2010/04/27

NEW NET Issues List for 27 Apr 2010

Below is the final list of issues for the Tuesday, 27 Apr 2010, NEW NET (Northeast Wisconsin Network for Economy and Technology) 7:00 - 9:00 pm weekly gathering. This week we'reupstairs at Tom's Drive In, 501 N Westhill Blvd, Appleton, Wisconsin, USA -- if there's a chain across the steps, ignore it and come on upstairs.

The ‘net

1. Top 10 Ways to Access Blocked Stuff on The Web http://lifehacker.com/5516305/top-10-ways-to-access-blocked-stuff-on-the-web The web is a generally free place, but some sites and services want to make it annoying to navigate and enjoy. Stream any video you'd like, see the sites you need, and get at services you thought were down with these tips…10. Skip Past Annoying User/Pass Requests…9. Read Articles That Rupert Murdoch Wants You Paying For…7. Get to Gmail When It's Down…The Gmail team itself has recommended using an IMAP client when Gmail isn't loading, and the How-To Geek has quite a few other work-arounds to recommend, including keeping a link to Gmail's HTML-only and mobile versions handy…3. Download YouTube and Other Flash Videos…To get at YouTube and other streaming video sites' goods, the How-To Geek wrote up a complete guide to ripping and converting Flash videos. Among the recommendations: YouTube Downloader or the Get YouTube Video bookmarklet, along with the old Vixy.net webapp standby. If Hulu's where you want to grab from, StreamTransport is, at the moment, working for that purpose. For conversion to nearly any format once the download's done, try the Format Factory…2. Access Country-Blocked Streaming TV…”

2. Pandora and Facebook: So Happy Together http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/pandora-and-facebook-so-happy-together/ The leading online radio service and world’s biggest social network have forged a bond that will solidify both companies’ dominance, while offering music fans a way to share music with each other that appears to lack any significant downside…integrating your Pandora and Facebook accounts won’t pollute your Facebook stream with endless notifications about what you’re listening to. The upside for Pandora users is significant, due to the ways in which it broadcasts their taste, helps them discover and enjoy new music through their friends. There are countless ways to do these exact same things elsewhere on the web, and you’ve already been able to share Pandora stations with friends. But Pandora + Facebook = such easy math that even the busy or excessively lazy can integrate it into their lives…if this aspect of Facebook’s initiative takes off it will make the company the de facto storage point for our musical preferences, while boosting Pandora’s utility…”

3. Time to Audit Your Facebook Privacy Settings, Here's How http://www.fastcompany.com/1624745/time-to-audit-your-facebook-privacy-settings Now that Facebook is loosening its data-sharing policies with third-party Web sites and applications, it's the perfect time for users to consider tightening up their privacy settings. This week the mega social network announced new personalization features that extend the Facebook experience to third-party Web sites--unless you opt out, that is. Here's a rundown of the new features, and how you can opt out if you choose…”

4. Inner Workings of Global Encyclopedia 'Better than a Soap Opera' http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,690402,00.html Wikipedia, the world's largest encyclopedia, is a massive project…behind the scenes of the German-language version of this intellectual utopia is a group of small and dedicated volunteers. Their passion for truth at times leads to bitter disputes. It was only one word that Wladyslaw Sojka changed on Wikipedia. But by doing so, he set off a running battle that lasted two and a half months and took on a tone so hateful that it even surprised Sojka…It started one night when Sojka modified the first sentence of the German-language Wikipedia article on the Danube Tower in Vienna. He changed "The Danube Tower is an observation tower" into "The Danube Tower is a television and observation tower."…The very next morning, Sojka saw…"Elisabeth59" had undone his modification and added a comment: "The Danube Tower is definitively not a television tower…Thus began one of the most absurd debates ever carried out on the German Wikipedia website. It amounted to pages and pages full of insults and corrections, reaching a length of 600,000 characters -- as much as a book. The underlying issues soon became much greater than just the Danube Tower -- it was about the truth and who has the right to enforce it. Wikipedia is the world's largest encyclopedia and it soon may be the only remaining one, so those issues are crucial. The print version of the German-language Brockhaus Encyclopedia as well as Microsoft's CD-ROM encyclopedia, Encarta, have been discontinued, and the Encyclopædia Britannica is experiencing financial difficulties. The days of thick encyclopedia volumes lining bookshelves are past…Wikipedia seems like a utopia come true -- global knowledge compiled by everyone, administered, amended and corrected by everyone…The miracle of Wikipedia, though, is how all that bickering can actually give rise to knowledge…The vast majority of Wikipedia's millions of users never even noticed the dispute over the Danube Tower. These users access the online encyclopedia to quickly look something up, and they know, for the most part, that not every single thing they find there is necessarily true…”

5. iFixit wants repair manual for everything http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/04/fixing-the-planet-ifixit-wants-repair-manual-for-everything.ars “…iFixit CEO and cofounder Kyle Wiens…believes that repairing and maintaining the devices we already have, instead of tossing them aside for new ones, can do more to help the problem than even recycling can. "Repair is better than recycling," Wiens said. "We can become vastly more sustainable by fixing things when they break rather than mining them for raw materials." To further that goal, iFixit is launching what it calls "Repair 2.0." iFixit's staff has written repair manuals for nearly every Apple product, but volunteers testing iFixit's new platform since September 2009 have written detailed repair manuals for game consoles, cell phones, cameras, and even the brakes on recent Dodge Caravans. "In the last six months, [volunteers] have written manuals covering as many devices as we've been able to write at iFixit in the last seven years…”

Security, Privacy & Digital Controls

6. McAfee apologizes for crippling PCs with bad update http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9175940/McAfee_apologizes_for_crippling_PCs_with_bad_update “…a McAfee…antivirus signature update wrongly quarantined a critical Windows system file after identifying it as a low-threat virus. Reports, confirmed and anecdotal, put the number of affected PCs in the thousands, the majority of them in businesses. Only systems running Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3), the newest version that Gartner analyst John Pescatore estimated had a 50% share of the enterprise market, were clobbered by the bad update. Computers crippled by the update crashed and rebooted repeatedly, and lost their connection to the network, a symptom that forced support staff to visit each downed PC, thus dragging out the time required to resuscitate machines…” [http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-20003399-83.html ]

7. The glass box and the commonplace book http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2010/04/the-glass-box-and-the-commonplace-book.html “…a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe and America, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book…“commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. It was a kind of solitary version of the original web logs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing. The great minds of the period—Milton, Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book…Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books…Locke’s scheme…provided just enough order to find snippets when you were looking for them, but at the same time it allowed the main body of the commonplace book to have its own unruly, unplanned meanderings…this magic was predicated on one thing: that the words could be copied, re-arranged, put to surprising new uses…By stitching together passages written by multiple authors, without their explicit permission or consultation, some new awareness could take shape…The overall increase in textual productivity may be the single most important fact about the Web’s growth over the past fifteen years…Apple’s new iBook application for the iPad…when you try to copy a paragraph of text. You get the familiar iPhone-style clipping handles, and you get two options “Highlight” and “Bookmark.” But you can’t actually copy the text, to paste it into your own private commonplace book, or email it to a friend, or blog about it…the book in question is Penguin's edition of Darwin’s Descent of Man, which is in the public domain. Those are our words on that screen. We have a right to them…the Kindle – even the Kindle app for the iPad – does allow you to clip passages and automatically store them on a file that can be downloaded to your computer…You are apparently limited to a certain percentage of the overall text of the book, which is perfectly reasonable in my mind…This is a page from the NY Times Editor’s Choice iPad app, showing what happens when you try simply to select text from an article. You can't do it…A single piece of information designed to flow through the entire ecosystem of news will create more value than a piece of information sealed up in a glass boxPeople who spend a lot of time on political sites are far more likely to encounter diverse perspectives than people who hang out with their friends and colleagues at the bar or the watercooler…This study suggests that Internet users are a bunch of ideological Jack Kerouacs. They’re not burrowing down into comforting nests. They’re cruising far and wide looking for adventure, information, combat and arousal…The reason the web works as wonderfully as it does is because the medium leads us, sometimes against our will, into common places, not glass boxes…”

8. Texas beauty school's cell phone jammer leads to $25K fine http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/texas-beauty-schools-cell-phone-jammer-leads-to-25k-fine.ars What does a cosmetology school just outside Dallas need with a 5W adjustable cell phone jammer? Blissful quiet in the classrooms, apparently. But the school's decision to install the jamming unit…was one link in a chain that last week led…to…a $25,000 fine against the company hawking the products…The CommLawBlog, which highlighted the FCC's proposed fine, concluded with this parallel: "Ironically, in both Texas and Florida it is legal to openly carry firearms into a Starbucks, say. But not a phone jammer. So when the cell phone at the next table erupts into The William Tell Overture and its owner bellows, “HELLO? HEY! YEAH, IN A STARBUCKS! IT’S RAINING HERE! SO WHERE’RE YOU?” pulling out the jammer is not an option. It’s the firearm or nothing…”

9. Senators complain about Facebook privacy changes http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/facebook-privacy-changes-get-senatorial-ftc-attention.ars Facebook's latest privacy policy update has once again gotten the company in hot water, this time with four US senators. Senators Al Franken, Charles Schumer, Michael Bennet, and Mark Begich wrote an open letter to Facebook on Tuesday, urging the company to take "swift and productive steps" to make user information more private and warning that the Federal Trade Commission may get involved if certain concerns aren't addressed soon. Being questioned is Facebook's decision to categorize a user's hometown, current city, "likes," interests, friends, and other info as "public information." Now, even the most private user cannot have a Facebook account to communicate with friends while also keeping this information hidden from public view…Schumer…said that Facebook should change its policies so that sharing all this information is opt-in instead of opt-out (in some cases, users can't even opt out if they wanted to)…”

