Google Drive, the infamous GDrive of years yonder, is about to become a reality…
According to “thenextweb”…probably far too late, as seems to be the norm for the big ‘G’ these days. 5GB for free, all major devices and OSes supported.
Facebook Buys Instagram
http://blog.instagram.com/post/20785013897/instagram-facebook
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100318398827991
Apparently the cost was in the $1 billion range.
Photographers the world over have now just about lost all of their edge – even normal folk can take filter enabled and dynamically adjusted photos now. With Facebook behind the wheel, photographers, your days are numbered. Knowledge was your power, not skill, and with every day that passes your advantage dwindles.
Google Begins testing new augmented reality glasses: Project Glass
Full article at the New York Times.
Record-seeking skydiver makes 13-mile test jump
In this photo provided by Red Bull Stratos, Felix Baumgartner prepares to jump during the first manned test flight for Red Bull Stratos over Roswell, N.M. on Thursday, March 15, 2012. Baumgartner is more than halfway toward his goal of setting a world record for the highest jump. A spokesperson says the skydiver took a practice jump from more than 13 miles high over New Mexico. He’s aiming for nearly 23 miles in the summer. The record is held by Joe Kittinger who jumped from 19.5 miles in 1960. (AP Photo/Red Bull Stratos, Jay Nemeth)
More info on the Red Bull Stratos Project.
Indian Albino Family Wait To Be Recognised By Guinness World Records (PICTURES)
Funny how Indian folk can look like Swedes when they’re missing a few extra bits of melanin to regulate their skin and hair pigmentation.
Remove your history from Google’s cache of information
Google knows a lot about you. It knows what sites you visit, they hold your email – they know what you talk about the most and what you search for.
Know your options on how they retain this information.
On March 1st, Google’s new unified privacy policy comes into effect – this means that Google can now use your personal search history to influence the types of targeted ads and recommendations you see, unless of course, you turn it off.
Google, as most corporate entities are wont to do, is being very shady and litigious about this particular type of change.
What they’ve done is pointed to the new privacy policy over and over again, in just about all of their products – touting it’s unified nature and imploring you to please check it out.
It’s a fun change! We’re so happy to unify our privacy policy! The vibe around is just great, isn’t it? They’re being so nice about it too! They’re even making other cursory changes in the visual style of their products to sort of, ease you into the idea that things are changing.
Legally, that’s them putting their best foot forward. If “do no evil” were true, what they’d actually be doing is announcing that they’re going to be using their customer’s search history within their other products, notably their advertising and recommendation engines.
They won’t do that, however, because the legalities around “corporations” as entities allow individuals that work within that type of structure to feel a sense of disconnected anonymity – that way, they can do evil.
Trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes and telling half-truths is evil.
The EFF has instructions on how to remove your web history from Google.
From Google’s perspective, and it’s probably true, all they’re doing is trying to make their products better and more suited to their user’s individual tastes. That’s true, it really is – but what about 10 years from now when the Government and Military decide that Google’s cache of information is in their best interests?
That may or may not happen; the problem is that the data would exist, perhaps not what Google themselves will do with it. Now that it will exist the possibility to exploit it exists. If it doesn’t exist, the possibility to exploit it doesn’t exist.
You should take some time to think about how you feel about that.
The 2012 SI Swimsuit Edition
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/swimsuit/
Regardless of the sheer quantity of porn available on the internet, as well as far more racy photographs of the models on display, here it is fella’s – the 2012 SI Swimsuit Edition. From what I can tell, the big inclusion this year is dudes like swimming sensation MIchael Phelps, yay! The girls take photos in swimsuits with half naked dudes. Good idea, SI.
I can’t think of a more lame and antiquated tradition still in circulation. I give the SI Swimsuit Edition 5 more years until it hits complete and utter cultural irrelevance. When the best feature of your product is that your Dad will tell you it was the only thing around to whack off to back in the non-internet days, your product’s days are numbered.
I’ll still check it out though …
Two Canadian Kids Launch first Lego Legonaut into Space
…details at 11. Not launched via the Propane bottle from yesterday.
Later on this year they can jot down details of their next mission in the Moleskine Lego Notebook we featured last week.
Facebook files for IPO, values company at $100 billion
… while owning 30% of company, that gives that twerp Zuckerberg a cool $30 bil net worth from just Facebook alone.
Pepsi Says Mountain Dew Can Dissolve Mouse Carcasses into Mush-like Gelatin
Man: “You sold me a can of Mountain Dew with a friggin mouse in it! A friggin mouse! I was disgusted! Pay me a million dollaros!”
Pepsi: “Silly human, don’t you know Mountain Dew would easily dissolve a mouse carcass into a mush like gelatin given the conditions you’re suggesting? Laughable! Laughable man!” “NASA uses it to degrease engines for crying out loud…”
Sadly, it’s rather true. Check it out here.
