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About Romantic Travel: Let It Snow!

2009-11-10T13:29:00.000-08:00

	Romantic Travel

In the Spotlight | More Topics | Top Picks | Video Bonus |

	from Susan Breslow Sardone Winter can be your new favorite season if you know where to spend it. This week's newsletter is dedicated to places that welcome lovers, skiers, and chocolate aficionados.

In the Spotlight

Before You Plan Your Winter Vacation
Whether you regularly take short winter getaways or this is your first time planning one together, find out where couples can have a hot time this season.

		More Topics
		Fun in Park City, Utah Activities for Couples Charm in Mont Tremblant, Canada A Ski Bargain Va-Va-Voom in Vail, Colorado Arrabelle at Vail Square Sweetness at Hotel Sacher Vienna, Austria Romance in the Canadian Rockies Jasper Park Lodge Winter Wonderland in Wyoming Jackson Hole Stay Warm and Shop West Edmonton Mall

Romantic Getaways at Ski Resorts
If you're thinking about a romantic winter getaway with your significant other that includes ski time, I'll show you resorts that offer more than just snowy terrain.

Winter Olympics Travel
While the eyes of the world will be on Vancouver beginning February 12 you can experience the excitement of winter sports at places where earlier Olympic events were held.

Sponsored Links

Top Picks - Romantic Gifts $250 and Under from your Honeymoons/Romantic Getaways Guide

Spending close to $250 on a gift or gifts for your romantic partner shows how wealthy you are -- and how serious your feelings are.

1) Diamond Stud Earrings - $249
Prong-set, near-colorless diamonds sparkle with internal fire. Screw-back posts keep the genuine diamonds secure, and buyers can choose between white or yellow gold mountings.

2) Mother of Pearl Watch - $130
Is she a paragon of good taste? Then she'll appreciate this water-resistant Skagen watch, which features a luminous white mother of pearl face surrounded by Swarovski crystals on a goldtone mesh band.

3) Red Velvet Pumps - $172
Is she a shoe freak? Has gorgeous legs? Loves the way she looks in heels? Even so, she may not have allowed herself to indulge in a sexy, high-heeled, pair. But you can do it for her. These sexy red pumps rock!

Video Bonus

Watch "How to Plan a Romantic Ski Getaway"
Jonathon E. Stewart says, "If you and your significant other both enjoy fun in the snow, there's nothing more cozy and romantic than a vacation on the slopes" and offers tips on planning a ski getaway for two.

Home Allergy Center

Quick Cleaning Tricks
These easy shortcuts and tips will help keep rid your home of grime, dust and other allergens. More >

Honeymoons / Romantic Travel Ads


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Sign up for more free newsletters on favorite topics. You are receiving this newsletter because you subscribed to the About Romantic Travel newsletter as raveereckl.adiposity@BLOGGER.COM. If you wish to change or remove your email address, please visit: http://www.about.com/nl/usgs.htm?nl=honeymoons&e=raveereckl.adiposity@BLOGGER.COM About respects your privacy. Our Privacy Policy. Our Contact Information. 249 West 17th Street New York, NY, 10011 © 2008 About, Inc.

E-News: Native American Summit, Why Afghanistan is like Fantasia, and More

2009-11-10T12:24:00.000-08:00

Friends Committee on National Legislation

A Quaker Lobby in the Public Interest

E-News: Native American Summit, Why Afghanistan is like Fantasia, and More

Tuesday, November 10

Health Care: On to the Senate
Native Americans: White House Hosts Nation-to-Nation Conference
From 2C: Afghanistan: Which Fairy Tale Tells the Truth?
Global Warming: Next Steps in Congress
Preventing War: Update on the Emergency Crises Fund
New Era, New Openings: FCNL Hosts Annual Meeting This Week
War Is Not the Answer Photo of the Week: Circleville, Ohio

See the online version of this newsletter.

Health Care: On to the Senate

©iStockphoto.com/ sjlocke

On Saturday, the House passed legislation that, in our analysis, would provide access to affordable, comprehensive health care for the majority of people in this country and improve health care for Native Americans. Maintain the momentum by asking the Senate to pass legislation that also meets these criteria.

Native Americans: White House Hosts Nation-to-Nation Conference

Sec. of Interior Ken Salazar and Native leaders at the summit.

Last week, President Obama invited representatives from each of the more than 550 federally recognized tribes to the White House to discuss how all sides can move beyond our troubled past and toward a more just future together. See program assistant Inez Steigerwald's thoughts on the conference and learn more about FCNL's work on Native issues.

From 2C: Afghanistan: Which Fairy Tale Tells the Truth?

If President Obama wants to understand the problem of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, he might do well to turn to a fairy tale. I suggest that he take his top civilian and military advisors to the Family Theater at the White House to watch Walt Disney's 1940 film Fantasia. It tells the story of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." It's not just for kids anymore.

Joe Volk

Global Warming: Next Steps in Congress

Last week, a key Senate committee approved legislation to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and create green jobs. Although far from perfect, the legislation would protect key Clean Air Act provisions that would require dirty coal-fired power plants to meet minimum modern technology standards for global warming pollution. You can help protect this provision by urging your senators to sign a letter to the Senate leadership organized by Senator Robert Menendez (NJ).

Preventing War: Update on the Emergency Crises Fund

FCNL continues to lead a lobbying effort for the inclusion of a $100 million Emergency Crises Fund in the State and Foreign Operations Appropriations bill. This fund would help the State Department and USAID respond quickly to unforeseen crises. The latest Prevent War email list message has an update--read it on our website.

New Era, New Openings: FCNL Hosts Annual Meeting This Week

Participants at FCNL's 2008 Annual Meeting.

From Thursday through Sunday, nearly 200 Quakers will meet in Washington to discuss the opportunities and challenges for FCNL's lobbying work in this era.

Keynote speakers at the event include Joshua DuBois, head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and Sayyid M. Syeed, National Director of the Office for Interfaith and Community Alliances at the Islamic Society of North America. We'll update you on meeting highlights in next week's e-newsletter.

War Is Not the Answer Photo of the Week: Circleville, Ohio

Three members of the Circleville, Ohio Friends Worship Group at their most recent "Honking for Peace and Justice" vigil at the Pickaway County Courthouse, November 5, 2009.

Order your own War Is Not the Answer sign and see where this movement is showing up across the country. Find out how to submit your own photo.

You are subscribed to FCNL's e-newsletter. Make sure you receive these email updates from FCNL. Find out how to add joevolk@fcnl.org to your address book.

Donate to FCNL.

Update your email address, manage your FCNL email subscription, or unsubscribe from this list.

Subscribe to this or other email lists.

About Today: Where Do You Like to Take Photos?

2009-11-10T11:15:00.000-08:00

	Today

In the Spotlight | More Topics |

	from Jen Hubley My sister is an amazing photographer. This is partly because she's extremely talented and partly because she lives near a beautiful beach. The last part is cheating, obviously. (Although, if you ask me, being talented is sort of cheating, as well.)

In the Spotlight

Reader's Favorite Photo Locations
Our readers have recommended spots as diverse as Abbey Park in Leicester, England to Tulum, Mexico. My favorite rec from a reader? "At home. There are many things you can photograph at home. For example, my three beautiful grandchildren."

		More Topics
		Season 40 of 'Sesame Street' Starts Today Preschoolers World Series of Poker Winner Is Youngest Ever Poker 'Gossip Girl': Did Monday's Episode Go Too Far? TV Dramas Maclaren Recalls 1 Million Strollers Baby Products Great Vegetable Sides for Thanksgiving American Food Best Business Opportunities Right Now Small Business: Canada Follow Us on Twitter About.com

Where Do You Like to Take Photos?
My favorite thing to photograph is the various signage on my street. For example, I once lived near a TV repair place called the John F. Kennedy Radio & TV Repair Shop. I'm pretty sure the facade had been the same since the early 60s.

Fruit Falling Through Water, and Other Fun Lessons
Want to be a better photographer, or just take neat pictures of burning ice and falling fruit? These are the lessons for you. (I'll give you one guess which camp I'm in.)

Sponsored Links

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Quick Cleaning Tricks
These easy shortcuts and tips will help keep rid your home of grime, dust and other allergens. More >

Today Ads


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Sign up for more free newsletters on favorite topics. You are receiving this newsletter because you subscribed to the About Today newsletter as raveereckl.adiposity@BLOGGER.COM. If you wish to change or remove your email address, please visit: http://www.about.com/nl/usgs.htm?nl=todaysl&e=raveereckl.adiposity@BLOGGER.COM About respects your privacy. Our Privacy Policy. Our Contact Information. 249 West 17th Street New York, NY, 10011 © 2008 About, Inc.

VentureBeat

2009-11-10T11:08:00.001-08:00

VentureBeat

Vidly brings HD video sharing to Twitter
Running a startup outside of the Valley
Six Degrees raises $7M for online sports video games
Syncplicity becomes the latest sync service for businesses
Twitter, LinkedIn sync status updates to hone in on the professional market
Modern Warfare 2, the biggest video game of the year, debuts
Under new ownership, Moxi churns out more DVRs that can record three shows at once
Intel introduces a digital book reader that reads aloud to the blind
5 O’Clock Roundup: Google gets Gizmo, Timberlake as Facebook prez
ZeroFootPrint makes your wall sockets talk
Will Google’s deal with Admob invite antitrust concerns?
People Power launches into crowded home energy monitoring field
GridPoint keeps acquisitions rolling with ADMMicro buy
Twitter to support location-based trends with new API
Video game publisher EA announces decent earnings but will lay off 1,500

Vidly brings HD video sharing to Twitter

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 10:45 AM PST

Vidly, a video-sharing service designed to work around Twitter, is bringing high-definition video to the to the microblogging network. They’re allowing users to tweet out short high resolution videos to their followers — see National Geographic’s channel for examples.

It could be helpful for small businesses and brands that want to deepen their relationships with followers. Twitter’s traditional 140 character limit is constraining, so offering richer media content might make a brand seem more personable. Vidly says it’s ideal for showing movie trailers, music videos and game trailers. (Of course, Vidly faces competition if brands decide to host their own content or YouTube makes its Twitter integrations more seamless.)

The San Francisco-based startup, which used to be called TwitVid.io and is backed by angel investors including Ron Conway, released a video-sharing app on the iPhone a week ago. It lets you record short videos and post them to Twitter. The next version will post videos to Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and blogs and make it easier to share with select groups of friends.

Running a startup outside of the Valley

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 06:00 AM PST

It's easy to feel left out if you're a startup that's not based in Silicon Valley.

We'll admit to feeling the occasional sting of envy when we hear about the exciting events and opportunities taking place there from our headquarters in Vancouver, Canada. But we've also learned that there are some real advantages to being headquartered beyond the bubble – and that having a day-to-day presence there isn't as important as it might seem.

Here are a few of the upsides we've discovered, as well as tactics for staying connected to the tech entrepreneur 'mother ship' while enjoying the benefits of your home base:

Avoid the "Valley premium" – Startups that set up shop in the Valley fork over a premium for the exclusive location. As one of the most expensive urban areas to live in nationwide (according to ACCRA), the Valley drives up basic costs, ranging from salary and benefits to rent and utilities. This means the $5 million in funding your Valley-based competitor receives may barely keep the lights on, while a smaller round of funding could mean major growth for your firm. Leverage this fact with investors that are interested in hearing about how you can do more with less.

Be the local rock star, instead of a dime a dozen - The Valley is like a modern day Gold Rush: the possibility of striking it rich draws the masses and every tech company wants a piece of the action. As a result, it's easy to get lost in the crowd. (And, to add insult to injury, there are no economic incentives or tax breaks for your business.) In contrast, local governments outside the Valley bubble often give entrepreneurs the star treatment and big cost-savings— such as tax breaks or subsidized health care—to stimulate growth.

Recruit Valley ambassadors - An industry influencer or PR agency based in the Valley can serve as an advisor, champion your technology and help you penetrate the exclusive bubble – giving you a "physical" presence despite being geographically removed from the Valley. They can also teach you the lay of the land, arrange networking meetings, alert you to local events and help fine-tune your Valley strategy.

Don't be a stranger - Travel to the Valley at least once a quarter, timing your visits around major conferences/events to maximize in-person meetings and networking opportunities. Regular face time ties a personality to a name, which ultimately may be all people remember about your company. It's also a key ingredient for maintaining relationships.

Be a joiner - Participate in local industry and entrepreneur groups – not only will they help you build a stronger presence where you're based, but they can connect you with sister organizations or other entrepreneurs in your industry that are based in the Valley.

Give your startup space to stretch its wings - The Valley offers a high concentration of opportunities, but niche industries often struggle to get even a sliver of that pie. Consider opting for an area with a concentration of companies in your space that can help nurture your startup with good talent and resources. Colorado, for example, has a strong portfolio of UI and design startups and Canada is known for its video gaming industry.

Take advantage of the talent - When you are a company of 10, your talent is your business. Without resource-wealthy giants creating silos for incoming talent, startups outside of the Valley have a fighting chance to recruit and retain great employees without having to resort to alternatives such as outsourcing – an option that has become less cost-effective in highly-skilled industries. Target areas with academic institutions that groom the type of talent you seek or governments that allow you to import talent without heavy regulation.

Take advantage of the upcoming economic turn - Historically, investors have had a primary focus on the Valley, but with Bay Area deals falling by a much faster rate than the rest of the country last year (57 percent according to Dow Jones) investors are now more willing to look outside the bubble for innovation.

Photo by christian.rondeau via Flickr

Six Degrees raises $7M for online sports video games

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 05:00 AM PST

Online sports is always a good bet. That’s why Six Degrees Games has raised $7 million in a second round of funding in a deal led by Time Warner Investments.

The Marina Del Rey, Calif.-based company runs an online sports game web site, ActionAllStars.com. The company will use the money to expand its growth in sports entertainment and enhance its internal development capability.

The company lets players create their own sports athletes and enter them in competitions. Since the company launched its site in December, 2008, it has grown to more than a million unique users a month, said Minard Hamilton, chief executive, in an interview. Like rivals such as QuickHit, the goal is to build an online sports empire before video game giant Electronic Arts wakes up and invades the space.

Six Degrees has official licenses from partners such as the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball. Now there are more than a million new athletes created every month. The site now has 14 games that target older kids and teens. Players start as amateur athletes and work their way up through five levels to become All Stars.

Hamilton started the company in 2007 with Ben Jones, who worked with Hamilton at Jamdat Mobile, which was bought by Electronic Arts in 2006. They had worked to secure deals with sports companies such as ESPN to use their brands in mobile games. Hamilton also served as a general manager at ESPN.com from 1999 to 2001. They started the sports game site because they felt no one was targeting older kids and teens with sports interests online.

At the new company, they were able to leverage those relationships and cut deals allowing the use of the NBA and MLB brands in their games. In the coming week, the company will add micro-transactions to its site, allowing players to challenge each other and customize their characters. The company plans to sell items to the players.

Other investors include Clearstone Venture Partners and Prism VentureWorks. To date, Six Degrees has raised $14 million. Both participated in the new round. The company was founded in 2007 and has 20 employees. Rivals include sports game sites such as QuickHit, UpperDeckU, Electronic Arts and NFLRush.

