflop/s barrier in the latest Top500 supercomputer list. Cray's XT5 Jaguar supercomputer has narrowly missed displacing IBM's Roadrunner system as the world's fastest supercomputer, according to the results of the bi-annual 'Top500' supercomputing...
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SuperSpeed USB 3.0 unleashed
- The final specification for so-called SuperSpeed USB, which is said to be 10 times faster than USB 2.0, has been published by the USB Implementers Forum. Version 3.0 of the universal serial bus specification has been released. Unveiled on Monday by the USB Implementers Forum,...
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Gartner: 85 percent of companies using open source
- The analyst house warns that, although take-up of open-source software is widespread, most companies do not have formal procurement or governance policies in place for such software. Eighty-five percent of companies are already using open-source software, with most of the remaining 15 percent expecting to do so...
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Ubuntu to run on ARM-based netbooks
- Canonical and the chip designer are to collaborate on a version of Ubuntu tailored to ARM's architecture, with a focus on low-cost subnotebooks. Canonical has announced it will be developing a version of its Ubuntu Linux desktop operating system specifically for ARM's Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 processor architectures. ...
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Net bombarded by heaviest ever attacks this year
- Online networks suffered their heaviest brute force attacks to date this year, with more sites than ever coming under sustained assault. Online networks suffered their heaviest brute force attacks to date this year, with more sites than ever coming under sustained assault. IP networks were...
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Study: BlackBerry has twice the failure rate of iPhone
- Apple's iPhone has half the failure rate of RIM's BlackBerry in the first year of use, a study carried out by a mobile-phone warranty firm has found. Apple's iPhone has half the failure rate of RIM's BlackBerry in the first year of use, a study carried out by...
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A fraud ring or social networking - it's the same thing
- Silicon.com sat down with SAS's CEO in Las Vegas this week to find out his thoughts on cloud computing, succession planning and the iPhone. SAS is unique among tech heavyweights for its private ownership - the business intelligence BI company has been run for more than 30 years by...
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It's up to tech to save the world
- Larry Brilliant, executive director of Google's philanthropic arm, says the IT industry has a major role to play in tackling climate change and global disease. The technology industry can play a major role in tackling global disease and battling climate change, according to the executive...
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Ballmer calls Google's Android 'way behind'
- Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer dismissed Google's Android operating system, saying he believed it was financially unsound. Sydney, Australia--Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer on Thursday dismissed Google's Android operating system, saying he believed it was financially unsound. Speaking at Telstra's annual investment day, Ballmer said that Android was...
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Ubiquity of location intelligence is near
- Businesses rely on location technology to plan store and office placement and logistics - and to learn about their customers, says Ventana Research's Mark Smith. Commentary--Information about location has never been more available or more widely used. Businesses rely on it to plan store...
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Schneier slams US border biometrics
- The Department of Homeland Security has disputed Bruce Schneier's claim that the US-Visit program has had no impact on reducing criminal and terrorist threats. Security expert and BT chief security-technology officer Bruce Schneier has attacked the US-Visit border-biometrics program, saying it has had "zero benefit" in terms of security....
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Who Would Have Guessed? Blackberry Users Love MySpace
- When I think of Blackberry users, I think of accountants, lawyers and anyone else who wears a tie and carries a briefcase. You know, really boring people. MySpace users, sorta the opposite.
But there must be some significant overlap, because 400,000 people downloaded the MySpace Blackberry application in the last week, says MySpace - it was launched on November 12.
Both RIM and MySpace say this is a record - no other application has been downloaded so quickly onto Blackberry devices, and MySpace has never had an application on any platform be downloaded as often.
MySpace also says that 15 million messages have been sent and received via the mobile app, and users have updated their mood and status more than 2 million times.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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YieldBuild Launches Self-Serve Ad Optimization In Public Beta
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YieldBuild, an ad optimization platform that helps users manage multiple ad networks and position advertisements on their webpages, has launched its self-service program to the public. When we last covered the company, YieldBuild was still in private beta and only sites with more than 500,000 monthly visitors were eligible to participate. Now, web publishers of any size are welcome to join, and the installation process has been streamlined to require only a few snippets of JavaScript.
YieldBuild helps publishers maximize their ad revenues in a number of ways. To begin, the publisher ties their accounts from Google AdSense and similar services to their YieldBuild account. Next, they designate a number of hotspots on their page where ads can appear, but don’t necessarily have to (for example, I could tag five possible ad spots on a page and let YieldBuild figure out the ideal configuration). YieldBuild will automatically display different configurations to different visitors until it figures out where each ad should be placed for optimal results. The service also takes into account ad appearance, adjusting font size and color as needed. In the past the system would take around 100,000 visitors until it had ‘learned’ the ideal settings, but the new algorithm needs only a fraction of that traffic.
