There's certainly something to be said for the Olympus E-420, which only takes up 5.1 x 3.6 x 2.1-inches and 13.4 ounces in your bag -- but that totally 80s body style is getting tired. Would it really have killed them to update the look from the E-410 and the rest of the line? Still, it's not the most expensive DSLR you've ever met, and it does have a 10 megapixel sensor with live view, 2.7-inch display, and ISO up to 1600 (meh). Come April or May (depending on where you live) expect to drop $500 for the body, $600 with an ED 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 Zuiko lens, and $700 with an ED 25mm f/2.8 Zuiko lens.
Company makes 3x6 ft carbon nanotube sheets, 100 sq. ft. sheets by the end of the summer; possible uses include consumer electronics, aircraft, and spacecraft
It's been in development for nearly half a decade, but this year at Microsoft's R&D extravaganza TechFest, the company finally lifted the curtain on its research-oriented Singularity OS. Let's just be clear from the get-go, though: while it's available for immediate use, Singularity is nowhere near anything you'd replace your desktop OS with. The sole intention here is to test out futuristic new concepts in application interaction, microkernel architecture, and so on, so don't expect to hear that Microsoft is hanging up the Vista apron or anything. But for the turbo-geeks in the crowd, the Singularity Research Development Kit (RDK) 1.1 is now available for download for academic non-commercial use. And for the rest of us, well, we'll just see what the year 2011 holds in store.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Read - Brush up on your Singularity theory Read - Download that biz
If there's one person at CeBIT you don't want to not recognize, it's German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Nevertheless, we can only assume that Vodafone booth workers were left with their tails stuck between their legs after said figure gave its recently announced picture-based search engine a go. Upon Otella returning nothing after a picture was presumably snapped of Merkel, she quickly asserted: "I am not in the database." Better still, she continued by proclaiming: "That's a major gap." Heck, maybe she should be happy -- after all, Vodafone's set to trial the service with Europe's "best selling tabloid," and not being in there would most certainly be a good thing.
EDGE: Nicholas Christakis, Douglas Rushkoff, Alan Alda, and the EDGE Dinner
In the last edition of John Brockman's always-provoctaive EDGE, Harvard MD and sociologist Nicholas Christakis talked about social networks. But instead of delving into well-trodden social network phenomena like viral videos, Christakis studies a variety of unexpected things that can spread through social networks, such as obesity, happiness, altruism, and, oddly, the taste for privacy. From the essay:
For me, social networks are like the eye. They are incredibly complex and beautiful, and looking at them begs the question of why they exist, and why they come to pass. Do we need a kind of just-so story to explain them? Do they just happen to be there, for no particular reason? Or do they serve some purpose — some ontological and also pragmatic purpose?
Along with my collaborator James Fowler, I have been wrestling with the questions of where social networks come from, what purpose they serve, what rules they follow, and what they mean for our lives. The amazing thing about social networks, unlike other networks that are almost as interesting — networks of neurons or genes or stars or computers or all kinds of other things one can imagine — is that the nodes of a social network — the entities, the components — are themselves sentient, acting individuals who can respond to the network and actually form it themselves. Link
As EDGE is a conversation, the new edition includes two insightful responses to Christakis's essay, from Douglas Rushkoff and Alan Alda (yes, that Alan Alda), and, finally, Christakis's response to them. Also in this EDGE edition, photos from the annual EDGE Dinner where big thinkers meet, eat, and somehow avoid being suffocated by the massive amount of smarts in the room. Link
This has got to stop, people. We just can't stand to think of all these bits and bytes -- not to mention their offspring -- crammed into something like this Buffalo LinkStation Mini NAS. Dual 500GB 2.5-inch hard drives were just never meant to be in this close of proximity. Oh, it has RAID 0 / RAID 1? We suppose those 1's and 0's will just have to suffer. The LinkStation Mini LS-WS includes an FTP server, DLNA and iTunes capability, can share a printer of USB and reads memory cards and other mass storage devices. Buffalo plans to ship it in March for 85,000 yen (about $824 US).
