corigin.com

UNIMurph sends word out of Stanford University that researchers have discovered a way to increase battery life tenfold by using silicon nanowires. Quoting News.com: ‘It’s not a small improvement,’ [lead researcher Yi] Cui said. ‘It’s a revolutionary development.’ Citing a research paper they wrote, published in Nature Nanotechnology, Cui said the increased battery capacity was made possible though a new type of anode that utilizes silicon nanowires. Traditional lithium ion batteries use graphite as the anode. This limits the amount of lithium — which holds the charge — that can be held in the anode, and it therefore limits battery life… ‘We are working on scaling up and evaluating the cost of our technology,’ Cui said. ‘There are no roadblocks for either of these.’”

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ta bu shi da yu writes “Mozilla has hired several developers from Humanized. According to Ars Technica, Humanized is a “small software company that is known for its considerable usability expertise and innovative user interface design. The Humanized developers will be working at Mozilla Labs on Firefox and innovative new projects.”"

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The Burton Group, an IT research company, published a study urging that enterprise organizations adapt OOXML rather than ODF. Their reasons include things like “ODF is controlled indirectly by Sun,” “MS Office is cheaper than OpenOffice.org,” and “OOXML improved many problems of DOC.” The Burton Group also claims that although ODF is well-designed, OOXML is better suited for the specific needs of enterprise organizations. The study claims to be impartial in that Microsoft didn’t pay for it. Ars Technica now has up a pretty thorough debunking of the Burton study. Ars wonders how the Burton authors can so blithely overlook Microsoft’s vote-buying in Sweden, while wielding unfounded accusations of chicanery in Sun’s direction.

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I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “Swedish prosecutors appear to be close to finally pressing charges against The Pirate Bay, having served them with 4,000 pages of legal papers. While this might appear bad, the administrators have already moved some of the servers out of the country, so Swedish prosecutors can’t shut it down, even if they want to. Moreover, the people of Sweden are decidedly on their side, with the Pirate Party, which is sympathetic to TPB’s cause, being one of the top ten political parties in the country. Still, this looks like a dirty trick on the part of the prosecutors — like they’re dumping all of this on the defendants in the hope that they won’t have enough time to sort through it and defend themselves. For comparison, the second-biggest murder case in Sweden required only 1,500 pages.”

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Struggling gay and lesbian media and entertainment company PlanetOut Inc. [LGBT] late Monday said
it has retained Allen & Company LLC to assist it in evaluating
strategic alternatives, including a possible sale of the company.

Just in time for the Super Bowl and ahead of IAC’s (IACI) breakup, Ticketmaster has struck a deal to acquire online ticket scalper TicketsNow for $265 million. This follows eBay’s (EBAY) acquisition of StubHub for $310 million last year. TicketsNow is the second-largest online ticket scalper after StubHub, having sold $200 million worth of tickets in 2006.

Many
of the tickets that scalpers, er, brokers, sell on these secondary
marketplaces are initially purchased from the Ticketmasters of the
world. So the markup is a missed opportunity for Ticketmaster, whose
own TicketExchange has shown lackluster performance.

An anonymous reader writes “Following the success of Elephants Dream, the Blender Foundation is developing a follow-on open movie called Peach, set for completion later this year. Computerworld has up an interesting interview with Matt Ebb, lead artist from Elephants Dream (the interview is split over 5 pages). Ebb talks about the making of the world’s first open movie and offers some advice to others wanting to start such a project.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I had planned to post a trip report article about Macworld Expo tonight, but the wifi in my hotel room is horrendous. As a result, there’s no way I’ll be able to upload pix. So a report will be posted after I get home Friday.

This was my very first Macworld, so I can’t really compare it to anything. Really, the only new and exciting product that I saw was the Macbook Air notebook and the iPhone software update. I was also able to briefly play around with the Modbook. Everything else was just a blur of iPhone / iPod case after case after case and iPod speaker after speaker after speaker. Lots of laptop bags were shown as well. Of course there was an abundance of Mac software, but since that isn’t a topic that I typically cover, nothing jumped out at me. More when I get back to good old Columbus, Indiana.

