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Feed Xerox developing "natural language color editing" (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets


Xerox's Geoffrey Woolfe seems to think he's found a way to make picking just the right color a bit easier, laying out his plans for so-called "natural language color editing" at the annual meeting of the Inter-Society Color Council (ISCC). While it's apparently still in the early stages, the system will supposedly let you adjust colors simply by describing them in natural langauge, using voice or typed commands like "make the sky a deeper blue" or "make the background carnation pink" -- the software then does all the rest of the work. Of course, Xerox isn't exactly giving any indication when that may happen, so you'll have to make do with the cumbersome point-and-click method of color-choosing we've somehow managed to get along with all these years for a little while longer.

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Media

Submission + - Why Enterprise 2.0 Won't Transform Organizations

Submitted by
Julie
Julie writes: "Tom Davenport, Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College debates the merits of Enterprise 2.0 in his blog on Harvard Business Online. http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/davenport/2007/03 /21/ Some thought-leaders argue that blogs, wikis, tagging, and other participative tools will change the way organizations operate. But Davenport argues it will take more than Enterprise 2.0 to make more democratic organizations — and that these social media tools won't live up to the hype."
Communications

Verizon Rejected iPhone Deal 290

Posted by kdawson from the just-saying-no dept.
SnowDog74 writes "According to an article in USA Today, Verizon Wireless rejected an Apple deal over the iPhone. The article says that Verizon wasn't happy with the strict terms Apple demanded — a Verizon Wireless VP is quoted saying that Apple wanted a cut of monthly revenues and control of the customer relationship. What's perhaps equally interesting, however, is the implication from sources that say Cingular's exclusive 5-year deal with Apple applies within the United States only. If this is true, it undermines some of the criticism Apple has been receiving for their business strategy surrounding the iPhone, given the size of the cell-phone market outside the US."
Privacy

Restrictions On Social Sites Proposed In Georgia 349

Posted by kdawson from the shoulder-surfing dept.

A state senator in Georgia, Cecil Staton, has introduced a bill that would require parents' permission before kids could sign up at a social networking site such as MySpace and Facebook, and mandate that the sites let parents see all material their kids generate there. Quoting: "[Senate Bill 59] would make it illegal for the owner or operator of a social networking Web site to allow minors to create or maintain a Web page without parental permission [and require] parents or guardians to have access to their children's Web pages at all times. If owners or operators of a company failed to comply with the proposed law, they would be guilty of a misdemeanor on the first offense. A second offense would be a felony and could lead to imprisonment for between one and five years and a fine up to $50,000 or both." The recently offered MySpace parental tools fall short of the bill's requirements. This coverage from the Athens Banner-Herald quotes Facebook's CPO saying that federal law forbids the company to allow anyone but the account creator to access it..
Robotics

Submission + - New Air Force drones have payload of F-16s

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Call them UAVs, drones, remote-controlled aircraft, or robotic air vehicles-it's clear that this new generation of weaponry increasingly is playing a key role in the U.S. arsenal. And what we've seen so far is nothing compared with what's in the pipeline. In early production today is a kind of Predator on steroids-the MQ-9 Reaper. Six times heavier than the current Predator, the Reaper is capable of holding a payload of missiles and bombs equal to that of an F-16 fighter-and can linger in the same area for as long as 24 hours. See story for photos: www.usnews.com/badguys
The Internet

Submission + - .um Domain Meets Demise

Submitted by Dr. Eggman
Dr. Eggman writes: The little used .um internet domain is no more. The domain was used, or rather unused, for US minor outlying islands and the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute had grown tired of maintaining it. This announcement comes as last month ICANN began taking comments on deletion of outdated suffixes. Among the top of the list? .su, the internet domain of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union's .su may prove harder to remove however, as Google still lists 3 million .su sites. Thought The Soviet Union had disbanded? That's what they wanted you to think.
Programming

Submission + - ScrabbleBot - New Leap in AI

Submitted by
weasel
weasel writes: "A new Scrabble AI engine has just been polished; it actively tries to steal your potential words instead of just scoring for itself. How long until shooters and other video games build up the same level of nefariousness? Or is it a bit too frustrating to be considered a good gaming concept?"
Announcements

Submission + - eBay fees to rise in March

Submitted by ScaryTom
ScaryTom writes: Just received an email from eBay announcing an important change to eBay's EU structure talking about how they "have set up a new entity in the European Union, located in Luxembourg, called eBay Europe" effective from March 1st, 2007. What they aren't so keen to highlight is that they are rolling out some fee adjustments at the same time. The initial changes look beneficial, but if you read some of the later tables, and look past their somewhat short-sighted example sales, you'll see that the bottom line is that selling "Books, Music, DVDs, Film & TV, Video Games and ('Media') products" will soon incur a fee of 9% of the final sale price. This changes from the current graduated fee ranging from 5.25% to 1.75%.
Sci-Fi

Submission + - Top Predictions of our Techno-Utopian Future

Submitted by
HeroicLife
HeroicLife writes: "Killer (medicine-eating) robots, nuclear apocalypse, nano goo, mass starvation, class warfare or climate hell — is this our future? Or can we look forward to a technological utopia that fulfills our every whim but bores us to death? Here's an unusually positive outlook that answers the most common doomsday scenarios and offers some things to look forward to. "The sum of all these innovations will gradually change the way we define ourselves. Our consciousness becomes the central processing unit of a complex system, with external storage and sensor facilities spread across the world and to other people. As human-computer interfaces improve, our sense of self will evolve to include our digital memories as well as those of others...""
Databases

Submission + - Database pioneer Jim Gray lost at sea

Submitted by elmiller
elmiller writes: Jim Gray, database pioneer, hasn't returned from a Sunday morning solo sailing trip to the Farallon Islands outside San Francisco's Golden Gate. The Coast Guard searched all night Sunday evening, with no success and no signals of any kind from Dr. Gray's sailboat. Updates at the SF Chronicle web site (current story is here).
Programming

Boston Game Devs Make 8 Games in 36 Hours 52

Posted by Zonk from the much-better-than-american-idol dept.
Darius Kazemi writes "This past weekend, a bunch of Boston-area game developers got together and did a 36-hour Boston Game Jam, inspired by the Indie Game Jam. We made eight games in 36 hours based on the theme of 'shift' for platforms as diverse as PC, GBA, and cell phones. The games range from a surprisingly complex behavioral sim to a game where you have to squish your opponent in a 2D physics deathmatch. Most of the games are available for download right now, and some of them even include the source code. In days to come, we'll be adding developer diaries and other goodies."
Space

Submission + - Remembering Apollo 1

Submitted by wiredog
wiredog writes: On January 27, 1967, (forty years ago tomorrow) Apollo 1's crew — Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee — was killed when their capsule, which had a pure oxygen atmosphere, caught fire during testing. Articles from Wikipedia and Nasa.

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