Creative Commons-licensed test for African sleeping sickness
Eric sez, "Australian scientists developed a cheap blood test for African sleeping sickness and gave it away under a Creative Commons license."
Zablon Njiru and Andrew Thompson of Murdoch University led a team that developed the elegantly simple way to check for trypanosomes -- protozoan parasites that are sometimes carried by tsetse flies.
To catch an infection in the earliest stages, when it is most treatable, technicians must look for a very small number of parasites in a sea of body fluids. That is not an easy thing to do, but there is a trick to make it easier: By mixing the liquid sample with a cocktail of molecules that can copy trypanosome DNA, they can make the serum resistance associated gene, a signpost of the disease, stand out -- transforming each test into a manageable task.
Instead of using the polymerase chain reaction, which amplifies the microbe DNA with the aid of an expensive instrument called a thermocycler, the researchers employed another gene multiplying technique called loop-mediated isothermal amplification. It requires little more than a warm water bath and a few chemicals. After that procedure, which takes less than a half hour, the scientists can simply add some SYBR green dye and watch the brew change color if it contains a boatload of duplicated genetic material from the pathogen.
Bjork won't be performing in China any time soon -- the singer shouted "Tibet, Tibet," after performing her song "Declare Independence," which was originally about Greenland.
Her remark was not reported in official media, but led to criticism when it began to circulate on the web. While China's 58-year occupation of Tibet remains controversial abroad, most Chinese see Tibet as a part of their country and regard calls for its independence as intrusive and divisive.
Here's an article and video from the Guardian, Link to others on YT.
Visualizations of IP and phone traffic from New York
MIT researchers are visualizing telecom traffic between New York City and the rest of the world. The project, titled New York Talk Exchange, is part of a the new "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The system converts IP and voice data traffic into several animations revealing network flow over time between neighborhoods, international calls between more than 100 cities, and the like. Missing from the project though is a visualization showing the traffic routed through the NSA's headquarters. From MIT News:
"We are interested in visualizing and exploring the connections that New York entertains with the rest of the world, how they change over the course of a day, and how the city's neighborhoods differ from each other by maintaining special and distinct relationships with particular cities and countries," said Kristian Kloeckl, project leader at the senseable city laboratory...
Over the next few months the MIT team hopes to address some important research questions that loom behind the MoMA visualizations: How is the structure of global cities evolving? How could telecommunications data allow us to gain new insights into the dynamics of globalization? How do byte transfers across the globe affect the need for travel and physical displacement, thus suggesting ideas for better sustainability at a global level?
"Our cursory analysis illustrates how telecom data can help us to expand our conception of global cities and their role in the process of globalization," said Ratti. "In the end, the NYTE project reveals as much about the city of New York as it does about its worldwide counterparts, in areas such as business, culture and immigration. In other words, our visualizations demonstrate that in the information age, urban life is as global as it is local."
This morning CNN reported that Steve Jobs has come out saying that Adobe’s Flash technology simply isn’t suitable for the iPhone.
Jobs believes that the desktop version of Flash runs too slowly on the iPhone, the cellphone version of Flash isn’t functional enough, and “there’s this missing product in the middle” that would presumably run fast enough for the iPhone while retaining enough functionality.
Adobe doesn’t appear to have any plans for this so-called “product in the middle” so his remarks suggest that iPhone won’t support Flash anytime soon. This is not going to make developers or consumers happy given how important Flash has become for the web, whether it be for delivering rich applications or video.
Those who were hoping that Flash support would be announced with the SDK tomorrow will be especially disappointed. Perhaps Jobs was trying to soften the blow a little bit by announcing his Flash intentions a day early.
Of course, as Duncan speculates, this provides an opportunity for Microsoft to swoop in and enable the iPhone with Silverlight. But is that even imaginable?
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Announced in the first Microsoft Mix keynote this morning was advanced zooming capabilities in Silverlight 2. The functionality comes from SeaDragon, a product first shown by Microsoft at TED last year.
