Comment Netflix. (Score 1) 196
Because compholio has video tearing like nobody's business.
Location Selected For $1 Billion Ghost Town 172
Hugh Pickens writes "Although a fully operation city with no people sounds like the setup for a dystopian sci-fi novel, the Boston Globe reports that the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation will develop a $1 billion scientific ghost town near Hobbs, New Mexico to help researchers test everything from intelligent traffic systems and next-generation wireless networks to automated washing machines and self-flushing toilets on existing infrastructure without interfering in everyday life. Bob Brumley, senior managing director of Pegasus Holdings, says the town will be modeled after the real city of Rock Hill, South Carolina, complete with highways, houses and commercial buildings, old and new. Unlike traditional cities, City Labs will start with its underground 'backbone' infrastructure that will allow the lab to monitor activity throughout the 17-mile site. Since nobody lives in the Center's buildings, computerized systems will mimic human behavior such as turning thermostats up and down, switching lights off and on, or flushing toilets. The Center's test facilities and supporting infrastructure may require as much as 20 square miles of open, unimproved land where the controlled environment will permit evaluation of the positive and negative impacts of smart grid applications and integration of renewable energies for residential, commercial and industrial sectors of the economy. 'It's an amusement park for the scientists,' adds Brumley."
Comment Re:$39 BILLION!? (Score 1) 367
Not so.
Not all 3G phones support all the bands. For instance, there is an AT&T and a T-Mo version of the Nexus One, and a mismatched phone/carrier will allow you to access only 2 of the 3 bands.
Pope Says Technology Causes Confusion Between Reality and Fiction 779
Pope Benedict XVI has warned that people are in danger of being unable to discern reality from fiction because of new technologies, and not old books. "New technologies and the progress they bring can make it impossible to distinguish truth from illusion and can lead to confusion between reality and virtual reality. The image can also become independent from reality, it can give birth to a virtual world, with various consequences -- above all the risk of indifference towards real life," he said.
G2 Detects When Rooted and Reinstalls Stock OS 406
RandyDownes writes "And you thought the Droid X's kill switch was bad. HTC and T-Mobile's new G2 can detect when it's been rooted and responds by reinstalling the factory OS. This seems like a violation of the Apache license Android is licensed under and is especially ironic given Eric Schmidt's recent statement about not requiring carriers to give consumers the option to install Google's own version of the OS. Schmidt called it a violation of the principles of open source."
Update: 10/06 17:47 GMT by S : As readers have noted, the G2 is not from Motorola. Here's a better source, and here's the XDA Developers thread discussing the issue.
Comment Prior Art (Score 1) 187
I believe it was called "Survive the Outbreak." Original site is down, but youtube has a copy. It is also one of the only two legitimate, non-obnoxious uses of youtube annotations I have seen.
Google Nabs Patent To Monitor Your Cursor Movement 198
bool2 writes "Google has been awarded a patent for displaying search results based on how you move your mouse cursor on the screen... Google's plans are to monitor the movements of the cursor, such as when a user hovers over a certain ad or link to read a tooltip, and then provide relevant search results, and ads, based on that behaviour. It means that it does not require users to actually click a link to know that they were interested in it, opening a world of opportunity for even more focused ads."
Warships May Get Lasers For Close-In Defense 482
King Louie writes "Raytheon and the US Navy have successfully tested a ship-borne laser capable of shooting down aircraft. Video at the link shows the 32-kilowatt solid-state laser shooting down an unmanned aerial vehicle. The technology is apparently mature enough to be deployed as part of ships' short-range missile defenses, a role currently filled by the Basic Point Defense Missile System (based on the Sea Sparrow missile) and the Close-In Weapons System (based on a 20mm Gatling gun)."
Facebook and the "Social Graph" 200
itwbennett writes "Peter Smith is blogging about day 1 of the Facebook F8 conference and Mark Zuckerberg's vision for Facebook, which, as it turns out, is somewhat confusing: 'Zuckerberg clearly sees Facebook as a service. Facebook Connect (the name) is going away and being replaced by the Facebook Platform. "Share on Facebook" buttons are being replaced with "Like on Facebook" buttons. And Comcast is now called Xfinity. ... What does it all mean to the end user? There's a new API to fetch data from Facebook more easily, which sounds great, if only I could figure out why I'd want to do that. The overall tone of the keynote was that Facebook was serious business and they were going to build the Social Graph, a vast network of connections between people and the things they like. Zuckerberg was a man with a mission.'"
Comment Odd thing about the HW teardown - the rest of it (Score 1) 492
Shennanigans regarding Engadget vs Gizmodo (bar in Redwood City vs bar in Cupertino) aside, there is an interesting question left:
Where is the rest of the hardware teardown? All we are given is a single photo of a ribbon cable inside the phone, but none of
the shots of the chipset, PCBs, layout, etc.