Syncplicity becomes the latest sync service for businesses

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 12:00 AM PST

It looks like there’s a real business need for file synchronizing services — at least, that’s what Syncplicity is hoping, since it’s announcing a new business version.

The San Francisco company follows SugarSync, which launched a small business version last week. The basic goal of both products is the same — to allow users to access folders and files on multiple devices, with changes to a file on one computer reflected on all devices. Not only does this keep your files up-to-date across different machines, but it also means your key data is backed up if, say, your desktop computer dies or your laptop is stolen.

The business case for this type of service seems obvious — if anything, it seems even more essential for a team to share and collaborate on files than it is for a single user who just uses lots of computers. That’s especially true for Syncplicity, since it emphasizes intelligent “conflict management” when multiple users are editing a document, as well as a smooth transition when moving documents from the web in Google Docs to your desktop on Microsoft Office, and vice versa.

The new, business-specific features include a central console for IT administrators, and the possibility of paying for accounts with unlimited file storage. Chief executive Leonard Chung showed me how administrators can create accounts for employees and and determine their access levels (so one employee could read and edit a folder, while another could only read it, while a third wouldn’t have access at all). One downside: The company is still developing its Mac service, after releasing a version earlier this year and withdrawing it after being dissatisfied with the results.

Pricing starts at $45 per month for three years and 50 gigabytes of storage.

The company has raised $2.35 million from True Ventures and others.

Twitter, LinkedIn sync status updates to hone in on the professional market

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 09:44 PM PST

Twitter and LinkedIn are syncing status updates as the microblogging network looks to serve a growing number of users who are tweeting for business purposes. In many ways, Twitter has become like a living resume — people use it to promote their ideas, to build relationships or to do research by asking their followers questions.

Sending status updates to LinkedIn also fits in with Twitter’s distribution strategy. Rather than trying to keep status updates within their network, they’ve syndicated them out to others like MySpace and AOL. (Twitter can also publish tweets into Facebook’s stream, but Facebook will not allow its status updates to go the other way into Twitter.)

So how does it work? The deal will allow LinkedIn users to tweet directly through their status updates on the professional social network’s site (see below).

Going from the other direction, Twitter users can either send all of their tweets to LinkedIn or they can selectively send a few by including the hashtags #li or #in. (See below.)

In this video (with terrible music), Twitter co-founder Biz Stone sits down with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman to explain the partnership:

Modern Warfare 2, the biggest video game of the year, debuts

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 09:36 PM PST

Modern Warfare 2 is universally expected to be the biggest video game of 2009. The game debuted tonight at midnight Eastern time as retailers around the country held midnight events.

The game, part of the Call of Duty franchise but set in the context of modern anti-terrorist combat, is going to create a blast radius. Rival games slotted in the same launch period are likely to be overshadowed by Modern Warfare 2.

The last version of the game, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, launched in 2007 and sold more than 14 million units, giving its developer Infinity Ward and Activision Blizzard one of the most powerful game franchises on the planet. At $60 each, the game has generated more than $840 million at retail, and it got an average review score of 96 out 100. The industry is hoping that Modern Warfare 2 will bring back the sizzle in game sales that have been hurt by the recession. Activsion Blizzard chief executive Bobby Kotick said it may be the biggest entertainment opening of all time, with revenues exceeding the $155 million opening weekend of The Dark Knight. About 10,000 stores opened at midnight.

I’m eagerly awaiting playing this game. I played the first one all the way through and went on to play multiplayer combat for weeks at a time. I got a few dozen levels up in the multiplayer rankings, out of a possible 50. Based on the previews I’ve seen so far, this is likely to be one of my picks for the best game of the year, fighting it out with titles such as Sony’s Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.

The original Modern Warfare game was an intense first-person shooter game where you play the role of American or British special forces soldiers fighting terrorists. The combat is bloody and gritty. Infinity Ward has a knack for creating intensely dramatic combat situations; one of my favorite parts of the last time was a firefight inside a broadcast TV station where flying grenades and shattering glass abounded. The new game has the same kind of intense scenes, such as firefights aboard snowmobiles.

It’s not without controversy, however. We wrote about how Activision Blizzard had to fight to run down pirates who released pirated copies of the game early. And PC gamers are in an uproar because Activision Blizzard has reversed its policy and taken control of game servers itself, rather than allowing game clubs known as clans to run them on their own. Activision Blizzard argues that its own matchmaking system for multiplayer games is easier for players to join and it eliminates rampant cheating in games.

The game also has spurred shock and dismay from people who are offended by the fact that you can take on the role of a terrorist at a certain point in the game.

But gamers will care about the way the game plays. This one includes multiplayer combat with lots of cool perks as you climb up the ranks and fight enemies on 17 new maps. The single-player campaign takes place five years after the last game and you’re after a Russian terrorist. The battles take place in Russia, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan and Brazil. The game is available on the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Under new ownership, Moxi churns out more DVRs that can record three shows at once

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 09:01 PM PST

Moxi is revamping its digital video recorder line-up for the first time since it was sold to broadband networking firm Arris Group in September.

Moxi is launching a new high-end multi-room DVR that comes with three tuners. That means it can record three shows at the same time even while it is playing a fourth show. Previous Moxi DVRs came with two tuners and could only record two shows at once. As you can tell, the Moxi gear is aimed at consumer electronics freaks.

DVRs are consumer set-top boxes that let you record shows and skip commercials. Moxi, which invented a cool user interface for navigating through tons of TV content, has been been around since 1999, when it was founded by WebTV founder Steve Perlman. Meanwhile, investor Paul Allen started Digeo, which was merged with Moxi. The company launched its line of Moxi HD DVRs for cable TV subscribers. But that market proved somewhat narrow and Moxi tried to sell its gear at retailers. Meanwhile, Moxi has added new content sources, such as the ability to surf Hulu.com, Netflix and YouTube directly from your TV.

Suwanee, Ga.-based Arris is now supporting the company’s effort to compete against the likes of Tivo and Sony. The new Moxi HD DVR with three tuners will sell for $799 and it will come bundled with a Moxi Mate, an accessory device that lets you watch different recorded content in another room of the house. You can get a three-tuner Moxi HD DVR bundled with two Moxi Mates for $999.

Meanwhile, the two-tuner Moxi HD DVR with a single Moxi Mate will sell for $499, down from $799. And a single Moxi Mate will sell for $299 instead of $399. With a fall software update, users will be able to watch live TV on a Moxi Mate. Previously, you could only watch recorded programs on a Moxi Mate.

The idea is to cover the whole spectrum of consumer preferences, said Marc Beckwitt, vice president of CPE video business development at Arris. There are no monthly DVR service fees or in-menu ads with Moxi. You can record up to 75 hours of high definition video on a Moxi product. Or, if you prefer, you can record 300 hours of standard definition video. The devices are expandable to record up to 1,000 hours of HD video.

Intel introduces a digital book reader that reads aloud to the blind

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 09:00 PM PST

Ben Foss grew up with dyslexia, a learning disability so severe that his mother had to read books to him throughout his school years, all the way through college. Now 36, he is spearheading the launch of a remarkable device from Intel that can read electronic books aloud to the blind or visually impaired.

The Intel Reader is available today for $1,499.That’s a pretty hefty price, considering that devices like the $259 Amazon Kindle can read books aloud in a robotic voice. But the Intel Reader is based on a lot of research and is designed for the visually impaired, first and foremost.

The reader can read digital files of books aloud. It can also capture images from any printed material and use its text-to-speech technology to read aloud the publication at a variety of listening speeds. It also has a four-inch color display that can render the words being read in large font sizes. The device can read millions of books that have been formatted online for visually-impaired readers, and it comes with a high-resolution camera that can convert printed text to digital text. The reader can then read the words aloud to the user. It can even work with web pages if users first capture the text from a site in a plain text file.

“We want people to experience the independence of being able to read on their own in a public place or anywhere they want to,” said Foss (right), speaking at a press event on Monday. “A metaphor for this are the ramps that make buildings wheelchair accessible. This reader is like a ramp.”

The paperback-sized device is aimed at 55 million people in the U.S. who have eyesight problems and don’t want to be dependent on others for the pleasure of reading a novel, looking at a restaurant menu, or reading web site pages. It comes with a 5-megapixel digital camera that can be used to snap pictures of book pages. Foss said he was able to scan a 262-page book in a half hour and listen to the first chapter of the book while he was doing it. The device can read text in the DAISY format, plain text, as well as MP3 music files.

The product is a result of years of research in Intel’s Digital Health Group, headed by Louis Burns. The aim is to use technology to improve quality of life. That group has devised technologies that allow patients to be monitored remotely so that they can stay home rather than be monitored in an expensive hospital. Intel hasn’t had the best history with consumer products, but Foss says the world’s biggest chip maker is committed to the project and to the digital health market.

There are ways to use personal computers and digital cameras to do the same thing with text-to-speech software. But the Intel Reader attempts to take the hassle out of the process. Other devices have not been designed directly for the visually impaired, said Dorrie Rush, who is visually impaired herself, and works as the marketing director for the nonprofit Lighthouse International, a foundation that helps the visually impaired. However, the KNFB reader, backed by futurist Ray Kurzweil, has been around for a couple of years and is designed to work with Nokia N82 or N86 cell phones.

Intel has done its homework on the device, said Rush. That’s why it has support from Rush’s group as well as other charitable instituions including the National Center for Learning Disabilities, the International Dyslexia Association, the Association of Assistive Technology Act Programs, the Council for Exceptional Children, and the National Federation of the Blind. But Foss noted Intel sees the reader as a for-profit business.

Foss noted that the packaging comes with Braille lettering that identifies its manuals. It also has an audio CD that tells users how to use the device. The device does not come with built-in Wi-Fi networking because many school don’t allow web-connected devices in the classroom.

Rush, said that there are 15 million people like herself with impaired eyesight that can’t be corrected with lenses. She held a newspaper four inches from her face and noted she could only read the name of the paper and nothing else.

Foss said Intel tested its prototypes with more than 400 visually-impaired users, including some with partial eyesight and some who were completely blind. The device can come with an Intel Portable Capture Station (right), which costs extra. The station can be used to capture images of an entire book. It has a plastic guide that holds pages down while the camera can be placed overhead. The button for placing the images is low on the station, since many visually-impaired people are older and don’t have the strength to keep raising their arms to take pictures. ‘The image capture works even if a book is placed upside down.

The device has an Intel Atom microprocessor and two gigabytes of flash memory storage. It runs Linux software and some third-party software for scanning and reading aloud. With a fully charged battery, the device can read aloud for four hours. It can last for days on standby power. It can store about 500,000 pages of text or 600 pages of scanned book pages.

One of the cool features is the ability to change the speed of the voice reading. If you set it to 110 words per minute, it sounds like a normal, if robotic-sounding, voice. At 250 words per minute, it sounds like a chipmunk talking. But Foss said that is the speed he listens at when he is trying to absorb a book quickly. The voice sounds less robotic with headphones, and even less so if it is set to a mode that emphasizes things like exclamation points. In that way, it can be used for informational reading or entertainment.

The Intel Reader will be available through resellers such as CTL, Don Johston, GTSI, Howard Technology Solutions and Human Ware. Foss acknowledged that the price of the device isn’t cheap, but he noted that the device has a lot of custom-designed components, and it is cheaper than devices such as Braille readers,which can cost up to $10,000. Some devices for the blind take a long time to learn, but the Intel Reader takes only a few hours to internalize, Rush said. Since Intel had priced the device fairly high, there is a risk that it will be undercut by eBook readers that can be converted to handle reading aloud.

Foss said there are a variety of sources for the books, including the Gutenberg Project and Book Share. The Internet Archive has 1.6 million books available to be read aloud. That includes out-of-copyright books such as Moby Dick or Alice in Wonderland. He noted that copyright law allows readers to make a copy of a book for their own personal use. On top of that, there is an exception to the law that allows books to be copies for use by disabled people.

The device isn’t perfect at capturing all of the nuances of print. In scanning a newspaper, for instance, it may have trouble with layouts that blend columns of different stories together. It isn’t really made for capturing and translating street signs either.

Over time, the company plans to introduce international versions of the device. Within a week or so, it will launch the device in the United Kingdom where it will use a speaking voice with an English accent. Here’s a video of Foss demonstrating the product.

5 O’Clock Roundup: Google gets Gizmo, Timberlake as Facebook prez

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 08:04 PM PST

Google has acquired VoIP startup Gizmo – The deal for the Skype-alike startup was done for around $30 million in cash, says the rumor mill. eBay had come close to buying Gizmo as the company’s backup infrastructure, says TechCrunch, but walked away after the company’s founders settled with Skype.

Sun – Oracle deal meets stiff opposition from European antitrust regulators — The European Commission issued a list of objections t0 the deal. Unlike U.S. antitrust authorities, the EU feels that the open-source MySQL database is particularly threatened by an Oracle-Sun alliance, since Oracle would then 0wn Sun’s version 0f MySQL.

Yahoo to provide free WiFi in Times Square – The network goes live on Tuesday. But … isn’t there plenty of free WiFi in Times Square already?

First photos of Justin Timberlake as Facebook president Sean Parker – Timberlake’s been cast as Parker in “The Social Network,” a movie currently in production by Columbia Pictures. Valleywag put a photo of JT on the set of the movie next to a shot of the real Parker from January. Click for full size.

ZeroFootPrint makes your wall sockets talk

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 06:18 PM PST

ZeroFootPrint, maker of the so-called TalkingPlug that sits on top of regular electrical outlets and helps companies keep better track of their energy use and carbon emissions, says it will launch the product next week.

Containing an radio frequency identification (RFID) chip, a microprocessor and chip for wireless networking, the plugs will be able to drill down into how much energy individual appliances (plugged into the outlets in question) are using. Users will also be able to remotely control their devices via the TalkingPlugs because they are programmable.

To optimize use of TalkingPlugs, homeowners and companies are told to install many of them at once, allowing them to cast a mesh network of information over the entire space. This data is sent to its web-based interface where users can view how much electricity they are using, how they are using it, and how their consumption compares to that of others. This strategy might get a bit costly for average homeowners, with the price tag estimated at $50 per plug, although that could drop if the company starts making them en masse. It competes with Kill-a-watt, an electricity measuring device that is already on the market and costs $22. With Kill-a-watt, you plug the device into the wall and then plug whatever you want to measure into the Kill-a-watt. It reports how many watts the device uses, but that’s all it does.

Right now, the company, based in Toronto, is recruiting companies interested in trying the product out, and determining how it will impact their employees’ behavior and ultimately their electricity bills.

VentureBeat is hosting GreenBeat, the seminal executive conference on the Smart Grid, on Nov. 18-19, featuring keynotes from Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Kleiner Perkins' John Doerr. Register for your ticket today at GreenBeat2009.com.

Will Google’s deal with Admob invite antitrust concerns?

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 05:09 PM PST

Google announced its acquisition of mobile display-ad company AdMob today. It feels a bit like a replay of Google’s 2008 acquisition of online ad company DoubleClick. The question is, will the Department of Justice’s eager anti-trust crime fighters scrutinize this deal to the extent it did the DoubleClick deal? Google has said it expects the deal to close in the next few months. And while it said it doesn’t anticipate any regulatory concerns, it also said it wouldn’t be surprised if there was some regulatory review.