10. Tool to see what Facebook says about you http://gigaom.com/2010/04/27/want-to-know-what-to-know-what-facebook-is-saying-about-you-try-this-tool/ “…Developer Ka-Ping Yee has come up with a simple tool that shows you everything the social network sends to anyone whose app or service decides to plug in to the new feature — all it requires is a user ID or user name. You can find out what information you’re sharing via your public profile by looking at your settings within Facebook,too, of course. But Yee’s tool shows you exactly what data a developer would get when it asks Facebook for info via the API, such as your name, birth date, location, etc. and also any public information such as your “likes” (formerly pages you were a “fan” of), your photos and so on…Yee…found that the API was showing what events he had recently attended, and even those he was planning to attend, information he didn’t recall giving Facebook access to (another developer says the old API provided this as well). Thanks in part to Yee flagging the issue in a blog post and contacting the social network, Facebook now appears to have fixed it so that the API no longer makes this available by default…Even though this glitch has been fixed, however, Yee’s tool has managed to surprise even some of the savviest tech users with what it reveals. Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch.com, for example, on Twitter called it “immensely useful [and] potentially scary. I’m a sophisticated privacy vet & found things I hadn’t known I was sharing…”

Mobile Computing & Communicating

11. RIM Launches Voice-Over-Wi-Fi Service http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/194990/rim_launches_two_new_blackberrys_and_voiceoverwifi_service.html “…RIM introduced its voice-over-Wi-Fi service for business users. BlackBerry MVS 5 works with Cisco Unified Communications Manager to allow users to use a single work number between their landline desk phone and BlackBerry smartphone over a Wi-Fi connection. Some key features of BlackBerry MVS 5 include incoming call filtering, network preference settings (the option to switch between Wi-Fi or cellular for making calls), and Wi-Fi network access controls. BlackBerry MVS 5 will be available later this year…”

12. Motorola drops Google’s location services in favor of Skyhook wireless http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/04/26/businessinsider-motorola-to-use-skyhook-wi-fi-gps-on-android-phones-replacing-googles-built-in-location-services-2010-4.DTL “…Motorola will build Skyhook's location service into "much" of its Google Android-based phones worldwide, replacing Google's built-in location service. This should, in theory, provide more accurate location positioning for apps that need it…Skyhook's location service is interesting: It's based on a huge grid of wi-fi hotspots. Your phone triangulates itself based on how far away you are from certain wi-fi hotspots, which tends to be much faster than GPS, much more accurate than cell-tower-based location, and works indoors…Motorola is the first Android phone maker that will replace Google's built-in location services with Skyhook. Apple already uses Skyhook in its iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and in the latest version of its Mac OS X operating system…”

13. Power your cellphone by walking http://news.discovery.com/tech/piezoelectronic-device-electricity-motion.html Every move you make, every step you take, you can generate electricity. By cramming 20,000 nanowires into three square centimeters, scientists from Georgia Tech have created the world's first device powered solely by piezoelectric materials…Within three to five years piezoeleectric nanowires, woven into a cotton shirt or housed in a shoe heel, could charge a cell phone or laptop battery after even a short walk…according to the two new papers published by Wang's group at Georgia Tech, piezoelectrics can generate voltages up to 1.26 volts, and soon will produce voltages much higher…The wires work with each other, amplifying the electrical charge to record levels as the single layer is pushed back and forth with only the most slight and gentle of nudges…”

Open Source

14. The White House: open-source Drupal developer http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/04/the-white-houseopen-source-drupal-developer.ars “…not only is the Obama White House using plenty of open-source software, its technology team is contributing back to the community…the Senior Advisor to the CIO of the Executive Office of the President, Dave Cole, announced that his team was contributing three new pieces of code to the Drupal content management system, which powers the White House website. "By releasing some of our code," Cole wrote, "we get the benefit of more people reviewing and improving it…”

15. Makers share their lore at Maker Faire http://www.heraldsun.com/view/full_story/7196304/article-Makers-share-their-lore-at-Maker-Faire Take parts of a hamfest, craft fair, computer security conference and science fair. Mix them together and you have a Maker Faire. Sanctioned by MAKE magazine but organized locally, a Maker Faire brings together inventors and creators of all kinds of materials…"You get robotics people who talk to textile people," said organizer John Danforth, and people comparing notes on topics from honey bees to boiling freon. The event was held in conjunction with the ShopBot Jamboree, which he knows through Techshop, a local do-it-yourself shop…The 3-D printer, explained Maker Faire staffer Drew Nelson, is a Replicating Rapid Prototype Machine that is designed to make itself and other plastic parts…At the Triangle Arduino Hackers Club table, Dante Cassanego of Durham explained Arduino, which is open-source hardware and software that allows people to simply control electronics…Visitors also learned about bees, habitats for bats, designing your own fabric, leather bookbinding and modern quilting…”

16. LinuxFest fosters ingenuity, software, robotics http://westernfrontonline.net/2010042712186/news/linuxfest-fosters-ingenuity-software-robotics/ At Bellingham Technical College, people were talking about computer software, astronomy and robotics — all in the same room. It was during LinuxFest Northwest 2010, and it took place April 24 and 25…The Bellingham Linux Users Group is a loosely organized group of people who have an interest in the Linux operating system and open-source software, Wright said. The average attendance for each festival for the last several years has been about 1,500 to 2,000 total, with Saturdays having the biggest crowd. The event is free and open to the public…The festival also featured Sehome High School First Robotics, a team of students from Sehome High School…Sehome's robotics team received aid from another local technology group, Bellingham Artificial Intelligence Robotics Society…a group of robotics enthusiasts…The Whatcom Association of Celestial Observers…was also at the festival…“Everyone here has a curious mind,” Bunker said. “Our connection to Linux is very tenuous…”

17. Vancouver City Hall's Open Data Experiment http://thetyee.ca/News/2010/04/26/OpenDataExperiment/ “…Over the past year, Vancouver's city government has launched a program to make large amounts of information to the public. These data sets, posted online at data.vancouver.ca, include garbage pickup schedules, drinking fountains and motorcycle parking…Mayor Robertson has gone even further, making a motion in city council that the city manager release the mayor's and council's budget and expenses, beyond the relatively scant information already available in financial disclosures…In May 2009, Coun. Andrea Reimer made a motion in city council to share as much data as possible with outside parties, to adopt open data formats and to put open source software on an equal footing with commercial applications…One of the biggest problems with this practice is changing the flow of information with government so that, instead of a single static dataset on the web, the public dataset is updated as the information changes…The idea is that people in the private sector, both companies and private citizens, can use the public data sets on the site to create new services. This has already sparked a number of ideas and experiments in making use of the open data…”

18. Counting down to Pengicon http://www.dissociatedpress.net/2010/04/26/counting-down-to-pengicon/ “…Penguicon, North America's finest science fiction and open source software convention…runs from April 30 to May 2 at the Marriott in Troy, MI…Penguicon seems to go all day and all night. Plenty of good and geeky talks as well as tons of gaming, crafting and Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream…you can still register at the door for the low, low price of $50 for the weekend. If you're in or around Troy, MI or can get there on short notice you should definitely make your way to Penguicon…”

SkyNet

19. Google Brings Earth View to Google Maps http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/Google-Brings-Earth-View-to-Google-Maps-403811/ Google…integrated Google Earth into Google Maps, providing an Earth view to Maps as a different way of looking at the world on the Web. Starting April 26, users can click the "Earth" button in Google Maps. Users will be able to zoom to any location and use navigation tools to pan around the browser. Users can "tilt" their view by holding down the shift key and the left mouse button while moving the mouse…” [ http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/04/earth-view-comes-to-google-maps.html ]

20. Google SkyMap for Android Puts Detailed Star Gazing in Your Pocket http://lifehacker.com/5524793/google-skymap-for-android-puts-detailed-star-gazing-in-your-pocket “…Install Google Sky Map for Android on your phone and you don't just get a chance to scroll through the heavens—although you can switch it to manual mode for fun zooming around—you actually get to see the celestial sphere as you would see it with perfect telescope-vision…Tilt the phone up towards the sky and you see what's above you, thanks to the GPS, compass, and tilt-sensors in your phone…”

21. Google Adds TV Episode Search http://mashable.com/2010/04/26/google-tv-search-2/ Google’s latest search engine feature enables users to search for individual TV episodes and sort the results by season in each series. Just search for a TV series like Mad Men or The Office, then click the “Show options…” button above the results. A panel appears on the left with several options; you can click “Videos” to narrow your search to videos, and after that the option to search for “Episodes” instead of “All videos.”…you can pick the season you want to watch and see only those episodes…It includes YouTube, Hulu, Vimeo, Amazon, Dailymotion, and network video sites like NBC.com, BBC.co.uk and AMCTV.com, among others…Television search engine startup Clicker has these features and more…”

22. Google Chrome OS kernel source code hints at ARM, Tegra 2 http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/04/chromeos-kernel-source-code-hints-at-arm-tegra-2-hardware.ars Google's browser-centric Chrome OS hasn't reached the market yet, but development is progressing…Google's operating system uses a Linux kernel and is partly based on the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution…Samsung revealed earlier this year that it is planning to ship Chrome OS on some upcoming products… likely that Samsung's first devices to ship with Chrome OS will be ARM-powered smartbooks…A look at the commit log of NVIDIA's branch indicates that the graphic chip maker's engineers has been busy adding Tegra support…”

