Toyota Concept Car from 2003 Osaka Auto Show - Watch a funny movie here
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May 29, 2009
Carrots might not scream when pulled from the ground,
but new technology is giving vegetables a voice in how they are raised.
Microchipped plants can now send text messages to a farmer's cell phone
and ask for water.
"It's akin to a clip on earring, very thin and smaller than a postage stamp,
and is affixed to the plant leaf," said Richard Stoner, President of
AgriHouse, a company marketing the technology.
"The farmer would just need their regular cell phone service, and the plant
would send a text message when it needed water."
For areas that receive regular and plentiful rainfall, such detailed crop
monitoring might not be useful or economical. But in the western United
States, where much of the water comes from underground aquifers,
conserving water, and more importantly, conserving the electricity that
pumps it to the surface and across fields, could save farmers hundreds of
thousands of dollars each year.
Water in the open spaces of the west is valuable, but it's virtually worth
its weight in gold in outer space. The original cell phone for plants was
developed years ago by scientists working with NASA on future manned
missions to the moon and Mars.
"You need plants on future space missions," said Hans-Dieter Seelig, a
scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who worked on the
original NASA project
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June 5, 2009
A mini-submarine that explored the undersea wreckage of the Titanic is being whisked
across the Atlantic to help retrieve the flight recorders of Air France Flight 447.
The French marine research institute Ifremersaid Thursday it has pulled the ship
Pourquoi Pas? (Why Not?) off a research mission in the Azores to help find the
remains of the Airbus plane. Flight 447 disappeared Sunday night en route from Rio
de Janeiro to Paris after flying into a dangerous band of thunderstorms over the
Atlantic Ocean.
On board the research ship is the Nautile, an 8-meter (26-foot) long deep ocean
submarine that has made multiple dives to the Titanic and a remote-controlled robot
called Victor 6000.
"The priority for us is to find the black boxes," said Vincent Rigaud, head of Ifremer's
underwater system department. "We will do everything we can to find them."
Search teams have a month to locate the plane's two black boxes -- the cockpit voice
and flight data recorders -- before they stop emitting signals. They could be scattered
nearly anywhere across a vast undersea mountain range below the surface of the
ocean.
The French ship will dock in the Cape Verde Islands off Africa's western coast on June
8 to pick up equipment -- including a hydrophonic microphone -- and personnel.
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The energy crisis has given rise to a new source of fuel – the Styrofoam cup. Mechanical engineers at Iowa State University in Ames have demonstrated how to boost the power output of biodiesel simply by adding waste plastic to the fuel.
Song-Charng Kong, a co-author of the study, says the experiment – funded in part by the Department of Defense – was conducted to find a way to dispose of trash and generate power under battlefield conditions.
"One can recycle any kind of plastic, but if you are camped in a remote area, recycling is not an option," Kong says. "Turning plastic into fuel is a way to get rid of garbage and generate electricity."
Kong and colleagues dissolved polystyrene – a polymer used to make disposable foam plates and cups – into biodiesel at concentrations ranging from 2 to 20% polystyrene by weight. "A polystyrene cup will dissolve almost instantly in biodiesel, like a snowflake in water," Kong says, although the plastic doesn't break down as well in petroleum-based diesel and other liquid fuels.
Thicker juice
Tests of the mixed fuel in a tractor engine used for electricity generation showed that as polystyrene concentrations increased to 5%, power output increased at roughly the same rate. However, there was a drop off in output for plastic concentrations above 5%.
Kong thinks the change is due to the fuel's increasing viscosity as more and more polystyrene is added. Initially, he says, the thicker fluid creates greater pressure inside the generator's fuel injector causing earlier injection of fuel into the engine and increasing its output.
But eventually the fluid gets so viscous that it doesn't completely combust in the engine and power output decreases. At 15% polystyrene, the fuel is so thick the fuel injection pump overheats.
The new fuel mix is not without its problems, however – as the concentration of polystyrene increases, so do emissions of carbon monoxide, soot, and nitrous oxides.
"You are putting large polymer compounds in, it's hard to burn them completely," Kong says, adding that he hopes to now work on refining the engine's fuel injection system to yield a more complete burn with fewer emissions.
Bulky problem
Robert Malloy of the University of Massachusetts Lowell says as long as emissions can be brought back into line, adding polystyrene into fuel makes sense.
A recent report suggests it's over three times as energy efficient to recycle trash rather than convert it to fuel, but Malloy points out that polystyrene is a special case.
"I think we should try to recycle as much as we can, but there are certain materials that don't lend themselves to recycling in an economic way," he says. Polystyrene is so lightweight and bulky that it's uneconomical to ship to recycling plants. "Technologies like this where you get energy back would be preferable to landfilling," Malloy says.
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BATALLIONS of super-soldiers could be selected for specific duties on the basis of their genetic make-up and then constantly monitored for signs of weakness. So says a report by the US National Academies of Science (NAS).
If a soldier is struggling, a digital "buddy" might step in and warn them about nearby threats, or advise comrades to zap them with an electromagnet to increase their alertness. If the whole unit is falling apart, biosensors could warn central commanders to send in a replacement team.
