Salon - http://www.salon.com/rss/all_salon.rss
Friday, April 30, 2010
"Dark Knight" Sequel to Open July 20, 2012
"Dark Knight" Sequel to Open July 20, 2012: "An already rich genre movie season has just become even wealthier with news that Christopher Nolan's third Batman film is to open in the summer of 2012, joining new Spider-Man and Star Trek films plus 'The Avengers.'"
CBR News - http://www.comicbookresources.com/
State of the Internet Operating System Part Two: Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars
State of the Internet Operating System Part Two: Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars: "As I wrote last month, it is becoming increasingly clear that the internet is becoming not just a platform, but an operating system, an operating system that manages access by devices such as personal computers, phones, and other personal electronics to cloud subsystems ranging from computation, storage, and communications to location, identity, social graph, search, and payment. The question is whether a single company will put together a single, vertically-integrated platform that is sufficiently compelling to developers to enable the kind of lock-in we saw during the personal computer era, or whether, Internet-style, we will instead see services from multiple providers horizontally integrated via open standards.
"
O'Reilly Radar - http://radar.oreilly.com/
Microsoft: The future of the web is HTML5; IE9 HTML5 will support playback of H.264 video only
Microsoft: The future of the web is HTML5; IE9 HTML5 will support playback of H.264 video only: "The future of the web is HTML5. We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only..."
MacDailyNews - http://www.macdailynews.com/
Pixelmator 1.6 Nucleus to go Mac OS X Snow Leopard-only
Pixelmator 1.6 Nucleus to go Mac OS X Snow Leopard-only: "Yup, that’s right: we are moving our whole code to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard..."
MacDailyNews - http://www.macdailynews.com/
The Steve Jobs Revolution leads us to a new economy
The Steve Jobs Revolution leads us to a new economy: "The U.S. is leading the most significant macroeconomic revolution since the Transportation Revolution..."
MacDailyNews - http://www.macdailynews.com/
Apple Becomes Largest U.S.-Based Mobile Phone Manufacturer
Apple Becomes Largest U.S.-Based Mobile Phone Manufacturer: "
In an article on Motorola's earnings report earlier this week, Forbes notes that Apple has passed Motorola to become the largest mobile phone manufacturer based in the United States.Motor..."
MacRumors - http://www.macrumors.com
Apple-owned Lala music service to close, offer iTunes credit
Apple-owned Lala music service to close, offer iTunes credit: "Acquired by Apple in December 2009, streaming 'music locker in the cloud' service Lala announced that it will shut down next month, but it leaves its users with a lovely parting gift.
"
Macworld - http://www.macworld.com
Oregon Takes a Lesson from Google, Puts Apps in Schools | News & Opinion | PCMag.com
Oregon Takes a Lesson from Google, Puts Apps in Schools | News & Opinion | PCMag.com: "Schools in Oregon will soon have the option to embrace homework, lessons plans, and lectures in the cloud. The state is the first to adopt Google Apps for Education in all of its public schools, Google announced Wednesday.
Starting today, all school districts in the state will offer access to Google Apps – including Docs, Sites, Video, and Groups – to all teachers, staff, and students. The suite will also include e-mail filtering and protection from Postini, shared contacts via Google Contacts, Google Calendar, private online discussion groups via Google Groups, Google Talk, and iGoogle.
"
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Thursday, April 29, 2010
Relax, your girls aren't harlots yet
Relax, your girls aren't harlots yet: "
You can tell a bogus New York Times trend story when they start comparing the new craze to drug addiction. And that's what the very opening line of Douglas Quenqua's Times article on the rise of makeup use among tweens does: 'It began for Alyssa Pometta, as these habits so often do, with the soft stuff. We are talking of course about lip gloss.'
Salon - http://www.salon.com/rss/all_salon.rss
We (meaning you) must tighten our belts
We (meaning you) must tighten our belts: "Dean Baker attended the Pete Peterson Social Security Destruction summit earlier today and made this important observation at the revolting sight of Peterson and Robert Rubin patting each other on the backs and demanding that everyone buckle down and sacrifice for the greater good:
"
Salon - http://www.salon.com/rss/all_salon.rss
Jenna Jameson plays down abuse claim
Jenna Jameson plays down abuse claim: "Forget the domestic violence arrest. Forget the tear-filled press conference, the emotional interviews with paparazzi and the accusations hurled back and forth. Former porn star Jenna Jameson and boyfriend Tito Ortiz are taking it all back.