General Technology

23. Driving With Your Eyes, Not Your Hands http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http://www.fu-berlin.de/campusleben/forschen/2010/100423_eyedriver/index.html&sl=de&tl=en “…computer scientists at the Free University…have developed "EyeDriver" software: steering a car only through eye movements. It has the basic equipment for the new project initially quite unostentatious. You need: a car, a bicycle helmet, a laptop…the bicycle helmet with cameras…One of the helmet cameras recorded the eye movements of "driver"…movement is converted into control signals for the steering wheel, the vehicle can be steered with the eyes…"Routing Mode" on the other hand most of the time itself, goes so autonomously. Only at forks, such as intersections, stops the vehicle and asked the driver via voice, to determine the next route. This requires the support of the helmet for three seconds left and the right look. His gaze lingers long enough in one direction, is confirmed to him by the eyeDriver software acoustic, that the election has been accepted…Famous are Professor Rojas and his team for a long time: last year they introduced a car controlled by iPhone…”

24. AMD Launches Six-Core Phenom II at Bargain Price http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20003458-1.html “…In addition to introducing six-cores, the Core i7 980X Extreme earned the single-chip speed crown, complete with a high-end $1,100 price tag. AMD's new Phenom II X6 won't beat Intel on speed, but at a top-end price of $295 for the Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition, AMD makes six-core computing far more accessible. It may also make life uncomfortable for Intel's quad-core chips at that price. The Phenom II X6 actually has two iterations launching Monday--the overclockable 3.2GHz Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition ($295), and the 2.8GHz Phenom II x6 1055T ($199). Specs for both include 125W power draw, 3MB L2 cache, 6MB L3 cache, 4000MHz HyperTransport bus, and socket AM3/AM2+ motherboard support…”

25. A Brain-Recording Device That Melts Into Place http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100418155449.htm Scientists have developed a brain implant that essentially melts into place, snugly fitting to the brain's surface. The technology could pave the way for better devices to monitor and control seizures, and to transmit signals from the brain past damaged parts of the spinal cord. "These implants have the potential to maximize the contact between electrodes and brain tissue, while minimizing damage to the brain. They could provide a platform for a range of devices with applications in epilepsy, spinal cord injuries and other neurological disorders…”

26. Lousy tech support makes "Computer Stress Syndrome" worse http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/04/lousy-tech-support-makes-computer-stress-syndrome-worse.ars Tech support: two words that send chills down the spines of both computer experts and tech novices. Hours spent waiting on hold, techs with questionable communication skills, costly and time-sucking solutions to seemingly simple problems…The report, Combatting Computer Stress Syndrome, was compiled by the marketing think tank Customer Experience Board…two-thirds of those surveyed have experienced "Computer Stress Syndrome" thanks to spyware and viruses, overall slowdowns, loss of Internet connections, and other problems. This is despite the fact that 78 percent of those surveyed consider themselves to be computer-savvy. The most significant way in which computer failure had affected users' lives was increased stress levels, followed by interrupted work or play time, loss of valuable data, dropped network or e-mail connections, and the inability to complete an online purchase…Forty-one percent of those who called tech support were not happy with the experience, citing long wait times, the inability of techs to fix their problems, the cost of service (among those who didn't use free services), and limited language skills as the reasons for their dissatisfaction. A full 13 percent went so far as to rate their tech support service as either "poor" and "terrible…”

27. We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide…that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti. “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked…The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession… “PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps…(He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations…followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat…when a military Web site…asked an Army platoon leader in Iraq, Lt. Sam Nuxoll, how he spent most of his time, he responded, “Making PowerPoint slides.” When pressed, he said he was serious. “I have to make a storyboard complete with digital pictures, diagrams and text summaries on just about anything that happens…Despite such tales, “death by PowerPoint,” the phrase used to described the numbing sensation that accompanies a 30-slide briefing, seems here to stay…”

Leisure & Entertainment

28. Rent full-length films on Youtube http://www.fastcompany.com/1625836/youtube-quietly-begins-renting-movies-warming-up-for-fight-against-apple-netflix-hulu-et-al Google knows it needs to compete with Apple, Amazon, and Netflix on content. That's why they're digitizing libraries. But considering Google also owns the world's largest streaming video site, they've stayed remarkably quiet while Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Hulu have begun to figure out how to make boatloads of money off video content…Back in January, YouTube began offering five movies for rent as part of a partnership with the Sundance Film Festival. The five movies--The Cove, Bass Ackwards, One Too Many Mornings, Homewrecker, and Children of Invention--are selections from the 2009 and 2010 Sundance lineup. But they've now expanded that to a larger selection of mostly indie and foreign fare, including many recognizable titles…also a few TV shows, but nothing particularly interesting…prices of rentals vary between $1 and $4, with few exceptions, and are available for 48 hours after purchase…You pay through Google Checkout, which is pretty convenient, and since it's YouTube, you can view the movies on pretty much any device. Of course, there are also a boatload of easy, one-click ripping tools for YouTube…”

29. Goodbye CableCARD, hello "AllVid" http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/fcc-goodbye-cablecard-hello-allvid.ars “…Federal Communications Commission has asked for feedback on a new video interface to replace its failed CableCARD policy—an "AllVid" adapter that would, in the FCC's words, "act as an intermediary" between home theater gear and pay-TV services. Under the proposal, cable, satellite, or telco video providers would send their signals "to a small adapter on the customer's premises that would present a standard interface to all consumer devices," explained FCC Chair Julius Genachowski at Wednesday's Open Commission meeting. "The adapter could be connected to the customer's TVs, computers, or other devices that can display multichannel video programming and Internet content…”

30. How to get your photos out of Flickr, Picasa Web Albums http://arstechnica.com/software/guides/2010/04/how-to-get-your-photos-out-of-flickr-picasa-web-albums.ars Photo sharing services are no longer used by a select few—for some Internet users, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums are the place to store and organize photos. But what happens if you decide to just pick up and go to another service?...Backup lecture aside, there are numerous reasons for you to want to pull your photos down from the cloud. Some services make this task easier than others, but after finding out on Twitter that numerous readers of ours have wanted to get a mass download of their photos stored online, we figured it would be useful to give a brief how-to for Picasa and Flickr, two of the most popular photo sharing services…”

31. Burn Blu-ray Disks on Regular DVDs With x264 http://newteevee.com/2010/04/26/burn-blu-ray-disks-on-regular-dvds-with-x264/ The developers of the open source h.264 codec x264 have just released an update that makes it possible to burn Blu-ray discs on regular DVD-9 or even DVD-5 DVD-Rs. x264 uses advanced compression to fit Blu-ray movies on much cheaper DVD-Rs “with a reasonable level of quality,”…Most players will treat these discs like a regular Blu-ray disc. x264 has gained some notoriety as the codec of choice for file sharers trading Blu-ray discs via BitTorrent, but it has also been used by a number of high-profile video platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, to encode their assets in h.264. The x264 developers see the announcement as a step towards putting affordable high-quality Blu-ray authoring tools in the hands of end users…”

Economy and Technology

32. Credit cards losing ground to mobile technology and the Internet http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Credit+cards+losing+ground+mobile+technology+Internet/2941629/story.html “…The credit card industry is caught in a perfect storm," the report said. "Record net loss rates driven by rising consumer bankruptcies are occurring at a time of increased government regulation."…credit cards have gone from being one of the most profitable to one of the least profitable areas. Emerging trends in the industry will change credit cards, with the Internet and mobile technology playing a central role in payment systems…Social networking sites and personal digital assistants will be used as a payment platform with online purchases made possible through such means as virtual currency that is purchased through debit or credit card transactions. And e-wallets such as PayPal could extend their online reach by developing micro-payment solutions for social media platforms like Facebook…Loyalty programs will increase between card issuers and retailers…”

33. Bechtolsheim network switch goes for another win http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/04/19/bechtolsheim-thinks-new-box-changes-the-game-again/ “…Andy Bechtolsheim…past exploits include co-founding Sun Microsystems, selling a networking company to Cisco Systems and becoming the first outside investor in Google…Bechtolsheim has come up with a switching device that he says trumps the competition by dramatic margins in every way that matters…“We are three to ten times better in every metric,” Bechtolsheim says…It has 384 ports…that connect to racks that each may have a stack of 48 servers…A comparable Cisco device is about twice the size of the Arista device, draws 10 times the power and offers only 64 ports…And it lists for about $10,000 per port, Bechtolsheim says, compared with a little above $1,000 per port for the new Arista 7500…Assembling a combination of competing boxes that would pump the same amount of data as a $400,000 Arista switch at maximum speed would cost $13.7 million…Bechtolsheim opted not to develop proprietary circuitry but to cleverly package components that are available from commercial chip vendors…”

34. Apple expands in-house chip resources by acquiring Intrinsity http://deals.venturebeat.com/2010/04/27/apple-intrinsic-a4/ Following rumors earlier this month that it was acquiring mobile chip company Intrinsity, Apple today confirmed the deal…it seems like part of a larger effort to move more of the design and manufacture of its products inside the company. The A4 chip in the iPad was the first big example of that, and there’s speculation that Intrinsity’s chip was “the basis” for the A4…The acquisition should help Apple expand its chip efforts to its other devices like the iPhone…”