The demonstration featured the Hard Rock Memorabilia site. It started with what looked like some basic memorabilia shots, then zoomed out to a button on a suit. The seamless image was 2 billion pixels created from many separate images with Silverlight natively providing the stitching.
The crux of the functionality is to provide the ability to zoom in and out quickly without the need to download an entire picture; Silverlight only loads what’s required as the user goes to that part of the overall image, saving on bandwidth and in theory providing a quicker and more pleasurable end user experience.
The video above is an interview the Mix crew did with the Hard Rock team that includes a demonstration of the site in action.
To see it live, install Silverlight 2 then visit the Hard Rock Memorabilia site here.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Censorware that blocks BB mentioned in Denver Post piece on filtered WiFi at DIA
Michael Booth of the Denver Post has an article out today about the use of censorware at Denver International Airport to block access to certain websites on the airport's public WiFi service. The net-filtering at DIA came to public attention when legendary musician, artist, and techno-explorer David Byrne blogged about not being able to access Boing Boing and other blogs from DIA.
They say they're using prudent judgment in a public, family-friendly atmosphere. But others see it as cyber-censorship that taints Denver's self-portrayal as a progressive economy.
"Give people some credit," said David Byrne, founder of the legendary art-rock band Talking Heads, who was blocked from boingboing.net. while connecting through DIA to an Aspen workshop last month. "And the more credit you give them, the more they respond. It's just trusting people's discretion."
Critics, like boingboing.net. editor Xeni Jardin and others, point out that DIA uses the same kinds of software filters employed by the repressive regimes of Sudan and Kuwait. Jardin is tired of her tech-update site getting blocked by private and government filters just because it occasionally posts respected artworks that might include nudity.
"This gets to the heart of what the Internet is all about and whose responsibility it is," said Jardin, who is based in California. "It seems particularly unfortunate that something as symbolic as the city's airport, a gateway to culture, commerce and the flow of ideas, would be blocked in such a fundamental way. The intent is understandable, but the outcome is bad for Denver."
Link. Image: "Dave Lewis of Aurora uses the free Wi-Fi service at DIA. Airport officials say they would rather deal with complaints about blocked sites than an angry parent whose child accidentally saw porn. (Brian Brainerd, The Denver Post )."
Update: Here's a testimonial from a BB reader familiar with DIA, who calls baloneyshit on some of the statements by people in the article defending the use of censorware there...
I travel on United extensively (1K flyer), and have to put up with the DIA "free" wifi system all the time.
a few things you should know about the system:
1. "With more than 4,000 Wi-Fi connections a day, the airport has received only two formal blocking complaints so far, he said."
After being frustrated by an inability to access Boing Boing, I spent 15 minutes on the DIA's website trying to find out how to lodge a complaint. There isn't any way that I could find, short of writing a snail mail letter. There is no phone number, no email address, no webform for pubic feedback.
no wonder they only received 2 complaints.
2. I have technology installed on my machine that alerts me to attempted breakins on my computer. The advertising system that DIA uses employs a technique called "cross-frame scripting" that has the potential to examine private information on webpages I am viewing, such as bank accounts and credit card information, as a means of displaying contextual advertising. Luckily my machine is protected against these kinds of attacks, but not every machine is. I have filed a complaint with the CERT, which is run by DHS, against DIA.
3. Because the DIA advertising system uses a proxy server to reformat the web pages with a set of contextual ads, it must intercept all web traffic. This has the effect of preventing the many other applications that use the same communications mechanism (HTTP) as web traffic from operating correctly on the DIA wifi network.
4. Since the system is free, there is way too much traffic on the DIA network, which makes it excruciatingly slow for a business traveller like myself. Since I already have a T-Mobile wifi subscription, I usually hang out underneath the escalators that lead to the Red Carpet Club, and hop on the much faster T-Mobile wifi network. As a "business hub," DIA is hurting its business travelers with this system.
