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Here is a article on TechTV's site concerning Google's programming contest winner. Hey look I found the /. thread concerning the contest. I can't find the original thread, but I am sure someone out there started one.

I would imagine that if they awarded this guy $10,000 plus expenses for his trip out to visit them, that they would have serious thoughts about adding this feature to their website.

I wonder why Mr. Dan Egnor decided to release all his source code for this project under the GNU liscene when google is paying him all this money to essentially act as a consultant for them.

I wonder how long it takes for the other search engines to integrate this source code into their engines. Is this Teoma Google's closest competitor? They have the Teoma search bar and their site seems to be reasonably fast.

I certainly see no reason to switch.

Oh and by the way the Google Toolbar has been updated apparently since (6/7/02) if you haven't downloaded it since then you might want to check it out again. I think they added some new buttons.

I wonder if that has to do with the article posted today at techt tv from the etherlink company in California.

What is with this incessant desire to make things ever smaller and smaller? I'm just going to take my teeny tiny Motorola V. Series 66 phone, my ultra slim Fujitsu LifeBook S-4510 , which of course is running with QNX as the operating system, viewing the worlds smallest website and neatly set them all in my Mini Cooper S and drive off the nearest curb, falling to my death while transferring all my life's memories onto my IBM Microdrive.

Question: Will it get us to IPv6 or even v7 faster?

btw, The Screensavers have a poll on the topic of 'Should the government control the Web?'
On the Screensavers page scroll down.

I hate these kind of fabricated numbers - the question is, would the 11 million people who are supposedly stealing cable and sat services (more detail here) have really bought 6 billion bucks worth of programming and pay-per-view if they didn't have their illegal access. I think their number would be far lower.

That's like the recording industry claiming massive theft when someone downloads a popular single they heard on the radio - would that person have actually gone out and purchased the CD for that song if the file-sharing apps weren't around? I doubt it, at least most of the time. I know I download hundreds of tunes that I never would have considered buying in the first place (but may now purchase because I get to hear what the CD sounds like - but that's a different argument...)

If I had access to free pay-per-view, I'd watch almost every movie out there, as I'm a huge movie buff. But I don't have free access, and I've never purchased a single pay-per-view program - how can the cable company claim any losses?

I wonder why so many people choose teddy bears for their projects.

teddy bear spy camera

teddy bear network switch

teddy bear terror bomb

Strange geek fetish?

Its only a matter of time until we get Blipverts.

Watching TechTV and they had a story about Northpoint Wireless.

Northpoint wireless wants to offer wireless broadband (tv/music/inet) but the FCC wants to charge for the spectrum, which northpoint owns the copyright for. They believe they should have it for free, its their technology that makes it work. And they cant afford the outrageous prices the FCC wants for the spectrum. They say they can deploy to 90% of the USA.

Who knows, sounds interesting. Maybe someone on slashdot is testing it?

This reminds me of the guy who claimed ownership of the moon and is selling land on it...people think that they can make an e-business by selling the equivalent of a pet rock, only without giving the purchasar/registrar/commandar/landownar/whatevar any tangible thing...unless you want to count an acre of the moon that you can't really own anyway.

I hope that this e-commerce trend ends soon. The current domain name system, nobody-owns-the-moon-"ownership"-program, etc all work fine. I wish companies had learned their lessons back during the dotcom crash - to make money, you have to sell something that is real and/or is good enough to replace what your consumer has already got.

You could try this...I'm not sure about its range, but it will probably work in an average sized room. Just get a walkman and use one of these thingamajigs to play your music on a standard FM Walkman. You could even save batteries and get a crystal radio (just pump up the volume on your PC).

That's the kind of argument DOJ was trying to make and the MPAA ate up: "DeCSS is a digital crowbar."

In that case, I propose that we apply the exact same restrictions to DeCSS that we apply to crowbars.

It's days like this that I look around my room and smile, knowing that I haven't bought a CD in months, rather the room is ever so slowly filling with vinyl. yep. Good old 12" singles. Sometimes I'm glad that I'm not a slave to (North American) popularity and prefer some good old-fashioned techno which comes on non-copy-protectable slabs of black plastic.

. . .But the day they take that away. . .

And the internet radio thing is another story altogether. Anyone who reads this and happens to be in the US (I have no "representative" to write to) write your representative and get Certain legeslation rejected. Please?

We need Larry Lessig to write this email! He's the one law professor who is most up-to-date with the damage that the DMCA, RIAA, CARP and others are doing daily and can articulate it in a way that most non-/. folks will understand. He has taken on Jack Valenti (head of the MPAA) directly in debates and run circles around their theories and ideas.