As advances in neuroscience bring all this into the realms of reality, there are ethical issues to consider. Last week, the NAS released a report assessing the military potential of neuroscience, providing a rare insight into how the military might invest its money to create future armies.
Sponsored by the US army and written by a panel of 14 prominent neuroscientists, the report focuses on those areas with "high-payoff potential" - where the science is sufficiently reliable to turn into useful technologies (see "Where should the money go?").
"A growing understanding of neuroscience offers huge scope for improving soldiers' performance and effectiveness on the battlefield," says the report.
If a soldier is struggling, a digital "buddy" might step in and warn them about nearby threats, or advise comrades to zap them with an electromagnet to increase their alertness. If the whole unit is falling apart, biosensors could warn central commanders to send in a replacement team.
As advances in neuroscience bring all this into the realms of reality, there are ethical issues to consider. Last week, the NAS released a report assessing the military potential of neuroscience, providing a rare insight into how the military might invest its money to create future armies.
Sponsored by the US army and written by a panel of 14 prominent neuroscientists, the report focuses on those areas with "high-payoff potential" - where the science is sufficiently reliable to turn into useful technologies (see "Where should the money go?").
"A growing understanding of neuroscience offers huge scope for improving soldiers' performance and effectiveness on the battlefield," says the report.
Within five years, biomarkers might be used to assess how well a soldier's brain is functioning, and within 10 years, it should be possible to predict how individuals are likely to respond to environmental stresses like extreme heat and cold, or endurance exercises.
Genetic testing might also enable recruitment officers to determine which soldiers are best for specialist jobs. For example, by combining psychological testing with genetic tests for levels of brain chemicals, a clearer picture of a soldier's competencies might shine through. "We might say that given this person's high levels of brain serotonin, they're going to be calmer under pressure, so they might make a good sniper," says Paul Zak of Claremont Graduate University in California, who was on the NAS panel. Alternatively, someone with low dopamine might be less likely to take risks, he says, and therefore be better suited as a commanding officer in a civilian area.
Selection by genotype could be fraught with difficulty - applicants rejected for certain jobs might try to sue on the grounds of genetic discrimination, say. Anders Sandberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, says the military also needs to choose the traits it wants to optimise with care. "The battlefield is changing quite a lot right now. Wars are becoming more like computer games, which means that in the future having the genes that make you a good physical fighter might not be so important as having excellent hand-eye coordination."
Perhaps more sinister is the possibility of neuroscientists creating cognitively manipulated warriors, whose emotions have been blunted, for example.
Zak emphasises that the panel was not asked how to turn soldiers into better "killing machines", although "the whole purpose of maximising and sustaining battlefield capacity is to gain superiority over opponents", admits Floyd Bloom of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, who chaired the panel.
That's not to say someone won't try it, though. Zak's own work focuses on the role of the hormone oxytocin in trust and empathy. If drugs were developed to block oxytocin, the effect might be to reduce a soldier's ability to empathise with enemy combatants or civilians.
Genetic testing might also enable recruitment officers to determine which soldiers are best for specialist jobs. For example, by combining psychological testing with genetic tests for levels of brain chemicals, a clearer picture of a soldier's competencies might shine through. "We might say that given this person's high levels of brain serotonin, they're going to be calmer under pressure, so they might make a good sniper," says Paul Zak of Claremont Graduate University in California, who was on the NAS panel. Alternatively, someone with low dopamine might be less likely to take risks, he says, and therefore be better suited as a commanding officer in a civilian area.
Selection by genotype could be fraught with difficulty - applicants rejected for certain jobs might try to sue on the grounds of genetic discrimination, say. Anders Sandberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, says the military also needs to choose the traits it wants to optimise with care. "The battlefield is changing quite a lot right now. Wars are becoming more like computer games, which means that in the future having the genes that make you a good physical fighter might not be so important as having excellent hand-eye coordination."
Perhaps more sinister is the possibility of neuroscientists creating cognitively manipulated warriors, whose emotions have been blunted, for example.
Zak emphasises that the panel was not asked how to turn soldiers into better "killing machines", although "the whole purpose of maximising and sustaining battlefield capacity is to gain superiority over opponents", admits Floyd Bloom of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, who chaired the panel.
That's not to say someone won't try it, though. Zak's own work focuses on the role of the hormone oxytocin in trust and empathy. If drugs were developed to block oxytocin, the effect might be to reduce a soldier's ability to empathise with enemy combatants or civilians.
"There are lots of stories of soldiers who refuse to shoot other soldiers," says Zak. "If you could get rid of that empathy response you might create a soldier that's more prepared to engage in battle and risk their life."
The panel recognised that such ethical dilemmas might be an inevitable consequence of their work. For this reason, they recommended that the US military should recruit ethicists to examine the ramifications of such developments before they occur. "They need to be explored because at some point someone's going to do them," says Zak. "Controls have to be put in place."
Neuroscience could also help to save lives in a military context. If you could predict which soldiers were particularly susceptible to stress, for example, it might help prevent a tragedy. Last week US army sergeant John Russell was charged with shooting five of his colleagues dead. Russell had completed a 15-month tour of Iraq and was being treated for stress.