Gakken's no stranger to build-it-yourself retro audio gear, and it now looks to be trying to bring some of its old school ways to your iPod with its new Vacuum Tube Amplifier kit. As you can see above, however, while the company is apparently pitching it as an iPod dock of sorts (like we've seen before), it'll also work just as well with any other audio device, as it relies on nothing more than a headphone jack to hook things up. Of course, you'll only be able to do that after you put the kit together, but judging from the number of parts that doesn't look to be too daunting a task, and at about $150, it's not all that unreasonably priced either (the shipping from Korea could be another matter though).
Ready to torture yourself even more? For folks not shacked up in Japan, there's little good in spending precious moments of your life checking out screenshots of the recently launched TV Guide Channel. Still, that's absolutely no reason to not check out the same on video, now is it? Oh, and for those curious, the Wiimote simply changes stations and volume levels like any other remote -- 'cept it's 498.3-percent more likely to shatter your set. Check out the vid after the jump.
Route Michigan Opens in Ramadi, Traffic Flows Again
(images/stories/features/2008/march/080305_fea1_hi.jpg)CAMP RAMADI — Three years ago, Route Michigan was closed for Iraqis because of all the violence in the...
Warfighters in Iraq Use Hand-held Video Devices, Live Feeds from UAVs
Looking around the corner or on the other side of a wall is increasingly high priority as urban street fighting becomes the norm for much of the fighting in Iraq.
Britain is pushing ahead with strategic unmanned aircraft work and examining the utility of the EJ200 turbofan as the basis for an unmanned combat air vehicle engine.
Can WordPress become the basis of a social network? Automattic founder and WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg hinted today on his blog that WordPress might go in a more social direction. He announced a new hire, Andy Peatling, the developer behind BuddyPress, a social network built on top of WordPress. BuddyPress will now become an official WordPress project.
Peatling describes an earlier version of BuddyPress, ChickSpeak (a social network for college women). He built ChickSpeak (and BuddyPress) on top of a multi-user version of WordPress. He moved all the blog posts off to the side and made most of the real estate a profile page with messaging functionality. Finally, he took advantage of all the open-source plugins available for WordPress:
Wordpress also has an excellent plugin API, as well as a whole host of quality pre-built plugins ready to download and activate. The key here is that I didn’t have to hack the core - I could just achieve the additional functionality needed by building dedicated plugins.
Plugins were built and used for private messaging, advanced profile management, online polls, photo management, multi-blog search and user credential management.
It is easy to dismiss this as completely unnecessary given the abundance of social networks already out there, as well as application development platforms like OpenSocial. But an open-source social network does present some intriguing possibilities. New apps and features could be added simply by creating new plugins. And there would be no lock-in to any proprietary code or development environment. Mullenweg writes:
Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.
I asked Mullenweg if the world really needs another social network. His response:
The world doesn’t need another social network, it needs a thousand networks that let you own your data and interconnect using open standards. We invest countless hours giving our data to networks like MySpace, essentially sharecropping on their land for the privilege of being able to connect to our friends. It’s our friends, our time, our connections, our data — it should be our software.
I think only an Open Source solution can do that.
Automattic already hosts nearly 2.6 million blogs on Wordpress.com that generate more than 100,000 posts a day. That is a vibrant and big community. Could that be used to seed a social network? Even if BuddyPress remains a completely separate project, it will be interesting to see if it can out-innovate Facebook or MySpace or Bebo as a social networking platform. Does anyone think it has a chance?
Update: Strangely the GNU Public Licensed BuddyPress has had its page taken down by Automattic and replaced with default “coming soon” message with links to the code removed (cache of the original page here). Same with the project page on Google Code, the main page having only just been pulled as the original page is still available to be viewed via Google cache. A subsidiary page with access to the plugin hasn’t been deleted by Automattic yet and is available here. Update 2: The code is back up now. It was taken down temporarily in anticipation of a move to a new URL buddypress.org (not live yet).