Blogger Scott Cleland is a little less optimistic that Google will close the deal quite so easily. Among his arguments:

* AdMob is the equivalent of a “Mobile-DoubleClick,” and the FTC took several months to review that deal closely. When the FTC approved that deal 4-1, they assumed Yahoo would remain a strong competitor, which was proven dead wrong when the DOJ, eleven months later, had to intervene and block Google’s anti-competitive proposed Ad Agreement with Yahoo.

* The antitrust concern [in the acquisition of AdMob] would be that Google’s acquisition of AdMob would lessen competition by accelerating Google’s growth and emerging dominance of the mobile search market where NetMarketShare.com’s latest survey of mobile search engine market shares has Google Global with 97.50% share.

For plenty more reasons Cleland’s sure this latest acquisition isn’t in for smooth sailing, check out his full post.

People Power launches into crowded home energy monitoring field

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 04:51 PM PST

If any one thing can be learned from the deluge of events, conferences, articles and blog posts on the emerging Smart Grid, it’s that home energy monitoring companies are the sexiest startups in the space. Consumer-facing, colorful and sleekly-designed, they are more appealing than clunky meters or cryptic networking and software startups. But the household monitoring field is getting crowded, with Tendril, Control4, EnergyHub, SilverSpring’s Greenbox, OpenPeak, Gridpoint and still more duking it out. And today it got even more so with the launch of People Power.

Peddling an open-source home area network platform — the open-source aspect being a key difference from many of its rivals — the company has said that its focus on serving consumers exactly the information that want will distinguish it from the rest — something that almost every other company in the space has said when asked the same question.

People Power will draw data from all home appliances and power-sucks into a central online portal where users will be able to view how much energy they are using, where, and how much it is costing them. It has also mentioned that it will be churning out various sensory devices that can be attached to appliances to monitor their energy use. This sounds a lot like British AlertMe, which does something similar, but perhaps not exactly.

Right now, the challenge for companies hoping to transmit energy data from appliances is that not all home devices, like refrigerators, washing machines, etc. come with ports or the uniform technical specs needed. Some startups are working on sensors that can be stuck to and report from any power-using device.

For now, People Power has introduced affordable devices like “GreenVent” to measure HVAC systems, “GreenHeat” to keep tabs on water heaters, “GreenSentry” to turn electric meters into smart meters, and “GreenDog” to gauge clothing dryer energy use. It also makes a special power strip that can measure how much energy is going to TVs, computers and other wall-plug electronics. The idea is that these sensory devices would learn people’s patterns over time, and eventually be able to turn appliances off and on at certain times in order to trim electricity use and bills — a very similar proposition to smart thermostat company EcoFactor.

Based in Palo Alto, Calif., People Power does have several advantages. It has teamed with top-tier researchers at UC-Berkeley and Stanford to work on a longer-range open-source wireless network that it has dubbed the Open Source Home Area Network (OSHAN). The service would be free to download online. The company says it hopes that the open-source structure will help it gain traction and inspire others to build applications on top of the platform, making it an even more valuable tool.

People Power has to make sure this happens in order to stand a chance even among its startup competitors, not to mention General Electric, Google and Microsoft, which are each hard at work developing their own home energy monitoring services. General Electric has joined forces with Tendril to make appliances that funnel energy data into web portals, while Google and Microsoft have launched consumer-facing energy dashboards PowerMeter and Hohm, respectively.

So far the company has raised an undisclosed first round of funding from New Cycle Capital and several angel investors.

GridPoint keeps acquisitions rolling with ADMMicro buy

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 03:42 PM PST

GridPoint, the very generously-funded Smart Grid startup looking to get its foot in every door pertaining to the emergence of a cleaner, more efficient grid, is doing a good job of paying for progress. Its acquisition strategy continues today with the purchase of ADMMicro, a company that managed energy use for commercial and industrial customers.

At its core, GridPoint is a service and software vendor for utilities — giving them the tools they need to balance peak power loads, keep track of and parse the flood of energy consumption data being channeled by their smart meters, and supply consumer-facing home energy monitors intended to encourage conservation and energy bill saving.

The company, based in Arlington, Va., says it will integrate ADMMicro’s technology to create new opportunities in the commercial and industrial sectors. With $220 million in its pocket, its hard to tell when and where GridPoint will stop buying up the fruits of others’ labor to build its portfolio.

It rised its first round of funding shortly after its inception in 2003, bringing in $8 million from Skypoint Capital and BDC Venture Capital. Since then, Advantage Capital Partners, Altira Group, Contango Capital Partners, Goldman Sachs, New Enterprise Associates, Perella Weinberg Partners, Robeco, Susquehanna, Quercus Trust and Craton Equity Partners have all chipped into its sizable coffers.

GridPoint’s last acquisition, of home energy management system maker Lixar, came in June. Its products were being tested by Duke Energy at the time. And before that, in September 2008, it bought V2Green, developer of software systems that manage how electric cars are charged based on energy prices.

So far, it seems like GridPoint, which didn’t have a very compelling project until its acquisitions, has been able to buy success (the pitch must have been great). It has shaken up the space, and Austin Energy, Duke Energy and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District have taken notice, each working to integrate GridPoint’s software and demand response offerings into their grids.

It will be interesting to see which direction the company chooses with its next startup buy. In the meantime, it has a lot of pilot projects to keep tabs on before its technology is more widely adopted.

As more major corporations enter the Smart Grid space — like Cisco, IBM, General Electric and the like — startups offering networking, software and demand response services are going to be bought or merge to form larger units. Ironically, GridPoint is leading all of these players as the number one buyer of small Smart Grid companies. Will it be able to build its empire in time to compete with the giants?

VentureBeat is hosting GreenBeat, the seminal executive conference on the Smart Grid, on Nov. 18-19, featuring keynotes from Nobel Prize winner Al Gore and Kleiner Perkins' John Doerr. Register for your ticket today at GreenBeat2009.com.

Twitter to support location-based trends with new API

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 03:29 PM PST

Twitter is adding what could become a powerful new source for news and things to do. The company is going to support location-based trends with a new application programming interface so that users can see what others nearby are tweeting about. That could make mash-ups like the one pictured above from Trendsmap quite powerful. (Trendsmap shows the most buzzed-about terms on Twitter for different cities around the world.)

Raffi Krikorian of Twitter’s Platform Team writes:

The one feature request that we’ve heard over and over, however, is “what’s going on where I am?” To answer that, we wanted to give you all a heads up regarding the new “Trends API” that we’re launching. This API will open up trending information that is specific to a number of locations around the world.

Twitter’s using Yahoo’s Where on Earth IDs (WOEIDs) to name locations because the company’s markers are language-agnostic and stable. Based on the company’s documentation, it looks like the API will return 10 trending terms for a given location.

Video game publisher EA announces decent earnings but will lay off 1,500

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 01:45 PM PST

Electronic Arts said today it would lay off 1,500 employees as it focuses more tightly on its best-selling video games and digital media businesses. The company also posted slightly better-than-expected revenues for its second fiscal quarter, but the big video game publisher fell slightly short on earnings.

Redwood City, Calif.-based EA also announced that the layoffs would result in cost savings of $100 million and one-time charges of $130 – $150 million. It did so even as it announced this morning it bought social game publisher Playfish for up to $400 million. John Riccitiello, chief executive, said in a statement that the company made “tough calls” to lay off employees in targeted areas so that it can invest more in higher-priority games and digital businesses. The layoffs will be completed by March 31.

The company said the layoffs will result in facilities closures, but it didn’t identify which game development studios would close. The company is already reeling from cutbacks. A year ago, EA laid off 1,000 of 10,000 employees. These new cuts are even deeper, and they reflect a few things. The newest job cuts will add up to 17 percent of EA’s 8,800 employees.

First, EA has been hurt by the recession. Second, its newest original games, such as the Beatles Rock Band, haven’t set the world on fire. Lastly, gamers have been turning to cheaper fare such as free-to-play games on Facebook. The latter is the reason that EA acquired Playfish, which offers free Facebook games and makes money with sale of digital goods, such as pet food in its Pet Society game.

John Schappert, chief operating officer, said in a conference call that Playfish got more than 90 percent of its revenue from direct consumer purchases and that EA was impressed that a very small portion of it came from the more controversial offers business (latter is my description, not his). Schappert said he thinks the social gaming industry will continue to grow exponentially for some time. Those games will also likely be entry points for gamers who might be upsold later to console and PC games.

“EA is playing offense, positioning ourselves for the future,” Riccitiello said on the conference call.

Riccitiello said he was cautious about the second half of EA’s fiscal year because consumers have been hit hard by the recession. On the positive front, EA has 17 titles this year with a Metacritic rating (aggregate of review scores) of 80 or higher. Last year, EA had 13 games rated 80 or higher. And two years ago, it had only five. Under Riccitiello, EA put more focus on building quality games rather than shoveling out licensed movie titles and other low-quality games.

EA reported non-GAAP revenue of $1.147 billion, up 2 percent from $1.126 billion a year earlier. Non-GAAP net earnings were $19 million, or 6 cents a share, compared with a loss of $20 million, or 6 cents a share a year earlier.

Sales were driven by the launches of the FIFA 10 soccer game, Madden NFL 10, The Beatles Rock Band, Need for Speed Shift, and NCAA Football 10. FIFA 10 sold 4.5 million copies in its first week and was particularly strong in Europe. Madden NFL 10 was the No. 1 title in North America, according to NPD, and it sold more than 3.9 million copies worldwide. Need for Speed Shift sold more than 2.5 million copies in the quarter.

On a GAAP basis, revenue was $788 million, compared with $894 million a year earlier. EA lost $391 million, or $1.21 a share on a GAAP basis for the quarter, compared to a net loss of $310 million, or a 97 cents a share, a year earlier.

Analysts were expecting a consensus non-GAAP profit of 7 cents per share on sales of $1.12 billion for the second fiscal quarter ending Sept. 30, according to Thomson Reuters. EA said it is the No. 1 publisher in North America and Europe, with 21 percent overall market share in PC, mobile, and console games. (Activision Blizzard reported it had 16 percent market share in PC and console games.)

Digital non-GAAP revenue hit an all-time high at $138 million, up 23 percent from a year ago. the digital businesses include titles like the free-to-play online game Battlefield Heroes. EA Mobile generated $50 million in non-GAAP revenue in the quarter, up 9 percent from a year ago. EA said it is the No. 1 publisher in iPhone games with seven of the top 10 games to date. It is No. 1 on Verizon, with eight of the top 10 games. During the quarter, EA launched six iPhone games; all six made it into the top 100 paid apps list, no small achievement with 100,000 apps on the Apple AppStore. And four of those games made it into the top 15 list.

A few years ago, digital businesses were 10 percent of the overall industry. But Riccitiello said digital is now 35 percent of the overall game business, and it is the reason that the game industry will grow in 2009, despite weakness in the packaged goods industry. Riccitiello said he thinks the packaged goods games sold at retail will bounce back, in part because console makers can still lower prices further and because new console owners will likely buy software in 2010.

For the fiscal year ended March 31, the GAAP net revenue is expected to be $3.6 – $3.9 billion. Non-GAAP revenue is expected to be $4.2 – $4.4 billion. GAAP diluted loss per share is expected to be $1.20 – $2.05 a share. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share are expected to be 70 cents – $1 a share. EA expects to be profitable on a non-GAAP basis in both the third fiscal quarter ended Dec. 31 and the fourth-fiscal quarter ended March 31.

Big games coming in the second half of EA’s fiscal year are Mass Effect 2, Dante’s Inferno, Army of Two: the 40th Day, and Left4Dead2 (created by Valve, published by EA).

EA did not identify which studios it was closing in the coming months. But Riccitiello said that Nintendo Wii titles have not been hitting expectations. He noted that multi-platform titles have not been selling well on the Wii. The current relative weakness in the Wii compared to the resurgence of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 is good for EA, which is stronger on the latter platforms, Riccitiello said.

EA also said it would put an emphasis on its EA Games label and EA Sports Label games, which lead to perennial hits over the years, and launch a new version every year or two. After that, EA would also focus on its Sims games and Hasbro-related games. EA is also investing in its digital online businesses from social games to online subscription games. But the company is essentially cutting the bottom third of its portfolio, Riccitiello said.

Other publications have reported that EA is cutting a lot of jobs at its Mythic, Tiburon, Black Box and Redwood Shores game studios. To get a sense of what this means, EA launched somewhere around 65 games last year, is launching 50 titles this year, and may have mid-30s in the coming year that ends March 31, 2011.

The Hump Day Humor-Gram: I Scream for More Fun!

2009-11-10T08:04:00.000-08:00

The Early Edition Humor-Gram, November 10, 2009 Issue 329
===============================================================
This week on Humor at Work TV: Finding the accidentally funny
in your workplace, ideas on getting ideas, and a special
discount offer on "340 Ways to Put Humor to Work".
Watch at http://humoratwork.tv
===============================================================
1. I Scream for More Fun

Okay, how about ice cream for more fun? Or, how about more fun
with your ice cream? Ben and Jerry's ice cream are one of the
few companies to actually have a "humor policy." The wildly
successful Vermont-based company discovered that the "punch
line is not that far from the bottom line." Active since 1988,
their "Joy Gang" has continuously strived to instill fun into
daily routines, including holding many offbeat theme days
such as, "Clash-Dressing Day" and "Barry Manilow Appreciation
Day." (It's hard to imagine a more fun workplace: ice cream,
a humor at work committee, and Barry Manilow.)
================================================================
2. Mike's Fun at Work Tip

Have a "name tag" day where everyone wears one of those "Hello,
My Name is ______ " tags. Then (and here's where the fun
really kicks in kids) have everyone pretend that they are
meeting everyone for the first time. I guarantee you people will
laugh, plus it will give everyone a chance to reconnect,
encourage everyone to say hello to everyone else, and even let
some people start their relationships over with a clean slate.
================================================================
3. Quote of the Week

"Humor in the workplace comes naturally AFTER you've done
everything else right." Dilbert creator Scott Adams
================================================================
4. It's a Wacky World

Okay folks, is it just me or this a rather inappropriate
newspaper headline: Stiff Opposition Expected in Casket-less
Funeral Plan
================================================================
Copyright Michael Kerr, 2009. www.humoratwork.com

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CrunchGear

2009-11-10T05:41:00.000-08:00

CrunchGear

Google to shine holiday cheer and free Wi-Fi in 47 airports for the holidays
Amazon finally releases the Kindle for PC app (but it’s still in beta)
NTT Docomo’s 19 new cell phones for Japan (photo gallery)
Japan gets 17 new cell phones: SoftBank’s complete winter-spring line-up (photo gallery)
Daily Crunch: Danger! High Voltage Edition
100% concept watch coming to market after all
Modern Warfare 2 Is Here: Twitter Is Noticing
Apparently, this is the Droid you are looking for
Digeo outs a 3-tuner Moxi HD DVR, drops prices across the board
Video hands-on with the Dell 5130cdn, the world’s fastest color laser printer
Excellent idea: flat outlet pulls out to allow extra plug
Six hot ‘n fresh DisplayPorts on one video card, coming right up
GamersGate has a virtual currency I might actually want to earn
Trillions: a short film on the future of computing
How to read, and respond to, video game reviews
Star Trek Blu-ray release earns a perfect score at Blu-ray.com
Review: BlackBerry Bold 9700
Finally, Roombas enacting a game of Pac-Man
Test Drive: 2010 Volkswagen GTI
Great, Seattle middle-schoolers are making shanks now

Google to shine holiday cheer and free Wi-Fi in 47 airports for the holidays

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 05:36 AM PST

Google loves you and wants to make sure your holiday travel isn’t absolutely horrible by providing free Wi-Fi at 47 airports nationwide. Don’t be evil, indeed.