Other research has suggested that navy recruits whose hypothalamo-pituitary axes (an area of the brain involved in the stress response) are highly reactive to stress are less likely to complete navy SEAL training. Robert Ursano at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Maryland, and his colleagues have hinted that you might be able to predict individual responses to stress by looking at numbers of serotonin receptors, and levels of p11, a protein linked to depression (Progress in Brain Research, DOI: 10.1016/s0079-6123(07)67014-9).
The difficulty is finding predictive markers that are reliable enough, says Simon Wessely at the King's Centre for Military Health Research in London, who was not involved in the report. "Current predictors are too weak, and while they may work statistically in large groups, they cannot say that Private A is vulnerable and Private B isn't." Moreover, "if you wrongly label someone as vulnerable to breakdown, you are damaging his career and robbing the army of much-needed manpower".
A more likely short-term prospect is monitoring whether an individual soldier's mental performance is deteriorating because of stress or tiredness.
Many errors involve lapses of attention, so finding ways to monitor attentiveness could have big benefits. Recent studies have linked variations in blood flow and oxygenation with occasions when observers miss signals, says the report, so sensors in helmets to monitor these variations could alert the soldier and his unit that his attention was fading.
Another possibility might be to use brain imaging to work out which recruits have understood new training concepts. In a recent study, fMRI was used to compare the brain activity of physics students and other students when they watched film clips of two different-sized balls falling at either the same or different rates.
The students were asked if the film they viewed was consistent with their expectations of how the balls should fall. In the non-physics students, an area of the brain associated with error detection lit up when the large and small balls fell at the same rate. For the physics students, the same area lit up when they fell at different rates - suggesting that they had fully grasped the Newtonian concept that different balls should fall at the same rate, regardless of their size.
Bloom emphasises that while all technologies have the potential to be misused, this is not necessarily a reason for ignoring them. Indeed, military investment could even reap benefits for the wider society. "Investment in such opportunities will be of benefit to the public by improving ways we educate our children and understand ourselves," he says.
The panel recognised that such ethical dilemmas might be an inevitable consequence of their work. For this reason, they recommended that the US military should recruit ethicists to examine the ramifications of such developments before they occur. "They need to be explored because at some point someone's going to do them," says Zak. "Controls have to be put in place."
Neuroscience could also help to save lives in a military context. If you could predict which soldiers were particularly susceptible to stress, for example, it might help prevent a tragedy. Last week US army sergeant John Russell was charged with shooting five of his colleagues dead. Russell had completed a 15-month tour of Iraq and was being treated for stress.
Other research has suggested that navy recruits whose hypothalamo-pituitary axes (an area of the brain involved in the stress response) are highly reactive to stress are less likely to complete navy SEAL training. Robert Ursano at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Maryland, and his colleagues have hinted that you might be able to predict individual responses to stress by looking at numbers of serotonin receptors, and levels of p11, a protein linked to depression (Progress in Brain Research, DOI: 10.1016/s0079-6123(07)67014-9).
The difficulty is finding predictive markers that are reliable enough, says Simon Wessely at the King's Centre for Military Health Research in London, who was not involved in the report. "Current predictors are too weak, and while they may work statistically in large groups, they cannot say that Private A is vulnerable and Private B isn't." Moreover, "if you wrongly label someone as vulnerable to breakdown, you are damaging his career and robbing the army of much-needed manpower".
A more likely short-term prospect is monitoring whether an individual soldier's mental performance is deteriorating because of stress or tiredness.
Many errors involve lapses of attention, so finding ways to monitor attentiveness could have big benefits. Recent studies have linked variations in blood flow and oxygenation with occasions when observers miss signals, says the report, so sensors in helmets to monitor these variations could alert the soldier and his unit that his attention was fading.
Another possibility might be to use brain imaging to work out which recruits have understood new training concepts. In a recent study, fMRI was used to compare the brain activity of physics students and other students when they watched film clips of two different-sized balls falling at either the same or different rates.
The students were asked if the film they viewed was consistent with their expectations of how the balls should fall. In the non-physics students, an area of the brain associated with error detection lit up when the large and small balls fell at the same rate. For the physics students, the same area lit up when they fell at different rates - suggesting that they had fully grasped the Newtonian concept that different balls should fall at the same rate, regardless of their size.
Bloom emphasises that while all technologies have the potential to be misused, this is not necessarily a reason for ignoring them. Indeed, military investment could even reap benefits for the wider society. "Investment in such opportunities will be of benefit to the public by improving ways we educate our children and understand ourselves," he says.
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Japanese company Fujitsu has released the thinest of watertight phones -Fujitsu F703i.Japanese company Fujitsu has released a fine of watertight _ -Fujitsu F703i. Its thickness is only 17.9 mm. According to the company, Fujitsu F703i be sustained at a depth of one metre, untouched and unharmed 30 minutes. So if you can not leave mobile phones even go swimming, a half an hour to take a bath with him you’ll be able!Also impressive dignity, Fujitsu F703i has 2.2-inche QVGA TFT LCD display 1,3-megapixels camera and additional camera videocalls, MicroSD slot. Available new model in the white, red and black colors. It is a pity only that sold the phone will not be with us, and the Japanese mobile operator NTT DoCoMo.