HOWTO Earn an artist's living in the 21st century: 1000 True Fans
Kevin Kelly's just posted "1000 True Fans," a business plan for all kinds of creators in the twenty first century:
A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans...
Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day's wages per year in support of what you do. That "one-day-wage" is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that. Let's peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.
One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years. True Fanship is doable. Pleasing a True Fan is pleasurable, and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that True Fans appreciate.
We've seen some overclockers go to pretty great lengths to keep those chips cool while they crank up the GHz, but Foxconn's demonstration at the company's CeBIT booth is really a sight to behold. They appear to be using copious amounts of liquid nitrogen, along with other black magicks, to boost a Core 2 Extreme processor almost past the 6GHz mark. We're a little short on specifics, but this setup was certainly hot, and by hot we mean cold.
Crocodile jumps at annoying man trying to pose for photo
A tourist in Australia's Northern Territory teasing a crocodile beside his boat annoyed the animal so much that it jumped out of the water at him. The man escaped. From The Telegraph:
"I began playing with it for a photo,'' Mr Mashiah said. "I was pointing at it when it suddenly jumped up at me - I didn't realise that crocs were so aggressive.''
The "saltie" – which experts believe probably approached the boat in search of a free feed of fish – propelled itself out of the water with terrifying speed. After narrowly missing its prey, it smashed into the side of the small metal boat before plunging back into the water.
Cryptomundo's Loren Coleman and I Love The Yeti's Henry Stokes made fun companion posts today about the Yeti's depiction in popular culture over the years. From Cryptomundo:
It is only when we move into the 1960s (after Sir Edmund Hillary’s debunking Yeti expedition) do we see the shift to the “white” Abominable Snowmen. Is this due to the establishment of a concrete-thinking postwar USA, where Americans’ insights in popular culture were viewed as the most important ones of the day?
Or is it merely a reflection of the worldwide popularity of the Bumble (from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer)?
Yes, I am a firm advocate of the theory that the whiteness of the modern popular cultural icon the Yeti or Abominable Snowmen directly issues from the depiction of the “Abominable Snow Monster” or “The Bumble” in the oft-repeated Christmas TV classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Thanks to a little digging at the FCC, we knew good and well Mio had a few Moovs on the way, and it's really no surprise that it chose CeBIT to make things official. Aside from looking incredibly sexy, the new Moovs all feature MioMore to unearth local gems and points of interests, SiRF GPS chipsets and InstantFixII for acquiring your location in a jiffy. Up first is the Moov 330 Regional (€180; $273) / 330 Europe (€230; $350), which each boast a 4.3-inch display and differ only in the expansiveness of their European maps. Next up is the €280 ($426) Moov 370 Europe, which ups the ante on the previous two by including Bluetooth and traffic information. Lastly, we've got the Moov 200 Regional (€150; $228) / Moov 200 Europe (€180; $273), which look to boast 3.5-inch displays and pack the same features as the 330 series. Mum's the word on availability, but folks situated across the pond aren't apt to miss a design like this.
Why hardware ebook readers are a dead end (for now, anyway)
My latest Locus column, "Put Not Your Faith in Ebook Readers," just went live. In it, I discuss the fact what while there's plenty of programmers who'll hack you a little ebook business that runs on a phone, handheld game device or PDA; there's a genuine shortage of high-quality manufacturers who'll build you a great, cheap, hardware-based ebook reader, and that that's likely to continue for some time.
China has experienced the largest migration in human history — 160,000,000 people moved from the inland farms to the coastal manufacturing cities — but it is not endless. Most of the world has shut down most of its factories, shuttering domestic manufacturing capacity in favor of the cheap labor, poor working conditions and environmental controls of China's factory cities. When you go to China to get your Kindle or your Wii produced, you're competing for space among the factories that produce socket wrenches, Happy Meal toys, laptop computers, prison cafeteria trays, decorative tin planters, vinyl action figures, keychain flashlights and cheap handguns.