YieldBuild has also recently introduced support for CPM ad networks, and allows users to not only perfect the placement of their ads, but also which ad networks should be used at a given time to maximize revenues. Other players in this space include Pubmatic and Rubicon Project which also offer management for multiple ad networks, but focus less on the actual placement and formatting of the ads.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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Google Makes Major Interface Change To Search: SearchWiki
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We’d noticed an increasing number of people emailing on a large-scale bucket test (a product change tested on just a percentage of total users) that Google has been conducting for months - adding a Digg-like voting feature to search results (which also changes the ranking) as well as user comments.
Tonight, Google apparently said “what the hell” and turned it on for everyone.
The changes are called SearchWiki, and are a dramatic departure from Google’s streamlined, algorithm-rules approach to search. It takes features from Digg to allow users to vote site results up or down, as well as features from Wikia Search to allow users to add comments, move search results, add search results, etc. The result are customized results that appear every time you do that search in the future (assuming you are logged in).
Here’s a demo video:
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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BitGravity Testing New "Multiview" Product; This Is How I Want To Watch Sports
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Content Delivery Network BitGravity is testing a new product they’re calling Multiview (at least internally) that delivers up to six different synchronized high definition video streams at once. The viewer sees the normal view but can click on any of the other views at any time, and audio is obviously synchronized. The result is this: the viewer is put in the producer’s chair, and can switch camera angles at any time.
Why would you want this? I’m speculating, but an obvious use is sporting events. Instead of watching whatever is on screen, viewers could watch particular players instead. And if a particularly interesting play happens, users can switch cameras to see it from different angles.
There are other obvious uses for this too. As usual, the pornography industry may be the first to try it out.
This is also a view into the future, where video breaks away from the bonds of broadcast television. The Internet is interactive - so let viewers interact.
To see a Multiview test, go here, which shows a driving trip from six different camera angles (it’s Google street view on steroids). Not sure if they’ll keep this live now that we’re pointing to it.
Note that the BitGravity guys are known for doing random stuff to show off their network. But from what we hear, Multiview is being productized.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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Genwi Further Blurs The Line Between A Feed Reader And A Friend Reader
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When we first wrote about Genwi a year ago, it was a social feed reader with content feeds that could be organized by different categories (blogs, news, videos, music, podcasts) and shared with your friends. Today, it is relaunching with a completely new design that takes into account what your friends are doing across the Web as well.
You can think of Genwi as a combination of Google Reader and FriendFeed with sophisticated search, auto-categorization, and filtering features. As before, Genwi is a super RSS feed reader. It suggests feeds by category, or you can add your own (via search or by importing an OPML file from another reader). You can also invite your friends by giving Genwi permission to match its members to your contacts in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, LinkedIn, AOL, Outlook and elsewhere (although it does not have Facebook integration yet).
Once you do that, you can track your the social activity of your friends across the Web, just like on FriendFeed. Anytime a contact does something on Twitter, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, or other social media sites, it appears on Genwi. (The other supported services are Vimeo, Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr, Pownce, Yelp, Upcoming, Last.fm, iLike, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, Jaiku,Webshots, Picasa, Smugmug, Zoomr, Furl, Reddit, Mixx, and Diigo).
So far, so what. But Genwi has some interesting features that could push the ball forward in the Web filtering/lifestreaming game. Genwi treats the Web as a collection of information objects. An object can be a blog post, a video, a streaming song, a photo, a Tweet, a Digg. Genwi lets you grab the objects you care about either directly through RSS feeds or indirectly by paying attention to what your friends do and presents them all in a manageable, personalized, searchable feed. Explains Genwi co-founder Killian P. McKiernan:
At first a web page was a published document. It has evolved to a collection of objects--wading through all of these objects by searching and loading pages may not be the most efficient way to consume them. It might be better to bring in all the objects that matter to you and create a context enabling you to filter and directly consume what is most interesting.
Once all the objects are ingested into Genwi, it starts to do some interesting things with them. Each post/video/song/object can be filtered by type and category, as well as by most popular, highest rated, and most recent. They can be rated, shared, or added as a favorite. All of your friends favorites show up in your wire (which is what Genwi calls your personal super feed). The most popular items are available in a public wire, which can also be sorted in various ways. When you search for things, favorite items across the network come up top, adding an element of social rank to the searches.
