The NASA Centennial Challenges: Inspired by the X-Prize, NASA has begun a series of challenges to private inventors with cash prizes for things ranging from extracting oxygen from moon rocks to building better astronaut gloves to improving personal aircraft. Thanks to Congressional approval, NASA will be launching larger challenges of up to $50 million in value, including a new multi-million dollar lunar lander contest. With government space efforts criticized by private entrepreneurs, is this the right direction for NASA?
posted on May 6, 2006 - View this thread

Microsoft WSYP A very exciting and promising new technology coming from Redmond. [movie - .asf (windows media)]
posted on Oct 20, 2005 - View this thread

"A look at the average number of page views per title reveals that Microsoft gets about half as many page views per title as compared to Google and Apple" a strong indication of where reader interest actually resides." - ZDNet. Intelliseek's Blogpulse reveals similar numbers: #1 Google: 473K, #2 Apple: 381K, #3 Microsoft: 262K. Venture capitalist, Ed Sim, says: "While the OS is important, Microsoft has lost its complete and utter dominance as we move to a service-oriented world where broadband is everywhere, apps are in the cloud, and the browser becomes king."
posted on Jul 27, 2005 - View this thread

iPod Coffee Table created by a Toronto design student
posted on May 24, 2005 - View this thread

IBM to give away 500 patents. Curiouser and curiouser. Why now? And, what patents? IBM makes a great deal of money licensing their patent portfolio - is this meant to stimulate additional licensing? How does this fit in with the open source movement? In other news, IBM just received the go-ahead to sell off their PC unit to a firm that just won a rather large contract to provide PCs in China.
posted on Jan 11, 2005 - View this thread

Vintage Technology :: I like the bric a brac best.
posted on Jan 7, 2005 - View this thread

All watched over by machines of loving grace is Adam Greenfield's take on the consequences for designers of ubicomp. Setting moral guidelines seems critical in these early days of technological encroachment-- but how long can decency hold out against the promise of profit? I was forwarded a recent email from the CEO a major bookseller that made it clear that it's possible for them to track everything I do in their stores and online, and thank goodness they choose not to take advantage. But how long will that last? And with homeland security crumbling our civil liberties, article's like Adam's that remind us about our responsibility are even more important than ever.
posted on Oct 30, 2004 - View this thread

Cybermohalla --really interesting group project in and around Delhi, bringing young people together via "Compughars" (fully-equipped media centers in their neighborhoods). Located in LNJP Basti (an illegal neighborhood) in Delhi, and Ambedkar Nagar (a resettlement colony) at Dakshinpuri in south Delhi, and cyberspace, and created by ANKUR - Society for Alternatives in Education (an NGO) with Sarai, the New Media & Urban Culture Programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, they've created everything from texts, collages, posters, animations, and publications, to videos, and large-scale installations. Don't miss by lanes --collected excerpts of some of the kids' personal and public diaries (pdfs), and the scratchbook (55-page pdf) and the animated gifs.
posted on Aug 20, 2004 - View this thread

I just ordered mine. [via Kevin Rose]
posted on Aug 6, 2004 - View this thread

Don't blame the technology. A refreshingly reasonable piece from a mainstream newspaper breaking down people's fear of technology as a springboard for outright condemnation of that technology when it's used for bad things.
posted on Jun 24, 2004 - View this thread

How to speak UNIX - interrobang's nick explained?!
posted on May 25, 2004 - View this thread

Opacity no match for technology! A CS grad student comes up with a technique for restoring words that have been blacked out in classified documents.
posted on May 13, 2004 - View this thread

US-made ultrasonic gun uses baby's scream The gun is capable of causing permanent ear damage, even death.
Makes me want to scream.
posted on Mar 30, 2004 - View this thread

Digital Utopia and its Flaws
Cory Doctorow In Conversation With R.U. Sirius

"Every other media revolution that we've had from Gutenberg to the radio to recorded music and so on, ended up with an industry that's a thousand times larger, that makes a thousand times more money, and makes available a thousand times more work. That happens every single time! If you go back far enough, you will find the guild of clavichord makers decrying the advent of the lute."
posted on Mar 4, 2004 - View this thread

The Vos Pas is an apartment that it's owner has lit entirely with LEDs. More here.
posted on Jan 10, 2004 - View this thread

Iranian bloggers challenge the President in the Summit: It all started from a post on the Geneva Summit's blog, DailySummit, asking Iranians to report on the Net censorship. Then, they asked them to post their questions for the Iranian President, who was going to have a press conference. Then reporters asked the questions from the president: Is the there a blacklist for Iranian websites? Do you read Persian weblogs? How hard is it to connect to the Net in Iran? Later they asked tougher questions from the Minister of Telecommunications: Why don't they public the blacklist? Why Sina Motallebi, the blogger, was arrested? Isn't the summit about how technology benefits democracy and human rights? Blogs can definitely be a big part of the answer.
posted on Dec 11, 2003 - View this thread