The promo starts on November 16 and runs through January 15, 2010. The only catch is that once you log onto the free Wi-Fi, you will be prompted to try Google Chrome and set Google as your default search engine. Fine by me. In fact, it sounds less annoying that current airport Wi-Fi that generally has a gigantic banner somewhere on the screen reminding you that you’re in a wonderful airport waiting to board an H1N1-invested plane.

Amazon finally releases the Kindle for PC app (but it’s still in beta)

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 05:20 AM PST

Huzzah! PC users can finally include their computers within the each of Amazon’s syncing capabilities with the Kindle for PC app. The just released beta finally gives PC users a viable ebook reading option on a program that doesn’t look like it was designed for Windows 95. Although the majority of users will probably be those that already own a Kindle and just want to turn a few pages while at work, still relying on a Kindle for most of the reading. The app is pretty darn powerful in of itself, but there are some notable drawbacks and limitations.

The Kindle for PC app has full access to the Kindle Book store, but it’s through the computers Internet browsers and not a touchscreen-friendly app. Ebooks look great in the app but only Kindle ebooks; you can’t import anything including PDFs or any other ebook. The app itself looks great but isn’t especially meant for a a touchscreen.

Amazon is onto something here but it’s a good thing this app is still in a beta. If Amazon could make the app a little more touchscreen friendly with larger buttons and a dedicated book store, it very well could be a must-have app on all the touchscreen MID and UMPCs. The stradegy would be solid, get those proven gadget fans hooked with a free app and then possible sell them a Kindle. If they don’t buy a Kindle, at least they are still dropping $10 for each book. That’s money.

The beta is free so why not jump over to Amazon and download it yourself. Mac users will need to sit quietly in the corner until Amazon outs an OS X edition.

NTT Docomo’s 19 new cell phones for Japan (photo gallery)

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 04:43 AM PST

Following KDDI's announcement three weeks ago, Japan's biggest cell phone carrier NTT Docomo today unveiled [JP] its winter-line up of cell phones (SoftBank, the No.3, did the same). And here are all the new models announced by Docomo for the Japanese market today.

Japan gets 17 new cell phones: SoftBank’s complete winter-spring line-up (photo gallery)

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 01:22 AM PST

KDDI did it as early as last month, and today it was NTT Docomo's and SoftBank's turn to unveil their line-ups of new cell phones for the Japanese market. Here are all of SoftBank's 17 future models [JP], which will be sold in Japan from this fall through spring 2010.

Daily Crunch: Danger! High Voltage Edition

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 12:00 AM PST

GamersGate has a virtual currency I might actually want to earn
Excellent idea: flat outlet pulls out to allow extra plug
USB-powered gloves that keep your fingers warm (but why?)
Finally, Roombas enacting a game of Pac-Man
Star Trek Blu-ray release earns a perfect score at Blu-ray.com
Trillions: a short film on the future of computing

100% concept watch coming to market after all

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 10:30 PM PST

Check out the latest creation from the specialty design company, 100%. Despite having a name that’s really annoying to blog about, they do have some cool products for sale. What they don’t have for sale (quite yet) is this bracelet that cleverly conceals a digital wristwatch.

Not sure exactly how they do it, and power consumption might be an issue, but it certainly is a cool looking watch that looks more like an accessory then your bog standard watch.

No formal announcement on the release date or the price, but it should probably be out in the next few months and be in the sub-$400 range.

[via ablogtoread]

Modern Warfare 2 Is Here: Twitter Is Noticing

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 10:26 PM PST

It’s finally here! Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is finally legally available in the US through special midnight release parties tonight. People can’t seem to stop tweeting about the game, as “Modern Warfare 2″ is now a trending topic on Twitter. Whether people have already gotten the game or are waiting in ridiculously long lines, people have something to say about CoD:MW2.

There is one common thing between all these tweets: everyone is excited to play this game. It’s already gotten two perfect scores and if what early players say is true, I’m sure more high scores are to come. I would add more to this, but let’s be honest, the lines on the West Coast are already two hundred deep and growing, and I need this game. Tonight.

Apparently, this is the Droid you are looking for

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 09:30 PM PST

Good news for Motorola and Verizon, it looks like the Droid is a hit. The new phone is certainly living up to the hype, and seems to be the breakaway hit of this holiday season.

Digeo outs a 3-tuner Moxi HD DVR, drops prices across the board

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 09:00 PM PST

Digeo has managed to stay busy despite going through an acquisition by Arris. The company just went live with a slew of updates that show the company is serious about the DVR game. First and foremost is a new HD DVR model. This boy is almost exactly like the current Moxi HD DVR except it comes equipped with three tuners that will allow you to record three separate stations at one time off of a single multi-stream Cable Card. Take that, TiVo.

The new three-tuner model is perfect for the somewhat new Moxi Mate that will soon be able to utilize the tuners in a Moxi HD DVR for live TV viewing. Picture this: you’re streaming a recording from your main Moxi HD DVR onto the Moxi Mate in your bedroom but the wife fails asleep. This means you’re no longer obligated to watch Gray’s Anatomy and instead of switching to your TV’s tuner, the Moxi Mate will act just like a full size Moxi HD DVR and stream content live from one of the free tuners located in the full size Moxi HD DVR. You can even change the channel, view the guide, and timeshift live TV all over magic of Ethernet.

Up to two Moxi Mates can connect to one three-tuner DVR but can access live TV only when the main Moxi has a tuner available. If the tuners are in use, the user will be notified of the conflict and given the option to cancel the recording to free up the tuner. The necessary Moxi Mate software update will be available within the coming weeks along with an update to the Moxi HD DVR that tweaks the menu structure a bit.

Of course the new three tuner Moxi HD DVR can do the standard DVR functions too. Except this model allows you to record on three stations while watching a previously recorded program.

With the new model comes price drops. The two-tuner HD DVR is now $499 down from $799 and the standalone Moxi Mate is $299 instead of $399. The three-tuner model is only available in a bundle pack with either one or two Moxi Mates for $799 and $999, respectively. Just like before, there is no monthly fee with any of these products.

Digeo has been on a roll ever since the Moxi HD DVR was released last December. This is the 3rd straight quarter that the company has significantly updated its Moxi HD DVR product line. TiVo hasn’t done that in years.

New Three-Tuner Moxi® HD DVR and Reduced Pricing for Moxi Multi-Room Packages Unwrapped for Holiday Season

Under ARRIS Ownership, Moxi Continues to Innovate and Deliver New Features to Consumers

SUWANEE, GA – November 10, 2009 – As part of its first product update since acquiring the award-winning Moxi product line from Digeo, Inc. in September, ARRIS (Nasdaq: ARRS) today announced the introduction of a three-tuner version of the Moxi HD DVR as well as reduced pricing for its two-tuner Moxi HD DVR and Moxi multi-room packages.

The new three-tuner Moxi HD DVR, which allows for recording of three channels simultaneously while watching a fourth recorded program, is available in a Moxi HD DVR plus Moxi Mate bundle for $799 MSRP.

The price of the two-tuner Moxi HD DVR introduced earlier this year has been reduced to $499 MSRP (formerly $799).

In addition, ARRIS is introducing a three-room multi-room bundle option—a three-tuner Moxi HD DVR plus two Moxi Mates that collectively serve three rooms for $999.

The company also announced plans to deliver live TV on the Moxi Mate via the Moxi HD DVR. The Moxi HD DVR will receive the update automatically through a software download. Additionally, the price of the Moxi Mate has been reduced to $299 (formerly $399).

"We've heard from consumers that they love the Moxi products but are looking for different price and component options to serve their individual needs," said Marc Beckwitt, VP of CPE Video Business Development, ARRIS. "The recent acquisition by ARRIS brings the market presence and leverage required to drive cost out of the product, and consequently, we're able to offer these very competitive prices to consumers."

ARRIS continues to stand by the commitment to deliver the Moxi "all in", with no monthly or lifetime DVR service fees. Moxi also has no in-menu advertisements.

The Moxi HD DVR is designed to appeal to the most demanding digital cable entertainment enthusiasts. Some of its key attributes include:

A native HD interface and Emmy® award-winning Moxi Menu

Up to 75 hours of HD recording space or up to 300 hours at standard definition, and expandable to 6.5 Terabytes for up to 1000 hours of HD recording with an external eSATA drive

Access to many Internet services consumers already use, such as Rhapsody®, Flickr® and online video from Netflix®, Hulu™, and YouTube™ via DLNA server software such as PlayOn™ (currently provided at no charge) running on their PC

Multi-room viewing with the Moxi Mate and the ability to record three channels simultaneously while watching a fourth recorded program on the three-tuner version of the Moxi HD DVR

Remote and mobile browser scheduling to set recordings while away from home moxi.com

MoxiNet for full-screen web browsing and SupertickerTM —a ticker widget that provides information, such as weather, sports scores and news along the bottom of the screen

The Moxi HD DVR makes it effortless for consumers to discover, experience and share high definition media from their digital cable provider, PCs on the home network, and the Internet.

Also scheduled for release later this month are additional software upgrades to Moxi, which include new search and record option menus. These software updates will enable users to specify preferred record settings that can be applied to any new recorded TV shows or TV series. The new menu structure delivers easier access and better visibility related to the DVR function of the Moxi HD DVR, such as available hard drive space and other Moxi HD DVR related recording and scheduling functions.

Software upgrades, which have been delivered each quarter since unveiling the Moxi at CES in January 2009, continue to be delivered to the consumer automatically and at no charge.

Taking advantage of ARRIS e-tail infrastructure, the company is also introducing payment via major credit card instead of the PayPal option previously offered. The new Moxi pricing and bundle options are available now at www.moxi.com.

For more details, technical specifications and screen images of the Moxi HD DVR and Moxi Mate, please visit: www.moxi.com. You can also follow Moxi on Twitter at www.twitter.com/moxi_hd or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/moxi.hd.

Video hands-on with the Dell 5130cdn, the world’s fastest color laser printer

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 09:00 PM PST

Yup, that gigantic Dell box contained a huge color laser printer. But to my pleasant surprise, the 100 lbs 5130cdn isn’t nearly as boring and mundane as I thought it was going to be. I really don’t know if it’s the fastest printer in the world like Dell claims, but I do know that this printer could be a serious weapon in the hands of a comic book pirate. (I would like to think they exist)

Disclaimer: I don’t know jack about business-level printers. When Dell first asked me to look the world’s fastest color laser printer, I thought it was going to be a desktop model like Best Buy sells. Nope, the 5130cdn is a full scale, business printer with a monthly load throughput capacity of a 110,000 pages. This printer is serious business but for $1,549 I would expect nothing less.

I managed to get the printer set up after some issues with Windows 7. For some reason, this brand new printer doesn’t ship with Windows 7 drivers, instead I had share the printer on another computer and then the print speed wasn’t up to spec. But once Dell gave me the right drivers and assured me that I got a pre-production model and the retail version will have the compatible drivers, I was off to the races.

The printer is rated at 47ppm in both mono and color and I found those numbers to be accurate. With just a random text-only PDF, I was able to get about 39ppm when printing over a wireless network and exactly 47ppm via a direct USB connection. Even when the document has a splattering of color, the speed isn’t noticeably affected.

But let’s say you want to print a full-color comic book for some random reason. Just how fast is it then? Well, the 5130cdn managed to spit out the 38 pages in 1:38 as shown in the video above. Trust me, that’s fast considering each page is a full color image around 800KB in size. Try that with your inkjet and see what you get.

Dell has of course loaded this printer with a ton of new technology to get these results. It’s the first Dell printer to use ColorByDell, which is a total print quality solution that improves color saturation, sharpness, and print quality. Plus, the printer has a Cost Per Page of 1.04c per page for black and white, and 7.72c for color.

The 5130cdn is available starting today for $1,549, which includes a 3 year next business day on-site service contract. Let me warn you though, if you do buy this monster, its shipping weight is 120 lbs on a pallet and your wife won’t like it if it sits in the living room all evening.

Dell Launches World's Fastest Color Laser Printer

3 New Commercial Printers Help Customers Boost Productivity & Lower TCO

ROUND ROCK, NOVEMBER 10, 2009 – Dell today announced three new commercial workgroup printers to help businesses of all sizes increase productivity and lower their total cost of printing. Printers available today include the Dell 5130cdn, the world's fastest single function letter (LTR) size color laser printer, the Dell 7130cdn, Dell's first LED color printer with tabloid size printing capability; and the Dell 3330dn, a single function monochrome laser printer for high performance class black and white printing. These new printers will be launched and available in Europe and the Middle East on November 24.

The Dell 5130cdn can print up to 47 single-side and 37.6 double-side LTR pages per minute (ppm) in both mono and color, making it the world's fastest LTR size single-function color laser printer. The 5130cdn also premiers ColorbyDell, a total print quality solution that delivers improved color saturation and image sharpness and outstanding print quality. This is enabled through a combination of a powerful new image enhancement algorithm, advanced toner technology and improvements in print engine design. The Dell5130cdn also brings significant energy and cost savings by using a new toner formulation that fuses at a lower temperature, enabling a remarkable Cost Per Page (CPP) of 1.04c for black and white and 7.72c for color print outs[i]. With a maximum duty cycle up to 110,000 pages a month, the Dell 5130cdn provides outstanding reliability and is available today in the US from $1,549 with 3 Year Next Business Day (NBD) Onsite Service after remote diagnosis[ii].

To help companies reign in the costs of their color printing, Dell also announced the availability of Dell ColorTrack Pro—a remote administration tool for IT administrators to centrally monitor and control access to color printing on the Dell 5130cdn. Designed for workgroup environments, Dell ColorTrack Pro manages user access at the server level, to more easily control printing and toner costs.

"With a school district as large as ours, it's important that we provide students, faculty and staff access to quality technology," said Tim McNeese, Information Systems Director of Williamson County Schools. "After installing the new Dell 5130cdn printers, we noticed a big difference in the quality and speed of the printouts. The great value and high production rate helps our schools run smoothly and collaboratively," he added.

The Dell 7130cdn is Dell's first LED-based color printer with the ability to print up to tabloid-size, high quality Pantone® approved color prints, for more accurate color reproduction. With its ability to bring professional quality color printing in-house with lower costs and improved printing options, the Dell 7130cdn includes a rich feature set, including numerous paper handling options, a powerful processor and enhanced memory. This allows the printer to print the first page (First Print Out Time) as quickly as 6.5 seconds in both mono and color. The Dell 7130cdn is available today in the US from $2,799 with 1 Year Next Business Day (NBD) Onsite Service after Remote Diagnosis[iii].