-info

What happens is that the air is broken down TO PLASMA between the wires so that it conducts electricity, just like lightning 8-D. The spark then convects upwards due to the very hot air. After it's shot off, air is broken down at the bottom again, and another spark is started.

The best photos are probably HERE, but they're yellow sparks (i think that's to do with the gas) which isn't in my opinion as cool as brilliant blue ones :). TechTV also has a page on it and a cool-ish video if you can view asx files. Their JL is pretty weak though, because it stops before the spark "falls off" the end - meaning the wires are too far apart for the voltage to be that small to be able to turn the air in between into plasma.

and installs 'blipverts'!!! Wouldn't surprise me if they did... but will TechTV follow suit?

I don't think we ever knew what system the original show was done on. I assumed it was a custom vector system.. anyone know?

TechTV has the answer.

...and some very good computer-generated special effects (mostly done on Amiga 1000s).

TechTV is owned by Vulcan Inc., the Bellevue, Washington-based investment organization of Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen.

Hmmm... is TechTV objective? Do they also have Apple and Open Source programming?

The Screen Savers also feature a lot of Microsoft bits. But they throw a lot of other bits in there too. They did a week of shows mostly dedicated to Linux. They do "alteratips" which are tips for mostly MacOS X and Linux (although, like the Windows tips, they're pretty light-weight). They do on-air help calls for Linux and Mac issues on occasion. The show hosts occasionally grumble about Microsoft and its faults (technical and political/marketing). Tux appears in the background often. OSX's strengths are lauded. Linux is often portrayed as an OS people already enjoy, and the viewer might like to try out too. And for their daily tech news, they often quote articles from Slashdot.

Of course, that's not to say all of TechTV is as enlightned. Sometimes TechTV Live and Cyber Crime have articles with viewpoints and/or quotes that make me cringe.

In all, Paul Allen seems to have a fairly wide focus despite his involvement in Microsoft. And TechTV seems to harbor an environment that allows a reflection of a wide degree of the IT industry.

TechTV is owned by Vulcan Inc., the Bellevue, Washington-based investment organization of Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen.

Hmmm... is TechTV objective? Do they also have Apple and Open Source programming? I really don't know. Otherwise this scares me.

Carl

• Asia: Dumping ground for high-tech trash
• Recycled Electronics Pose a Health Hazard in Asia
• Cleaning Up Computer Trash

b) Far as I can see he really didn't "make" anything, it's the same old boards, ports, controllers, etc, just superglued in a PC case.

now this deserves props, HE actually MADE something ORIGINAL, not just pop open his consoles and superglue them in a PC case!

I have a feeling TechTV is just trying to appeal to the geek crowd by passing this off as a "hack". Sorry but I don't buy it, it's just several consoles with the cases removed shoved in a PC case. That's not a hack or "work of art" as the arrogant Yoshi called it.

First, Baldur's Gate has a great option... in the Options tab you can set BG to run in a window instead of full-screen. This can kill the playability on older PCs but BG isn't an action game so it's still a viable option.

Also many games support the (on windows) ALT+ENTER hotkey to switch between normal and full screen mode (like if you're watching a DVD or MPEG you can switch this way).

But whatever your game of choice, if, unlike at Kasmiur's, your workplace does not allow games, you might want to look into an insanely useful program called "Watchcat." First of all, it's FREEWARE. The program, either by clicks or hotkeys, will hide any or all applications currently running... so if you're a Solitaire freak and you hear someone coming up, smack that hotkey and not only is the game off the desktop, it's off of the taskbar too. This program ROCKS.

Here's a small article about the program on Tech TV

They've had tutorials on how to build your own Teddy Borg, among other things. I do wish they'd give credit to the originators of the design on the show and the website, instead of just the site, though.

And, this does nothing for other countries. And, this does nothing but group porn where it will be easier to find. For example, if I am wanting to go to the White House, but instead put in http://www.whitehouse.com, then I hit a porn site. Or, I can just put ".com" after phrases like "blowjob", "sexydancers", etc., and be fairly assured of porn sites. Now, just tack on ".prn" to any group of words in the english language? A kid won't be able to type in ".prn"?

TechTV's Screensavers show did a roundup of Office alternatives, last week. There's a summary of the show at http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/showtell/story/ 0,24330,3378739,00.html.