Civilian Aerospace

35. Will private spaceships have the right stuff? http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36678222/ns/technology_and_science-space/ “…Many veteran engineers from NASA are skeptical about the idea that less experienced teams with fewer resources could possibly replicate the space agency's success at developing spacecraft to carry humans…But the task may be far less daunting than the skeptics think. This is because the "goal posts" in human spaceflight have shifted over the decades, and the required know-how has spread even as the general level of aerospace engineering capabilities has risen…space taxis being created to serve the new policy are being designed for an entirely different mission. Unlike America's previous spaceships, these new taxis will be focused only on delivering passengers from Earth’s surface to an existing space facility and back again. There’s no need for long periods of independent orbital cruising. There’s no need for carrying equipment to be later used for moon flights…The crucial systems for the taxis have mostly already been built and are available as off-the-shelf technology — which means the spaceships could be much cheaper, much smaller and much more reliable…”

36. Time to bring Silicon Valley spirit to space industry http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_14929987 Just over five years ago…Thousands of people gathered under the crisp Mojave Desert sky to see SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded spaceship, take flight and ride a rocket-powered boost all the way to space…SpaceShipOne gave us a glimpse into a future many thought we could only dream about…NASA will now partner with commercial space companies to bring that Silicon Valley spirit to all of NASA and breathe new life into the space industry…NASA should focus on pushing the frontier rather than operating a trucking service to low Earth orbit like today's space shuttle…Back in Silicon Valley, 30 years ago, we could never have imagined all the uses for computers, but as prices dropped new markets and capabilities opened up…commercial vehicles won't just transport NASA astronauts and private citizens; they'll also contribute to zero-gravity research, development of drug therapies, and sectors that we have yet to imagine…”

37. Towards a smarter future in space http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1613/1 “…We do not know if humans and other terrestrial creatures require the gravity of Earth to live and reproduce over generations. We do not know if resources can be cost-effectively utilized to create self-sustaining environments for humans beyond Earth. However, today we do have the tools and the ability to answer these questions without large budgets…the International Space Station (ISS)…is the one location we have to run the fundamental long-duration animal life cycle experiments to determine if there are biological barriers to low-gravity development and living…An assessment of space resources is also needed for purposes of fuel, shielding, and other raw materials to build up a space transportation infrastructure…The Moon would be a near-term target of automated in situ resource utilization demonstration experiments. Whether the Moon could be a site for future settlement, however, would depend upon the outcome of low-gravity biological experiments conducted on ISS…”

Supercomputing & GPUs

38. A double parallel, symplectic N-body code running on Graphic Processing Units http://gpgpu.org/2010/04/26/double-parallel-symplectic-n-body-code This paper…discusses the characteristics and performances, both in terms of computational speed and precision, of a code which numerically integrates the equations of motion of N particles interacting via Newtonian gravitation and moving in a smooth external galactic field…The code, called ”NBSymple”, uses NVIDIA CUDA to perform the all-pairs force evaluation on an NVIDIA TESLA C1060 GPU, while the O(N) computations are distributed across CPUs using the OpenMP API…”

39. Venom T4100 Personal Supercomputer http://www.businesswireindia.com/PressRelease.asp?b2mid=22386 “…Venom Personal Super Computer…delivering a staggering 1,792 GPU compute cores…the Venom 4100 provides in excess of 4TFLOPS of computational power. This remarkable power-house is encased in a single desk-side Supermicro tower enclosure which can also be rack mounted to suit installation needs. Powered by Supermicro servers using NVIDIA’s latest generation of Tesla graphics processing unit (GPU) compute processors, the Venom T4100…systems represent today’s cutting-edge solutions for a wide range of graphics and computationally intensive applications in fields like medical imaging, oil and gas exploration, quantum chemistry, financial simulation, genomics and astrophysics…”

40. EM Photonics Unveils New CUDA Training Classes http://www.hpcwire.com/offthewire/EM-Photonics-Unveils-New-CUDA-Training-Classes-92201314.html EM Photonics, Inc., the developer of the GPU-accelerated linear algebra library CULA, announced today the immediate availability of its new CUDA Training Program. With hands-on experience and real-world examples, the multiday customizable training is ideal for anyone interested in learning the essentials of programming on the NVIDIA CUDA platform as well as advanced optimization techniques…The two-day standard training program covers parallel computing basics, CUDA programming, cross-platform development, debugging, deployment concerns, GPU optimization…”


*****

2010/04/20

NEW NET Issues List for 20 Apr 2010

Below is the final list of issues for the Tuesday, 20 Apr 2010, NEW NET (Northeast Wisconsin Network for Economy and Technology) 7:00 - 9:00 pm weekly gathering. This week we'reupstairs at Tom's Drive In, 501 N Westhill Blvd, Appleton, Wisconsin, USA -- if there's a chain across the steps, ignore it and come on upstairs.

The ‘net

1. Library of Congress Acquires Entire Twitter Archive http://www.loc.gov/tweet/how-tweet-it-is.html “…Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress…Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions…a few examples of important tweets in the past few years include the first-ever tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (http://twitter.com/jack/status/20), President Obama’s tweet about winning the 2008 election (http://twitter.com/barackobama/status/992176676), and a set of two tweets from a photojournalist who was arrested in Egypt and then freed because of a series of events set into motion by his use of Twitter (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/786571964) and (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/787167620)...The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000. Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress. We also operate the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program www.digitalpreservation.gov, which is pursuing a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations…”

2. Report: 6.8% Of Business Internet Traffic Goes To Facebook http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/04/report-68-of-business-internet-traffic-goes-to-facebook/ A report from the Network Box shows that 6.8 percent of all the URLs accessed by businesses goes to Facebook and 10 percent of internet bandwidth goes to Youtube. The study analyzed 13 billion URLs accessed by businesses and studied business bandwidths to find results, and found Facebook and Youtube leading other companies like Google and Yahoo…In the traffic category, Facebook used 4.5 percent of all bandwidth, Windows Update used 3.3 percent, Yimg used 2.7 percent and Google used 2.5 percent…The figures show that IT managers are right to be concerned about the amount of social network use at work. There are two real concerns here: firstly that employees will be downloading applications from social networks and putting security at risk; and secondly the amount of corporate bandwidth that appears to be being used for non-corporate activity…”

3. 10 Things the Internet Has Killed http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20100415/tc_pcworld/10thingstheinternethaskilledorruinedandfivethingsithasnt “…the Internet is the killer app--literally. From newspapers and the yellow pages to personal privacy and personal contact, the Net has been accused of murdering, eviscerating, ruining, and obliterating more things than the Amazing Hulk…Here are ten things the Net is making virtually extinct, plus five that have flourished…Trust in Encyclopedias…Barroom Arguments…Your Old Flame…Civil Discourse…Listening to Albums…Expertise…Gud Spellng…Celebrity…Sex…Chuck Norris…”

Security, Privacy & Digital Controls

4. Government uses NSA tool to detect thumb drives on network http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/government-uses-nsa-tool-to-detect-thumb-drives-on-network.ars USB thumb drives and other portable storage devices offer a lot of convenience, but they also pose some unique security challenges…The NSA built a tool, called USBDetect, that is designed to help government agencies track the usage of USB storage devices on their internal networks. The tool is not publicly available, but is briefly described in a section of the NSA's 2011 budget proposal…"A Computer Network Defense Tool developed by NSA, USBDetect 3.0, is available to U.S. Government (USG) users free of charge. USBDetect gathers data (locally or on a network) from personal computers running Microsoft Windows 2000 or later operating systems, and reports unauthorized usage of Universal Serial Bus (USB) thumb (a.k.a. flash) drives, external hard drives, compact disk drives, and other storage devices…The NSA characterizes the development of USBDetect 3.0 as one of its major accomplishments for the fiscal year 2009…”

5. Congress outlaws all Caller ID spoofing (VoIP too) http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/congress-outlaws-all-caller-id-spoofing-voip-too.ars “…the "Truth in Caller ID Act of 2010" (PDF)…does exactly what its name would lead you to believe. Under the bill, it becomes illegal "to cause any caller ID service to transmit misleading or inaccurate caller ID information, with the intent to defraud or deceive." The bill maintains an exemption for blocking one's own outgoing caller ID information, and law enforcement isn't affected. The change will affect "any real time voice communications service, regardless of the technology or network utilized," so VoIP calls are included. In fact, the Congressional Research Service summary of the initial text makes clear that VoIP was a key target here…”

6. EFF Backs Yahoo! to Protect User from Warrantless Email Search http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2010/04/13 The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) along with Google and numerous other public interest organizations and Internet industry associations joined with Yahoo! in asking a federal court Tuesday to block a government attempt to access the contents of a Yahoo! email account without a search warrant based on probable cause. The Department of Justice is seeking the emails as part of a case that is under seal, and the account holder has apparently not been notified of the request. Government investigators maintain that because the Yahoo! email has been accessed by the user, it is no longer in "electronic storage" under the Stored Communications Act (SCA) and therefore does not require a warrant, even though that same legal theory has been flatly rejected by the one Circuit Court to address it…”

7. Spam Suspect Uses Google Docs; FBI Happy http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/cloud-warrant/ FBI agents targeting alleged criminal spammers last year obtained a trove of incriminating documents from a suspect’s Google Docs account, in what appears to be the first publicly acknowledged search warrant benefiting from a suspect’s reliance on cloud computing…The warrant demanded the e-mail and “all Google Apps content” belonging to the men, according to a summary in court records…From Beers’ account, the FBI got a spreadsheet titled “Pulse_weekly_Report Q-3 2008″ that showed the firm spammed 3,082,097 e-mail addresses in a single five-hour spree. Another spreadsheet, “Yahoo_Hotmail_Gmail - IDs,” listed 8,000 Yahoo webmail accounts the men allegedly created to push out their spam…Privacy advocates have long warned that law enforcement agencies can access sensitive files stored on services like Google Docs with greater ease than files stored on a target’s hard drive. In particular, the 1986 Stored Communications Act allows the government to access a customer’s data whenever there are “reasonable grounds” to believe the information would be relevant in a criminal investigation — a much lower legal standard than the “probable cause” required for a search warrant…”

