Over the past 30 years, designer, writer and Principal Researcher for Microsoft Research
Bill Buxton has collected input and interactive devices whose designs he found "interesting, useful or important. In the process, he has assembled a good collection of the history of pen computing, pointing devices, touch technologies, as well as an illustration of the nature of how new technologies emerge." This week, he
unveiled his collection at the Computer-Human Interaction conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. An extensive gallery has been posted online with images and notes at
The Buxton Collection.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on May 11, 2011 -
6 comments
A Tragedy of Errors. On Feb. 21, 2010, a convoy of vehicles carrying civilians headed down a mountain in central Afghanistan and American eyes in the sky were watching. "The Americans were using some of the most
sophisticated tools in the history of war, technological marvels of surveillance and intelligence gathering that allowed them to see into once-inaccessible corners of the battlefield. But the high-tech wizardry would
fail in its most elemental purpose: to tell the difference between friend and foe."
FOIA-obtained
transcripts of US cockpit and radio conversations and
an interactive feature provide a more in-depth understanding of what happened.
posted by zarq
on Apr 10, 2011 -
59 comments
Let's say just for a moment that you were ready to cash out. Quit your job. Sell your house. Take you and yours out of the rat race with a few hundred of your friends and family and relocate onto arable land. What tools would you need to sustain a livable—maybe even comfortable—lifestyle?
Open Source Ecology suggests you start with ~2.6 million dollars and
these |
fifty |
machines (← watch this first), collectively referred to as the Global Village Construction Set.
posted by carsonb
on Mar 28, 2011 -
48 comments
"The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin. Mr. Spitz has provided a rare glimpse — an unprecedented one, privacy experts say —
of what is being collected as we walk around with our phones."
posted by Scoop
on Mar 26, 2011 -
45 comments
"
Towards a Sustainable Global Golden Age" (four youtube links) is a talk by Carlota Perez comparing the current revolution in information and communications technologies (ICT) to four prior technological revolutions. She argues that each revolution has started with a long phase of experimentation driven by finance, which leads to a financial bubble and subsequent crash. The short phase of recovery from the crash is followed by a long phase of consolidation driven by concrete productivity gains and government policy. She believes that NASDAQ was the crash in the ICT revolution, and that we are still in the recovery phase, partly because cheap oil and manufacturing labor facilitated a reemphasis on unskilled-labor- and energy-intensive means of production. She speculates on what may come out of the consolidation phase she hopes we're now entering.
[more inside]
posted by Coventry
on Mar 3, 2011 -
4 comments
(Warning: several-hour documentaries ahead)Peter Joseph, the creator of the 2007 hit conspiracy documentary
Zeitgeist, has
come a long way from pleading 9/11 truth, attacking the foundations of Christianity, and warning of one-world governments. In his 2009 sequel,
Zeitgeist: Addendum, Joseph steers away from the "man behind the curtain" theme and centers the film around a radically different thesis:
money is obsolete,
technology is our future, and
society must be redesigned.
Addendum has enjoyed a dose of
mainstream discussion, but Peter ain't done.
Now it's 2011, and Joseph's third and completing installment,
Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, opened with
314 screenings world wide, and the film bears even less resemblance to its grandparent.
Who is this Peter Joseph guy, anyway? [more inside]
posted by Taft
on Feb 13, 2011 -
89 comments
Reality Touch Theatre at the University of Groningen: "... we turned our existing 3D theatre with a big cylindrical screen into one that can detect 100+ simultaneous touches."
[more inside]
posted by bwg
on Feb 12, 2011 -
4 comments
"We've had revolution in Tunisia, Egypt's Mubarak is teetering; in Yemen, Jordan and Syria suddenly protests have appeared. In Ireland young techno-savvy professionals are agitating for a "Second Republic"; in France the youth from banlieues battled police on the streets to defend the retirement rights of 60-year olds; in Greece striking and rioting have become a national pastime. And in Britain we've had riots and student occupations that changed the political mood.
What's going on? What's the wider social dynamic?"
posted by doobiedoo
on Feb 6, 2011 -
111 comments
The anchor of the printing plant is a custom-built 121-ton web press. ... It prints at a rate of 55,000 pages per hour. ... The mailing system is fully automated and is capable of addressing 150,000 pieces every eight hours. The entire shipping line is capable of shipping better than 500,000 boxes and individual items each week. [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Feb 2, 2011 -
30 comments
The "Brown Stabilizer" - better known as a
Steadicam - had its
first commercial use 35 years ago in
Bound for Glory, Hal Ashby's biopic of Woody Guthrie. Later that year, it was used to film the
iconic shot of Rocky Balboa running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But it was
this shot in
The Shining - which even Kubrick-hater Pauline Kael deemed "spectacular" - that showed the technology's full potential.
(previously)
posted by Joe Beese
on Jan 16, 2011 -
41 comments
We expect even more rapid innovation in the web media platform in the coming year and are focusing our investments in those technologies that are developed and licensed based on open web principles. To that end, we are changing Chrome’s HTML5 <video> support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies. - Google's Chrome is will be joining Firefox in
no longer licensing the MPEG-LA H.264 video codec favoured by Apple and Microsoft for use in the HTML5 <video> tag (
previously).
Not everyone is seeing this as a good thing.
posted by Artw
on Jan 13, 2011 -
145 comments
The French government today said it was the victim of an "economic war" after Renault, the partially state-owned car maker, suspended three top executives over suspected leaks of secret electric car technology.
The French industry minister, Eric Besson, told French radio: "The expression 'economic war', while often outrageous, is for once appropriate here." He said the case illustrated "the risks our companies face in terms of industrial espionage, and economic intelligence".
posted by infini
on Jan 6, 2011 -
28 comments
Google's sheer size and power is staggering - and of course a little disconcerting. But ultimately are they ensuring the internet remains open and user friendly? CBC Radio had a great piece on the
Algorithm That Changed World on how Google has helped keep the internet useful and spammers at bay. As a user, I have not found any other search engine that come close in giving me useful results. Intelligent Life's take on
Apple vs Google, shows how this open system vs closed system philosophical differences plays itself out with product strategy. Of course, Google's user-centric world can suck if you have ever written a
book.
posted by helmutdog
on Dec 28, 2010 -
106 comments