More interesting still is the fact that the one (uninteresting) photo of the disassembly is named open13.jpg, implying that there
was an entire series of these shots, including juicy things like the processor, etc.
Why are these photos missing? Careless omission, or is something else going on here?
Just my $0.02.
Where is the rest of the hardware teardown? All we are given is a single photo of a ribbon cable inside the phone, but none of
the shots of the chipset, PCBs, layout, etc.
More interesting still is the fact that the one (uninteresting) photo of the disassembly is named open13.jpg, implying that there
was an entire series of these shots, including juicy things like the processor, etc.
Why are these photos missing? Careless omission, or is something else going on here?
Just my $0.02.
Comment Scam site is google-ranked higher than google's. (Score 1) 291
Well... It appears that the first google hit for 'chrome add-ons' links to mychromeaddons.com
This site is made to look like google's, but is LITTERED WITH ADS. The whois information reveals it's a third-party site.
The OFFICIAL chrome add-on site also does list an AdBlock extension, but something is fishy about it. When trying to install it, Chrome warns that "this extension is trying to access your data on api.flickr.com." What the hell?
We'll see if and how Google will try to combat these issues...
This site is made to look like google's, but is LITTERED WITH ADS. The whois information reveals it's a third-party site.
The OFFICIAL chrome add-on site also does list an AdBlock extension, but something is fishy about it. When trying to install it, Chrome warns that "this extension is trying to access your data on api.flickr.com." What the hell?
We'll see if and how Google will try to combat these issues...
Comment Silver lining, or nuke it from orbit? (Score 1) 439
Would apple seriously ever consider USING such a thing? It would be most terrible. But of course, apple is so obsessed with its image that I doubt they would ever employ this technology.
Of course, having a patent on this atrocious god-awful piece of work will effectively prevent other, less image-conscious vendors from doing similar things, which might mean (could it be?) less intrusive advertising on other platforms.
Of course, having a patent on this atrocious god-awful piece of work will effectively prevent other, less image-conscious vendors from doing similar things, which might mean (could it be?) less intrusive advertising on other platforms.
Comment Learn Eagle (Score 1) 262
Get Eagle. It's free and there are a lot of part libraries out there. It's quite backward, but you will soon learn that most electronics CAD tools are. I guess there isn't all THAT much overlap between ECE and HCI people... Have Eagle produce a Gerber file and then send it off to your favorite board house. Happy routing :)
US Pentagon Plans For a Spy Blimp 374
nloop writes "The Pentagon is intending to develop a new spy ship — a dirigible. At 65,000 feet it would provide a 10 year, solar power based, unblinkingly intricate and continuous view of the surface via radar surveillance. Because of its altitude it would be safe from surface-to-air missiles and most aircraft. A 1/3-scale prototype, now being designed, is 'known as ISIS, for Integrated Sensor Is the Structure, because the radar system will be built into the structure of the ship. ... 'If successful, the dirigible... could pave the way for a fleet of spy airships, military officials said.'"
Comment Re:I can has Multiprotocol Label Switching? (Score 1) 690
In a connection-oriented system, it is easier to provide QoS (guaranteed bandwidth, delay, etc) because the routers know which packet belongs to which flow. Thus, the routers can maintain per-flow bookkeeping, and drop any packets from a connection that is exceeding its allocated bandwidth. At the same time, the network is told the amount of requested bandwidth per connection ahead of time. Since each router knows its available bandwidth (and the bandwidth reserved so far), each router can definitely answer whether or not it can support X amount of extra bandwidth. This way, a proper path can be negotiated through the network, at connection time, such that every node along the way can handle the requested bandwidth, delay, jitter, etc.
As for security, knowing your path to someone else isn't the issue. The issue is being able to manipulate that path (and others) at will. There are a number of hijacking, redirection, man-in-the-middle, etc attacks that rely on issues within the way IP packets are routed. In a circuit-switched system, like MPLS, the control plane basically lives in its own separate world and is essentially decoupled from the data plane (like with the phone network). That is, forwarding decisions are made based on an extra attribute connected to every packet (the so-called label ID) and not on some user-accessible field within the data itself. The only time that the user has access to this attribute is when specifying the "connection ID" associated with each outgoing packet, but that is strictly an agreement between the user and his serving router and has little relation to the upstream label tables.
As for security, knowing your path to someone else isn't the issue. The issue is being able to manipulate that path (and others) at will. There are a number of hijacking, redirection, man-in-the-middle, etc attacks that rely on issues within the way IP packets are routed. In a circuit-switched system, like MPLS, the control plane basically lives in its own separate world and is essentially decoupled from the data plane (like with the phone network). That is, forwarding decisions are made based on an extra attribute connected to every packet (the so-called label ID) and not on some user-accessible field within the data itself. The only time that the user has access to this attribute is when specifying the "connection ID" associated with each outgoing packet, but that is strictly an agreement between the user and his serving router and has little relation to the upstream label tables.
