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Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 242

by jmarkantes (#30444764) Attached to: Google Unveils goo.gl URL Shortening Service
I agree they've become pretty annoying. But, they sound like they're here to stay, and I've found this to be handy: http://www.longurlplease.com/ Firefox extension (and others, I think) that gives you options for these shortened urls. Either expand completely, or in the title attr so you can see it on mouseover, of the href so you can see the full url in the status bar. J
Microsoft

NZ Outfit Dumps Open Office For MS Office 581

Posted by kdawson from the pull-of-the-dark-side dept.
(Score.5, Interestin writes "The NZ Automobile Association has just announced that it is dropping Open Office and switching back to MS Office. According to their CIO, 'Microsoft Office is not any cheaper, but it was almost impossible to work out what open-source was actually costing because of issues such as incompatibility and training.' In addition, 'you have no idea where open-source products are going, whereas vendors like Microsoft provide a roadmap for the future.'" About 500 seats are involved. MS conceded to letting Office users run the software at home as well.
NASA

Probe Shows Jupiter Moon 'Puking' Into Space 152

Posted by Zonk from the intergalactic-bodily-fluids dept.
Tablizer writes "The New Horizons probe caught the moon Io in the act of 'barfing' into space. A five-frame sequence from the New Horizons probe captured a beautiful plume of ash from Io's Tvashtar volcano. "Snapped by the probe's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) as the spacecraft flew past Jupiter earlier this year, this first-ever "movie" of an Io plume clearly shows motion in the cloud of volcanic debris, which extends 330 kilometers (200 miles) above the moon's surface ... The appearance and motion of the plume is remarkably similar to an ornamental fountain on Earth, replicated on a gigantic scale.""

Comment Mainly it's multitouch (Score 1) 466

by jmarkantes (#19323591) Attached to: Microsoft's Multitouch Coffee Table Display
I think the apps are nice, but the major enabling technology is multitouch. Which has been around, but just now is making some (marketing) headway.

Coupled with a large screen it is awesome, but I could see this in several applications. Imagine just the simple touchpad on a laptop being multitouch. You could do a lot of the similar photo manipulations with just that, separate from the screen. Or on pda's or large screen phones (like the iphone).

Anyways, could be kinda cool in the future.
J
Programming

Should Games Be More Boring? 180

Posted by Zonk from the are-talking-like-drake-and-the-ninety-nine-dragons-boring dept.
An anonymous reader writes "At Gamasutra, serious games creator Ian Bogost is making the case that video games should be more mundane, particularly discussing of Nintendo' Brain Age: 'It's certainly a very different kind of game from Halo or even Miyamoto's own Zelda series, games that allow the player to inhabit complex fantasy worlds. Instead, much of Brain Age's success seems to come precisely from the ordinariness of its demands.' Would games become more accessible if they tapped into everyday things a little bit more, as opposed to spiralling off into fictional realities?"
NASA

Large Caves Found on the Surface of Mars 191

Posted by Zonk from the oh-crap-i'd-better-move-my-stuff dept.
David DelMonte writes "Space.com is reporting on the discovery of seven dark spots near the Equator on Mars. The thinking is that these are cave openings. The openings are the size of football fields, and one of them is thought to extend approximately 400 feet below the surface.'The researchers hope the discovery will lead to more focused spelunking on Mars. "Caves on Mars could become habitats for future explorers or could be the only structures that preserve evidence of past or present microbial life ," said Glenn Cushing of Northern Arizona University, who first spotted the black areas in the photographs.'"
AMD

AMD Demonstrates "Teraflop In a Box" 182

Posted by kdawson from the speedy-silicon dept.
UncleFluffy writes "AMD gave a sneak preview of their upcoming R600 GPU. The demo system was a single PC with two R600 cards running streaming computing tasks at just over 1 Teraflop. Though a prototype, this beats Intel to ubiquitous Teraflop machines by approximately 5 years." Ars has an article exploring why it's hard to program such GPUs for anything other than graphics applications.
Education

U.S. Cities Don't Make the Intelligence Cut 350

Posted by samzenpus from the the-most-common-elements-in-the-universe-are-hydrogen-and-stupidity dept.
coondoggie writes "For the second year running, no U.S. city has made the list of the world's top Intelligent Communities of 2007, as selected by global think tank Intelligent Community Forum. The ICF selects the Intelligent Community list based on how advanced the communities are in deploying broadband, building a knowledge-based workforce, combining government and private-sector "digital inclusion," fostering innovation and marketing economic development."
Biotech

Walking Molecule Now Carries Packages 108

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the delivery-in-20-minutes-or-it's-free dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "Chemists from the University of California at Riverside designed two years ago a molecule which could move straight on a flat surface — a nano-walker if you wish. Now, they've found a way to force this walking molecule to carry packages. The nano-worker can now carry two CO2 molecules. And like yourself when you carry two heavy bags, this nano-worker is slower when it carries other molecules. The researchers think their discovery will lead to reliable ways of carrying molecules, an equivalent of the conveyor belts in today's factories."
Power

Ford Airstream Electric Concept Car 202

Posted by kdawson from the fill-it-up-with-H2 dept.
Not to be upstaged by GM's plug-in electric concept vehicle, Ford has unveiled its own concept. The twists are design by Airstream and a hydrogen-powered fuel cell to charge the battery. From the AutoblogGreen article: "The fuel cell, made by Ballard, turns on automatically when the battery charge dips below 40 percent. With the on-board charger (110/220 VAC), the battery pack can be refilled at home. Ford says the HySeries Drive is 50 percent smaller and less complex than conventional fuel cell system and should have more than double the lifetime."

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