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NTT DoCoMo officially gathered journalists, in order to give you an insight into that its engineers tested voice and packet data networks 4G…
Most of the countries are either beginning to shift to cell third generation network, or had recently been moved, but the largest Japanese cellphone operator already testing, and preparing for licensing to the networks fourth generation which offer 50 times faster and rich services, mobile communications, the 3G network.In NTT said that they had been working on the technology of the fourth generation for nearly 10 years, however, even with so much time in the company stressed that the technology is not yet ready for commercial use. The 4G network in Japan planned for launch by 2010, but recent studies in the WCDMA standard revealed the 3G network still have some growth potential, and it will take about five years before commercialization 4G.At the end of last year, the company stated that a prototype of the experimental apparatus for cellular networks 4G.NTT DoCoMo officially gathered journalists, in order to give you an insight into that its engineers tested voice and packet data networks 4G.
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An Apple job posting suggests the company might be thinking about adding 3G wireless radios to future MacBooks.
Apple's Mac Hardware Group is looking for a quality-assurance engineer with experience in the various networking technologies popular in the personal computing market, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, "and/or 3G Wireless WAN," according to the job posting spotted by Computerworld. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet are the standard network interfaces on the Mac at the moment, while 3G Wireless WAN is a technology confined just to the iPhone inside Apple.
A few years ago, notebooks with embedded chips that could connect to cellular networks were thought to be the next big thing in mobile computing, but the concept didn't exactly pan out in the same way that Wi-Fi is now ubiquitous in notebook computing. But Apple may be considering a MacBook partnership with AT&T, given its close ties to the carrier through the iPhone.
Rumors to that effect have surfaced before, and it might make sense that Apple would want to have some sort of tweak available for its MacBook lineup heading into the second half of the year.
Apple's Mac Hardware Group is looking for a quality-assurance engineer with experience in the various networking technologies popular in the personal computing market, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, "and/or 3G Wireless WAN," according to the job posting spotted by Computerworld. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet are the standard network interfaces on the Mac at the moment, while 3G Wireless WAN is a technology confined just to the iPhone inside Apple.
A few years ago, notebooks with embedded chips that could connect to cellular networks were thought to be the next big thing in mobile computing, but the concept didn't exactly pan out in the same way that Wi-Fi is now ubiquitous in notebook computing. But Apple may be considering a MacBook partnership with AT&T, given its close ties to the carrier through the iPhone.
Rumors to that effect have surfaced before, and it might make sense that Apple would want to have some sort of tweak available for its MacBook lineup heading into the second half of the year.
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Palm's comeback attempt rests squarely on the notion that it has found a better way to manage your complicated digital life.
Ever since its January coming-out party at the Consumer Electronics Show, Palm has generated buzz for the Pre unlike any other phone released since Apple's iPhone arrived in June 2007 (that includes impressive phones such as Research in Motion's BlackBerry Bold and HTC's G1 Android phone.) The two phones will be forever compared--not just because of their consumer-oriented styles and emphasis on gesture-based user interfaces, but because of the very real enmity between the proud team that worked on Apple's historic iPhone breakthrough and the ex-Apple executives and engineers attempting to rebuild Palm.
Ever since its January coming-out party at the Consumer Electronics Show, Palm has generated buzz for the Pre unlike any other phone released since Apple's iPhone arrived in June 2007 (that includes impressive phones such as Research in Motion's BlackBerry Bold and HTC's G1 Android phone.) The two phones will be forever compared--not just because of their consumer-oriented styles and emphasis on gesture-based user interfaces, but because of the very real enmity between the proud team that worked on Apple's historic iPhone breakthrough and the ex-Apple executives and engineers attempting to rebuild Palm.
While the iPhone has set the standard for future smartphones, Palm's WebOS delivers two important improvements that the iPhone can't yet match: true multitasking between applications, and a subtle notifications system that doesn't interrupt your train of thought. It does that while unveiling its own stamp on the multitouch user interface that Apple introduced to the masses with the iPhone and finding room for a slide-out hardware keyboard favored by CrackBerry addicts.
There are several reasons why no one should expect the Pre to turn the smartphone world upside down just yet. Business users still love their BlackBerrys and RIM is aggressively courting the consumer. Apple has a killer brand, great audio and video player technology, and more than 35,000 applications inside an easy-to-use App Store that grows by the hour.
All the same, Palm has taken a few steps forward that developers and users should take seriously. Until we know how much it's going to cost, it's impossible to predict how many other smartphone users will see value in these improvements, but they (and the competition) will notice. The Pre is expected to arrive sometime within the next few weeks, although all Palm has said is that it will be out in the first half of 2009.
Let's examine the subject of multitasking first, which has been a major criticism of the iPhone almost ever since it was released.
Outside of a few core applications, such as the phone and iPod player, an iPhone user must completely exit out of one application in order to use another. For example, you can return to the home screen and select another iPhone application while staying connected on a phone call, but you can't move back and forth between two applications while allowing the first application to run in the background, making it harder to use applications like instant messaging or streaming radio.