"Dell's new commercial printers add to a compelling portfolio of business color and mono printers for organizations of all sizes," said Keith Kmetz, Vice President of Hardcopy Peripherals Solutions and Services at IDC. "The Dell 5130cdn revolutionizes speed and usability. And its user-friendly appeal makes it attractive to organizations looking for high quality color output at a low total cost of ownership," he added.

On the black and white printing front, Dell announced the Dell 3330dn, a single-function black and white performance printer that can print up to 40 pages per minute (ppm), with a monthly duty cycle up to 80,000 pages. Built for high performance printing needs, the Dell 3330dn packs work-horse reliability, and includes paper drawer and memory expansion capabilities that grow with increasing business demands, all in a compact desktop size. The Dell 3330dn is currently available from today in the US from $599 with 1 year Advanced Exchange Service.

"Dell has always focused on efficiency, reducing costs and increasing productivity for businesses of all sizes, and today we have extended that same winning formula to the printing world," said Mike Arterbury, Global Director Commercial Software & Peripherals at Dell Inc. "Our portfolio of printers provides customers with valuable and affordable choices and lower cost of printing, saving them time – and real money!" he added.

"Dell's complete lineup of laser printers provide customers with outstanding value, world class reliability and ease of use to help them achieve more with less, with minimum downtime and complexity," said C. K. Lim, General Manager of Dell's Global Imaging Business.

Dell printers are available direct from Dell and from Dell's more than 50,000 partners worldwide.

Printer Specifications

5130cdn Color Laser Printer 7130cdn Color Laser Printer 3330dn Mono Laser Printer

List price US$ 1,549 (includes 3-yr NBD On-site Service after remote diagnosis) US$ 2,799 with 1-yr NBD Onsite Service after remote diagnosis US$599 with 1-yr NBD Advanced Exchange after remote diagnosis

Consumables type Separated toner and drum unit Separated toner and drum unit Separated toner and drum unit

Print Speed (Letter) Up to 47ppm in both mono and color (Actual print speed will vary with use) Up to 35ppm (actual print speed will vary with use) Up to 40ppm (actual print speed will vary with use)

Duplex Print Standard Standard Standard

Max. resolution Up to 1200 dpi x 1200 dpi Up to 1200 dpi x 1200 dpi Up to 1200×1200 dpi / 2400 IQ

User interface 160 x 64 Mono Graphics backlit LCD text 128 x 64 Graphics backlit LCD text 4 line backlit LCD (text and graphics)

3-button + 5-way cursor keypad 6-button cluster 20 buttons keypad

1 LED: Status (green, yellow & red) 1 LED: Status (green, yellow & red) 1 two-tone LED

Processor 800 MHz 1 GHz 466 MHz

Connectivity High-speed USB 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet High-speed USB 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet USB 2.0 (Hi speed), Parallel, 10/100 Ethernet

Print Language PCL® 5c, 5e/6 Emulation: 81 fonts

Adobe® PostScript® 3: 136 fonts
PCL® 5c, PDF direct v1.4 , Adobe® PostScript® 3 Adobe® PostScript® 3 PCL® 5e, PCL 6, PCL XL, HBP (GDI), XPS (GDI) and PostScript® Level 3 Emulation

Paper input (std/max) 700 / 2900 sheets 600 / 2100 sheets 250 / 850 sheets (550tray+MPT)

Paper output (std/max) 500 / 1000 sheets 400 / 400 sheets 50 sheets

Multi-purpose input 150 sheet 100 sheet 150 sheets

Max. monthly duty cycle Up to 110,000 pages Up to 150,000 pages Up to 80,000 pages

Size (W x D x H) 22.1" x 20.0" x 17.0" 25.2" x 26.2" x 15.7" 10.2″ x 16.6″ x 14.53″

Weight 99lbs (45kg) 145.2lbs (66 kg) 31.15 lb.

Related Links:

For more details, please go to www.dell.com/printers

Excellent idea: flat outlet pulls out to allow extra plug

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 07:28 PM PST

One must be careful when re-inventing industrial design that has been around for a long, long time. Chances are, it was like that for a reason. The Node Outlet, for instance, looks cool at first, but upon reflection has some serious and dangerous problems. I don’t see any similarly obvious issues with this pull-out plug, but hello, I’m a blogger. What the hell do I know?

I suppose the major challenge with something like this is making sure there’s no current interference. Or… resistance… polarization. Never mind, I give up. Can you guys think of any reasons why this shouldn’t work?

More info and pictures at Art Lebedev’s site.

Six hot ‘n fresh DisplayPorts on one video card, coming right up

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 06:00 PM PST

When I first saw Eyefinity demoed, I thought “that’s pretty awesome, but aren’t you going to have to pull some shenanigans to get that many monitors hooked up? I mean, daisy-chaining monitors isn’t science of the rockets or anything, but it does mean certain restrictions need to be observed, and certain accessories bought. But what if your graphics card had as many outputs as you had monitors? Or, say, a lot more?

That’s what this particular ATI Radeon 5870 is doing. Can you say six (mini) DisplayPorts?

Apart from the extra ports, this model doesn’t differ too much from the reference 5870, though it does sport a slightly different PCI interface and, of course, it has 2GB of GDDR5. It’s got HDMI and two DVIs, plus… I don’t recognize that one on the left, am I losing it? (yes, I am, it’s a standard DisplayPort)

No pricing or availability information at the moment, but it’s good to know it’s out there if I ever happen to buy five more monitors and need to rock that Eyefinity.

[via Tom's Hardware]

GamersGate has a virtual currency I might actually want to earn

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 05:00 PM PST

Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of virtual currencies. They certainly have their place, but usually they’re just an obstacle between you and the object you want. Why do I have to buy points if points are just your version of dollars? There are exceptions: here in Seattle there are a couple alternate currencies being traded for goods and services which work on a different level from dollars — and GamersGate, the direct-download games site, appears to have something of a good deal in their blue coins.

Unlike in Mario 64 and other games, you can’t get an extra life by collecting 10 blue coins. That would be impossible. No, these are used for buying games, just like regular money, but it appears that you can earn them just by participating in the site. Writing reviews for games, answering questions in the “Game Tutor” program, and doing other stuff nets you a load of coins. They’re not worth a lot individually, but once you buy or review a few games (may I recommend X-COM?) and lurk on the forums for a bit, you should have enough to make a bargain purchase or two.

If you keep an eye on the offers page, you can also find games that give you lots of bonus coins, too — so if it’s between buying it there or on Steam or whatever, you might as well get the extra buck or two off.

Anyway, if you’re going to lurk on a gaming community, you might as well get paid for it, right? I couldn’t find a complete guide to how to get coins so I’ve put what they sent me here:

Some of the current EA titles have huge Blue Coin bonuses (i.e. Dragon Age: Origins- 5,000 blue coins).

Pre-order

GamersGate allows you to pre-order a game, and when you do you'll be rewarded with Blue Coins. The standard is 250 BLC, but sometimes there are special offers that include more.

Price guarantee

If the pre-ordered game drops in price within 30 days after its release, for more than 5 days, you will get the difference back in Blue Coins.

Review

Your reviews posted on GamersGate are important as they will help other gamers with their game selections. Therefore we want to ensure that all reviews are as useful as possible to our gamers. Anyone who has purchased a game is welcome to write a review, which will be published on GamersGate. Please note that in order to get your review published you need to follow our review policy. In order to review a product, you must be logged in and own the game, and you can only review a product once. If you are first to review you will receive 300 BLC, with additional reviewers receiving 150 BLC.

Ratings – rate a game

GamersGate allows you to rate the game you have purchased, using a five-star rating scale. If you are first to rate the game, you will receive 100 BLC with subsequent ratings receiving 50 BLC.

Game Tutor

The Game Tutor program is designed to help members with any game issues and reward those who help.

For example, let’s say you can’t get your game to load or you are struggling on a specific level of a game. You simply go the page, post your question and the first member who responds with the solution is rewarded with Blue Coins which can later be used to purchase games. The person who provides the solution will be rewarded with 500 BLC.

Purchase Games

For every game you buy, you will receive 5% of the purchased value in BlueCoins. Let's say you have bought 5 games for $39.99 – you'll have enough coins to get a FREE game (valued at $10).

Walkthrough

GamersGate offers tons of challenging games, and players are bound to get stuck from time to time. Any player who writes a Game Walkthrough for the site will be rewarded with 1,000 Blue Coins.

GG Tag

Gamers will use their "GG Tag" widget to direct new users to GamersGate. The "GG Tag" displays your GamersGate profile with links to your profile page, the game you are currently playing and the games you own. Users will be able to post their "GG Tag" widget on websites, blogs, and any other place where you can imbed HTML code. You will have a kickback in BlueCoins on every purchase generated from your GG Tag.

White member will receive 2%, Green 2.5%, Yellow 3%, Red 5% and Black 10%.

Reward program;

Pre-order: 250 BLC (Watch out! Sometimes games give you more BLC.)

Review (1st): 300 BLC

Review: 150 BLC

Rate (1st): 100 BLC

Rate: 50 BLC

Game Tutor Solution: 500 BLC

Walkthrough: 1,000 BLC

Purchase Games: 5% of the total purchase value will be rewards in BLC

[Example: Buy Football Manager 2010 for $49.95 get 5% back in Blue Coins, or 2,498 BLC. Or buy 5 games for $39.99 each and get a game for $10 for FREE.]

GG Tag: Create you own GG Tag and show off your entire GG catalogue.
Publish the GG Tag on your blog; when friends buy games through the GG Tag widget, you'll be rewarded with BLC.

Member status:

White Member: 0 – 1,249 BLC

Green Member: 1,250 – 4,999 BLC

Yellow Member: 5,000 – 12,499 BLC

Red Member: 12,500 – 999,999 BLC

Black Member: >1,000,000 BLC

And no, I’m not on the payroll there! Just seems like a good deal.

Trillions: a short film on the future of computing

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 04:14 PM PST

This is an interesting little futurist tease of a movie by MAYA that’s “a fast paced preview of a larger effort — I’m guessing where they fill in the gap at the end. The idea is that computing right now is at one of those thresholds where we can’t quite grasp the idea of the “next generation.”

Just as computing in the 60s and 70s was about mass calculation and interpretation of external data and experts foresaw little of what we have now, the future of computing involves such a low level of fundamental integration and a high number of nodes that it’s practically impossible for us to see how it will work. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, though.

[via LikeCool]

How to read, and respond to, video game reviews

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 02:30 PM PST

Keep this in mind when you’re reading a video game review from your favorite publication.

To quote Destructoid:

If a videogame review that you disagree with is posted online, you are duty-bound to respond and shame the writer into committing suicide, because it’s just that crucial. Of course, you need to be armed with the proper responses, and fortunately, we’re here to help. Come with me as I show you exactly how to respond to a video game review. That no-good writer who trashed Uncharted 2 by giving it an 8.5 will be crying into his oatmeal by sundown!

It goes on to detail, in humorous fashion, how you, the everyman on the street bouncing from IGN to Eurogamer to Edge to 1UP to Kotaku to CrunchGear when I get around to it, should react to a review of your favorite video game. Hate the score the reviewer gave the game? Call him biased! Upset that a game you hate got a 7.5 instead of a 7.0? (That’s why I don’t give numbers in my reviews, which are always entitled "Wherein we discuss [Game]," because I think they’re dumb.) Make wild accusations about conflicts of interests, as if every video game reviewer is a stock holder in a video game publisher.

I have no stock in anything, for the record. That’s a rich man’s game.

Now, we can use this as an opportunity to discuss what y’all look for in video game reviews. I do know that when I was younger (let’s say around 13), the first thing I’d check was the review score. "Yes, they gave Zelda a 5.0 for the fun factor~!" I didn’t pay much attention to the review itself, just the score. Today, it’s the complete opposite. I’d rather sit through a really long Edge review and not see a score (like the magazine did with Fatale) then see some 200-word quickie with an 8.0 tacked on the bottom for good measure.

Star Trek Blu-ray release earns a perfect score at Blu-ray.com

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 02:02 PM PST

We all know that the new Star Trek was the best movie of all time – I’m serious – but how about the upcoming Blu-ray release? Well, Blu-ray.com takes Blu-ray releases and grades them on four levels: Movie, Video, Audio, and Extras. The upcoming Star Trek release scored a perfect five out of five in each category. Yeah, it’s that awesome.

Normally I would encourage you to jump over to the source website and read the whole review yourself, but the damn thing is over 4,000 words so let me summarize it for you: the Blu-ray release is tits. Buy it.

Review: BlackBerry Bold 9700

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 02:00 PM PST

The Short Version: I’ve always preferred functionality over looks in my gear. But the Bold 9700 puts a sleek outer cover on a powerful processor. T-Mobile’s first 3G BlackBerry is manufactured by Research In Motion. Perhaps you were expecting something more a bit more post-worthy?

RIM’s newest release brings us BlackBerry OS v5. It has all of the standard features you’ve come to know and love, email, SMS, IM, web browsing, etc. The Bold takes all of that and serves it too you on a 624MHz processor. i would say the only weak spot is the web browser.

The Bold is 4.29″ x 2.36″ x 0.56″ and weighs in at 4.3 ounces. Size wise, it feels about the same as any other BlackBerry, but it was much lighter than I expected. The back has this interesting faux-leather cover for those of you who want to feel like you really got your money’s worth.

The control surface proved a nice improvement. RIM replaced the traditional trackball with an optical trackpad. Personally, I like this interface much better. It feel much smoother and more precise than a ball. The trackpad sits flush with the body of the phone, so it won’t get damaged or worn out nearly as often. The keyboard proved to be easy to type on as well. The keys themselves are a little small, but the sculpted edges prevent you from slipping. Other dedicated buttons include a keypad lock key and a mute key on the top, voice dialing on the left side, and a volume rocker and programmable button on the right (default to opening the camera).

The display is something to behold. Not only can you watch streaming video with the new and improved JavaScript and streaming protocol support, but it all looks absolutely beautiful. The quality of pictures and video playback is pretty damn good. The camera itself isn’t too shabby either. 3.2 Megapixels with image stabilization, a 2x digital zoom, and flash. The onboard mic for video recording isn’t the greatest, but that’s to be expected.

In terms of connecting to the outside world, the Bold has not only 3G and Wi-Fi capability, but UMA support. Meaning you can make calls over a wireless network, without using your plan minutes.

T-Mobile hasn’t given us a firm release date. But you can expect it in time for the holidays for $199.99 with a two-year contract.