8. The Rise of Fake Anti-Virus http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2010/04/rise-of-fake-anti-virus.html “…Vulnerabilities in web browsers and popular plugins have resulted in an increased number of users whose systems can be compromised by attacks known as drive-by downloads. Such attacks do not require any user interaction, and they allow the adversary to execute code on a user’s computer without their knowledge. However, even without any vulnerabilities present, clever social engineering attacks can cause an unsuspecting user to unwittingly install malicious code…One increasingly prevalent threat is the spread of Fake Anti-Virus (Fake AV) products. This malicious software takes advantage of users’ fear that their computer is vulnerable, as well as their desire to take the proper corrective action…At Google, we have been working to help protect users against Fake AV threats on the web since we first discovered them in March 2007…We conducted an in-depth analysis of the prevalence of Fake AV over the course of the last 13 months, and the research paper containing our findings, “The Nocebo Effect on the Web: An Analysis of Fake AV distribution” is going to be presented at the Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats…Our analysis of 240 million web pages over the 13 months of our study uncovered over 11,000 domains involved in Fake AV distribution — or, roughly 15% of the malware domains we detected on the web during that period…”

9. Crime Prediction Software Is Here and It's a Very Bad Idea http://gizmodo.com/5517231/crime-prediction-software-is-here-and-its-a-very-bad-idea There are no naked pre-cogs inside glowing jacuzzis yet, but the Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice will use analysis software to predict crime by young delinquents, putting potential offenders under specific prevention and education programs. Goodbye, human rights! They will use this software on juvenile delinquents, using a series of variables to determine the potential for these people to commit another crime. Depending on this probability, they will put them under specific re-education programs. Deepak Advani—vice president of predictive analytics at IBM—says the system gives "reliable projections" so governments can take "action in real time" to "prevent criminal activities?"…I don't know about how reliable your system is, IBM, but have you ever heard of the 5th, the 6th, and the 14th Amendments to the United States Constitution?...No? Let's make this easy then: Didn't you watch that scientology nutcase in Minority Report?...But what really worries me is that this is a first big step towards something larger and darker. Actually, it's the second: IBM says that the Ministry of Justice in the United Kingdom…already uses this system to prevent criminal activities. Actually, it may be the third big step, because there's already software in place to blacklist people as potential terrorist…IBM clearly wants this to go big. They have spent a whooping $12 billion beefing up its analytics division…”

10. Thousands of laptop webcam photos allegedly taken by school http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20002697-71.html A new motion in the Lower Merion School School District Webcam-spying case has presented extraordinary suggestions as to the frequency and intimate nature of the photographs allegedly taken remotely by the cameras on school-issued laptops…lawyers for 15-year-old Blake Robbins and his family claimed that thousands of images were taken by the laptop Webcams. Included in these were…"pictures of Blake partially undressed and of Blake sleeping."…lawyers claim that each time the LANRev software took Webcam shots, it sent them back to school district servers, where employees found entertainment in "a little LMSD soap opera."…The Robbins' family motion…specifically named Carol Cafiero, one of the employees placed on leave. The family reportedly suggested that Cafiero "may have been a voyeur"…When the accusations first came to light, the school district admitted that it had remotely activated the Webcams 42 times. An assistant principal at Harriton High School, attended by Blake Robbins, denied that she had ever authorized any of the alleged Webcam spying. The LANRev software was activated, the school said, only in the event of a reportedly lost or stolen laptop…Perhaps the most interesting part of the judge's order is that it was reportedly faxed to 17 different lawyers…”

Mobile Computing & Communicating

11. Verizon’s Lynch: LTE Going Live in Q4 http://www.sidecutreports.com/2010/04/15/verizons-lynch-lte-going-live-in-q4/ “…Dick Lynch…helped announce the groundbreaking for a new Long Term Evolution (LTE) Innovation center in the Boston area…In a quick phone conversation from the innovation center launch festivities in Waltham, Mass., Lynch said that Verizon’s LTE testing in Boston and Seattle is now complete, and that the company will test systems with friendly users (usually company employees and other partners) during the third quarter of 2010. “In the fourth quarter, we’ll be turning on [commercial] markets as planned,” Lynch said, confirming that the stated goal of 25 to 30 markets covering a population of 100 million people is still the target Verizon intends to hit…The innovation center, a 60,000-square foot three-story planned addition to Verizon’s existing facilities in Waltham, will help Verizon help potential LTE startups, Lynch said, by allowing them to learn and collaborate with Verizon’s telecom engineers and software experts…”

12. RIM chief: no market for tablets, touch-only phones http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/04/16/rim.co.ceo.questions.ipad.iphone.staying.power/ RIM's co-chief Mike Lazaridis downplayed many of Apple's efforts…The executive was concerned that there wasn't necessarily a market for tablets like the iPad and that any devices would have to be put in the context of computers and smartphones…He added that smartphones are getting more powerful and more computer-like over time; he implied this would reduce the need for a tablet due to the amount of overlap in features. The company leader also downplayed the importance of touchscreen-only phones…touch-only phones (like the iPhone) aren't as popular anymore, Lazaridis argued. He claimed that most of the people who bought touchscreen-only phones in the past two years were going back to phones with hardware QWERTY keyboards, whether touch-enabled or otherwise…”

13. HTC Droid Incredible Solidifies Elite Standing http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/HTC-Solidifies-Its-Elite-Standing-With-Droid-Incredible-845955/ “…on April 15, HTC introduced the Droid Incredible—an Android 2.1 smartphone that will replace the swift-selling Motorola Droid as Verizon's flagship Android device. The Droid Incredible features a 3.7-inch WVGA AMOLED capacitive touch screen, a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, an 8-megapixel camera, integrated GPS and WiFi, and a "leap" view, for quick navigation across its optional seven home screen panels. It will become available April 29…”

14. Apple Rejects Kid-Friendly Programming App http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/apple-scratch-app/ “…40 years ago, tech legend Alan Kay invented the idea of a lightweight tablet computer that children could use to learn programming. Apple’s iPad delivers on the tablet part of that vision — but the company has blocked a kid-friendly programming language based on Kay’s work from getting onto the iPad. Apple last week removed an app called Scratch from its iPhone and iPad App Store. The Scratch app displayed stories, games and animations made by children using MIT’s Scratch platform, which was built on top of Kay’s programming language Squeak, according to MIT…Though the Scratch app wasn’t made by Kay…he wasn’t pleased…“Both children and the Internet are bigger than Apple, and things that are good for children of the world need to be able to run everywhere,” Kay told Wired.com in an e-mail. Kay…is credited for conceiving the idea of a portable computer…He called his concept the Dynabook. In his conception, it would be a very thin, highly dynamic device that weighed no more than two pounds, which would be an ideal tool for children to learn programming and science…Steve Jobs took a tour of Xerox PARC in 1979, and some might even say that his visit is still unfolding with the release of the iPad tablet, which resembles Kay’s description of the Dynabook…Jobs this month personally mailed an iPad to Kay, who praised Apple’s tablet as “fantastically good” for drawing, painting and typing. But Kay declined to give his full evaluation of the iPad to Wired.com until his question of whether Scratch or Etoys, another educational programming language Kay developed for kids, would be usable on the device…”

15. Will FaceCash, the mobile payment application, kill the credit card? http://mobile.venturebeat.com/2010/04/19/will-facecash-the-mobile-payment-application-kill-the-credit-card/ “…Greenspan demonstrated FaceCash today for VentureBeat, by using it to demonstrate how he could pay for a lunch he had at the Indochine Thai restaurant in Palo Alto…Here’s how it works: You can download the FaceCash application on any leading smartphone — it will be available on iPhone, BlackBerry or Android phones beginning next week. Then you type in your bank account information, Social Security number, and driver’s licence number, and upload your picture. That’s it. You can now use your phone to make pretty much any in-person transaction, whether at a restaurant or at a grocery store — as long as the merchant has signed up for the service. To accept your payment, the merchant simply scans the FaceCash barcode on your phone with a scanner, and your picture will pop up on their computer screen — which helps them avoid fraud. They then approve your payment. Dead easy…The company plans to formally launch FaceCash at the Electronics Payments Association conference this coming weekend. FaceCash is impressive because its payment system is built from the ground up. If Greenspan pulls it off, he’ll boast complete control over the payment processing system, and thus can offer a cheaper and more efficient payment feature than any other company. Of course, it will take a massive amount of work to get there. But if he does get it right, there’s huge potential: The mobile payments market is expected to be $510 billion by 2012…”

16. iPad banned on some college campuses http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/more_details_about_the_ipads_connecitvity_issues_e.php “…some colleges have banned the iPad from their networks. Princeton and Cornell, for example, are seeing major networking and connectivity issues…quite a few iPad owners have experienced WiFi connectivity issues with their devices. There seems to be a wide variety of issues, ranging from bad WiFi reception to regular drops on the WiFi connection…at least one of these connectivity problems can be traced back to how the iPad handles DHCP leases. DHCP, which stands for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, is responsible for assigning IP addresses to computers on a local network. Normally, these IP addresses are renewed at regular intervals. If the device doesn't request a renewal of the address, the DHCP server can hand this address out to another device…under certain circumstances, iPads renew their lease of a given IP address once but then allow the lease to expire. Once the lease has expired, however, these devices still try to use the same address without asking for a new lease, which is bound to fail, as the router doesn't remember the device anymore…”