Apple has said these limitations are necessary to prevent battery life from dropping off a cliff and to ensure application stability. That is perhaps part of the reason why Palm has chosen a different development model.
WebOS applications will be created with standard Web development tools such as CSS, JavaScript, and HTML that run on a version of the Webkit engine. This doesn't mean they are "Web applications," which require a connection to the Internet to work. It does, however, mean they are (in general) more lightweight and less-resource intensive than iPhone applications, which are developed using the Objective-C programming language.
There are several reasons why no one should expect the Pre to turn the smartphone world upside down just yet. Business users still love their BlackBerrys and RIM is aggressively courting the consumer. Apple has a killer brand, great audio and video player technology, and more than 35,000 applications inside an easy-to-use App Store that grows by the hour.
All the same, Palm has taken a few steps forward that developers and users should take seriously. Until we know how much it's going to cost, it's impossible to predict how many other smartphone users will see value in these improvements, but they (and the competition) will notice. The Pre is expected to arrive sometime within the next few weeks, although all Palm has said is that it will be out in the first half of 2009.
Let's examine the subject of multitasking first, which has been a major criticism of the iPhone almost ever since it was released.
Outside of a few core applications, such as the phone and iPod player, an iPhone user must completely exit out of one application in order to use another. For example, you can return to the home screen and select another iPhone application while staying connected on a phone call, but you can't move back and forth between two applications while allowing the first application to run in the background, making it harder to use applications like instant messaging or streaming radio.
Apple has said these limitations are necessary to prevent battery life from dropping off a cliff and to ensure application stability. That is perhaps part of the reason why Palm has chosen a different development model.
WebOS applications will be created with standard Web development tools such as CSS, JavaScript, and HTML that run on a version of the Webkit engine. This doesn't mean they are "Web applications," which require a connection to the Internet to work. It does, however, mean they are (in general) more lightweight and less-resource intensive than iPhone applications, which are developed using the Objective-C programming language.
That may limit the performance of WebOS applications. Don't expect the sophisticated gaming community, for example, to embrace the Pre. But Palm's approach means it will be very easy for anyone who has developed a Web application to get up and running on Pre development, which could help expand the number of applications in the early days of the device if the smartphone world likes what they see.
Other mobile operating systems--notably Android and Windows Mobile--allow multitasking, but Palm has developed an elegant way of switching between "cards," something vaguely akin to a combination of Windows' Alt-Tab switching and Mac OS' Expose, or switching between tabs on a Web browser. New applications can be launched using the "Launcher" software button on the bottom of the home screen, and users navigate between different applications by flicking finger left or right.
It remains to be seen how many open WebOS applications it will take to crash the Pre. (Palm product managers at CTIA 2009 refused to speculate, but said it would be very hard to overload the phone.) But Palm's implementation of multitasking is slick, as is its method for delivering notifications.
Notifications are the lifeblood of the mobile computer: if I'm carrying an always-on, always-connected computer, then I want to know right away when something has happened. With the release of iPhone OS 3.0, Apple plans to expand its notifications service to third-party applications, whereas right now it only works for core applications such as incoming phone calls, text messages, and calendar appointments.
Other mobile operating systems--notably Android and Windows Mobile--allow multitasking, but Palm has developed an elegant way of switching between "cards," something vaguely akin to a combination of Windows' Alt-Tab switching and Mac OS' Expose, or switching between tabs on a Web browser. New applications can be launched using the "Launcher" software button on the bottom of the home screen, and users navigate between different applications by flicking finger left or right.
It remains to be seen how many open WebOS applications it will take to crash the Pre. (Palm product managers at CTIA 2009 refused to speculate, but said it would be very hard to overload the phone.) But Palm's implementation of multitasking is slick, as is its method for delivering notifications.
Notifications are the lifeblood of the mobile computer: if I'm carrying an always-on, always-connected computer, then I want to know right away when something has happened. With the release of iPhone OS 3.0, Apple plans to expand its notifications service to third-party applications, whereas right now it only works for core applications such as incoming phone calls, text messages, and calendar appointments.
But Apple's system for notifications uses a pop-up window that interrupts you in the middle of a task, pauses the application, and forces you to make a choice (close, view) before proceeding. Palm's notification bar is much less obtrusive.
When a Pre user receives an e-mail or text message, that alert will pop up on the lower part of the Pre's screen as a horizontal bar. But the alert won't interrupt the application, and if the user chooses simply to ignore that alert, it will soon retreat to the lower edge of the screen to be accessed later when the task at hand is completed. That alert will always be at the bottom of the Pre's screen no matter what application or view you've selected, along with some brief information such as the sender or subject line.
Apple's approach lets you dismiss the alert and continue what you were doing but forces you to remember that you received notifications from a specific application, such as the ESPN Alerts application demonstrated at the iPhone 3.0 event. A number outlining how many alerts you've received will appear over the icon for that application--just as you can see how many e-mail messages await you--but if you're in a different sector of the home screen, you won't necessarily see the alerts for that particular application.