Technical Specs

Memory: 256MB of internal flash memory, with a microSD card slot
Battery Life: Talktime – 6 hours Standby Time – 19 days
Display: 480 x 360 color display, TFT LCD
Camera: 3.2 MP camera with 2X zoom, flash, and video
Optical Trackpad
Keyboard: Full QWERTY keyboard, backlit
Bluetooth: v2.1
Headset Jack: 3.5mm stereo headset
Media Player Supported Audio: 3GP, MP3, WMA9/WMA9 Pro/WMA 10, MIDI, AMR-NB, AAC/AAC+/eAAC+
Supported Video: DivX 4, DivX 5/6 partially supported, XviD partially supported, H.263, H.264, WMV3, MPEG4, Sorenson Spark and On2 VP6 (Flash support)
Wi-Fi: 802.11 b/g (w/ UMA support)
GPS: photo geotagging capability
BlackBerry OS: v5.0

Finally, Roombas enacting a game of Pac-Man

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 01:22 PM PST

Yes. It is finished. We can shut down NASA, DARPA, all the arts and sciences, and stop trying now. The pinnacle of human achievement has been reached. Robot vacuums have been hacked to play the parts in a real-life game of Pac-Man.

The ghosts are actually moving autonomously along computer-defined lines (they can’t “see” the actual maze) and the Man of Pac himself is guided by an RC controller. I was a little disappointed to see that he doesn’t eat the dots, though.

I won’t waste your time by summarizing all the hacks and modifications that went into this project; they’re well-documented here, and good reading too if you’re into that sort of thing.

[via Giz and En]

Test Drive: 2010 Volkswagen GTI

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 01:09 PM PST

The new 2010 Volkswagen GTI is a stylish and versatile piece of machinery. This latest installment in the GTI's nearly three-decade existence has been restyled to provide the driver with a sleek exterior, a comfortable interior, and plenty of power for moving around in the daily grind.

VW wanted us to drive test out this new car so bad, I was flown out to San Fran and put up in a swanky hotel for three nights where I was wined and dined. It was hard leaving my blue-collar routine in Detroit, but someone has to do it.

You know what though, I was thoroughly impressed with how the 2010 GTI performed during normal everyday driving and not-so-normal parking lot autocross racing. VW was even kind enough to provide me with one of their TDI cup drivers, Perry Richardson, to show me how to put the Mk VI GTI through its paces.

The two courses provided were set up thusly: a slow speed course that was very technical with numerous tight corners and switchbacks. Then there was a high-speed course, which featured a couple of good sweeping corners and a slalom at the end of it. Perry took me through both courses, explaining his technique to navigate through the sea of orange cones as he drove.

Then it was my turn. While a total blast to drive, my driving skills were not on the same level as Perry's. Nonetheless, this event displayed just how powerful Volkswagen's direct injected turbocharged 2.0L four cylinders are that making 200 SAE hp at 5,100-6,000 rpms and 207 lbs-ft. of torque from 1,800-5,000 RPMs. The 16-valve DOHC engine and six-speed manual transmission propels the GTI to a respectable 0-60 time of 6.8 seconds. The standard transmission allows the GTI to achieve a decent 21 city/ 31 hwy. MPG (EPA est.).

Now, as much fun as a manual gearbox is to drive, VW's optional six-speed automatic with DSG (Direct Shift Gearbox) gives the driver the ability to just get in drive and go, or put it into manual mode and control the up shifts and down shifts. The DSG automatic utilizes a computer to control the dual clutch system, telling one clutch to engage the next gear while the other clutch releases the current gear. The result is a smooth, crisp shifting, better acceleration (0-60 in 6.7 seconds), and improved fuel economy (24 city/32 hwy.).

A very neat feature on the automatic gearbox is the launch control. All you have to do is set the transmission into manual mode in first gear. Then turn off the traction control, put one foot on the brake and the other one the accelerator pedal. Release the brake pedal and let it fly! All this power is transmitted to either the standard 17 inch x 7 inch or the optional 18 inch x 7.5 inch wheels and "European-tuned" suspension.

While the wheels were stylish enough, I thought the suspension was almost too firm for a daily driven vehicle. Don’t get me wrong, I like a firm, responsive ride, but I felt like I was home in the pothole-riddled state of Michigan while driving around the surface streets of San Francisco. It's not a bad ride, I just think they could improve on it some more.

Then there is the interior. It's clean, functional, and easy enough to access the back in the two-door models. The front seats are very sport-minded and hold you in place during various… let's just say fun maneuvers throughout your drive.

I love the fact that an integrated an iPod connection into the car. This makes jamming your favorite tunes a breeze on either the standard touchscreen radio or the optional navigation system with a 30 GB hard drive (20 GB of which can be devoted to music). Both of these radios support Bluetooth, so you can keep in touch with everyone hands-free.

How much is it, you ask? The base starts out at $23,290 and goes on up from there. It is available in six different colors: Deep Black Metallic, Candy White, Tornado Red, United Gray Metallic, Carbon Steel Gray Metallic, and Shadow Blue Metallic. Let me suggest checking out what 25-years of GTI heritage has created.

Great, Seattle middle-schoolers are making shanks now

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 12:40 PM PST

I just came across this story in the neighborhood newspaper. I can’t find it anywhere online. What is wrong with our seventh-graders that they are using their DIY skills to make shanks instead of putting together a cool fort or at least a more creative weapon? They couldn’t, I don’t know, modify Nerf arrows with metal caps so they hurt when they hit?

If they’ve got some violence in the system, as many kids do, they need to work it out. Most kids do that through video games these days, yet why do I get the feeling that somewhere in the Seattle school district tonight, somebody will be cursing the same games for making kids more violent?

Luckily, no one was hurt in this incident. The kids involved were expelled, but beyond that nothing is known. I think that going to an inner-city high school and being held up at gunpoint a couple times has made me a more well-rounded person all told, but I wouldn’t wish a shank on anyone.

The Latest from Boing Boing

2009-11-10T05:28:00.001-08:00

The Latest from Boing Boing

Brits: send a message to Mandelson and fight "three strikes"
Science fiction from outside the English-speaking world
Epoch: podcast of my story about the death of the first AI
How EFF saved Indymedia from an unconstitutional subpoena for all its visitors' IP addresses
TSA doesn't understand what "random" means
Grateful Dead Archivist wanted at UC Santa Cruz
How inductors work
Larry Lessig talks about the values of education and science and the need to bring copyright into harmony with them
Pop Up Lunch NYC: temporary nosh-surfaces for New York's streets
New watch podcast: HourTime Show
Glittergeddon!
Duke University official concerned that sex toy study will make students want to "just sit around and masturbate"
Real-time, global marine traffic map
Genome sequencing for under $5,000
The real-life "Men Who Stare at Goats" were even weirder
Plastic surgery parody video
Zoomable cell size application helps you understand size of tiny things
Life Lessons from the Vogelkop Bowerbird
BBC's outrageous plan to put DRM on TV broadcasts shot down in flames -- thanks to you!
Is Sony legally required to make its games accessible to disabled people?
Progressive activists tussle over Islam and homophobia
The Matrix as a Charlie Chaplin short
Howl's Moving Castle made out of Lego
Gallery of antique radio tuning dials
Robot olympics coming to China
Rosemarie Fiore: Fireworks paintings
9/11 Truth and the Paranoid Style
Fake Steve Jobs v. NYT over Zynga-gate
Fun Experiment
Pigeon Impossible

Brits: send a message to Mandelson and fight "three strikes"

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 05:16 AM PST

The Open Rights Group is collecting "Messages to Mandelson" -- that is, photos and brief textual messages to UK Business Secretary Peter Mandelson, who has proposed that you should lose your access to the Internet if anyone in your household is accused (without proof) of violating copyright law. You can upload your photo and message and let Mandelson know how you feel.

Message Mandelson (Thanks, Jim!)

Previously:

Science fiction from outside the English-speaking world

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 02:11 AM PST

Lavie sez, "The Apex Book of World SF is the first anthology of SF/F/H stories from around the world, including Yang Ping's tale of Chinese hackers in a future game world, Aleksandar Ziljak's Men in Black meets Boogie Nights thriller and S.P. Somtow's classic examination of post-World War II Thailand and its most notorious serial killer. This rare anthology of international SF sets out to showcase some of the best international writers have to offer and the different perspectives of people from outside the American-British sphere of publishing - with authors from Malaysia, China, the Philippines, Israel and Palestine, France, the Netherlands and elsewhere."

The Apex Book of World SF (Amazon)

Apex Book of World SF Released! (The World SF News Blog)

(Thanks, Lavie!)

Previously:

SFWA European Hall of Fame: a chance to read sf from outside of ...

Epoch: podcast of my story about the death of the first AI

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:45 PM PST

I just finished my podcast reading of my latest story, "Epoch," which Mark Shuttleworth commissioned for my upcoming short story collection/experiment, With a Little Help. It's the story of the sysadmin charged with shutting down the first and only functional AI, which no one can figure out a reason to save -- and it's the story of the AI's bid to save its own life by fixing the Unix 32-bit rollover problem.

The podcast is in eight parts -- I started reading it before I'd finished the story, so there's some minor inconsistencies that'll be fixed in the final cut. Next up I'll be reading "Martian Chronicles," my young adult story about free-market ideologues colonizing Mars, and the video games they play on the way to the Red Planet.

The doomed rogue AI is called BIGMAC and he is my responsibility. Not my responsibility as in "I am the creator of BIGMAC, responsible for his existence on this planet." That honor belongs to the long-departed Dr Shannon, one of the shining lights of the once great Sun-Oracle Institute for Advanced Studies, and he had been dead for years before I even started here as a lowly sysadmin.
No, BIGMAC is my responsibility as in, "I, Odell Vyphus, am the systems administrator responsible for his care, feeding and eventual euthanizing." Truth be told, I'd rather be Dr Shannon (except for the being dead part). I may be a lowly grunt, but I'm smart enough to know that being the Man Who Gave The World AI is better than being The Kid Who Killed It.
Not that anyone would care, really. 115 years after Mary Shelley first started humanity's hands wringing over the possibility that we would create a machine as smart as us but out of our control, Dr Shannon did it, and it turned out to be incredibly, utterly boring. BIGMAC played chess as well as the non-self-aware computers, but he could muster some passable trash-talk while he beat you. BIGMAC could trade banalities all day long with any Turing tester who wanted to waste a day chatting with an AI. BIGMAC could solve some pretty cool vision-system problems that had eluded us for a long time, and he wasn't a bad UI to a search engine, but the incremental benefit over non-self-aware vision systems and UIs was pretty slender. There just weren't any killer apps for AI.

MP3s: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Podcast feed

How EFF saved Indymedia from an unconstitutional subpoena for all its visitors' IP addresses

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:35 PM PST

When the US government demanded the IP address of every visitor to Indymedia's website (and ordered Indymedia to keep the request secret), Indymedia called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. EFF fought the subpoena -- which was grossly unconstitutional -- and won. Here's the story of how it happened, and remember, if you ever get a crazy, unconstitutional request from a G-man, stop and call a lawyer or get in touch with EFF.

The government added insult to injury by also inserting this language on the first page of the subpoena: "You are not to disclose the existence of this request unless authorized by the Assistant U.S. Attorney. Any such disclosure would impede the investigation being conducted and thereby interfere with the enforcement of the law."
The problem? The law doesn't require the recipient of a federal grand jury subpoena to keep the subpoena secret (which is why, typically, subpoenas often will "request" -- but not require -- a recipient's silence). There are certainly secrecy requirements for participants in the grand jury -- such as the jurors and the prosecutors -- but those requirements do not extend to witnesses (or potential witnesses such as a subpoena recipient). And although the SCA does provide the government with the option of obtaining a court order under 18 U.S.C. § 2705(b) requiring silence when the recipient's disclosure would have an adverse affect on an investigation, the government in this case did not obtain any such gag order.
In sum, without any legal authority to back up their purported gag demand, the government ordered Ms. Clair not to reveal the existence of the subpoena, a subpoena that as already described was patently overbroad and invalid under the SCA. This is exactly the kind of unjustified demand of silence that creates a fog around the government's often-overreaching surveillance activities. How many other subpoena recipients have remained silent over the years in response to such bogus demands, and how many of them violated their users' privacy by handing over data that the government wasn't entitled to? We simply do not know, and because of a lack of meaningful reporting about the government's use of the SCA, we cannot know.
We were determined that our client would not be one of the silenced, and that this illegal subpoena would eventually see the light of day.

From EFF's Secret Files: Anatomy of a Bogus Subpoena

TSA doesn't understand what "random" means

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:31 PM PST

Deirdre Walker, the 24-year police veteran and former Assistant Chief of the Montgomery County, Maryland, Department of Police who wrote up a sharp, professional critique of the TSA's checkpoint procedures, has written a follow-up, showing a huge flaw in the "random" screening process used at the BWI airport:

I asked, "How are people selected for secondary searches?. She replied "It's random."
I asked "Is there a mark on my boarding pass?" She replied, "We used to do that, but we don't do it anymore." She did not know why that practice had been discontinued.
I stated "So you look at people as they are entering the metal detector, you make some type of assessment, and then you select people for secondary searches, right?"
...At this point, I turned to look over my shoulder and observed a Caucasian woman in her late thirties or early forties standing inside the whole-body imager. I called my screener's attention to this and said. "Look over there. There's a woman in the scanner. You all picked me for a search, and then the very next person you select is a woman. Why didn't you pick a white guy? Where are all the white guys?"
She replied, helpfully, "We are understaffed today and we don't have enough male screeners to do pat downs. We are not allowed to do opposite sex pat-downs so we are only selecting women for secondary screening."
By this point, I was seated and she was patting down the bottom of my feet. The secondary search, more thorough than the last search I had been subjected to in Albany, but equally ineffective, was nearing completion. I said "If you are only selecting women, how is that random?"
She said, "You're done. You can collect your belongings, Have a nice day."

"Where are all the white guys?" -- Update on "Do I have the right to refuse this search."

Previously:

Police veteran critiques TSA procedure - Boing Boing

Grateful Dead Archivist wanted at UC Santa Cruz

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:25 PM PST

If you've got a Master's in Library Science and a love of the Grateful Dead, the University of California at Santa Cruz is looking for you -- a rare job opening in the UC system, and what a plum gig it is: official Greatful Dead Archivist.

The University Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, seeks an enterprising, creative, and service-oriented archivist to join the staff of Special Collections & Archives (SC&A) as Archivist for the Grateful Dead Archive. This is a potential career status position. The Archivist will be part of a dynamic, collegial, and highly motivated department dedicated to building, preserving, promoting, and providing maximum access both physically and virtually to one of the Library's most exciting and unique collections, The Grateful Dead Archive (GDA). The UCSC University Library utilizes innovative approaches to allow the discovery, use, management, and sharing of information in support of research, teaching, and learning.
Under the general direction of the Head of Special Collections and Archives, the GDA Archivist will provide managerial and curatorial oversight of the Grateful Dead Archive, plan for and oversee the physical and digital processing of Archives related material, and promote the GDA to the public and facilitate its use by scholars, fans, and students.

Grateful Dead Archivist (via Resource Shelf)

Previously:

How inductors work

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:19 PM PST

Gareth from Make sez, "Here's Collin's latest electronics video tutorial, on induction. He's the David Lynch of DIY The Scorcese of open source education The Tarantino of tutorials And he rocks it all in a natty suit and tie! What's not to love?"

MAKE presents: The Inductor (Thanks, Gareth!)