Several readers sent us the story of three high school sophomores in Racine, Wisconsin who were just notified that a celestial body they had discovered during a science project has been verified as an asteroid. The students at Racine’s Prairie School will be given the opportunity to name the asteroid in about four years. They used a telescope in New Mexico, belonging to a college in Michigan, that they controlled over the Net.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Inc. (GOOG) is a virtual printing press for money, so it’s not too surprising to hear it may be looking to acquire U.K.-based Yellow Pages publisher Yell Group plc [YELL],
a company with a $5 billion market cap. Published reports indicate
Google could offer as much as 500 pence a share for Yell, or $7.7
billion. The offer would amount to a sizable 48% premium to where
shares of Yell were trading on the London Stock Exchange Monday.

Coldeagle sends us the news that the US Food and Drug Administration has declared that meat from cloned animals is safe to eat. The agency decided that no labeling is necessary for meat or milk from cloned cows, pigs, or goats or their offspring. (Ironically the FDA didn’t include cloned sheep in the announcement, claiming a lack of data, though the very first cloned animal was a sheep named Dolly.) The article notes that a couple of major food suppliers have already decided not to use any products of cloning, and that the groups opposed to cloning in the food chain will now concentrate their efforts on convincing more suppliers to boycott the business of cloning. The FDA noted that their focus groups and other public input indicated that about 1/3 of US citizens do not want food from cloned animals under any circumstances; another 1/3 have no objections; and another 1/3 fall somewhere in between.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yeah well Jobs said portable video was stupid. This sound like cutting remarks from some one worried. Google is becoming this gianormous company out of nowhere and they are wasting no time venturing. As for make a phone to be hard um I thought goggle was just doing the OS and was relying on phone makers to build the hardware.

I see you guy had to do some serious mac ass kissin after the last few bland posts about them.

Ultraorange

4T writes “Forget about monitoring your computers with spyware, now they’re going to monitor the users as well! ‘Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence. The Times has seen a patent application filed by the company for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer’s assessment of their physiological state.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By Brady Forrest

Last week I had the opportunity to get hands-on with the Dash’s new interface and learn about its upcoming API (previous Radar post). The internet-connected GPS has gone through quite a few changes since the Beta unit was released.

The first thing I noticed is that the interaction with the device is very different. The search interface now has a QWERTY keyboard (instead of alphabetical). When you search you are given the choice of searching Yahoo! Local or the on board data (the locations of airports, gas stations, food, hospitals and other POI types). The new hardware is much, much slicker.

The maps on the device now always show traffic. They are using data from Inrix to get down to arterial side streets. They are also pulling from their own historical records (gleaned from Dash users like yourself) when calculating routes and where realtime data is unavailable. When looking at the map the realtime traffic is in a solid line and the historical (predictive) is dashed.

The web portal (called My Dash) has also received a refresh not the least of which are custom Placebase maps designed to highlight traffic. On the portal you can create (and share) new sets of POI, import KML, and send it all to your car. This will be very handy for taking all of your Platial and Google My Maps in the car with you.

At the end of the month the Dash will get a RESTful API. At the user’s initiative lat/long coordinates can be sent to a server. The Dash will consume a GeoRSS feed. This is just the first release. In the future they may add HTML pages, search and even the ability to poll. The device I saw did not have any API-driven apps loaded, but I can imagine great ones (update my location and finding out who from my YASN contacts are nearby).

I am excited for the Dash. I want to be able to send content to and from my car. I relish the idea of being able to sync geo-content between my computer and my car. The devices are spendy (at $599 with a monthly charge of around 10 for the GPRS) and available for pre-order. It’ll be shipping in Q1.

The Dash has reinforced two trends for me. One is the need for multi-touch on an screen-based device. As I navigated menus and maps I kept trying to flick and expand like I would my iPhone. It only worked on one screen. The rest are button or slider based. As Tim commented about the Kindle, the interface felt dead. In the Dash’s defense the product team realizes this. They are concerned that multi-touch requires too much attention whereas the buttons and sliders, while less sexy, are more precise

The second is the need for a ubiquitous internet connection. My phone has it. The Kindle has it. My camera (when equipped with an Eye-Fi SD card) has one when wifi is around. The new Garmin Forerunner 405 will also take advantage of wifi. Now my car will (Radar post). More and more the internet is going to be needed for every device.

(Image courtesy of Dash, more on Flickr)

Isn’t Las Vegas in a desert? where are they going to get all the water needed?

Seems this would work better in a place like downtown Chicago.

Jason

An anonymous reader writes “After four fires in two years — see earlier Slashdot discussions for background — AT&T is going against its own independent lab findings and declaring that the Avestor batteries powering its U-verse network aren’t safe and need to be replaced. This is the network that SBC was building out prior to acquiring AT&T. Following the latest broadband equipment cabinet explosion in Wisconsin, the carrier says it will swap out 17,000 batteries deployed in several states across its network.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Looks great.