They picked gobeProductive over ThinkFree AND Star Office!

hmm..no pictures of it in action...a link to their news segment which has video of it in action i guess doesn't qualify

you're right..it is a lousy review ;-)

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi

You know, the first time I heard comedian George Carlin say during a performance that "this country was bought and sold a long time ago", I laughed it off as no big deal; an idea from an individual trying to entertain. When the DMCA came around, I thought, "well it's ok, it'll have amendments attatched to it to ensure nothing like the original actually makes it to law". The DMCA is now used to prosecute law-abiding people now. Now we come to the CBDTPA.

By this point, I've lost virtually all hope for the government of my great country. I've watched as my rights have been stripped away at an unbelievable rate in the last 5 years, and it leads me to believe that all we've fought for since breaking away from Brittain in the 18th century is almost gone. In the wake of Sept 11th, our privacy has been ripped away, our innermost secrets about our supposedly private lives demanded by our government. Communications are snooped, our own spies have turned their eyes and ears on us, and our government, while becoming more secretive, has simultaneously informed us all that we, as of now, are no longer allowed secrets; at least not from them.

And now we come to the CBDTPA, formerly known as the SSSCA. Assuming this bill makes it into law without serious modifications, we will soon see the end to entertainment as we know it. But much, much worse, we will finally know for certain that our government has been purchased from us while we weren't looking - sold to a few large corporations who will, from now on, dictate when, how, why, and if (yes if) we may lead our lives.

This sounds so outrageously apocolyptic that many reading this will have already dismissed my posting as meaningless. However, consider this for a moment - if I told you 5 years ago that you could be jailed for informing an audience of people about a security vulnerability without ever having helped to or supplied the tools to exploit that vulnerability, would you have laughed? For anyone who works in law, if I had told you 5 years ago that making a speech that was neither slanderous nor the cause of (in the words of the Supreme Court) 'clear and present danger' (such as yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre) would cause a person to be arrested, would you not have pointed out all the reasons why this could never happen in America? How about this - if I told you 10, 20, 50 years ago that a person could be arrested and jailed for nearly four years without a trial, would you have not been outraged? (Regardless of whether he was right or wrong or whatever, he is supposed to be protected under the Constitution, and therefore is supposed to have the right to a "speedy trial".)

Now what really concerns me here is the fact that when you look at the people in Congress who are the most supportive of the CBDTPA, you find that they are the same people who receive the most money from the entertainment industry. "This makes sense" you say, but my question is simply this - when an elected official passes bills contrary to the public interest and desire to serve the ends of his campaign contributors, how is this any different than a judge taking money from a defendant in exchange for a lighter sentence? Are they not both saying, "if you give me alot of money, I will use my power in office to ensure your interests are furthered, regardless of the public interest."? In this case, the CBDTPA continues where the DMCA left off, stripping away at what has been declared by the courts to be 'fair use'. This serves only to maintain the profit margains of the entertainment industry, while forcing yet more money out of the pockets of consumers. This most certainly doesn't help more than a few people in all of South Carolina, and certainly helps almost no minorities anywhere. Yet a democratic (democrats generally champion the rights of minorities and individuals) Senator from SC has been attempting to force this bill into law, even threatening to use his position on the appropriations and budget committees to kill funding for anyone who stands in his way. Why would a democrat from SC want to throw every bit of weight he has into such an anti-individual, pro-corporation bill? Money. The entertainment industry has, year after year, been one of Senator Ernest Fritz Hollings biggest campaign contributors. This is a simple equation folks, money for laws. You give me money, I give you laws. If a group of people raised more money for Hollings' next campaign than the entertainment industry, we could get the DMCA repealed in no time and be on our way to getting whatever laws we want on the books. This, ladies and gents, is completely pathetic. Someone ought to make an Ebay user name EFHollings and start auctioning off laws in a dutch auction; as it's what he does every day.

While this annoyed me when I first realized it, it didn't really hit me nearly so hard as when I read this latest article, and others like it, outlining the support for this bill throughout Congress. When you look at the people pushing this bill, one by one you see they're getting most if not nearly all of their money from the entertainment industry. Carlin was right, this country is being bought and sold. The worst part is, the average person is either too stupid, too ignorant, or too apathetic to see where all this is heading, and just how far it's come in the last 5 years.