Larry Lessig talks about the values of education and science and the need to bring copyright into harmony with them

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 10:34 PM PST

TonyBot sez, "This video is from a talk I saw Professor Lessig give on Wednesday the title is 'It is About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright.' The talk was given at EDUCUASE a major technology in higher education conference. As an IT support guy for professors at a New England state school I run up against copyright every day, Lessig's talk is both informative and inspiring, though I'd be interested in ways the people would react to his concluding call for action."

It is About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright (Thanks, TonyBot!)

Pop Up Lunch NYC: temporary nosh-surfaces for New York's streets

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:26 PM PST

Here's a great look at Pop Up Lunch: NYC, a work-in-progress from Ali Pulver, a grad student at Pulver. The idea is to create a bunch of portable, temporary eating surfaces that hungry New Yorkers can chow down from after buying street food from a wagon or cart.

Those of us who love eating street food, but hate taking lunch back to our desks, have a common problem. Where should we eat? There are a number of indoor pavilions and outdoor seating areas scattered across Midtown, but sometimes I just wish there was a place right next to the carts to just saddle up and tuck in. Well thanks to Pratt Grad Student Ali Pulver, now there is. For her thesis she is developing a couple of tools to make it easier for us to eat on the street. And after testing out the "Lunch Shelf" and the "Hydrantable" last week, I've got to say these could represent the greatest advancements in street food technology since the invention of chicken and lamb over rice!

Hydrantables & Lunch Shelves Are Amazing New Achievements in Street Food Eating Technology

Pop Up Lunch: NYC

(via Making Light)

New watch podcast: HourTime Show

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 07:44 PM PST

Attention horology fans: here's the podcast you're looking for, courtesy of Ariel Adams and John Biggs. [HourTime]

Glittergeddon!

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 06:17 PM PST

Channel 4's documentary-style drama, The Execution of Gary Glitter, imagines an alternative Britain that reintroduces the death penalty. Celebrity sex offender Paul Gadd—AKA glam rock star Gary Glitter—is re-tried for his crimes and hanged. It's a story about the moral quandary of capital punishment, generously garnished with the British media's obsession with pedophilia.

The real Gadd was disgraced by a child porn bust and his subsequent residency in sex tourist hotspots. After 18 months in a Vietnamese jail on a conviction for child molestation, he was released in 2008 and flown back to the U.K. The tabloids now stalk him and run stories like "Gary Glitter changes the style of his beard."

Execution depicts a different outcome. Arrested hours after landing, he's put on trial to test new legislation that allows capital punishment for crimes committed abroad. He sneers, argues, and wheedles. Talking heads, politicians and members of the public pop up in news-style interviews. Then he is put to death. Channel 4's Hamish Mykura says that "this drama confronts the public with what many say they want."

The documentary style is clever, and Hilton McRae does an excellent job as Glitter. He is alternatively smug, sordid, humane and pathetic. But then there's that whole weird thing about portraying an act of rationalized mob justice on someone who is very much alive and free.

Among the rationales offered is that the movie confronts us with a difficult truth; namely, that Britain needs to see Gary Glitter executed if it is to come to terms with its own moral indecisiveness over capital punishment. But the movie's concept isn't really "Imagine if we made new laws that dealt severely with sex offenders." It is "Imagine if we made new laws that would make Gary Glitter the center of national attention again." His presence is a gimmick. Without him, it would be a dry exploitation flick about no-one in particular—but one that might at least make sense.

The film's legal devices exist only to bring the celebrity to the rope. Hangings within a month of conviction, without any right to a court appeal? The EU not enforcing the Convention of Human Rights just to keep Britain happy? Get real, little Englanders. Besides, Britain has an ample supply of bona-fide child murderers competing for eligibility: I guess Ian Huntley just doesn't look enough like Fu Manchu.

Moreover, if the filmmakers cared about depicting the reality of capital punishment, they could have at least cooked up a more convincing doom. Western executions, where they play, follow years of legal wrangling. They are usually dehumanized clinical events, not pathos-filled remixes of Saddam's last gasp.

In any case, the dramatics fade before the loopyness of the Glitter premise. How did Britain's fixation on sexual stranger danger get this baroque? I'm stumped, frankly. I'm ready to be told the whole thing was some kind of deadpan black comedy. But a few ideas do spring to mind.

My countrymen often complain of the nanny state, but that modern taste for risk-peddling seems an international phenomenon. Throw pedophiles in the mix, however, and the outcomes start getting really weird.

Take, for example, the recent actions of Watford local council, which banned parents from being with their own children in a public play area. Then there's the 82-year-old woman accused of being a possible pedophile after taking photos of a swimming pool. And so on. This suggests confusion over the proper areas of association between kids and adults.

Then there's concern over youngsters' wellbeing in general. Britain's children are supposedly the unhappiest in Europe. Those responsible for their happiness were given a scathing review by UNICEF, which suggested British families are the least nurturing this side of the former Warsaw Pact. Though Britian's schools remain among the world's best, the rankings fell sharply over the last decade, and reports of its state childcare system make for grim reading.

There's also a broader anxiety over childrens' place in society at large. That younger kids are given few of the freedoms and pleasures older generations enjoyed is another problem hardly isolated to the U.K. But our fear of older youths is manifested in the press as a distinctively British moral panic. Tabloids seem to treat the nation's offspring either as hapless victims of predatory adults, or as dangerous, vaguely subhuman livestock.

Perhaps this sort of thing lets us forget that most childrens' problems are the result of familial and institutional neglect, not the likes of Gary Glitter.

Finally, there's the case of the bleeding obvious: media the world over sexualizes children, but Britain's is particularly ready to project its hypocrisy at deserving targets--or anyone who addresses the subject matter without the required solemnity.

Satirist Chris Morris produced the original "Paedogeddon" mockumetary in 2001, ridiculing the media's voyeuristic obsession with the subject. He got pols and celebs to repeat nonsensical urban legends, making fools of the lot. Condemnation of the show was nearly universal, but reinforced his point over and over again. One Daily Star article slamming the show ran next to an item praising a 15-year old singer's breasts. The Daily Mail described Morris as "unspeakably sick"--even as it ran a photo of the bikini-clad royal busts of princesses Beatrice, 13, and Eugenie, 11.

In one of the final scenes of The Execution, the condemned man says "they're not going to execute Paul Gadd." This makes a point about celebrity, about how it trades in mediated personas. The "thought-provoking" question is clear enough--is something other than a man being destroyed?--but it's a thought buried under the batshittedness of Glittergeddon.

If The Execution of Gary Glitter sounds barbaric, rest assured that it was merely inane. He isn't some metempsychotic vessel for the nation's unease over child abuse or the death penalty, after all. He's just a dirty old man, and he gets what he deserves.

Duke University official concerned that sex toy study will make students want to "just sit around and masturbate"

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 04:39 PM PST

A Duke University study on sex toys has the University's Catholic Center director worried that female students will "just sit around and masturbate."

Real-time, global marine traffic map

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 03:45 PM PST

Yo, where my ships at? You'll never have to ask again. marinetraffic.com is a fun way to burn otherwise productive time. Cargo ships, military vessels, luxury high-speed yachts: track them, and imagine yourself out there on the high seas, instead of in that cubicle. (thanks, @shirky)

Genome sequencing for under $5,000

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 03:38 PM PST

A US-based genomics company announces that it can perform genomic sequencing for under five thousand dollars. In my budget, that's "fully loaded 8-Core Mac Pro and a monitor," or "sweet new Canon 5D with one nice lens." But unlike those tools I covet, DNA is forever.

The real-life "Men Who Stare at Goats" were even weirder

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 03:25 PM PST

How many of the kooky military research projects featured in The Men Who Stare at Goats really happened? Reality is more complicated than the movie (or the book), reports David Hambling at Wired's Danger Room blog. But reality may also be weirder. Hambling's post examines, Snopes-style, the truth or bogosity of such purported American military projects as:

• Psychic Spies
• Drug experimentation
• Killing animals with telepathy
• Sound weapons
• An army of hippies who can smite you with the sheer force of their BO.

Oh alright, I embellished the last one a bit. Read: Psychic Spies, Acid Guinea Pigs, New Age Soldiers: the True Men Who Stare at Goats (Danger Room, thanks Noah Shachtman)

Image: the First Earth Battalion manual (PDF) from the movie, which was based very closely on the original manual created by Lt. Col. Jim Channon. He "dove deep into the New Age movement, and came back to the military with a most alternative view of warfare -- one in which troops would carry flowers and symbolic animals into battle."

Plastic surgery parody video

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 03:13 PM PST

Even though the title of this hilarious short mockumentary video is "Cockhead," it's probably safe for work, since the naughty bit is mosaiced. It was co-written by CJ Davies and Mr Tom Barbor-Might.

Cockhead

Zoomable cell size application helps you understand size of tiny things

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 03:05 PM PST

The University of Utah's Genetic Science Learning Center created this zoomable window that compares the size of a coffee bean with smaller things like a grain of salt, a paramecium, a red blood cell, a human egg, a glucose molecule, and so on, all the way down to a carbon atom.

Cell size and scale (Via Good Experience newsletter)

Life Lessons from the Vogelkop Bowerbird

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 02:18 PM PST

Lesson 1: When choosing gifts for your date, remember that girls prefer flowers to piles of fungus-ridden dung.

You know how some movies or TV shows are painful to watch because you see that a character is making some awkward mistake and you just know it will end horribly? This BBC video is similar. I kept thinking, "No, Mr. Vogelkop Bowerbird! Don't give her that! You'll never get mated!" But, honestly, I was thinking that at the flower-power fellow. Foolishly, I'd assumed that the lesson here was going to be something along the lines of, "Birds like things humans find repugnant and isn't that interesting."

Instead, the lesson turns out to be, "Everybody poops, but that doesn't mean they want to receive it as a gift."

VIDEO: Inside the Love-Den of the Vogelkop Bowerbird, BBC Life

Image courtesy the BBC, via Adam Abu-Nab

BBC's outrageous plan to put DRM on TV broadcasts shot down in flames -- thanks to you!

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 01:25 PM PST

Remember the BBC's daft plan to put DRM on high-definition broadcasts even though it's illegal for the BBC to put DRM on its broadcasts? Remember when people rose up and sent angry letters to Ofcom, the UK regulator that oversees the BBC's broadcasting activity?

It worked. Ofcom told the BBC to forget about it. Score one for the good guys. Give yourselves several pats on the back.

Meanwhile: the Beeb should be ashamed of itself. Especially for this disingenuous smear-job they published after I wrote about this ridiculous plan in the Guardian.

Ofcom received a large number of responses to this consultation, in particular from consumers and consumer groups, who raised a number of potentially significant consumer 'fair use' and competition issues that were not addressed in our original consultation. In view of these responses we have decided not to approve a multiplex licence change without giving these issues further consideration. We remain keen to support the successful introduction of HD services on the DTT platform and are willing to consider a further round of consultation on the licence amendment if you could provide more information and evidence in the following three areas:
1. The anticipated benefits to citizens and consumers, and to the DTT platform, of the proposed approach;
2. How you propose to address the potential disadvantages to citizens and consumers associated with the impact on the receiver market under the proposed approach;
3. An explanation of potential alternative approaches that would impact less on the receiver market, and the extent to which those alternatives would be able to deliver similar outcomes and benefits for citizens and consumers.
We are keen to provide early clarity on the licence amendment to all stakeholders affected by the DVB-T2, MPEG 4, HDTV upgrade on the DTT platform and would welcome your early response on these three issues. Until we reach a final decision on the licence amendment the HD service information broadcast on Multiplex B should be provided in a free to air format. If Huffman compression is used then the related tables should be made available to receiver manufacturers without the need for a licence for Huffman look-up tables from the BBC.

HD on DTT content management proposals (PDF) (Thanks, Glyn!)

Previously:

Is Sony legally required to make its games accessible to disabled people?

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 12:07 PM PST

On his Big Questions blog, Steven Landsburg (author of a new book called The Big Questions) discusses a partially blind gamer's lawsuit against Sony. The gamer wants Sony to makes its games more accessible for partially blind people.

Here's the first part of Landsburg's thoughts on the issue:

This raises the question: Exactly what does Sony owe to Alexander Stern (and others like him)?
A similar issue comes up in Chapter 20 of The Big Questions, where Mary the landlord won't rent to, say, Albanians. Ought we force her to?
In The Big Questions, I make two separate (but closely related) arguments on Mary's behalf. I was about to write a blog post offering the same arguments on behalf of Sony when I realized that only one of them applies. So I am forced to conclude that I should be a little less sympathetic to Sony than I am to Mary. My first argument is that Mary never had any moral obligation to rent to anyone in the first place—and if she has no general obligation to rent to anyone, then she can have no specific obligation to rent to Albanians. Likewise, Sony has no moral obligation to provide anyone with video games—and if there is no moral obligation to provide me with a video game then there is no obligation to provide one to Alexander Stern. Fine so far.
But my second argument is that Mary, appearances to the contrary, is actually doing some good for Albanian apartment seekers. By renting rooms to non-Albanians, she takes a little pressure off the housing market, driving down rents and making it easier for Albanians to find apartments elsewhere. Sure, she could be doing even more for them, but she's already doing more for them than I am, since I don't rent apartments to anyone at all. How can she be at fault for doing small amounts of good when I'm given a free pass to do no good at all?

Read the rest at his blog.

Previously:

Get Illuminated Podcast #10 -- Steven E. Landsburg

Progressive activists tussle over Islam and homophobia

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 02:35 PM PST

Earlier today, Xeni spotted an item by gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, encouraging black people to embrace the LGBT status of some of its heroes. Tatchell's been in the news of late for another reason, too: another tussle with fellow progressive activists.

The subject is Tatchell's vocal opposition to Islamic fundamentalism, assailed in "Gay Imperialism: Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the War on Terror," published by Raw Nerve Books. As a result, authors Jin Haritaworn, Tamsila Tauqir and Esra Erdem have come under fire. Raw Nerve was even induced to confess a list of "untruths" aimed at Tatchell.

Here's an illustrative paragraph from the apology:

Mr Tatchell has never "claimed the role of liberator and expert about Muslim gays and lesbians." He is not Islamophobic and is not "part of the Islamophobia industry." ... Mr Tatchell has never described "Muslims as Nazis" and he has never made the equation "Muslim=Nazi" or "Muslim=Evil." He has never "collaborated with the extreme right" and never "participated with several racist and fascist groups."

On one hand, Tatchell's "celebrity activist" style irritates those who feel sidelined by his prominence and threatened by his "litigious" reputation. Despite a lifetime building anti-racist credentials, he's often criticized for conflating Islam in general and homophobic muslims.

On the other hand, the paper's attacks could hardly have gone unchallenged. The argument seems compelling, but is layered throughout with a catty academic animus that speaks for itself. Defenders claim that the paper's constructions ("he often describes Muslims as Nazis", "he willingly collaborates with the extreme right", "reducing Islamophobia...to a fad which they can cash in on") were taken out of context. That Tatchell hasn't sued them shows not a little restraint, the obviously-forced apology notwithstanding.

The best line in the paper: "Criticism of him is dangerous." Woops!