"
Salon - http://www.salon.com/rss/all_salon.rss
Tool: Electric Lock Pick Is an All-Access Pass
Tool: Electric Lock Pick Is an All-Access Pass: "Place the SouthOrd's picking needle and tension tool inside the keyway of a locked door and the 8,000-rpm motor will knock the pins clear. Twenty seconds later you're in.
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
April 30, 1939: The Future Arrives at New York World's Fair
April 30, 1939: The Future Arrives at New York World's Fair: "The fair featured the original Futurama, GM's gleaming glimpse of a freeway-studded tomorrow. Watch the videos.
"
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
Report: Apple acquires iPhone app maker Siri
Report: Apple acquires iPhone app maker Siri: "Reports have surfaced that Apple may be about to acquire Siri, makers of the iPhone app Siri Assistant, which allows for voice-based searching.
"
Macworld - http://www.macworld.com
HP to buy struggling Palm for $1.2 billion
HP to buy struggling Palm for $1.2 billion: "Hewlett-Packard will buy the struggling phone maker for $1.2 billion, it was announced Wednesday.
"
Macworld - http://www.macworld.com
Analysts: Palm purchase a risky move for HP
Analysts: Palm purchase a risky move for HP: "Analysts say an HP acquisition of Palm would face significant hurdles in competing with more established products for business and developers.
"
Macworld - http://www.macworld.com
Arts & Letters Daily (29 Apr 2010)
Arts & Letters Daily (29 Apr 2010): "Adam Smith's great book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is a global manifesto for the interdependent world in which we live. Amartya Sen explains why... more
"
Arts & Letters Daily - ideas, criticism, debate - http://aldaily.com/
Military Wants to Super-Charge Troop Smarts
Military Wants to Super-Charge Troop Smarts: "The Pentagon has fooled with mind reading and performance-degrading drugs for enemy combatants for years. Now, it's launching a major effort to harness neuroscience, trying to help soldiers cope with the mental rigors of modern warfare.
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
Ad on urn: 'I've kicked the bucket - have you?'
Ad on urn: 'I've kicked the bucket - have you?': "
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has snapped up two advertisements for sale on a Springfield man's urn. Aaron Jamison has terminal cancer and is selling ads on his own urn to cover his cremation costs.
"KPIC - News - Local & Regional - http://www.kpic.com/news/local
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
AppleInsider | Apple acquires Siri, developer of personal assistant app for iPhone
AppleInsider | Apple acquires Siri, developer of personal assistant app for iPhone: "'There's a new way to get things done - just ask Siri,' the company's official website reads. 'No more endless clicking on links and pages to get things done on the Internet. Delegate the work to Siri and relax while Siri takes care of it for you.'
In a video demonstration, a user uses Siri to find local Italian food. The search is done with voice, and multiple sources of information are scoured to return results that include reviews, maps, and the ability to share with others via e-mail.
The free application (iTunes link) was also used to obtain a reservation for a restaurant using OpenTable, and to buy tickets for the film 'Avatar' in 3D in IMAX. Users on the App Store have given the application an average rating of 3 out of 5 stars.
The software also supports open-ended questions, with one inquiry demonstrated: 'What's happening this weekend around here?' The program returned results with events, including concerts and theater.
Voice queries are provided in 'natural' English, as one would use in a conversation. The user said 'How about San Francisco?' to have the location of the previous search automatically changed.
"
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Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Lost in the Details: Micro-View Blinds Scientists to Big Picture
Lost in the Details: Micro-View Blinds Scientists to Big Picture: "The universe is far more networked than science has anticipated. It's time we accept that no single gadget or reductionist approach is going to reveal the underlying logic of everything.
"
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
Microsoft brings Windows 7 to other devices
Microsoft brings Windows 7 to other devices: "The software maker said on Tuesday that it is ready with an embedded version of Windows 7 that can power devices ranging from TVs to digital signs."
CNET News.com - http://news.cnet.com/
Apple iTunes 9.1.1 - Play & buy music, videos, TV shows & burn CDs. (Free)
Apple iTunes 9.1.1 - Play & buy music, videos, TV shows & burn CDs. (Free): "WHAT'S NEW
Version 9.1.1:
Addresses several stability issues with VoiceOver
Addresses a usability issue with VoiceOver and Genius Mixes
Addresses issues with converting songs to 128 kbps AAC while syncing
Addresses other issues that improve stability and performance
"
MacUpdate - Universal Binary - http://www.macupdate.com/macintel.php
A month with the iPad: Surprises and disappointments
A month with the iPad: Surprises and disappointments: "Macworld's editors have nearly a month's worth of iPad use under our belts. With the 3G iPad set to arrive this week, we share the things that have surprised us and disappointed us about Apple's latest mobile device.