What happened to the Modem Guy? A great story on two partners and personal computer pioneers, Hayes (who got the fame) and Heatherington (who got the money).
posted on Dec 1, 2003 - View this thread

Trashtalking - German Style. Forget talking dolls, Berlin's speechifying its trash cans to thank pedestrians after they dump their litter. But is it appropriate to have immaterial things tell you how to use them? [More Inside]
posted on Nov 23, 2003 - View this thread

World solar challenge 2003. Darwin to Adelaide 19 - 28 October. Check out the route. Meet the teams. Have a look at the Green Fleet class as well, where technology meets reality. I won't be able to watch the race but have high hopes for next year's Olympics.
posted on Oct 18, 2003 - View this thread

Lick Me, I'm A Mackintosh. One columnist's ode/rant re: Apple's design ethos.
posted on Oct 1, 2003 - View this thread

Heaven or Hell? It's Your Choice
A new shareware E-Book is out, penned by the likes of Captain Crunch and Matthew Smith, that makes the claims:

Don't bother planning your pension, the world is about to change and we can prove it, please just take 2 minutes out of your life to read this page, it may change your life. Artificial intelligence is coming and it may become smarter than any of us. Smart networks using grid technologies could become a threat to us ALL, this is the real Matrix. From Dot.Net to the X-Box, from M-Theory to the Playstation 3 the future is V.R. / A.I. and Nanotech. If you ever wanted to know what the system is and what it has done to you, then this ebook is for you. You left school, you were standardised, you took an exam, you were graded, they made you believe in money, this is the last great social control mechanism. There's more to this, than you can imagine.

...and there you have it. Or do you?
posted on Jul 7, 2003 - View this thread

Ever since I became a TiVo addict, I've found myself wanting to use its features in real life, wishing I could rewind & replay moments of random comedy & chaos, usually involving my pugs. Soon, thanks the good folks at Deja View, I will be able to, with the help of a head mounted micro video camera unit that is always on, recording a 30 second buffer of real time, and up to four hours of manually recordable space for once you activate the record button. The scourge of ephemera will be wiped out in our lifetime.
posted on Jun 19, 2003 - View this thread

Child Pornographers Using Small Storage Drives. Small drives like this are giving the police quite a bit of trouble. One of the more interesting quotes from the story, "Even if the photos are encrypted, computer forensics specialists can break through most encryption schemes these days anyway."
posted on May 29, 2003 - View this thread

Technology comes to the rescue via the Department of Homeland Security. Now we will never have to fear terrorists, or criminals again. This post is 23 days late, but remains ever so relevant.
posted on Apr 24, 2003 - View this thread

Japanese create "invisible" cloak. Well, not really. Technically, just a two sided cloak, the front of which is a projector, and the back of which is a camera. Only works, one would imagine, if you're looking at a person straight on, and even then it would help if you were partially blind, or at the very least, raised in the wilderness & easily fooled by modern technology.
posted on Feb 5, 2003 - View this thread

Baked Apple. "PowerBook G4 cooked at 400 degrees for 20 minutes. The machine still booted, video and all..." [details at MacFixIt; no permalink]
posted on Feb 4, 2003 - View this thread

The Self-Healing Minefield From the current Village Voice: "Utilizing commercial off-the-shelf computer chips and 'healing' software, the networked minefield detects rude attempts to clear it, deduces which parts of itself have been removed, and signals its remaining munitions to close the hole using best-fit mathematics."

Bonus ubertasteless Flash animation courtesy of DARPA here. Color me fascinated and repulsed in equal measure.
posted on Nov 27, 2002 - View this thread

Present day Thomas Edison strikes again. More fine stuff from the guy who brought you the Segway HT. Dean Kamen, and his fine folks at DekaResearch, appear to have invented a device which promises to save countless lives across the globe, power villages, and runs on water. What's next? The perpetual motion machine?
posted on Nov 17, 2002 - View this thread

Geekroom contest 2002. [this is a mirror, the site was recently slashdotted] They say these are the best geekrooms; to me they seem to fall somewhere between somewhere between quintessential, and epitome-of. Does your computing take over a significant chunk of your space? A room? A nook? What do Mefites' geek lairs look like?
posted on Nov 10, 2002 - View this thread

Alien Equipment
Turning immigrants into cyborgs. A small video monitor and loudspeakers are installed at the center of the instrument and in front of the user's mouth. The monitor and the loudspeakers replace the real act of speech with an audio-visual broadcast of pre-recorded statements.
posted on Nov 6, 2002 - View this thread

"Your car will be watching the road even if you're not" Or so says DaimlerChrysler in their new ad campaign. Electronic eyes, infrared systems, ways to keep your eyes on the road better.... All in good time, as we all expected - but wouldn't you be worried if your car could just stop itself if it saw a squirrel in the road? (via the Wall St. Journal ad 10/9/02)
posted on Oct 10, 2002 - View this thread