It doesn't get much better when you look elsewhere either. In the wake of the absolute horror of September 11th, I see something even worse washing up behind it. They won. That's right, I mean the terrorists; they won. What could possibly make an American who loves his country and wants to see it become the greatest unified nation in history say such a thing? Policies, laws, etc, etc, etc. It's not the war, mind you; I'm all for wiping out all who had anything to do with what happened that day or would like to see things like it happen in the future. And I'm certainly all for turning bin Laden over to the Israelies so they can have fun with him. (Our laws just don't allow the things I want to see happen to him; they on the other hand, have no problem turning his existance into the closest thing to hell on Earth any twisted imagination could possibly come up with... gotta love Israeli intelligence ;) ) No, the war is fine. The support for the war and the President has been great. But they still won, in that they managed to allow our most basic freedoms to be either taken away or put up for review.

Who would have objected to a strip search every time you walk into the airport 5 years ago? My goodness, such an idea would have brought outrage and shock. But since September 11th, people want to feel warm and cozy and safe, and they seem to think all this new security, like this x-ray machine that allows screeners to do a virtual strip search of you. Most people seem to be under the dillusion that in 10 years it'll all be back to normal and we'll all go about like we do now. I can only hope so, but once this technology is widely available and fairly cheap, I can see everyone from government to corporations, to schools putting this in and refining it further. Personally, I'm extremely offended by the idea of any fool off the street (yes, the security personnel at airports are usually but not always lacking in the mental dept.) being able to get a pretty graphic shot of my entire body. Why? Well, invasion of privacy is the easy one. But how about this one? In this country, we work under a system that you are innocent until proven guilty. Now, in this situation, I fully understand that increased security must allow for a bit of elasticity here. In this case, feel free to xray the hell out of my luggage until my underwear bakes if it makes you happy. As for me, I'll happily go through your metal detector if it makes you happy; it'll certainly make me a little happier to see everyone else going through it. And feel free to run my name against a list of known terrorists. If something comes up funny, pull me aside and we'll have a chat. With none of this do I have a problem. Want to put armed air marshals on every flight? By all means, hell, I'll pay a little extra on my ticket if it ensures there's a couple on my plane. Just make sure they're not psychotic, stupid, incapable or unwilling to perform as needed, and not themselves terrorists. I'm sure there are many other wonderful security ideas we can come up with that don't involve Sgt Ricky and Officer Mickey staring at my unclothed body when all I want to do is go to Cali for a holiday trip.

Other examples of this include carnivore, which was pushed up after Sept 11th, and this stuff I keep hearing about the government using trojans to extract (or possibly inject) incriminating evidence from computers of US citizens. I'm reasonably confident that my paranoid security setup will insulate me fairly well from this silly toy (I hear it could have been better coded by a 12yo) but for all the clueless users out there (5 9's of them.. ie. 99.999%) I feel it's an outrageous violation of their right to privacy and their presumed innocence. Not to mention the fact that the potential for abuse is so extreme, it boggles the mind as to how in the world this wouldn't get all FBI/CIA/NSA folks having anything to do with this arrested immediately. You can hack into my computer and plant evidence and I'll go to jail for 10+ years, but if I hack into your computers and do nothing more than type ls/dir for 6 hours over and over, I'll go to jail for 10+ years. Hmm... do as I say, not as I do?

So in the last 5 or so years, we've seen fair use, freedom of speech, presumed innocence, privacy, and many, many other basic Constitutionally guaranteed rights disappear. And now it looks like our government officials could be spending half their time in eBay private auctions to see who gets the laws they wanted for christmas.

I think I'll move to Holland now. Dutch people are pretty cool.

Don't take my word for it, there's an article here:

http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/showtell/story/ 0,24330,3349719,00.html/

Deedrit -q6-

While it doesn't go into depth, several PC tablets where covered at TechTV in their article Tablet PCs: The New Ultraportable? based on their shown of February 7. It would seem to have the links to the major players. Now what I want to is is get my audio/video routed then controlled by such a beast.

While it doesn't go into depth, several PC tablets where covered at TechTV in their article Tablet PCs: The New Ultraportable? based on their shown of February 7. It would seem to have the links to the major players. Now what I want to is is get my audio/video routed then controlled by such a beast.

The Hiptop by Danger, Inc. uses a JVM to power their wireless, always-on PDA.

Danger, Inc.

Various articles about the device can be found via Google; TechTV had a reasonable review of the device.

It isn't vaporware, it just isn't out yet.

Fresh Gear on Tech TV is running a story about an Electroactive polymer being explored for personal power generation for the military. Right at the end of the story they address other uses for this polymer including using a thin layer of this material to create a new type of loud speaker.

This article has a bit of the story as well as show times.

Fresh Gear on Tech TV is running a story about an Electroactive polymer being explored for personal power generation for the military. Right at the end of the story they address other uses for this polymer including using a thin layer of this material to create a new type of loud speaker.