Frankly, book reading just isn't important enough to qualify for priority treatment in that marketplace. E-book readers to date have been either badly made, expensive, out-of-stock or some combination of all three. No one's making dedicated e-book readers in such quantity that the price drops to the cost of a paperback — the cost at which the average occasional reader may be tempted to take a flutter on one. Certainly, these things aren't being made in such quantity that they're being folded in as freebies with the Sunday paper or given away at the turnstiles at a ballgame to the majority of people who are non-book-readers.
Meanwhile, handheld game consoles, phones, and other multipurpose devices have found their way into the hands of people from every walk of life. In some countries, mobile phone penetration is above 100 percent — that is, a significant proportion of the population maintain more than one phone, for example, a work cellular and a home cellular.
Not only can these devices command the lion's share of China's high-quality manufacturing capacity, but they are produced in such staggering volume (and often distributed with a subsidy — game devices are sold below cost in the expectation of selling games; phones are subsidized by carriers) that they can be had for a pittance.
The politics of the KC-X decision are heating up, with none other than Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) calling for a "thorough examination" of the contract award.
What are the national security implications of using an aircraft supplied by a foreign firm for this essential mission?
Were the risks associated with choosing a conceptual design over a proven capability properly assessed?
Was sufficient consideration given to the impact of the contract award on jobs in America and on our technological base?
I can tell you the answer to question #3 was "no"...and if it were anything different, no one would do business with the Pentagon anymore.
Norm Dicks' guy chimed in as well yesterday, sending me the following:
Note in this Boeing brochure dated Nov 2006 (while the draft Tanker RFP was out; prior to Jan 30, 2007 Final RFP) that Boeing was prepared to offer a larger tanker version based on the 777 airframe. All the communication that took place between the AF and Boeing (in addition to congressional briefings) indicated clearly that the KC-X competition was for a “Medium Size” tanker. Based on that, Boeing offered the KC-767 tanker version when the final RFP was issued.
Between then and last Friday, the Air Force set aside the briefing slides that clearly indicated its preference for a medium sized tanker and opted for an A-330 tanker that has a greater wingspan and is longer than the jumbo KC-10 tanker. We are not sure what happened here, and this is one of several issues that could be grounds for a protest and material for questions during upcoming hearings in congressional committees.
Now we're starting the see the CSAR-X arguments all over again. "Did they ask for a medium lift and get a heavy lift?" etc. Next step: Hillary/Obama/McCain skirmish.
The papers today said that Boeing has not yet issued a formal protest and will wait until the Air Force briefs the companies on the whys and why nots of the decision. That's not expected to happen until next week, but that sure isn't stopping the politicians from "waving the bloody shirt" over this already.
[EXTRA:Gonna try a little experiment here folks...Take the poll below and tell me what you really think. I'll fix the formatting as we go along, but I wanted to see if we could get some idea of where you all stand on the "Tanker Tango."
It's been in development for nearly half a decade, but this year at Microsoft's R&D extravaganza TechFest, the company finally lifted the curtain on its research-oriented Singularity OS. Let's just be clear from the get-go, though: while it's available for immediate use, Singularity is nowhere near anything you'd replace your desktop OS with. The sole intention here is to test out futuristic new concepts in application interaction, microkernel architecture, and so on, so don't expect to hear that Microsoft is hanging up the Vista apron or anything. But for the turbo-geeks in the crowd, the Singularity Research Development Kit (RDK) 1.1 is now available for download for academic non-commercial use. And for the rest of us, well, we'll just see what 
"We are interested in visualizing and exploring the connections that New York entertains with the rest of the world, how they change over the course of a day, and how the city's neighborhoods differ from each other by maintaining special and distinct relationships with particular cities and countries," said Kristian Kloeckl, project leader at the senseable city laboratory...
They say they're using prudent judgment in a public, family-friendly atmosphere. But others see it as cyber-censorship that taints Denver's self-portrayal as a progressive economy.
"I began playing with it for a photo,'' Mr Mashiah said. "I was pointing at it when it suddenly jumped up at me - I didn't realise that crocs were so aggressive.''