Nüp2 Incorporated will revolutionize the electronic memory business. Using our patented memory technology and our patent-pending "Topolithographic" manufacturing process, we will develop and produce solid-state electronic memory having gigabytes of storage in a tiny package for just a few dollars per Gigabyte. Hoax? Vaporware? Revolution in data storage? You decide.
posted on Sep 17, 2002 - View this thread

Employing a rather breath-taking counter, Netsizer claims to track the growth of the internet (users and hosts) in real time based on a methodology briefly and unsatisfyingly explained here. According to Netsizer the number of internet users already tops 800 million, but the Cyber Atlas is projecting 700-950 million users in 2004. Does anybody really know what's going on?
posted on Sep 1, 2002 - View this thread

MIT's R&D for the US Army of the future appears to be based on a comic book.
posted on Aug 28, 2002 - View this thread

Teleportation finally? Not quite "beam me up scotty" yet, but a definite surge forward. The mechanics of it aren't quite sophisticated enough yet to handle humans, but this does make quantum computers close to reality.
posted on Jun 17, 2002 - View this thread

With teeny tiny xGB hard drives like the Archos line available, why do PDAs/handhelds have such small memory capacity? The gorgeous new Sony Clie has a mere 16 MB to its name, and most PocketPCs top out around 64MB. When do you think we'll see handheld devices that really parallel the capabilities of a desktop computer?
posted on Jun 17, 2002 - View this thread

The Umbrella Sail at Last a Reality! Technofetishists will love this fabulous collection of Popular Mechanics covers going back to 1902. Who'd have thought a weaving machine could be so beautiful? Futuristic cityscapes, bizarre weapons, new-fangled sports and surprisingly delicate and artful scenes are just a few of the pleasures in the year-by-year archive. The mag's male-dominated world can get kind of, um, gay, but it's hard to imagine a better display of the joys and fears (especially the fears) of our monkey fascination with technology.
posted on Jun 17, 2002 - View this thread

Check out this soccer/baseball stadium. You can fold the baseball field and roll in the soccer one. Animation here. Amazing.
posted on Jun 1, 2002 - View this thread

"It would no longer be a marketplace; it would be a kind of a jungle, where this one unlicensed instrument is capable of devouring all that people had invested in and labored over and brought forth."

Good ol' Cryptome has been kind enough to post Jack Valenti's original congressional testimony against the insidious VCR Threat of 1982. Now we can see his famous 'Boston Strangler' quote in context and pick out a few new favorites. So kick back, substitute the word 'Internet' for 'VCR' and wallow in the sweet irony.

(And don't forget to check out Jack's cool 80s-era Japan-bashing. Keep fightin' the good fight, Jackie-boy!)
[via Slashdot]
posted on May 31, 2002 - View this thread

Sexual Encounters 1.0 for the Pocket PC. (Work safe). If you need this, then you need this. (Via Cruel).
posted on May 22, 2002 - View this thread

Lying with video. Researchers at MIT have created videos of people uttering sentences they never said that consistently fool viewers and are accepted by them as real. Once upon a time, it was a lot harder to be false with film, but whether the medium will be in any way trustworthy going forward seems doubtful. What will it mean when you can't even believe your own eyes?
posted on May 15, 2002 - View this thread

Thanks to a breakthrough in medical technology allowing HIV-infected semen to be purified of the virus, thousands of men will now be able to father children whose high-school graduations they'll never live to see. Is there no limit to human vanity?
posted on May 2, 2002 - View this thread

Professor becomes world's first cyborg Surgeons have carried out a ground-breaking operation on a cybernetics professor so that his nervous system can be wired up to a computer. It is hoped that the procedure could lead to a medical breakthrough for people paralysed by spinal cord damage, like Superman actor Christopher Reeve. Prof Warwick believes it also opens up the possibility of a sci-fi world of cyborgs, where the human brain can one day be upgraded with implants for extra memory, intelligence or X-ray vision. The medical possibilities with this are amazing, so why does it make me feel so uneasy?
posted on Mar 22, 2002 - View this thread

"Arrr, matey, insecure transaction off the port bow!" Data can be stolen as it is transferred by recording and interpreting the flashing of LED lights on your equipment. Theoretically, then, your data isn't safe within viewing distance of a telescope, unless some engineer comes up with an ingenious workaround.
posted on Mar 7, 2002 - View this thread

Hi-tech webserver platfrom unveiled! Seriously though, a webserver running on a Commodore 64... what will people think of next?
posted on Mar 7, 2002 - View this thread

MS Windows for your car? Let me make sure I'm getting this...cell phones in cars = bad, BSOD in cars = good?
posted on Mar 4, 2002 - View this thread

First Monday has not been mentioned since September 16, 1999 (no comments), but it's still timely and intellectual. In this issue, "Technological and Social Drivers of Change in the Online Music Industry".
posted on Feb 19, 2002 - View this thread