"
Macworld - http://www.macworld.com
Four reasons the LaserWriter mattered
Four reasons the LaserWriter mattered: "How important can one printer be? This one served as the first network printer, helped launch the desktop publishing revolution, and more. Come revisit with us why Apple's LaserWriter mattered.
"
Macworld - http://www.macworld.com
Monday, April 26, 2010
Climate Change Starts to Shake Up Wine Industry
Climate Change Starts to Shake Up Wine Industry: "There is much more to the question of wine and climate change than the character of pinot noir. Because wine grapes are extraordinarily sensitive to temperature, the industry amounts to an early-warning system for problems that all food crops — and all industries — will confront as global warming intensifies.
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
How Important is the iPad? | Tim Bajarin | PCMag.com
How Important is the iPad? | Tim Bajarin | PCMag.com: "History will determine whether the iPad truly is Jobs's most important device. Introducing the world to the PC and the GUI have cemented Jobs's role as a visionary. But perhaps the creation of a device that makes a computer totally transparent to the user, popularizes touch computing, and offers a vast array of computing scenarios for consumers and business might actually top his other achievements so far.
"
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Bajarin: Why Steve Jobs thinks the iPad is the most important product he has ever worked on
Bajarin: Why Steve Jobs thinks the iPad is the most important product he has ever worked on: "On two occasions, Steve Jobs has called the iPad the 'most important product' he has ever worked on..."
MacDailyNews - http://www.macdailynews.com/
Virtual ][ 6.3.7 - Emulates the Apple II, Apple II+, and Apple IIe computers. (Shareware)
Virtual ][ 6.3.7 - Emulates the Apple II, Apple II+, and Apple IIe computers. (Shareware): "
Virtual ][ 6.3.7
Virtual ][ is a program that emulates the Apple ][, Apple ][+ and Apple IIe computers. If you want to find out more, read the Virtual ][ help file.
WHAT'S NEW
Version 6.3.7:
- Fixed an issue that could cause the arrow keys to generate incorrect game paddle values if used in combination with the command key.
- Added a convenience menu in \'Quick Settings\' to easily invert the direction of the up and down arrows when used as a joystick.
- The Mac OS X Finder now correctly recognizes disk images as Virtual ][ files.
REQUIREMENTS
Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later.
PRICE
$49.00
DEVELOPER
DOWNLOADS
16893
"
MacUpdate - Universal Binary - http://www.macupdate.com/macintel.php
Stream audio and video to an iPad
Stream audio and video to an iPad: "Although Apple hasn't made a way to stream content from your computer to your iPad, there are several ways to accomplish such a feat.
"
Macworld - http://www.macworld.com
I hate computers: confessions of a sysadmin
I hate computers: confessions of a sysadmin: "I provide computer support all day every day to ‘users’. I am not one of these snotty IT guys who looks with scorn and derision on people who don’t know what an IRQ is. I recognize that users don’t care about computers. The computer is a means to an end for them: a presentation to solicit more grant money, or a program to investigate a new computational method, or just simply sending a nice note to their family. They don’t want to ‘use the computer’ so much as do something that the computer itself facilitates. I’m the same with with cars: I don’t want to know how an internal combustion engine works or know how to change my oil or in any other way become an automotive expert — I just want to drive to the grocery store!
"
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Don't ignore the Tea Party's toxic take on history. - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine
Don't ignore the Tea Party's toxic take on history. - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine: "The pamphlet made me think further about 'cult of personality' as a phrase in relation to the Tea Party. It occurred to me that their cult of personality is a kind of perverse cult of Obama. They've made a graven image of alien evil out of him. Obama: communist, Muslim, Kenyan, Manchurian candidate, fascist, socialist, capable of all varieties of political malevolence. A supervillain, with superpowers. Who requires super lies to combat.
"
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Sunday, April 25, 2010
<cite>Lost<cite> Creators Explain How They Did It
Lost Creators Explain How They Did It: "When Lost — the most puzzling yet entertaining TV show ever — ends on May 23, its producers have vowed to never speak of it again. Wired stops time to decrypt and honor its mysteries.
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
Sony delivers floppy disk's last rites
Sony delivers floppy disk's last rites: "Electronics giant, which pioneered and dominated the market for the storage medium, announces it will cease Japanese sales of the disks in 2011."