Some may dismiss these differences as simply user preferences. But multitasking and notifications are among the most important reasons to own a mobile computer, and few companies have managed to come up with something that advances the game along those lines since the iPhone OS made its debut. Palm has.
When a Pre user receives an e-mail or text message, that alert will pop up on the lower part of the Pre's screen as a horizontal bar. But the alert won't interrupt the application, and if the user chooses simply to ignore that alert, it will soon retreat to the lower edge of the screen to be accessed later when the task at hand is completed. That alert will always be at the bottom of the Pre's screen no matter what application or view you've selected, along with some brief information such as the sender or subject line.
Apple's approach lets you dismiss the alert and continue what you were doing but forces you to remember that you received notifications from a specific application, such as the ESPN Alerts application demonstrated at the iPhone 3.0 event. A number outlining how many alerts you've received will appear over the icon for that application--just as you can see how many e-mail messages await you--but if you're in a different sector of the home screen, you won't necessarily see the alerts for that particular application.
Some may dismiss these differences as simply user preferences. But multitasking and notifications are among the most important reasons to own a mobile computer, and few companies have managed to come up with something that advances the game along those lines since the iPhone OS made its debut. Palm has.
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The immensely popular BitTorrent client uTorrent recently added a Google powered torrent search engine to its website. This added search capability used Google’s custom search program and allowed visitors to search for .torrent files on Google. For reasons unknown, Google appears to be blocking the use of its search technology on the site.
With over 28 million active users a month, uTorrent has established itself as the client of choice for most BitTorrent users. In an attempt to bring in some much needed revenue, BitTorrent Inc. decided to add a search engine to its website using Google’s custom search program.
On the one hand this offers newcomers to BitTorrent a familiar interface to find all sorts of torrent files directly from the uTorrent homepage. The search engine uses Google’s search algorithms to find .torrent files on sites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. BitTorrent Inc. profits from this through search based ads that Google adds to the search results.
This seems to be a win-win situation for everyone but for reasons unknown, Google no longer allows uTorrent to use the custom search program. When entering a keyword into the search box on the website the following error is returned (see picture). BitTorrent Inc. has now removed the search box but they have no clue why they have this problem with Google.
Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management told TorrentFreak that there is indeed a problem but that they yet have to find out the details. At this stage we can only guess at the reasoning behind the lack of functionality. Most BitTorrent sites are not allowed to serve Google ads because they link to copyrighted content, but since uTorrent was only linking to these sites indirectly through Google’s own search engine, this seems less likely.
Yet there are more BitTorrent oriented sites that have faced similar problems. The Pirate Google, another website that uses Google’s custom search had similar problems recently.
uTorrent’s search has been down for around 5 days now, so one could expect a technical issue to be resolved by now, but until we hear back from Google the actual cause is open to speculation. The net effect is the same though - uTorrent’s revenue from this source isn’t rising as planned.
Update: We heard from “The Pirate Google” admin that Google did indeed block inbound queries from his site. He found a temporary workaround but this proves that Google is actively blocking (these) torrent related sites. Don’t be evil?
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The Swedish telecom operator Tele 2 plans to erase all data identifying its 600,000 customers, a decision that will undermine the new IPRED law and make the hunt for internet scofflaws more difficult.
Starting on Tuesday, Tele 2 will destroy records of IP addresses after they’ve been processed for internal use. It’s a way to secure the customers’ privacy — and, the company likely hopes, to strengthen the ISP’s market position.
“This is a strong wish from our customers and therefore we’ve decided to no longer keep records of customers’ IP addresses,” Tele2’s CEO in Sweden, Niclas Palmstierna, told the Swedish news agency TT. “We do this to strengthen the protection of customer privacy.”
“We’ve analyzed the legislation carefully and found that we have no obligations at all to store information about our customers’ IP addresses,” he continued.
The IPRED law went into effect on April 1 in Sweden and allows courts to order ISP’s to hand over details that can identify suspected illegal file sharers. Previously, the only option for copyright holders was to report alleged infringement to the police.
Tele 2 is following the example of Bahnhof and Alltele, smaller Swedish internet operators that declared early on that they would no longer store users’ IP addresses. But the announcement from Tele 2 is of considerably greater significance, since the company is one of Sweden’s main telecom providers and boasts a giant customer base.
With no data to reveal, the new law will be ineffective.
Henrik Pontén of the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau is very critical of the operators’ decision.
“This will cause a huge problem for the police in their investigations of severe internet crimes, such as child pornography,” he told Threat Level. “I think it’s a shame that a company puts its profit interest ahead of their customers’ safety. This will open the door to crime.”
A police official told TT that this could have a serious impact, not only on law enforcement’s bid to crack down on internet pirates, but also on other criminal investigations.
“In some cases, this will make an investigation impossible,” said Stefan Kronkvist, the head of Swedish police’s internet crime unit.
The police are now waiting for a new legislation implementing the European Union’s data retention directive, which would force ISPs to store electronic data for a minimum of six months. That law is planned to come into force this fall.