Go for the gold! Concord 2002: Site of the upcoming Loebner Prize. Can reigning champion A.L.I.C.E. repeat her triumph? Chat bots from around the globe are scouting out their rivals on the AI competitive circuit and studying their crib notes.
posted on Feb 9, 2002 - View this thread

A really cool idea. This is how new technology is born
posted on Jan 26, 2002 - View this thread

For Paranoid Parents everywhere. A global satellite positioning wristwatch, in happy-happy day-glo colours, that you can security-clamp onto your kid's wrist. Then, at your office terminal, you can find out exactlywhere they are. Love the 911 button. How about actually playing with your kids, rather than launching them out into the urban wilderness, on a wireless tether? "Latch-key" takes on a whole new dimension.
posted on Jan 8, 2002 - View this thread

Is The Economy Broken? It was one thing when it was the tech/Internet sector - the bubble burst, but now the wave continues with the 2002 recovery seeming like wishful thinking. If it's not layoffs, companies are cutting their 401k plans. Argentina's crisis seems like it will have ripple effects as well. Then you have numbers saying people are confident, so are we getting tanked by jittery Wall Street-ers? Oh, there's also a war on.
posted on Dec 31, 2001 - View this thread

Advice for Maine: Piss poor education technology planning yields piss poor results. Is anyone aware of a large scale "computer per student" education initiative that has worked well? Teachers still need better wages don't they? (more inside)
posted on Dec 3, 2001 - View this thread

What's inside? Surely this is a man thing. We get something with screws in it and have to take it to pieces. this man bought a gamecube. He says that it still works. There are a few pages of pictures here so be warned.. I thank you.
posted on Nov 30, 2001 - View this thread

MIT's Erotic Computation Group. "By developing advanced sexual appliances and techniques, we seek to broaden the range of human amative expression and heighten our potential for sexual gratification." Good to see that at least some people are doing research that will benefit all mankind.
posted on Nov 25, 2001 - View this thread

As usual, when it's the U.S. turn, they play by different rules How come Russian and Scandinavian hackers can be charged under U.S. law for activities done in their home countries, yet when an American company gets a very reasonable request (IP tracking that it is done for web banners anyway) from a judge overseas, the U.S. grabs the free speech / local law argument.
posted on Nov 8, 2001 - View this thread

Lockheed Martin beat out Boeing for a $200 Billion contract to build the new F-35 fighters jets earlier today. Missile defense, planes that can take off vertically, bombs that fry electronics...military technology is accelerating at a really frightening pace.
posted on Oct 26, 2001 - View this thread

iWalk : Apple's new device is rumored to be a PDA/MP3 Player with a color screen and airport functionality. Never heard of spymac.com before, but this looks pretty legit. (contains photo)
posted on Oct 23, 2001 - View this thread

Is it sloppy programming, or do full computer security vulnerability disclosure make it too easy for hackers? Microsoft has a personal interest in minimizing the exploit of their code, but the evil you know is better than the evil you don't. Others have weighed in on this debate in the past, or provided a fair but vague blueprint for the computer security community. Do you think that a middle ground exists?
posted on Oct 18, 2001 - View this thread

Apple Computer will introduce a 'breakthrough device' next week. Will this be the long-rumored Apple PDA that Newton fanatics have been asking for? A device for wirelessly streaming your mp3 collection through your stereo? Your basic portable mp3 player? Or something that hasn't shown up on any of the rumor sites at all? Whatever it ends up being, my curiousity is officially piqued.
posted on Oct 17, 2001 - View this thread

Face Recognition ATMs In Australia, a tech company is developing face recognition ATMs, which operate on biometric technology (face, voice, and lip-movement). This technology could be an alternative to PINs. Is this idea really convenient or really freaky?
posted on Oct 12, 2001 - View this thread

PostPet Japan's most popular email program. it's NOT outlook, it's NOT notes, it's NOT eudora. it's PostPet. related article here: A Dancing Pink Bear Named Momo. now looking at this pink bear in particular and japanese culture in general, any chance that imode will *really* be popular in Europe and the US?
posted on Oct 9, 2001 - View this thread

PDA physical therapy. Handspring's new module uses Electronic Muscle Stimulation (EMS) for muscle stimulation/relaxation after a hard day's work. Will this be the new yuppie toy? Imagine people walking around with two white pads glued to their face confronting quizzical stares with an angry, "What?"
posted on Oct 2, 2001 - View this thread

"They just shrug... They don't think that someone is jamming their conversations." A friend of mine bought a cell-phone jammer two months ago and has been happily creating "sanity zones" within which cell phones are rendered inoperable. People have a right to communicate, he conceded. But "I have the right not to participate in that communication process - I really don't need to hear people yelling into a cell phone if I'm standing half a block away."
posted on Sep 11, 2001 - View this thread