Ciclismo Suicida en Chile (translation: “the best bike couriers in the world…” or something like that…)
Suicide Biking in Chile – watch out for the dogs!
What Happened aboard Air France Flight 447? Why did it plunge into the Ocean and Crash?
In reading through the cockpit transcripts from the flight, sadly, nothing was mechanically wrong with the plane. It was perfectly capable of flying straight and true throughout the storm they had meandered into. It wasn’t hit by lightening, it didn’t experience horrible turbulence or weather it was unable to navigate.
The transcripts show human beings instituted fixes for non-existent problems, additional fixes to solve the problems those fixes created, didn’t recognize computer mode changes, ignored screaming alarms and then the sudden, horrible realization, that it was about to end – the impossible was about to happen, they were about to crash one of the worlds most sophisticated flying machines and none of them were going to survive it.
Two years after the disaster, and not long after the black boxes were recovered from the downed Airbus, the truth of what had occurred within the cockpit has finally been revealed. Confusion reigned supreme, the left hand didn’t know what the right was doing, system modes were switched into without sufficient warning, warning chimes were ignored over and over again – most likely due to unofficial training.
The crux of the issue in the cockpit was this; when the pitot tubes that control the airplane’s air speed indicators iced over and stopped functioning, the aircraft’s auto pilot disengaged and the computer system put the controls into “alternate law”. Within “alternate law”, more control is given to human operators, as opposed to “normal law” (which is the usual operating system mode used in 99% of all flying associated with these airplanes). Under “normal law” conditions, it is not possible to stall an aircraft – the controls won’t allow that to happen, no matter how hard you pull back on the stick. When the system switched over into “alternate law” – more control was given, and the co-pilot in charge of the aircraft at the time stalled the aircraft by over reacting to the conditions present, was unable to recover, and crashed into the ocean.
This is unfortunate for the family of Pierre-Cédric Bonin, co-pilot, who downed what was essentially a perfectly fine flying machine. There were factors, mitigating factors, however – it was inexperienced and unqualified humans that caused this plane to plunge into the ocean. That’s sad.
Give the article from Popular Mechanics a look, it’s a gut tightening read and gives you a sense of the confusion and chaos within the cockpit prior to the airplane descending into the ocean.
Higgs Boson weighs in, appears to be in the range it should be – CERN tightens its grip on potential discovery.
Check out the article at the Huffington Post
I’m concerned about the air of slight irrelevance that’s contained in the articles I’m reading about the Higgs / Boson. “It would be great to find it – just so we can validate our equations.” “It would be nice to cross our t’s and dot our i’s in the physics community…” This is the over-arching field that gives mass to everything, and determines just about every single function of the standard model! Personally, I think it’s incredibly entertaining, and some of the most beautiful science taking place in the world today. Truly a monumental achievement, even if it’s ruled out and we have to redesign all of our physics models.
The Higgs Boson is essentially the quantum of the Higgs field, the smallest definable value of the Higgs field – basically. The Higgs field itself is theorized as a field that permeates everything and ties to particles to give them their inertial mass as they move within it. Particles themselves don’t actually have mass, not until they interact with the Higgs field – the Higgs field is everywhere, it occupies all space throughout the entire Universe. Pretty fundamental stuff, right?
Take you for example, if the Higgs field was not keeping all of your particles together by giving them mass, you would evaporate into space. It’s the field that ties everything together. It’s the most fundamental field theory possible for the most fundamental understanding of how the Universe is created.
Remember how Yoda described the ‘force’, it’s all around us, binds us, that speech? It’s kind of like that – not in the sense that it’s some unknown force that allows Vadar to force-choke folks, in the sense that it’s the field that gives – everything – inertial mass and allows particles to interact with it to maintain their inertial mass.
Apple HDTV to surface soon? 32″ to 55″ models rumored.
Here’s a concept artist’s take on the possibilities. Purportedly expected to cost upwards of twice as much as a regular HDTV, the Apple marketing machine may well have finally bitten off more than it can chew.
The demographic has changed for this one, this time, it’s not about what the cool kids think. Cool kids don’t purchase expensive televisions – old parents do.
On the other hand, “television” is a bit of a misnomer these days – a “television” as such doesn’t really exist anymore – they’re monitors for electric devices, be it a laptop, media box or gaming console. If Apple is indeed going to continue their premium-pricing model, and there’s no reason to suggest they wont, this is not an area that the younger generation will be the primary demographic. Kids get the old TV, not the new one.
Let’s see if they can pull it off and become a dominate player in the TV market such as they have in the laptop, personal music player and tablet markets, personally, I have my doubts. I think Apple is ripe for a decline, it’s the story the public wants, especially after Steve Jobs death. To iconify Jobs, Apple must fall – and fall they will.