There are other features that noteworthy as well. You can follow other people’s wires without having to “friend” them. If you wan to send a “quick post” to all your friends, it will appear Twitter-like in all of their feeds (FriendFeed has something similar called “messages”). It handles all sorts of media quite adeptly. And it does a better job of showing what’s popular on the service in a very granular fashion.
On the downside, the site takes longer to load than FriendFeed and is not quite as responsive. But it has a few tricks worth checking out.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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Have a Cow With Creative's Zen Moo Moo-sic Player [Zen Moo]
- Holy cow! Just in time for the upcoming Year of the Ox, Creative has released its Zen Moo line of mp3 players and speakers in China. Based on the Zen Stone, you can get either the Zen Moo or the Zen...
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Asus All-In-One Eee Top Touches Down In Taiwan [EEE Top]
- Asus' long awaited all-in-one touchscreen PC, the Eee Top, is now out in the wild... at least in Taiwan. The 15.6-inch display "nettop" runs Windows XP and holds an Intel Atom N270 processor with 1GB...
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OrbLive 2.0 iPhone App Keeps Your Devices File- and Embarrasment-Free [IPhone App]
- Today, the media streaming service Orb announced their official iPhone application, OrbLive 2.0, allowing you to stream your media files across multiple devices via 3G, EDGE or Wi-Fi. The last...
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iPhone 2.2 Update Available Now [Iphone 2.2]
- That was fast. It's barely Nov. 21 and the iPhone 2.2 update is here, all 246MB of it, as promised. Included in the update, according to the release notes and as we'd heard, are all the new Google...
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Verizon Staff Accessed Obama Cellphone Data, Became Ex-Verizon Staff [Ways To Get Fired]
- Several Verizon Wireless employees stumbled upon the Pandora's Box of personal cellphone accounts, that of President-Elect Barack Obama, and couldn't help sneaking a peek. Luckily, the account was...
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Nab A PS3 Bundle For $200 in Amazon.com Contest [Dealzmodo]
- Looking to get a Playstation 3 for as low as $200? Who isn't! Amazon is hosting a pretty amazing deal which could land you an 80GB PS3, a PS3 game and Bluray movie set for either $199 or $229,...
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AT&T 3G Network Down In Some Areas, Reports Say [At&t]
- We here at Gizmodo have been getting interesting missives from several readers about how AT&T's 3G network has just plumb broke in several areas, like Boston and Hawaii. Any calls made to an iPhone...
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Flight Test: Porn and VOIP Confirmed at 35,000 Feet [In-flight Wi-fi]
- Jalopnik's Road Test Editor Wes Siler is currently at 35,000 feet, flying American Airlines from LA to NY. Since his Boeing 767 had the recently launched Gogo in-flight Wi-Fi, and since he was...
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Multi-Function Wheelchair Doubles As a Toilet [Wheelchair]
- The Home Chare—yes, that's chare, not chair—is a combination wheelchair for the disabled and for Jabba the Hutts. This device not only can be adjusted into a bed and standing aid, but...
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iPhone 2.2 Release May Come Tomorrow [Apple]
- newVideoPlayer("/iphonebugfsit_gizmodo.flv", 320, 260,"");According to a Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information press release, the eagerly expected iPhone 2.2 operating system update will arrive...
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Bruce Lee Nunchucks the Crap Out Of Ping Pong in Nokia Shill [Bruce Lee]
- newVideoPlayer("/bruceleenokia_gizmodo.flv", 506, 423,""); A couple of weeks ago, a ten second clip called "Bruce Lee's secret training video," featuring someone looking like the famous Kung Fu...
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Gas Pump Blue Screen of Death is Poo Poo Inducing [BSoD]
- Seeing a Windows blue screen of death is fine, if annoying, if you're just balancing your checkbook, but what if you see it in more...precarious situations? Like when you're pumping gas? Reader Dave...
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Sprint Asking Employees to Please Resign, Pretty Please [Sprint]
- Some companies, like Dell, are encouraging employees to take a day or two off—unpaid, natch—to help the company save money. Then there's Sprint. Oh, Sprint. Bleeding cash and customers...
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This is What Fellating a Microphone Sounds Like (NSFW) [Nsfw]
- The age old question of "what a microphone would sound like if it were fellated by a woman" has now been answered by this lovely lady (Wojciech Kosma?), as she performs at an art opening. She's been...
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Cellphone Concept Has a Sweet Looking Glass [Cellphones]
- This isn't the first cellphone concept to incorporate glass, but I'll be dammed if it isn't one of the prettiest. There aren't any details on functionality, but it is clear that designer Mac...
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