As the technology industry lays off thousands, a division of the German conglomerate, Siemens, takes a different approach. I like the idea of having a sabbatical of sorts with half pay instead of simply being laid off. Of course, this would never happen in the U.S. - we love laying people off here and contributing to overall unemployment and higher welfare rates. Just look at what Salon has to say about it.... (note, you need to scroll down to midpage).
posted on Sep 5, 2001 - View this thread

Slate's Mickey Kaus and the Washington Post ask the question: For all the claims of illegal monopolies and unfair advantage, is the tech industry counting on Microsoft and Windows XP's Oct. 25 release to save its bacon?
posted on Jul 30, 2001 - View this thread

WAP is dead. Can the Mobile Services Initiative make the wireless Web really useful?
posted on Jun 13, 2001 - View this thread

Acts of Becoming: Autobiography, Frankenstein, and the Postmodern Body
"an authentic, developed "disabled perspective" of culture" by Mark Mossman.
posted on Jun 10, 2001 - View this thread

Hax0ring, power up, make the next level.
posted on Jun 8, 2001 - View this thread

Miracles of the Next Fifty Years -- a reprint of an article from the February 1950 issue of Popular Mechanics. At times laughably naive, other times pretty accurate (the author predicts that cancer won't be cured by 2000, but it won't be far off), it's a fun piece of George-Jetson-meets-Ozzie-and-Harriet gee-whizness.
posted on Jun 2, 2001 - View this thread

The first really interesting cold war relic sale I've seen. It's big ... it's pretty ... it can pummel the sound barrier and NASA spent $30mil retrofitting it. Now if I can just find $10 million I don't need. Maybe if I look under the couch cushions or something.
posted on May 19, 2001 - View this thread

Death by Information: "Does the word 'pedestrian' frighten you? Could you survive for an hour without a cell phone, laptop, or - even worse - a television?"
posted on Apr 22, 2001 - View this thread

iPix Movies are cool interactive movies, you choose the angle you view while it is playing and you can turn to any angle, up, down, left, right and zoom. This is pretty wild but takes a broadband connection so if you are a dial up user, forget it. I want the little helicopter the camera is on, very cool.
posted on Apr 13, 2001 - View this thread

The Story of Mel - Almost everyone's seen the Story of Mel on USENET or via email... the story of the guy who wrote programs for a particular ancient drum computer by using the characteristics of the drum to handle memory allocation and time delays. In a footnote on the Jargon File, it seems that his last name is known... An interesting footnote to an interesting and probably true story.
posted on Apr 7, 2001 - View this thread

Internet Explorer 6 and Standards Microsoft says they'll have 100% CSS1 and DOM (I assume level 1) support. A step in the right direction? Too little too late? Discuss.
posted on Apr 5, 2001 - View this thread

Government GPS surveillance through your digital camera. A DOJ project to go after pedophiles and obscenity-mongers by regulating digital still and motion cameras is slated to be introduced in Congress:

A DOJ project code-named "Indecent Images" plans to implant technologies developed to automatically recognize hard-core Internet sex images into the next generation of cameras. An II-compliant camera will refuse to take illegal photographs or videos, and could even quietly tip off law enforcement to illicit behavior. . .

The II draft says that "any variant" of digital still or video camera must include a GPS device and a transmitter that is compatible with U.S. pager networks. When a child pornographer takes an illegal photo, the camera recognizes it and transmits an encrypted message containing the image, the date, and the location to the local police -- who would then raid the home and save the child from continued erotic exploitation.

They've got to be kidding. I'm not endorsing exploiting kids, natch, but I can't believe this this kind of surveillance is even being contemplated. . .

Then again, remembering Ashcroft's beady little eyes. . . (via J. Orlin Grabbe)
posted on Apr 2, 2001 - View this thread

Say farewell to the geeky white guys. The new generation of Internet users looks a lot like the folks who cruise Wal-Mart-and then some. How the hell did that happen?
posted on Mar 20, 2001 - View this thread

Big Blue moves into the web services arena, claiming to be the first company to provide such services. Ever hear of .NET? Seems to me that they've been rolling a framework (that's got BETA development tools already) since last summer.

i think the most poignant point in this article isn't the fact that IBM's making false claims, but this quote by Peter O'Kelly:

``It's amazing that these guys are agreeing to work with the same standards. They've finally realized it's a disservice to customers when they try and compete on the basis of proprietary formats and protocols."

Now if the browser wars could end, we'd all be in better shape.
posted on Mar 14, 2001 - View this thread

There's an article in the current issue of Red Herring magazine (p. 58) titled Digital Canals about delivering data through water pipes. Sorry no link to this specific story, it's not up on the site yet. Can anybody shed some light on this technology? More in comments...
posted on Mar 12, 2001 - View this thread

"I can't talk right now, I need to use my phone to blow my nose" Paper cell phones? New and revolutionary technology that may very well change the way personal electronics are made? I think I've got goosebumps.
posted on Mar 9, 2001 - View this thread

The passing of a giant. Claude Shannon has died. He was a man of towering intellect, whose achievements are dwarfed only by the ignorance of the public to the value of those achievements. All our lives have been radically changed by him, but I bet not one person in a hundred has even heard of him.
posted on Mar 2, 2001 - View this thread

NASA admits "Dreaming isn't our job, anymore."