But having to send the machine in for repair every time the hard drive or battery dies is a kill point. Battery will be dead in less then two years. And a hard drive, while not having a set lifespan, does fail often in a business setting.

…way too expensive also.

newgalactic

Clearwire (CLWR) will migrate its customers to Google (GOOG) Apps including Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk.

If it weren’t for luck, or lucky accidents, none of these products would exist today. The following ten products were all discovered as a result of pure accidents. Where would we be today without some of these great products?

WirePosted writes “MacSpeech, the leading supplier of speech recognition software for the Mac, has canned its long-running iListen product and has launched a Mac version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the top-selling Windows speech recognition product. MacSpeech had made a licensing agreement with Dragon’s developer, Nuance Communications. The new product is said to reach 99% accuracy after 5 minutes of training.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Krow alerted me that MySQL has been bought by Sun. Right now there is only a brief announcement but it discusses what the acquisition will mean for the core developers, community etc.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If people go back to reading, what will become of the new iTunes Movie Rentals? Oh, the horror!

beyondthetech2007

I wonder if the food will even taste decent? You might think “oh its the same shit yall, comes from the same plants”…

But think about it. The sunlight is different, the air pollution is different, and theoretically its evil people planting the seeds (casino’s). And don’t all evil seeds produce bad fruits?

rainfever

OK, Matt..
1. There is always an Apple refresh on the way. Waiting for it means that you will wait forever.

2. What does multi-touch really give you? Plug in a mouse and you can re-size and rotate pictures much faster and more accurately than with the touch pad.

3. As to chipset Apple is almost always behind the curve here. It’s an inherant problem with them having to tune all their software to new hardware instead of letting the market do it. Get a Penryn and 4 months later an even better, faster, smaller chip will be out.

If you must have a powerful ultra portable at 13″ get a m1330. You can even Hackintosh it if you must have OSX. Otherwise take what Apple deigns to supply you.

P.S.
Impressed? Really? I didn’t see a single announcement that wasn’t either adding features that should have been in place at launch in old products, or a crippled new launch.

Xenocide

Gametrailers recently admitted that they run their Xbox360/PS3 graphics comparison videos with the full color range of the ps3 turned off, thus making the xbox360 version seem more vibrant when in reality there isn’t much difference. To see a true comparison go here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HvdRfUmoqQ

Of course, ESPN will still be featuring football & all the conventional sports. But it’s announced a new relationship with Major League Gaming (MLG) — will feature online all 2008 Pro Circuit competitions, exhibit on TV special competition segments & set stage for possible much fuller gaming coverage across ESPN TV networks.

Didn’t see that one coming. Blog contains details to what this could mean for both companies. May as well be one of the most important takeovers of 2008 already!

Hello, Bill here,

I wanted to let you know that we have just posted Microsoft Security Advisory (947563).

This advisory contains information about a targeted attack exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft Office Excel. Our investigation has shown that this vulnerability affects Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Service Pack 2, Microsoft Office Excel Viewer 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2002, Microsoft Office Excel 2000 and Microsoft Excel 2004 for Mac. 

Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Service Pack 3, Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac are not affected as they do not contain the vulnerable code.

We’ve activated our Software Security Incident Response Process (SSIRP) to investigate the vulnerability and have identified steps customers can take to protect themselves in the workaround section. As part of our SSIRP process, we currently have teams working to develop an update of appropriate quality for release in our regularly scheduled bulletin process or as an out-of-band update, depending on customer impact. In the meantime, we encourage customers to review the advisory and implement the workarounds.

While the attack appears to be targeted, and not widespread, we are monitoring the issue and are working with our MSRA partners to help protect customers. We will update the Advisory and this blog as new information becomes available.

Bill

Ian Lamont writes “Microsoft is apparently taking seriously a blogger’s claim that a Microsoft tech support employee called back to check on a 10-year-old BSOD trouble ticket. The anonymous blogger suspects someone at Microsoft typed “1/8/08″ into their tracking system for the date of a follow-up call, instead of “1/8/98.” Microsoft told Computerworld support cases “are reviewed regularly so that we can ensure we’re resolving customer issues in a timely fashion — regardless of the callback commitment set by the agent. Nonetheless, no system can ensure complete accuracy.”" To be fair, this is all unverified, so choose to believe at your own risk.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.