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Today brings more news of hacking at the hands of Pirate Bay fans endeavoring to show support and solidarity. Is anyone surprised?
While last week brought news of DDoS attacks on the main website of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, ifpi.org, which rendered the site sluggish and slow for most of Monday, there was no mention of similar attacks directed at lawyers representing the music, movie and game industries. It seemed the lawyers on the prosecuting side of the Pirate Bay case had made it away unscathed, but not so.
According to TorrentFreak, this past weekend brought similar troubles for Monique Wadsted, a lawyer who represented several major movie studios and called for a “very significant” prison sentence for the defendants during the Pirate Bay Trial. The movie industry lawyer’s site, MAQS, was targeted and yesterday the site displayed a notice informing visitors it was under attack.
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There are tons of ways to download files, be it pictures of last Christmas party, or that new cinema flick. Amongst them are the conventional direct download, FTP, and of course Peer-to-Peer.
BitTorrent, an example of P2P, is a great, perhaps even the best way to download files, both in concept as in use - that is, once you’ve got the hang of it.
Because all of it seems pretty abstract to innitiates, many people experience difficulties at the start. Even those that would call themselves ‘advanced users’ often don’t know even half of what’s possible.
MakeUseOf proudly presents to you The Big Book of BitTorrent. All you think you should know, and more.
In 28 illustrated pages, Saikat Basu from The Things I Do takes newcomers by the hand and guides them in their first steps. Initiates, but also the more experienced users get their fair share of information.
Read how to start, and advance is the world of BitTorrent. Download The Big Book of BitTorrent here for free, in PDF.
Please pass this manual around and help us spread the word.
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The storage advance, which G.E. is announcing on Monday, is just a laboratory success at this stage. The new technology must be made to work in products that can be mass-produced at affordable prices.
But optical storage experts and industry analysts who were told of the development said it held the promise of being a big step forward in digital storage with a wide range of potential uses in commercial, scientific and consumer markets.
“This could be the next generation of low-cost storage,” said Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisioneering, a technology research firm.
The promising work by the G.E. researchers is in the field of holographic storage. Holography is an optical process that stores not only three-dimensional images like the ones placed on many credit cards for security purposes, but the 1’s and 0’s of digital data as well.
The data is encoded in light patterns that are stored in light-sensitive material. The holograms act like microscopic mirrors that refract light patterns when a laser shines on them, and so each hologram’s recorded data can then be retrieved and deciphered.
Holographic storage has the potential to pack data far more densely than conventional optical technology, used in DVDs and the newer, high-capacity Blu-ray discs, in which information is stored as a pattern of marks across the surface of a disc. The potential of holographic technology has long been known. The first research papers were published in the early 1960s.
Many advances have been made over the years in the materials science, optics and applied physics needed to make holographic storage a practical, cost-effective technology. And this year, InPhase Technologies, a spinoff of Bell Labs of Alcatel-Lucent, plans to introduce a holographic storage system, using $18,000 machines and expensive discs, for specialized markets like video production and storing medical images.
To date, holographic storage has not been on a path to mainstream use. The G.E. development, however, could be that pioneering step, according to analysts and experts. The G.E. researchers have used a different approach than past efforts. It relies on smaller, less complex holograms — a technique called microholographic storage.
A crucial challenge for the team, which has been working on this project since 2003, has been to find the materials and techniques so that smaller holograms reflect enough light for their data patterns to be detected and retrieved.
The recent breakthrough by the team, working at the G.E. lab in Niskayuna, N.Y., north of Albany, was a 200-fold increase in the reflective power of their holograms, putting them at the bottom range of light reflections readable by current Blu-ray machines.
“We’re in the ballpark,” said Brian Lawrence, the scientist who leads G.E.’s holographic storage program. “We’ve crossed the threshold so we’re readable.”
In G.E.’s approach, the holograms are scattered across a disc in a way that is similar to the formats used in today’s CDs, conventional DVDs and Blu-ray discs. So a player that could read microholographic storage discs could also read CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs. But holographic discs, with the technology G.E. has attained, could hold 500 gigabytes of data. Blu-ray is available in 25-gigabyte and 50-gigabyte discs, and a standard DVD holds 5 gigabytes.
“If this can really be done, then G.E.’s work promises to be a huge advantage in commercializing holographic storage technology,” said Bert Hesselink, a professor at Stanford and an expert in the field.
The G.E. team plans to present its research data and lab results at an optical data storage conference in Orlando next month.
Yet, analysts say, the feasibility of G.E.’s technology remains unproved and the economics uncertain. “It’s always well to remember that the most important technical specification in any storage device, however impressive the science behind it, is price,” said James N. Porter, an independent analyst of the storage market.
When Blu-ray was introduced in late 2006, a 25-gigabyte disc cost nearly $1 a gigabyte, though it is about half that now. G.E. expects that when they are introduced, perhaps in 2011 or 2012, holographic discs using its technology will be less than 10 cents a gigabyte — and fall in the future.
“The price of storage per gigabyte is going to drop precipitously,” Mr. Lawrence said.