<sigh> We're never going to get off this planet. Crap.
posted on Mar 2, 2001 - View this thread

The next must have tech gadget is on its way this fall. Sure it probably weighs 50 pounds, but it's just too damn sweet not to get.
posted on Feb 27, 2001 - View this thread

Presenting the no-gasoline, no-pollution, no-engine personal flier Hydrogen peroxide is used to fuel individual rocket motors at the tips of helicoptor like rotors.... James Bond eat your heart out :)
posted on Feb 22, 2001 - View this thread

Bill Joy thinks the world will end unless we stop doing certain kinds of research right now. I think Bill Joy is full of crap, but he has valid points. (More inside)
posted on Feb 17, 2001 - View this thread

"I think it's dead. I think it's over with; it's gone. There is no long-term prognosis. The patient has died. There is no future." That's the web as content medium he's talking about. [more inside]
posted on Feb 3, 2001 - View this thread

See? Y'all sent me off to TVTechnology, and I found something interesting... Remember a couple years ago -- The Day The Pagers Died? They died because Galaxy 4 fell over, which in turn was because its Satellite Control Processors broke.

Both of them. 4 other birds are down one processor; a total of 25 are in danger -- all built on the Hughes HM-601 satellite 'bus'. What is it we always say about genetic diversity being good? Wouldn't you hate to be the engineer on the hook for *this* 12 billion dollars?
posted on Jan 29, 2001 - View this thread

In a perfect world , this would be in mass production. In black. With an espresso machine. I'm surprised I haven't heard of this earlier; most good, respectable geeks that I know would most likely kill for one of these.
posted on Jan 13, 2001 - View this thread

When a group of astronomers bought a bunch of land in Transylvania County, N.C., to use the abandoned satellite dishes, they got a bonus: Thirty-five years' worth of leftover techno-wonders from the National Security Agency. Check out what they found, and largely can't identify.
posted on Jan 6, 2001 - View this thread

If computer engineering defined the last half of the twentieth century, then biotech will surely define the first half of the twenty-first century.
posted on Jan 5, 2001 - View this thread

ConceptPC @ Intel - pretty much interesting...response from PCs to iMac-mania?....gimme a MagicBean!! (flash required)
posted on Dec 16, 2000 - View this thread

Lynn Conway is one of the major talents in the history of the development of computers, responsible for major advances without which computers we buy now would be much different. She's also a transsexual, born physically male. While working for IBM she had her sex-change operation, and IBM immediately fired her for it.
posted on Dec 10, 2000 - View this thread

Apple Cubebook?! Sounds like Apple is working their ass off to get new products out to show in January. The Cubebook sounds cool and I am sure there would be pictures if MacOS Rumors wasn't in Apple's back pocket.
posted on Dec 8, 2000 - View this thread

Screen Wars, a decent stab by Stephen Levy from Newsweek/MSNBC at summarizing the changes afoot in desktop OS GUIs. Credit where credit is due for some notable Apple alums; more faith than is justified in .NET.
posted on Dec 5, 2000 - View this thread

Every time you make something foolproof they invent a better fool. Just how the hell did he manage to crack that thing like that, anyway?
posted on Nov 15, 2000 - View this thread

180GB HD anyone? It's a bargain at only $2195.
posted on Nov 14, 2000 - View this thread

The first site to use the "SuperMedia" technology from Rail is up. The new Groovetech.
posted on Nov 8, 2000 - View this thread

True or not?! One of the weirdest things I've ever seen on the web. I was sure this was a hoax and kept digging for confirmation and never found it.
posted on Nov 3, 2000 - View this thread

The next Java frontier: your car. Sun Microsystems announced Monday it would partner with General Motors' dashboard technology division, OnStar, in an effort to make Java the computing standard for the automotive industry.
posted on Oct 16, 2000 - View this thread

Intel has a terrible quarter. Is the PC industry in the toilet, or is it just Intel executing badly?