Open Source

17. Did Google Just Kill Ogg Theora? http://newteevee.com/2010/04/14/did-google-just-kill-ogg-theora/ “…Google is going to open source its VP8 video codec at its Google i/O event…speculations have been abounded as to what this means for Ogg Theora, the video codec of choice of open source advocates…Theora is currently supported by the Mozilla foundation, whose Firefox browser utilizes the format instead of H.246 for HTML5 video playback… is Google going to kill Ogg Theora by open sourcing a superior video codec?...Ogg Theora is based on an erstwhile proprietary video codec called VP3.2, which was developed by a little company called On2 Technologies. On2 introduced VP3.2 in August of 2000…On2 meanwhile continued to develop new codecs, reaching its 8th generation with VP8, which was announced in September of 2008…VP8 came out eight years after VP3.2, eight years in which…Consumers got increasingly faster broadband connections, video hosting sites moved towards HD, and codec developers figured out a whole lotta tricks to improve things like HD streaming…Google’s Open Source Programs Manager Chris DiBona…said last year that it would need “substantive codec improvements” before Theora could power a site like YouTube…Firefox and Chrome would likely support VP8 as well as Theora…also enthusiastic about VP8’s potential. “A royalty-free codec that’s indisputably superior to H.264 will be very disruptive…”

18. CloudMade’s OpenStreetMap Surges On Wikipedia-Like User Passion http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/17/cloudmades-openstreetmap-surges-on-wikipedia-like-user-passion/ Many people describe CloudMade’s OpenStreetMap project as “Wikipedia for maps,” and they aren’t far off. The project allows anyone to add and edit map data around the globe, and the project is now a viable open and free source of mapping data…In some parts of the world, OpenStreetMap’s data is far more detailed than the data provided by TeleAtlas to Google and Navteq to Microsoft and Yahoo…A year ago 110,000 individuals had added or edited data. Today it’s up to 245,000 individual mappers. An average of 7,000 edits an hour are made to the data…Perhaps the most stunning case study is Germany. In 2007 it was a blank canvas. Today, the level of detail goes far beyond what any other service provides. It includes all major points of interest (even trees are now being added by users), the entire road network and turn by turn navigation…”

19. Linux: Strong and getting stronger http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-20002478-62.html “…At the Linux Foundation's annual collaboration summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, Executive Director Jim Zemlin kicked off the event with some interesting perspectives on the state of the Linux marketplace…Linux is going strong and getting stronger…the macro-economic trends have played to the strengths of Linux and open source…Would Google be the company it is today using proprietary technologies like Microsoft.NET? The answer is likely not…Linux is much more attractive--especially for the mobile Internet…Zemlin argues that the new PC economics look much more like the cell phone industry than it does the PC value chain…Zemlin predicts that in the next two to five years hardware will become free. People won't buy software and they won't buy hardware, they'll pay for services like Amazon Web Services…”

SkyNet

20. Goodbye, Gears - Google Docs Boots Plugin for HTML5 on May 3rd http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/goodbye_gears_google_docs_boots_plugin_for_html5_on_may_3rd.php “…Google Doc's offline mode is going...well...offline. Starting May 3rd, offline access for Google Docs…will be disabled. Previously, users had been able to take advantage of the offline functionality provided by Google Gears, an open source browser extension which allowed for both the viewing and editing of files when an Internet connection was not present. Soon, the Gears-enabled feature will be no more…In the plugin's place, there will be a "new and improved" HTML5-based offline option which will replace the former solution…At the moment, these web apps go offline if and only if you've installed the Google Gears browser plugin. Unfortunately, not all browsers can properly run this plugin…Internet Explorer users could never view spreadsheets offline…Google Gears on the iPhone? Forget about it. A better solution is HTML5, the next revision to the markup language used to code the web…HTML5 is a web standard, not a browser plugin. That means it will be supported across web browsers and operating systems, assuming users have updated to a modern browser instead of continuing to run IE6…The end result will be an Internet-based document creation tool and editor that can work anywhere, anytime, even when the Internet doesn't…”

21. Cutting Through the Fog of Google’s Cloud Print http://gigaom.com/2010/04/16/google-cloud-print-explained/ “…Google introduced its new approach to printing yesterday with the announcement of Google Cloud Print. But “cloud” in this case is equating to “foggy” for some…A web-based printing solution hasn’t been implemented yet by Google…for now, Google has simply outlined the plans, checked in some publicly available code and floated an innovative idea…Google is attempting to remove the computer from the middle of the print equation. In today’s world, we use an application to send a print job to the print server running on our computer. That software manages the task by communicating through a driver (more software) to the physical hardware of the printer. In the Google Cloud Print solution, the computer and accompanying print server software go away…Google handles the print job and communicates directly with a cloud-aware printer — these don’t exist yet, which is why I said the solution isn’t implemented yet. You may not need to replace your current printer with a cloud-aware one, though — Google will include a proxy software solution in the Google Chrome browser…Google’s cloud printing concept has merit and solves a problem that could otherwise hamper adoption of Chrome OS devices…yet Om made a good point with the opposite point of view: What’s the point of sending a print job up to the cloud only to pull it back down to the printer sitting three feet away?...I see that situation as the exception and not the rule because Chrome OS is meant for mobile use much more so than home use…”

22. Localized Google Suggest and Smarter Auto-Corrections http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_introduces_localized_google_suggest_smarter.php “…Google is…launching an improved version of Google Suggest that also takes larger metro areas into account. Now, Google Suggest will offer different suggestions for users in New York City and Portland, OR, for example…Google is also rolling out smarter corrected spellings for names. As Google notes, people often search for names, but don't know the exact spelling. Now, whenever you add a person's profession, affiliation or other related keywords to an approximation of this person's name, Google will offer better suggestions and more useful spelling corrections…”

23. Google: U.S. Demanded User Info 3,500 Times in Six Months http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/google-warrants-transparency#ixzz0lfkJtncK “…search engines and ISPs have refused to tell the public how many times the cops and feds have forced them to turn over information on users…on Tuesday, Google broke that unwritten code of silence, unveiling a Government Requests Tool that shows the public how often individual goverments around the world have asked for user information, and how often they’ve asked Google to remove content from their sites or search index for reasons other than copyright violation. The answer for U.S. users is 3,580 total requests for information over a six month period from July 2009 to December 2009…Brazil just edges out the U.S. in the number of requests for data about users, with 3,663 over that six months. That’s due to the continuing Brazilian popularity of Google’s social networking site, Orkut…”

24. Google Puts Its $50 Million To Work, Starts Using Aardvark For Help Support http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/16/google-puts-its-50-million-to-work-starts-using-aardvark-for-help-support/ “…Google acquired promising social search startup Aardvark for around $50 million. The service allows you to ask questions and get responses almost immediately from other users who are knowledgeable about the topic…we’ve already come across what may be Google’s first use of Aardvark in the wild: Help support. Visit the YouTube Help page and you’ll notice a prominent link prompting users to “give Aardvark a try!”…Google has put an identical message on the Help page for Google Toolbar…Most Google services offer Help guides, but there’s almost never a phone number or email address to contact an actual human (which isn’t surprising given that most of these services are free). Aardvark could serve as a good compromise for Google, adding a human touch without the need to set up phone banks of support personnel…I decided to put Aardvark to the test with a basic (but probably common) YouTube support question: “What file formats does YouTube support…I had my answer, complete with a link to the appropriate help article on YouTube, within around five minutes…”

25. Google Places http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/do_you_deliver_out_here_google_places_says_so.php “…Google has announced…several…new features, under the umbrella title of Google Places. According to Google, one out of five searches on the search engine are related to location…Google Places is primarily a merging of its Local Business Center with its Place Pages, of which there are more than 50 million…Google will be offering businesses the ability to define their service areas, allowing them to show customers which geographic areas they serve. That, coupled with real-time updates, should allow for some interesting uses of Google with not only delivery services, but completely mobile vendors and other such businesses. Our other favorite new feature offered by Google Places is its customized QR codes, which allows businesses to download and share QR codes in any number of ways…”

General Technology

26. Definitive 2TB HD Roundup: WD, Seagate, Samsung http://hothardware.com/Articles/Definitive-2TB-Hard-Drive-Roundup/ “…it feels like the good, old, reliable hard disk drive (HDD) doesn't get any respect. When it comes to storage, Solid State Drives (SSDs) are getting all the attention these days--and it's no wonder, considering the speed, durability, low-power, and silent-running attributes of current solid state drives. But SSDs are also very expensive and offer relatively low-capacities when compared to traditional HDDs…With costs as low as $0.07/GB (seven cents per GB), there's hardly any reason why your next 3.5-inch HDD shouldn't be a 2TB drive…In this roundup we take a look at a total of nine 3.5-inch, SATA, 2TB hard drives, from Samsung, Seagate, and Western Digital…”