G.E. will first focus on selling the technology to commercial markets like movie studios, television networks, medical researchers and hospitals for holding data-intensive images like Hollywood films and brain scans. But selling to the broader corporate and consumer market is the larger goal.
To do that, G.E. will have to work with partners to license its holographic storage technology and expertise, and the company is already talking with major electronics and optical storage producers, said Bill Kernick, who leads G.E.’s technology sales unit. The holographic research was originally related to G.E.’s plastics business, which it sold two years ago to the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation for $11.6 billion.
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MOSCOW, April 21 (UPI) -- Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said the software giant would invest $300 million in Russia projects over the next three years.
Ballmer praised the Russian government's handling of the economy, the Moscow Times reported Tuesday.
At a news conference in Moscow, Ballmer said the Moscow government had done "amazing work … fighting the economic crisis and the measures it has taken with a view toward long-term growth through innovation and productivity."
Ballmer signed an agreement with the Space Research Institute to start a program to study climate change and pledged support for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
Microsoft intends to expand the Dream Spark program that provides software to Russian university students.
Dream Spark will soon reach students in high schools and elementary schools, the Times said.
"There's massive opportunity in this market," said David Ferguson, a market analyst at Renaissance Capital.
"You probably have to give to receive, and investments of this kind are probably a way toward building a bridge," he said.
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Google is set to make changes to its search ranking algorithm to combat the spate of links leading to malicious web pages appearing at the top of Google’s search results, according to an inside source.
Over the past few months, cybercriminals have been using blackhat SEO techniques to manipulate search rankings. When it first began, they were marginally successful at following Google Trends to find buzzy search queries and elevating a newly created targeted webpage.
But after a short period of time, these same gangs appear to have become disturbingly effective. Last week, when researching a news story, I found the top five results all led to fake scareware pages.
Obviously if Google fails to do something about this manipulation, users will lose trust and the good ole days of Google will be over fast. A Googler speaking on condition of anonymity told WebProNews a ranking change is pending that tackles spam of this kind. Once the change goes live, users shouldn’t see it “nearly as often.”
A report from security company PandaLabs identified over a million links targeting malicious webpages ranking for auto part searches. Google noted that many of the phrases mentioned in the report were rare. A phrase like [1989 Nissan Pickup Truck Engine Check Light Troubleshooting], for example, only appears on attack sites set up by spammers, which explains why Google brought back so many attack sites in response to it and similar queries.
Google's response seems also an admission of how difficult it is to provide fresh, timely search results while simultaneously combating spammers. Part of the appeal of Twitter to many people is the platform’s ability to provide real-time information; the live Web works remarkably well there so far because Twitter’s set up isn’t very conducive to spam (yet). At least Twitter has to some extent control over accounts.
Google, on the other hand, cannot control for content appearing on the Web at large, and historically its famous algorithm performed better than any other at weeding out spammy webpages and malicious results. Unfortunately, that was a version of the Web that was more static. The live Web presents entirely new challenges manifesting as the first major weakness the search engine has faced.
The company naturally didn’t have a comment on the recently pondered “link velocity” ranking factor. Search engine optimization experts have identified the speed at which organic links appear as a possible important influence.
Link velocity therefore aids in explaining how blackhatters were able to manipulate search results by dropping enormous amounts of link spam into comment and discussion areas of social sites. The freshness or buzzy nature of a query also aided in this pursuit, and cybercriminals merely have to follow Google Trends and Google News to know which keywords and phrases to target.
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Youtube - You know that site with videos and all. Yeah! It turns out that its quite popular and you happen to visit and use it quite often. Instead of just searching and playing here are some top Youtube URL tricks that you should know about:
1. View high quality videos
Youtube gives you the option to switch to high quality videos for some of the videos, however you can check if a video is available in high quality format by appending ‘&fmt=18′(stereo, 480 x 270 resolution) or ‘&fmt=22′(stereo, 1280 x 720 resolution) for even higher quality.
While the above trick works for playback, if however you want to embed hig quality videos you need to append “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″ and “&ap=%2526fmt%3D22″ to the embed url.
Linking to a video where the real action starts at 3 minutes 22 seconds, wondered if you could make it start at 03:22? You are in luck. All you have to do is add #t=03m22s (#t=XXmYYs for XX mins and YY seconds) to the end of the URL.
The search box appears when you hover over an embedded video. To hide the search box add ‘&showsearch=0′ to the embed url.
Just append ‘&start=30′ to skip first 30s of the video. In general you can modify the value after start= to the number of seconds you want to skip the video for.
Normally when you embed a Youtube video and load the page, the player is loaded and it sits there waiting for you to hit the play button. You can make the video play automatically by adding ‘&autoplay=1′ to the url part of the embed code.
Append ‘&loop=1′ to make the video start again without user intervention after it reaches the end.
Publishing your content in the form of Youtube video? Don’t want people to see other people’s content that may be related but may as well be in competition to you? Just add ‘&rel=0′ to the end of the url part of the embed code and you just turned off the related video suggestions!
Some videos are only available in certain parts of the world. Your IP Address is used to determine your location and then allow or deny access to the video. Change the url from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
Do you know of some similar Youtube URL tricks and hacks? Fire them in comments!
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