It's just Intel executing badly. (Reports of the demise of the PC industry are greatly exaggerated.) AMD has another great quarter and appears to be stealing Intel market share.
posted on Oct 11, 2000 - View this thread

I don't recall having heard from anybody that the consumer experience of getting online required redefinition.
posted on Oct 5, 2000 - View this thread

Damien Barrett launches a new column on Macworld with a novel Holmesian (not Oliver Wendell, but Sherlock) approach. Give the man some feedback in the comments section at the bottom of the column. He also redesigned his web site. Damien's cool.
posted on Oct 4, 2000 - View this thread

Reading, 'Riting, 'Rithmetic Jakob Nielsen says "to take the Internet to the next level, users must begin posting their own material ... the vast wasteland of Geocities confirms this. Giving users a home-page editing program does not turn them into good writers." Meg takes Nielsen to task: "his recommended approach is crazy ...Why bog kids down with HTML?" Blogs, of course, are her solution. But for some folks this simply doesn't add up. Saying kids shouldn't learn HTML because Blogger exists is like saying they shouldn't learn to add because calculators exist.
posted on Sep 30, 2000 - View this thread

The Tecno AO electromagnetic bioprotectionoscillator is an almond shaped disk that is 1.2 inches long and attaches to the casing of your cell phone or pager. It emits a magnetic oscillation that may counter the potentially harmful effects of the radiation produced by cell phones.
(quoted from the FAQ)
posted on Sep 30, 2000 - View this thread

The long ride begins to slow. Kick it in gear Steve, the cube was cute but no ones buying.
posted on Sep 29, 2000 - View this thread

130 Years old! See! God may not exist, but technology will outpace religion and THEN I will live FOREVER!
posted on Sep 29, 2000 - View this thread

Dack provides a pointer to the growing backlash in the US against cell phone use. While "conspicuous" phone use can certainly at times be annoying, the general level of distaste and phone rage seems to be a phenomenon confined to the United States.
People in Europe, Australia and Asia, took to mobile technology like the proverbial ducks to water and haven't developed anywhere near the same irritation levels.
Is this just a difficult transition for a country slow to adopt a technology or says something deeper about the American psyche? Afterall, we are talking about the country that invented Dick Tracy and Maxwell Smart.
posted on Aug 3, 2000 - View this thread

I wondered who invented the Internet. Some people would say Al Gore, but even after reading parts of the history of the Internet (first link), I can't figure it out. I think the "USSR" prompted us to do it when they launched Sputnik. Is this really the case?
posted on Jul 24, 2000 - View this thread

IBM's Linux commercial. Part of their Avery Brooks "serious software" ad campaign, which I like a lot, I have to say.
posted on Jul 22, 2000 - View this thread

The Borg have sent a gift to Earth The much rumored Apple cube seems to be real. Apple Insiders has just posted what looks to be a promotional photo of the new computer. Looks pretty cool. Not sure why there are vents on top but still, I wouldn't mind having one.
posted on Jul 18, 2000 - View this thread

YAHOOGLE!!
Your average weblogger's favorite search engine makes the big time (and they just hit a billion pages indexed, too). Will success spoil the Googs?
posted on Jun 27, 2000 - View this thread

teens spin web of the future. great article re: the winners of a competition for teenagers maintaining useful, unique, nonprofit sites.

Emily Boyde, 17, of Newcastle, Australia, was the only female finalist. Her Web site, MatMice, allows kids to create their own Web sites and view sites made by their friends.

She taught herself to write HTML, the language used to create Web sites. "I don't know a lot of other females who do this sort of thing," she said. "But after I saw the Internet, I liked the look of it. So I decided to learn to use it myself."

Emily rocks my world.
What do you think of the winners?
posted on Jun 25, 2000 - View this thread

"Breakthrough in nanotechnology"
posted on Jun 13, 2000 - View this thread

Human Evolution Will the next significant steps be biological, technical or both?
posted on Jun 6, 2000 - View this thread

$50 dollars a year for a Web appliance and unlimited access. After three years, it's free. The only catch I can find is that if you cancel before three years, you have to pay a bazillion dollars. So who's going to make the Virginconnect into a cheap Linux box?
posted on May 14, 2000 - View this thread

Diamond Rio, or Diamond Rio. The choice is yours. [from jose]
posted on May 10, 2000 - View this thread

Does this seem like a bad idea to anyone else?
posted on May 7, 2000 - View this thread

"The attachment can also be sent through Internet Relay Chats (IRC), chat rooms accessible over the Web."
good to know those tech writers at yahoo are up on things.
posted on May 4, 2000 - View this thread

Not only can Kevin Mitnick not touch a computer, cell phone, or the Internet for three years, but a judge is trying to bar him from the lecture circut because he's talking about hacking and technology. I wonder, if they get him to stop talking about technology, are they going to bust him for thinking about it too?
posted on Apr 28, 2000 - View this thread

Phil Katz RIP
posted on Apr 26, 2000 - View this thread

If the Roger Black rant thread has aroused your curiosity, you may want to check out Michael Wolff's profile of Black that ran in New York magazine last fall. It covers the print world more than the web, but it explains the (quite real) Roger Black mystique in greater detal.
posted on Apr 25, 2000 - View this thread

Now here's a doozy of an ethical dilemma. Sometimes technology creates ethical problems, or un-solves ones we had previously solved. I'd be interested in how people answer the question posed in the title. Hmm?
posted on Apr 23, 2000 - View this thread