27. Intel Light Peak Optical Cables May Succeed USB http://www.pcworld.com/article/194226/ Intel sees its Light Peak technology for linking devices by optical cable as potentially succeeding USB 3.0, a change that in several years could mean the disappearance of a port used almost universally in gadgets today…Intel will make the technology available late this year and expects partners to start shipping devices with it next year…A trend toward optical instead of electrical links raises the risk that separate optical cables could appear for many protocols, such as USB and serial ATA…Light Peak can run multiple protocols at the same time over one line, so all the data meant for the separate cables could run through one Light Peak cable instead…Light Peak can currently transfer data at a speed of 10G bps (bits per second), or fast enough to send a full Blu-Ray movie in less than half a minute…the technology could be scaled up to 10 times that speed in the next decade…”

28. World Robot Population Reaches 8.6 Million http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/041410-world-robot-population The world's robot population has reached 8.6 million…The study divides robots in two categories: industrial robots and service robots…the number of industrial robots grew to 1.3 million in 2008…and service robots grew to 7.3 million …The report keeps these two categories separate…because these are very different robots in terms of complexity and cost: an industrial robot can be a multimillion dollar manipulator…whereas a service robot can be a $50 dollar toy robot…First, industrial robots…2008 sales reached 113,000 units, which is about the same as the previous year…the culprit, as you might have guessed, is the global economic meltdown…world industrial robot sales amounted to about US $6.2 billion in 2008…this amount doesn't include cost of software, peripherals, and system If you were to add that up, the market would be some three times larger, or around $19 billion. Now on to service robots…According to the report, 63,000 service robots for professional use were sold in 2008, a market valued at $11.2 billion. A breakdown by application: 30 percent (20,000 units) for defense, security, and rescue applications; 23 percent for milking robots; 9 percent for cleaning robots; 8 percent each for medical and underwater robots; 7 percent for construction and demolition robots; 6 percent for robot platforms for general use; and 5 percent for logistic systems…”

29. HP Designjet 3D Printer Now On Sale http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-04/hp-prints-three-dimensions-release-designjet-3d “…HP-branded Designjet 3D fabrication machines…based on Stratasys's Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technology…turns three-dimensional CAD drawings into tangible prototypes by extruding partially molten ABS plastic in extremely fine layers one atop the other, forming the entire 3-D model in a single piece from the ground up. Designjet 3D will print in ivory-colored plastic only while Designjet Color 3D will print single-color parts in up to eight different colors…the idea is to offer a point of entry into 3-D printing for those who want to prototype in-house directly from their computers. That kind of convenience can save a lot of time and money on product development…HP today announced that the Designjet 3D would retail starting at less than €13,000, or just under $17,500…”

30. Brain games don’t make you smarter, study finds http://www.healthzone.ca/health/mindmood/brainhealth/article/798025--brain-games-don-t-make-you-smarter-study-finds Playing computer brain games may boost your ability to track a ball or land an on-screen helicopter, but it won’t make you a rocket scientist, according to a new U.K. study…The study of 11,430 participants is the largest examination so far of brain games — an exploding pastime for baby boomers and seniors who are terrified of losing their minds. That fear has fuelled such a boom in online brain games, from Nintendo’s Brain Age to Posit Science’s Brain Fitness, that sales are expected to hit $5 billion by 2015, up from just $265 million in 2008… “If you’re doing the games with the hope of getting some kind of general cognitive improvement, the evidence suggests you’re wasting your time,” says Grahn. “It seems there are no shortcuts. Improving cognitive function requires more than just some fun games — like maintaining an active social life, eating well, doing aerobic exercises, keeping your stress levels low and learning new things like a language or how to play an instrument. Those are things that evidence shows can help brain function.”…A year-long study is now underway among people over the age of 60 to look at whether the games may have more of an affect on older brains or those with dementia and Alzheimer’s…” [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vnfv/ncurrent/pdf/nature09042.pdf ]

31. Meteor Fragment From Wisconsin Fireball Discovered by Farmer http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/wisconsin-meteor-fireball-fragment-100417.html A small chunk of rock believed to be a fragment from a meteor that burst into a stunning fireball over Wisconsin Wednesday night was discovered by a farmer after it fell on the roof of his shed. The meteor fragment is peppered with gray, white and reddish minerals, though one side is covered in what scientists called a "fusion crust" – a layer of dark material forged during the meteor's fiery passage into Earth's atmosphere. It weighs just 0.2 ounces (7.5 grams) and is about 2 inches…long…A camera mounted to a campus building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison caught the Wisconsin meteor's explosive demise. The meteor's sonic boom and explosion…sparked frantic 911 emergency calls across six different states…When the meteor exploded, it unleashed as much energy as the detonation of 20 tons of TNT, NASA scientists said. Their analysis found that the parent meteor was about 3.3 feet (1 meter) wide before it blew apart…The rock includes traces of magnesium, iron and silica compounds, as well as other common minerals like olivine and pyroxene. The meteor fragment also contained iron-nickel metal and iron sulfide…”

Leisure & Entertainment

32. All things technical at Spain's Campus Party http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100418/tc_afp/spaininternetit “…Campus Party, one of the world's biggest online entertainment events, where robots play football and visitors enjoy all things technical. The robots are the result of months of work for the students of Braga University in northern Portugal…Around 800 IT enthusiasts are taking part in Campus Party, which lasts until Sunday and is aimed at sharing ideas, experiences and all types of activities related to computers, communications and new technology as well as showcasing new talents. Some of the projects are just for fun, but some are serious…Seated behind their computers in a massive room of the Magic Box, an ultramodern complex that normally hosts tennis tournaments, are Matthias and Deborah, a German and a Spaniard…the Campus Party, which began in Spain in 1997…was held last year in the Mediterranean port of Valencia…Matthias said he drove 1,500 kilometres to show off his toaster-computer. "The idea is that when I feel lazy, when I don't want to get out of bed or to go to the kitchen I can grill my toast with a touch of my PC," he explained. Other projects are more serious, and even educational, such as that of Naima and a group of students from the Paris region. They have built a video game aimed at children to fight bad eating habits which involves using a joystick to separate carrots or tomatoes from packets of chips or hamburgers…” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campus_Party ]

33. "Shrek", the Web, transform Tribeca Film Festival http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100416/media_nm/us_tribeca “…the Tribeca Film Festival shifts into a new gear and embraces the future of film when it opens next week with a 3D "Shrek" movie and online streaming for Web audiences. The festival begins April 21…Tribeca was co-founded by actor Robert De Niro in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center as a way to bring people back to the Big Apple, and in those years it has ripened into a high-profile launch pad for independent films and world documentaries…this year they are opening a virtual theater door to several films so North American audiences can watch movies online…This year's Tribeca Film Festival will screen 85 feature-length films, including 55 narrative features and 30 documentaries, as well as 47 short films…"Freakonomics," is adapted from the best-selling book co-directed by "Super Size Me" director Morgan Spurlock and Oscar-winner Alex Gibney, who is also showing two other films…This year, movie lovers who can't make it to Manhattan can instead pay $45 for a virtual pass that will let them watch eight full-length features and 18 short films online. At the same time, they can comment on the movie in a chat space simultaneously as they are watching it. Festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal said Tribeca was keeping up with way younger audiences were watching films -- whether via mobile phones, IPods or computers…”

34. Seagate and Paramount ship 21 movies with FreeAgent Go drives http://www.geek.com/articles/news/seagate-and-paramount-ship-21-movies-with-freeagent-go-drives-20100413/ Paramount Digital Entertainment and Seagate have teamed up to start offering movies with new…500GB FreeAgent Go portable hard drives…with 21 DVD-quality movies preloaded on the disk taking up 50GB of drive space…Star Trek (2009) will be unlocked and available to watch out the box. The other 20 will be locked and require an additional payment to become watchable. The price of the license is thought to be between $9.99-$14.99 per movie, adding as much as $299.80 to the price of the hard drive if you wish to view all of the films. The license does allow for the transfer of movies off the Seagate hard drive and on to other portable devices or your desktop PC…if you are going to buy a 500GB portable hard drive anyway you might as well get the free film. But beyond that first movie this offer is terrible value for money. Nearly $300 to watch 20 films in digital form? No thank you…”

35. Comic publishers go tech for new readers http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/books/2163594,chicago-comic-entertainment-expo-041610.article Superheroes, aliens and vixens invade the city this weekend when the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo -- C2E2 -- touches down at McCormick Place…Comic books are making their transition to the iPad, which could net publishers a new audience for the genre…The new season preview of "Doctor Who is at 8 p.m. Friday…One of the newest trends emerging in the industry is savvy books that are cross-generational and cross-genre, such as the movie "Kick-Ass," which opens today; the comic book serial based on the film will follow. "Movies like 'Kick-Ass' introduce a new audience to characters that will transfer to comic book form, which puts [the audience] in on the beginning of the serial…"[Digital media] is a way to draw a new crowd without losing our long-time fan base," said Ryall, "[though] nothing can replace the physical experience of owning your favorite comic book…”

Economy and Technology

36. Zillow rises to No. 2 online real estate site behind Realtor.com http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/04/report_zillow_rises_to_no_2_online_real_estate_site.html Zillow.com surpassed Yahoo Real Estate to become the second most visited online real estate site during the month of March, according to a new report from Experian Hitwise. Zillow -- which for the past two months had ranked third -- recorded a search market share 3.49 percent. That compared to industry leader Realtor.com which came in at 6.51 percent. Yahoo Real Estate finished the month at 3.38 percent, while Rent.com came in fourth at 2.75 percent and ZipRealty finished fifth with 2.52 percent. Zillow.com's key rival, San Francisco-based Trulia, finished sixth with a market share of 2.32 percent. And Redfin continues to climb the online real estate charts as it expands service into more markets…”