CNET News.com - http://news.cnet.com/
Big Data shakes up the Speech Industry
Big Data shakes up the Speech Industry: "
I spent a few hours at the Mobile Voice conference and left with an appreciation of Google's impact on the speech industry. Google's speech offerings loomed over the few sessions I attended. Some of that was probably due to Michael Cohen's keynote1 describing Google's philosophy and approach, but clearly Google has the attention of all the speech vendors. Tim's recent blog post on the emerging Internet Operating System captured the growing importance of networked applications that rely on massive amounts of data, and it was interesting to observe in person its impact on an industry. (Google's speech and language technologies were among the examples Tim cited.)
Google thinks of seamless voice-driven interfaces as having two key features: (1) ubiquitous availability so users can access speech interfaces from any app and on any device, and (2) high-performance so speech technologies lead to frictionless user interactions. In order to produce and deliver ubiquitous, high-performance speech interfaces, Michael Cohen emphasized Google's big data systems as key to how they develop all their services.
Having speech technologies in the cloud lets Google quickly iterate and push enhanced speech engines on a regular basis. More importantly, their speech engines learn and get trained using real data from their many interconnected services. Speech engines typically rely on both language and acoustic models. Language models are statistical models of word sequences and patterns. Cohen pointed out that their language models use data collected from web searches, giving them access to an ever growing corpus that few can match (230 billion words collected, refined to a vocabulary of the million most common words). Cohen disclosed that some of the more recent acoustic models they're evaluating are built using unsupervised machine-learning algorithms. (These are speech algorithms trained on recorded speech that haven't been transcribed by hand.) While he coyly avoided explaining how an accurate system can be built from unsupervised techniques, it's likely they use data from their 411 service (something Tim predicted 3 years ago). [Update (4/25): A reader points out that Youtube is another possible source of data for tuning speech engines.]
Of course having access to relevant real-world, user-generated data is pointless if one can't operate at a large-scale. Fortunately Google pioneered many of the recently popular big data management and parallel computing technologies, so they're probably the best company equipped to use large-scale data. Big data technologies are essential pieces of infrastructure that Google engineers tap into. In fact their speech algorithms wade through massive amounts of data on a regular basis, resulting in a virtuous cycle of refinements.
There are situations when embedded speech engines make sense (e.g., speech enabled navigation systems should still work in the 'middle of nowhere'). Google's access to relevant data and their big data skills make them a formidable general purpose, cloud-based2 speech engine. Hybrid systems that use cloud services when available, and otherwise default to embedded speech engines, were mentioned frequently at the conference. This is great news for players like Nuance that have both embedded and cloud engines. But as network connections become more reliable and ubiquitous, Google's cloud-based (and big data driven) speech engines are going to get harder to beat. In recent years many speech companies have amassed lots of data, but in Google they face a competitor that leverages web-scale data.
Microsoft with its search engine and call center data, speech products and research group, is also a major player. It just isn't clear if they are using data from their interconnected services to benefit their speech products, as efficiently as Google does.
(1) Michael Cohen was one of the founders of Nuance and is currently the Manager of Speech Technology at Google.
(2) Some of Google's speech engines are easily accessible (at least on Android) through simple API's.
O'Reilly Radar - http://radar.oreilly.com/
"Stuff": The psychology of hoarding
"Stuff": The psychology of hoarding: "
America's most notorious case of hoarding came to light on March 21, 1947, when New York City police were called to investigate a dead body in a three-story Harlem brownstone. The building belonged to two elderly brothers, Langley and Homer Collyer, and when the cops made it into the building, they were shocked by what they saw: piles of junk -- including 14 pianos, a Model T Ford and the remains of a two-headed fetus -- that reached to the ceiling, and a system of tunnels in which Homer and Langley were found dead, one crushed to death by a pile of things, the other dead of starvation.
Salon - http://www.salon.com/rss/all_salon.rss
Friday, April 23, 2010
The SEC's porn problem
As the global economy crashed and burned, certain top staffers at the Securities and Exchange Commission were busy watching porn. Instead of policing Wall Street, some were surfing for smut. This is the revelation making headlines today after the leak Thursday night of a summary of 33 probes of SEC employees using government computers to access pornography over the past five years. For the most part, the summary (PDF) resurfaces information that was already public; and it's worth noting thatit was requested by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, and is now being used as political ammunition by the GOP.
Salon - http://www.salon.com/rss/all_salon.rss
Report: No software will be able to run on Mac OS X 10.7 without being approved and signed by Apple
Report: No software will be able to run on Mac OS X 10.7 without being approved and signed by Apple: "Apple began charting the future of their flagship computer Mac OS X..."
MacDailyNews - http://www.macdailynews.com/
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