What's old is new again. This sounds suspiciously like "core", which is what computers used when I was in college.
posted on Apr 9, 2000 - View this thread

Web-related software patents are starting to look like the new cyber-squatting equivalent. People are patenting all sorts of mundane things like "electronic shopping carts" and "making secure purchases via the internet." My guess is in 3 or 4 years, after many of these silly patents have been awarded, we'll see a restructuring of the US patent system.
posted on Feb 22, 2000 - View this thread

The Discovery Channel has a pretty good "Hackers Hall of Fame" but of course they get hacking/phreaking/cracking all munged up. There's a brief bio and short synopsis of activities for each person.
posted on Feb 12, 2000 - View this thread

The Athlon 1.1G Processor is due out this summer. I'm sure I'll need it to run my 36GB hard drives and my 140GB CDROM, but it's still a bit of a shock considering that only a few years ago I decided to splurge and get a cutting edge 486-66(MHz) with a 170MB hard drive I knew I'd never fill it up.
posted on Feb 8, 2000 - View this thread

I often forget that there's still a community of visual basic developers out there building all sorts of goofy apps for windows. This site has a whole bunch of useful utilities, including Gribouille, a program that lets you draw all over your desktop, Pubcruncher, an app that kills popup windows, and my favorite: "Nap and Coffee", a fake app that lets you walk away from your computer and make it appear that you're copying large files, scanning for viruses, or setting up a program.
posted on Feb 6, 2000 - View this thread

This article at zdnet is all about how wireless web devices aren't that handy, and how our lives would suck if wireless web access was everywhere. I heartily disagree. I have a wireless 2Mb LAN connection at work and it's liberating (it's possible to code, listen to shoutcast mp3 streams, and check email outside or down at the coffee house next door). My PCS phone is useful too, I can surf a few important websites when I don't have a laptop around, getting news, weather, and email. Wireless access is certainly a Good Thing, and should make our lives easier, but the article's author is blaming the possible deluge of information on wireless, instead of the user. How would a wireless broadband connection make your life better or worse?
posted on Feb 1, 2000 - View this thread

Paying for McDonalds drive-thru food without cash is the latest shameless marketing attempt to make things as "convenient " as possible. The sad thing is, what they're really trying to do is separate the notion of real money from "digital money" so you'll buy more stuff, thinking it's all monopoly money (credit card companies have built an industry on doing exactly this).
posted on Jan 26, 2000 - View this thread

If you're in Arizona, you'll be able to vote online for your Democratic Primary candidate this year. Nuts! I can't wait to see how this works out. All I can think is that it will be a security nightmare and hell on server resources to do that many writes to a database in a short period of time. I hope it's a success, and spreads to my state, so I won't have to go through the trouble of finding my polling place, waiting in line, and getting to work on time. You want voter participation to go above 20%? Make it easier.
posted on Jan 18, 2000 - View this thread

Webcams are pretty boring in general, and have been around forever, but leave it to Jason Kottke to inject new life into them. Here's what I came up with while playing with it.
posted on Jan 16, 2000 - View this thread

Ever noticed that the also-rans who have yet to be acquired by one of their peers seem to glom together like cornmeal in water? Take a look at who Be is partnering with for their Stinger internet appliance software: Bitstream - clearly a runner-up to Adobe in the typeface technology department; and Opera - who are trying desperately to be the alternative browser of choice. Who's next? Corel, and their latest BeOS port of WordPerfect?
posted on Dec 9, 1999 - View this thread

(via /.) comes the much-rumored new 4.8 Gb personal mp3 player. I heard about this a long time ago, but it seemed like a fantasy. 4.8 gigs! That's hours and hours of mp3's! My entire collection at home and work is less than 4 gigs. They claim it's going to be released next week. If they can sell if for under $300, I bet they won't be able to produce enough for the demand. The revolution has begun.
posted on Nov 10, 1999 - View this thread

If you don't know about the iPic server, you should. And if you do, you should check out the site again. The iPic server is the world's smallest Web server. It contains a few files on a chip the size of a nickel. If this isn't sassy, I don't know what is.
posted on Oct 26, 1999 - View this thread

This is most amazing traceroute app I've ever seen. It combines simple traceroute and ping capabilities with a simple GIS-like mapping component that resolves the location of network hops based on whois queries. Cool stuff.
posted on Aug 17, 1999 - View this thread

I'd heard about these for a while now but it's good to see actual shots of them. Barbie and Hot Wheels branded PCs are on the way. This is another sign that computers are becoming ingrained into our daily lives, when I was a kid, all I remember wanting was a racecar-shaped bed.
posted on Aug 6, 1999 - View this thread

Strange blue Mac products will soon be available from a Singapore company. It looks like they've tried to mimic the Microsoft Phone and the Diamond Rio for a mac audience.
posted on Jul 27, 1999 - View this thread