If Apple continues to be a massive success, then, well, I guess wasn’t all down to Steve Jobs genius now then was it? It’s a competition, really. Who’s bigger? Steve Jobs? Or Apple? Because only one of them can be the genius who was driving the bus, and so far, we’ve all been told it was Jobs – not the Apple collective, and it certainly wasn’t Tim Cook. Let’s be honest too, we all want it to be Jobs – we love stories like that. Journo’s around the world are salivating for any opportunity to slam Apple as having “lost it” now that Jobs is gone. That backlash is coming, that shit has been stepped in – it’s just a question of whether or not it sticks. I suspect it’ll stick.
Here’s my issue with TV manufacturers and with what they are going to attempt to foist upon you, you will never own a copy of your content. It didn’t work with the Apple TV because no one wanted it for that exact reason, so what they’ve decided is that it was the physical box that was the problem and to solve that they’re going to integrate it directly into the TV. Then use their marketing might to overprice it and sell it on engineering, style and iOS / iTunes functionality (apps!).
Everything content wise will be streamed, or stored in your (their) iCloud. Bluray is the last of the physical formats, and to be honest, still-born when you compare it to the relative longevity of VHS and DVD. I probably shouldn’t say this, but as far as I’m concerned? Bluray is already dead – I haven’t purchased a Bluray in well over a year’s time. Downloading 1080p movies is not that big a deal when you’ve got a 12Mbit connection, which is also not all that rare these days. 5Mbit is all you need to reliably stream HD content (90′s me still giggles when I write stuff like this).
The reason the iPhone, and to an extent, the iPad, are successful is because they give the end user what we had asked for, and more. Prior to the iPhone’s release, we were all stuck in carrier hell with bullshit screens, even the occasional black and white screen, shitty java based games that were next to impossible to install, no app or ‘markets’ to speak of, text based navigation, crappy media managers – it was a joke, and it was wrought upon us by the tight integration between carriers and device makers – both of whom were more interested in counting profit than product innovation.
A level of innovation and success that could have been theirs had they been more forward thinking and less concerned about current shareholder value, as Apple was at the time.
Apple came in and completely shook up the mobile industry by giving consumers what we wanted – finally – a phone and OS that was for us, and wasn’t built from the ground up to be a crappy platform for stealing money from the average user. Consumer land had been stuck in Blackberry envy (this is a condition typified by having a Motorola Razr flip phone while secretly yearning for a Blackberry – but you’re not a business user) for a couple years now, and was overjoyed at what was being presented to us – an upgrade on that platform in every way imaginable, it was simply phone-nirvana, it truly was.
You upgraded my iPod, gave it awesome apps, games, a camera, a touch screen to interact with, 3G, pre-defined gestures for that touch screen that gave the user a feeling that their phone wasn’t rigid or expecting an exact or specific movement. It would respond to those movements, adapt almost – even if their fingers were small, big, fat or thin and then they wrapped it up in a beautiful OS? Oh, right, and as a bonus, it was built to sync with the most popular music service in the world, on one of the most widely available and trusted software platforms in the world (iTunes)? Wow. Simply, wow. It was everything the consumer could have possibly asked for – a monumental moment in history, I truly believe that. It was a platform built exclusively for the consumer. Unsurprisingly, it sold like hot cakes – to all walks of life. A truly ubiquitous product, and quite a moment in time.
Imagine what would have happened had Google not been around to offer the Android platform as a serious alternative, it’s a frightening thought.
So you go right ahead and stream that HD movie to my TV, Apple, and then…? Then you leave it there, allow me to copy it out to other devices, put it in a format that’s easily editable and allow me to control what happens to it from there. But that won’t happen, will it? You will delete it for me. That is why you will fail.
Personally, I utilize Roku, WD and Boxee Box players throughout my house, in addition to the gaming consoles that will play content. I also utilize RSS software for torrents that allows me to setup subscriptions and have my content automatically downloaded without any interaction from me. I have a centralized RAID5 NAS that serves all my media (Movies, Televsion, Photos, Music) to all of these devices. The content is mine, I control it. It never goes down, it never goes away, it never gets integrated with advertising and is never manipulated in any way shape or form without my say so. That’s not where the industry is heading, that’s not where Apple is heading. Apple wants to control how you watch, and in terms of how you watch, what you watch and that’s what these TV’s are about.
The last thing these content providers want is for you to have a copy that you can do whatever you want with, that’s the whole problem with copyright – fair use. If the end user doesn’t have a copy, you have no copyright issues and there is no fair use.
Be wary.
There’s a massive content war brewing my friends, entertainment is due for a paradigm shift. All the players are trying to re-position themselves, you should be keeping an eye on developments.