37. Can You Live A Year On Virtual Currency? http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/16/can-you-live-a-year-on-virtual-currency-dibspaces-founder-will-find-out/ “…Canterbury is trying to prove that he can live his life (from rent, to food, to the clothes on his back) with just virtual currency for an entire year…Dibspace.com calls itself an “Overstock.com” for local services that trades in (yes, you guessed it) “Dibits.” One Dibit is worth one dollar but you can never cash out for real dollars. Businesses, like a local inn or a yoga studio, who have excess availability/products can post their wares/services on Dibspace. Interested consumers call “Dibs,” and then the vendor selects a consumer and invoices when the service/product has been rendered. There are multiple advantages from the small business perspective…private consumers can also post goods and services and receive Dibits for those transactions. You get 10 Dibits when you open an account, 10 Dibits for referring friends (30 if you refer a business), and 10 Dibits for posting an offer (up to 5), there is also an option to buy credits at different points throughout the year. The site is still relatively small, with just 4,000 users, but there should be enough on Dibspace for Canterbury’s venture. There are 1,500 offers on the site and roughly half-a-million dollars in goods and services have been traded (currently, the site is focused in the Puget Sound/Seattle area). Canterbury will embark on his virtual currency journey in 42 days…”

38. Daily Grommet Raises $3.4 Million For Invention Marketplace http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/15/daily-grommet-raises-3-4-million-for-invention-marketplace/ Daily Grommet, a curated online marketplace and video review site for quirky inventions and products, has raised $3.4 million in Series A funding…The site features one creative invention or product per day, with an in-depth video review. Daily Grommet will also sell the product on its site and take a small cut from sales. Think Etsy meets social product development platform Quirky. Daily Grommet features products of utility, style or invention that haven’t hit the big-time yet…The company receives submissions from consumers and spotlights products with a video review explaining what’s compelling about each day’s product and the story behind its creation…”

39. Apple revenue jumps almost 50 percent http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20002964-37.html “…Apple reported revenue of $13.5 billion and profits of $3.07 billion, or $3.33 earnings per share. That's a 49 percent increase from the $9.08 billion in revenue reported in the same quarter a year ago…Mac and iPhone sales were up, by 33 and 131 percent, respectively: Apple says it sold 2.9 million Macs, 8.75 million iPhones, and 10.89 million iPods during the quarter…”

40. For A123, Government Funding Brings Both Job Creation and Innovation http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2010/04/14/for-a123-government-funding-brings-both-job-creation-and-innovation-ceo-says/ “…A123, whose nanoscale electrode technology comes out of MIT, was initially funded in 2001 with a $100,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, but grew over the last decade to pull off a $380 million IPO in September 2009. A123’s first product, a battery for handheld electric tools, was used by Black & Decker, but the company has since evolved to focus on batteries for electric vehicles. It put its first production facilities in Asia because the region possesses all the materials, equipment, manufacturing, and development knowledge surrounding lithium-ion battery production…Last year, A123 won a $249 million grant as part of the DOE’s push for electric vehicles, and used the funding to begin construction on its first U.S. manufacturing facility in Livonia, MI…”

Civilian Aerospace

41. 3-D Printing Device Could Build Moon Base from Lunar Dust http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/3-d-printer-moon-base-100416.html Future astronauts might end up living in a moon base created largely from lunar dust and regolith, if a giant 3-D printing device can work on the lunar surface. The print-on-demand technology, known as D-Shape, could save on launch and transportation costs for manned missions to the moon…Dini's D-Shape has created full-size sandstone buildings on Earth by using a 3-D printing process similar to how inkjet printers work. It adds a special inorganic binder to sand so that it can build a structure from the bottom up, one layer at a time…”

42. Robonaut ready for duty http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2010/04/14/2270479.aspx When Discovery's six astronauts take the final space shuttle ride to orbit in September, there'll be one more rider sitting in the back of the bus: Robonaut 2, the semi-humanoid robot by NASA and GM. The 300-pound (137-kilogram) robot, known as R2 for short, is being outfitted for its first tour of duty on the International Space Station - a tour that marks one small step toward a world where robots and humans work side by side in space…It's only a robo-head and torso, equipped with two arms complete with humanlike hands and five fingers. But that's enough to start seeing how humanoid androids perform in zero-gravity. "This project exemplifies the promise that a future generation of robots can have both in space and on Earth, not as replacements for humans but as companions that can carry out key supporting roles," John Olson, director of NASA's Exploration Systems Integration Office, said in today's announcement about R2's itinerary. "The combined potential of humans and robots is a perfect example of the sum equaling more than the parts…”

43. Space: The "New West" Frontier http://www.huffingtonpost.com/da-barber/space-the-new-west-fronti_b_539744.html “…California and Colorado rank #1 and #2 respectively in private space industry workers, as well as designing almost all the spacecraft launched by the United States…Obama's changes in the mission of NASA could mean a windfall for the commercial space travel industry. And that's where the West could win in the long run if the "new" NASA is funded adequately…The administration decided to pursue a "flexible path" to get astronauts back into space quicker and build a slimmed-down version of the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle that would only be used as a crew lifeboat on the International Space Station. Other highlights include…Launch robotic exploration missions to scout locations for missions to Mars, to prepare for human landing by mid-2030's…Develop in-space refueling and inflatable habitats for living in space...According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the space industry employed nearly 263,000 Americans in 2008 with average salaries of $90,000 per year…”

44. Company To Focus On Small Space Payloads http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story.jsp?id=news/asd/2010/04/16/06.xml&headline=Company%20To%20Focus%20On%20Small%20Space%20Payloads&channel=space Andrews Space has formed a service company focused on providing routine, low-cost space access for small payloads. SpaceFlight Services is kicking off its business venture by signing an agreement with Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) to manifest payloads using excess capability on upcoming Falcon 9/Dragon missions…The company will be a commercial provider of small payload flight services for fixed and deployable cargo and spacecraft. It will use a process which “allows payloads to be rapidly manifested, certified, integrated and flown to space by simplifying launch integration planning and providing a single customer interface…”

45. New Mexico Spaceport Authority director resigns http://www.lcsun-news.com/las_cruces-news/ci_14903115 New Mexico Spaceport Authority director Steve Landeene announced his resignation Friday…"I now have a need to regain some work-life balance that cannot be accomplished given the current stresses and time commitments of the Spaceport America executive director role," he wrote…"We appreciate Steve's service and wish him well in the future," said Mondrag-n, in a statement. "The authority will move aggressively to find a replacement and move forward with the construction schedule for Spaceport America…”

Supercomputing & GPUs

46. NVIDIA Invests in Computing's Future http://www.marketwatch.com/story/nvidia-invests-in-computings-future-with-awards-to-top-phd-students-2010-04-15?reflink=MW_news_stmp NVIDIA…is awarding $250,000 to 10 top Ph.D. students to help solve complex visual and parallel computing challenges. Each student will receive $25,000, as well as engineering and technical support, to further their advanced research in these fields. Participants…were selected from 268 applications from 28 countries. Sponsored projects involve a variety of technical challenges, including light-transport simulation, computer vision using neuroscience, and programmability and optimization for heterogeneous systems…”

47. eyeon unveils Fusion 6.1 for nextgen GPU supercomputing http://www.hpcwire.com/offthewire/eyeon-Software-Unveils-Fusion-61-90879039.html “…Fusion 6.1 now supports the OpenCL language, which allows tools to take advantage of the GPU in modern NVidia and ATI graphics cards…benchmarking improvements of up to 1,000 percent on some of the most processor-intensive tools in Fusion (such as Defocus and Noise generators)…Instead of just doing 3D OpenGL rendering on graphics cards, more general processing can be achieved at orders of magnitude faster than possible with CPU-only processing. Fusion 6.1 now supports RenderMan renderer directly. This demonstrates the open plugin flexibility of the 3D rendering system…Fusion 6.1 now supports Python 3.1 right within the interface…”

48. Blackmagic Design introduces Da Vinci on the Mac http://www.macvideo.tv/editing/news/index.cfm?newsId=3220767&pagType=allchandate “…In the past DaVinci Resolve systems were pre built and priced from $200,000 for a 1 GPU based system, to over $800,000 for a 16 GPU top of the line system…The new Mac based software only version of DaVinci Resolve will retail at only US$995 and includes all the powerful DaVinci Resolve features…In the company’s performance testing, the single GPU performance on Mac is similar to the single GPU Linux systems that cost $200,000 only 6 months ago…a Linux based system that allows multiple GPUs and CPUs for faster processing…Linux license is US$19,995…Linux version lets them upgrade simply by adding GPUs as they need…most powerful system that’s possible to build would still be less than $150,000 including all hardware and software…dramatically less than the over US$800,000 it cost only 6 months ago…”

49. NVIDIA Quadro Enables High Resolution Real-Time Video Editing in Adobe Creative Suite 5 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/nvidia-quadro-unleashes-high-resolution-real-time-video-editing-in-adobe-creative-suite-5-production-premium-2010-04-12?reflink=MW_news_stmp “…Adobe CS5 with Quadro graphics is a godsend for production pros," said Matt Silverman, creative director/partner at San Francisco-based Bonfire and Phoenix Editorial. "When you add NVIDIA GPU acceleration to Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, the performance gains and time savings are enormous. There's simply no comparison between using CPU acceleration versus GPU acceleration. I can stack more layers and effects without affecting real-time playback, meaning I can be that much more creative in less time." A cost-effective NVIDIA Quadro-based workstation with Adobe video software now enables film and video professionals to achieve the performance and creative freedom previously reserved for dedicated edit suite systems costing upwards of $100,000…”


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