Photo: Petertatchell.net

The Matrix as a Charlie Chaplin short

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:47 AM PST

A Russian actor's group called "Big Difference" (Bolshaya Raznitsa / Большая Разница) remade The Matrix as a Charlie Chaplin silent film. (Via Neatorama)

Howl's Moving Castle made out of Lego

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:47 AM PST

Somebody has made the dreamy floating wonderworld from the Oscar-nominated Hayao Miyazaki film Howl's Moving Castle out of Lego. The details are quite impressive, and blogging about this is making me want to watch the movie again. Imagine's Brickzone's Flickr via Japanator

Gallery of antique radio tuning dials

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:40 AM PST

The radio dials shown here "represent only a small portion" of Michael Feldt's dial archive.

Gallery of antique radio tuning dials (Via Draplin Design)

Robot olympics coming to China

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:31 AM PST

Harbin, China, home to the Institute of Technology's robot football research group, will host a robot olympics in 2010. According to the BBC News, "Entry to the competition will be restricted to robots resembling humans. They must possess two arms and legs. Wheels are banned."

Rosemarie Fiore: Fireworks paintings

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 10:54 AM PST

Artist Rosemarie Fiore paints with fireworks. Here's more about the process. (via Eric Wareheim, sort of)

9/11 Truth and the Paranoid Style

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:16 AM PST

Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

(CC-licensed photo on Flickr by 911conspiracy)

Forty-five years ago, Harpers magazine published Richard Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." The occasion for the piece was the revenant conservatism that had driven Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign (the magazine hit the newsstands the month of the Johnson/Goldwater election), but it remains astonishingly apt. I cannot recommend it enough for anyone who wants to understand the mentalités of fringe political movements in the United States--from the Anti-Masons and Know Nothings in the first half of the 1800s, to McCarthyism, the Nation of Islam, and the Weathermen in the last century, to the Birthers and Truthers today.

I hesitate to bring up 9/11 Truth again after the firestorm of commentary I unleashed last week, but read Hofstadter on the pedantry of paranoid literature and tell me that he doesn't nail some of the most contentious of the posters (most of whom were probably not even born when the piece was written) with a psychoanalyst's precision and a novelist's sympathy:

One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed.....Respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates "evidence." The difference between this "evidence" and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it....

One of last week's more strident posters shared his frustration with members of his on-line forum (yes, I Googled myself, and of course I read all the nasty things they said about me), listing the seminal books I hadn't referenced ("Nafeez Ahmed's "War on Truth," Peter Dale Scott's "Road to 9/11," Michael Ruppert's "Crossing the Rubicon," Michel Chossudovsky's "War on Terrorism"), pointing out The Complete 9/11 Timeline at historycommons.org that I ignored, and exposing my transparently propagandistic mendacity in allowing one perfervid e-mailer to stand "as an avatar for the supposed pathologies of the 9/11 Truth movement."

Of course he's furious! He's educated, articulate, and politically committed. He's not some disreputable, anti-social obsessive--he's a veritable exegete of 9/11 anomalies, as fluent in the jargon of physics as he is in political dialectics. It's bad enough that he has to endure the studied neutrality or outright hostility of the really big guns of the left--Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein--but then an arrant nobody like me comes along with, as one of his fellow posters put it, "a metric tonne of standard issue boilerplate" and presumes that he can conjure away the whole edifice of 9/11 Truth with a couple of wisecracks. Not only am I smug and ignorant and intellectually dishonest --- it's as if I don't even care about the subtle distinctions between one brand of Truthery and another, as if I can't be bothered to acknowledge the museum's-worth of evidence that he and his colleagues have so assiduously curated.

Imagine that you were a Maria Callas fan. You own every recording she ever made -- 78s, LPs, remastered CDs, even reel-to-reel tapes recorded off of radio broadcasts. You've not only read every book and magazine article about her that was ever committed to print, you've written a few yourself. And then some fly-by-night music journalist casually dismisses her in the pages of a mass circulation magazine as a cracked-voiced diva whose sole claim to fame was that she and Jackie O were rivals for Aristotle Onassis's affections.

Reading through all that commentary, I thought of how misguided missionaries sometimes try to evangelize Jews by calling their attention to passages from the New Testament--a scripture that by definition carries no weight with Jews at all. From my outsider's perspective, most of the Truther's exhibits (the iron spherules, the 2.5 seconds of video-taped free fall, the anecdotes about the dancing Israelis, the housing official trapped in the stairwell of WTC7) aren't evidence at all but rather artifacts of confirmation bias--factoids (many of dubious provenance, some long past their sell-by date) that are plucked out of context and marshaled not to build or close a positive case for one thesis or another, but only to cast doubt on the default position. I can't engage the 9/11 issue on the same terms that a Truther does, because I'd have to be a Truther myself.

Religious fanatics, political radicals, obsessive fans -- the worlds they live in are closed systems, governed by dogmas and articles of faith. Discipline is strictly enforced; members are punished or purged for their lapses in ideological or doctrinal purity. Outsiders are regarded with suspicion and hostility -- milquetoast accommodationists who are presumptuous enough to suppose they can make common cause on one issue or another even more so than overt enemies. It's a pressure cooker -- turn up the temperature and you get sectarianism and schisms, higher still and you get witch hunts, show trials, Cultural Revolutions, and Nuremberg laws.

With its congeries of black sheep constituencies (Alex Jones Libertarian populists, movement leftists, anarchists, white supremacists, New World Order reactionaries, Protocols of the Elders of Zion anti-Semites, crusading architects and theologians) and its lack of a dominant leader or organization, the 9/11 Movement will likely never become unified enough to tear itself apart. But it has not been altogether innocuous either. "One of the major consequences of the 9/11 movement," Noam Chomsky said, "Has been to draw enormous amounts of energy and effort away from activism directed to real and ongoing crimes of state...crimes that are far more serious than blowing up the WTC would be, if there were any credibility to that thesis. That is, I suspect, why the 9/11 movement is treated far more tolerantly by centers of power than is the norm for serious critical and activist work."

Just as the missionary can't understand how the Jew can contemplate the prospect of his eternal damnation with such unnatural equanimity, the Truther can't fathom why the rest of us would rather look at the forest than the trees. There's a certain poignancy in their predicament. As Hofstadter wrote, "We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well."

Fake Steve Jobs v. NYT over Zynga-gate

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 10:24 AM PST

Fake Steve Jobs points to the NYT's kid-gloves piece on Zynga, published the same week as bloggers exposed Zynga's scummy doings, as reason number one for Big Print's Decline: "The truth is, if newspapers want to survive they should go back to doing what they started out doing -- muckraking, stirring the shit, calling bullshit."

Fun Experiment

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 09:20 AM PST

Mind Hacks blog Googles the phrase "psychologist says", with headesky results. The problem: "Psychologist" doesn't always mean what you think it means. Some stories quoted from peer-reviewed research, others turned to therapists with little-to-no academic or research experience, and everything in between.

Pigeon Impossible

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 09:13 AM PST

Lucas Martell's new animated film, Pigeon Impossible: "A rookie secret agent is faced with a problem seldom covered in basic training: what to do when a curious pigeon gets trapped inside your multi-million dollar, government-issued nuclear briefcase." (Thanks, Joaquin Baldwin)

Wizbang

2009-11-10T02:07:00.001-08:00

Wizbang

Sweet Thoughts For A Gentle Soul
On Cue
Supreme Court Refuses to Spare DC Sniper
It's official: Political Correctness led to the deaths at Fort Hood
Going Postal? Sudden Jihadi Syndrome?
Twenty Years Ago - The News Conference That Toppled The Berlin Wall

Sweet Thoughts For A Gentle Soul

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 10:03 PM PST

I lost my cat, Treasure, this week. I have wanted to write about him for days, but, every time I put pen to paper, I just couldn't do it. Now,...

On Cue

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 01:20 PM PST

In what is likely just a strange coincidence and in no way a defense of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's "alleged" killing of 13 people last week at Fort Hood, the...

Supreme Court Refuses to Spare DC Sniper

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 12:27 PM PST

John Allen Muhammad will be executed tomorrow, as scheduled. The money quote, emphasis mine: Muhammad's attorney, Jonathan Sheldon, says "Virginia will execute a severely mentally ill man who also suffered...

It's official: Political Correctness led to the deaths at Fort Hood

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 09:26 AM PST

Via The Blotter: U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials...

Going Postal? Sudden Jihadi Syndrome?

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 07:59 AM PST

Whereas "Going Postal" is a messy departure from normality, "Going Muslim" seems a deliberate and premeditated choice.

Twenty Years Ago - The News Conference That Toppled The Berlin Wall

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 04:35 AM PST

This week marks the twentieth anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin Wall, and the beginning of the end of oppressive Communist rule that kept Eastern Europe under the...

EmailGarage

2009-11-10T02:06:00.001-08:00

EmailGarage

1 day, 3 speakers, 2 cases and … a networking opportunity with other email marketeers.

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 09:25 AM PST

We invite you to take part in our upcoming Email Marketing Master Classes. You can sign up for the Dutch session on Tuesday 17 November or join the French session on Tuesday 24 November.

During these sessions we'll dig deep into the latest trends and give you the opportunity to sharpen your email marketing knowledge in just one day. Recent benchmarks, practical tips and relevant cases, those are the ingredients of a perfect mix to make your next email marketing campaigns work. Guaranteed no product demos – only valuable content by email marketing experts.

We kick off at 9:30 and close the day with a network drink at 16:30. Please note: in order to create the best possible interaction, we allow a maximum of 15 participants (preferably with some email marketing experience). As a bonus you receive the most recent IAB E-mailmarketing Cookbook (value €50).

The programme

Email marketing in Belgium: benchmark figures 2008/2009 (B2B/B2C/branch)
Relevance and personalisation of the email message: crucial for success
Deliverability & Opt-in
Renderability & Design
Leverage conversion with better landing pages
Data enrichment via CRM integration: pitfalls and possibilities
The role of email marketing in customer lifecycle management
Case 1 : Veritas / e-couponing
Case 2: Nutricia / lifecycle management

Practical info

Start: 9:30
End: 16:30
When: Tuesday 17 November (Dutch) and Tuesday 24 November (French). Slides at both sessions in English
Location: EmailGarage training centre, Overijse
Price: € 425 / €350 (for EmailGarage customers) incl. lunch, networking drink and IAB E-mailmarketing Cookbook,
excl. VAT

Don't miss this great opportunity to sharpen your knowledge and do some inspired networking.

>> Sign up for the Dutch session on Tuesday 17 November

>> Sign up for the French session on Tuesday 24 November

Posted in Copywriting, Deliverability, Design, Email Marketing, Events and seminars, Iab, Landing pages, Lists, Opt-in, Personalization, Rendering, Reporting, Surveys, Targeting, Technology, Tips, Trends

About Xbox Games: DJ Hero Review (X360)

2009-11-09T23:26:00.000-08:00

	Xbox Games

In the Spotlight | More Topics |

	from Eric Qualls

In the Spotlight

DJ Hero Review (X360)
Just when you thought you couldn't stomach another "Hero" game, Activision trots out DJ Hero. But wait, what is this? It is completely fresh and fun and unlike anything else... Read more

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		Xbox 360 Reviews Microsoft Project Natal Microsoft Xbox games reviews Top Picks for Xbox and Xbox 360 Games Xbox 360 FAQs Top 10 Xbox 360 Games Xbox 360 Buyer's Guide

WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw 2010 Review (X360)
For a few years there it seemed like the SmackDown series was getting stagnant and not really moving forward. That definitely isn't the case with WWE SmackDown! Vs. Raw 2010.... Read more

Lips: Number One Hits Review (X360)
Lips: Number One Hits is Microsoft and developer iNiS' follow up to their 2008 karaoke title, Lips. Known as much for having the best microphones on the Xbox 360 as... Read more

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About Spas: Doing What Oprah Did At Miraval!

2009-11-09T18:20:00.000-08:00

	Spas

In the Spotlight | More Topics |

	from Anitra Brown Last week Oprah had a show where she challenged viewers to "get outside their box." We watched as five women played roller derby, skydived, and went skinny dipping as the cameras rolled. Miraval also helps you get out of your box with challenges like "A Swing And A Prayer," which Oprah did when she went there! Also, The Greenhouse Spa in Dallas is back, and spas across the country host a Beauty Boot Camp this month.

In the Spotlight

Doing What Oprah Did At Miraval!
Like many people, I wanted to do A Swing and A Prayer because that's what Oprah did when she took 60 women to Miraval and filmed a whole show there. People said it was fun and easy. Find out why it was more challenging than I expected.

		More Topics
		Best Spas In The World Day Spas - All About Day Spas Resort Spas - Find The Right Resort Spa For You Destination Spas - Find The Right Destination Spas For You Medical Spas Spa Etiquette - Stripping & Tipping Choosing A Destination Spa

Legendary Greenhouse Spa Reopens!
The Greenhouse near Dallas closed back in June. But the well-known, pampering destination spa is back, with new packages, MUCH lower prices and day packages that give you a room of your own.

Spas Host Beauty Boot Camp
A special two-hour Beauty Boot Camp is going on in November at lots of spas across the country. But don't expect to work up a sweat!

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About Web Humor: Cute Animal Alert! Snow Leopard Playing with Jack O'Lantern

2009-11-09T11:41:00.000-08:00

	Web Humor

In the Spotlight | More Topics |

	from Lukas Kaiser Cute animals will do what cute animals will do! Plus some funny pictures, videos and more!

In the Spotlight

Cute Animal Alert! Snow Leopard Playing with Jack O'Lantern
The Wildlife Conservation Society has a really, really cute video up right now of a snow leopard playing with a jack-o'-lantern at the Central Park Zoo. This video is the... Read more

		More Topics
		Caption This Picture - Beer Graph The Body Flex Daily Workout

Movie Poster Mashups
The message board b3ta.com has a great post where they challenge their readers to create movie poster mashups. My favorites include the Yellow Submarine/Das Boot (pictured above) and this... Read more

Russian Plane Bar
English Russia has a pretty wonderful gallery of a ridiculous "plane bar" that's been erected in Russia. I'd totally go there to grab a drink if I wasn't scared... Read more

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About Country Music: Dolly, Charlie Daniels among New Inductees to Music City Walk of Fame

2009-11-09T11:36:00.000-08:00

	Country Music

In the Spotlight | More Topics |

	from Sean Dooley

In the Spotlight

Dolly, Charlie Daniels among New Inductees to Music City Walk of Fame
Dolly Parton, Ernest Tubb, Charlie Daniels, Kid Rock and "Tootsie" Bess, the owner and founder of the landmark Nashville honky tonk, Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, have been announced as the... Read more

		More Topics
		Country Music Photos Country Music Trivia Country Music Interviews Country Music Tours & Festivals Country Music Audio / Video How Miranda Lambert Found Her Groove Taylor Swift - 'Fearless' Review

Carrie Underwood Tapes CMT Special
The Carrie Underwood promotion machine is already in high gear to support her upcoming CD, Play On, which has a November 3 release date. In addition to the recent video... Read more

Breakfast with Alan Jackson
Listen up Alan Jackson fans! You are invited to drop by the Cracker Barrel restaurant in the Nashville suburb of Mount Juliet on Monday, November 2 at 9 a.m. to... Read more

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