This article has a bit of the story as well as show times.

Fresh Gear on Tech TV is running a story about an Electroactive polymer being explored for personal power generation for the military. Right at the end of the story they address other uses for this polymer including using a thin layer of this material to create a new type of loud speaker.

This article has a bit of the story as well as show times.

Better to invest in laser propultion and linear magnetic launchers.

Or time machines =) Now, if we could just get the power equivilant of a supernova into something the size of... say... a VW bug...

~z

Of course, while all this may be technically possible, it doesn't mean NASA has the money to pay for it. The price tag for the initial Earth-based space elevator is estimated to be $40 billion.

What's Moxie?

Essentially it's a TiVo with expanded capabilities. The CEO is from WebTV and has a good track record, on the other hand they've a late start into the market and are up against some powerfull licensees of TiVo & RePlay's technologies.

Its expected on the market for next winter's buying season if it finds partners.

You should have seen this on techtv...

here is one mention of it...

... Intel's Wireless Gateway and will let PC users go from a hardwired connection to a wireless connection and back, seamlessly.

Would be nice if I had some form of wireless network in the first place

If you look at Mars' atmosphere, you see a 50x higher concentration of carbondioxide compared to earth.

After an initial flurry of excitement, the original Miller-Urey experiments which produced some amino acids also highlighted a number of problems on the way along said road.

• The experiment was highly artifical, not at all a good representation of putative early Earth conditions
  
• despite this, we would expect some amino acids to form anyway, due to the chemical potentials involved (there is a dip in the road to life, into which some chemical processes will roll with very little pursuasion)
  
• the dip in potential has another side, and that looks kind of like the roads you see in some cartoons, which lead up to the base of a cliff, then trundle straight on up the face of it; what this means in real terms is that not only do some simple atoms/molecules find it relatively easy to become amino acids, but also more complicated molecules find it much easier to relapse to aminoness and it's very unlikely that aminos will self-assemble into anything much more complicated
  
• the acids formed were racemised, that is, about half of them were twisted the wrong way; with one exception, amino acids in living beings are twisted left-handed (are said to have left-handed chirality)
  
• the putative primitive conditions also destroy even the simple amino acids formed by the experiment very quickly
  
• the early conditions involve a heck of a lot of chemicals unlikely to exist in useful amounts on Mars
  
• for that matter, there is much evidence that Earth did not have a reducing atmosphere like the one used in the experiment, or at least did not have one for very long.
  

I think it's more important that the presence of water enables us to create colonies on Mars in the near future

Since the shopping site is low on details, here's TechTV's 7-paragraph description of the product.

Yes, the author is amazingly optimistic about human intelligence in general. They should not be taken seriously. I saw an interview with this guy on TechTV during an airing of The Screensavers, and I feel I can safely state that the author would agree with me in saying that it's not the foretelling that's important, but rather the intentions and thoughts behind them.

Let's not forget that Americans living during the 1900s lived in slums in the major cities of New York and Chicago. They invisioned flying cars and personal spacecraft before stumbling onto the Great Depression and two world wars. Let's not _underestimate_ human achievement either.

The author's intentions in this is to show what _can_ happen, given the proper circumstances and funding. I personally feel that if and when some glorious invention / annovation is made (e.g., time travel or "cure" for aging), it will be developed (and thus _patented_) by a whatever company creates it, and thus, most people will never see its hayday, until half a century later when politicians realize what a fucked up world it is. I can envision a world where time travel is patented by Sony and there's a huge Nike swoosh over Mars. Basically the worst parts of the Bible and The Matrix.

IMO, the author simply wants to foster intelligent conversation among people who care: this is what the world can be like. Here's what has to be done to prevent that... The power rests in your hands. Welcome to the Real World.

actually the screen savers already did it, sorta. It was when they reviewed the StarWars skin for warcraft (or ages or whatever it was...) that was passed off as a new game a while ago... the best quote of the review went along the lines of "but some parts of the star wars universe don't translate well... when was the last time you saw a jedi knight hacking away at a building with a light saber? ... but decimating a legion of jar-jar binks with a couple jedis is a thing to behold."

... implies they've tried before.

It was the "More Fast and Furious" soundtrack CD and the resulted in this discussion when it was found the protection could be bypassed with a DVD player.

We're getting science news from the TV now are we?
Heaven help us!

I have to totally disagree with this notion of "built in obsolesence." In fact, the general consensus (even amongst wintel folks) is that Apple computers hold their value far longer than any other brand out there (see here and here for examples). Just take a stroll through the Apple section on eBay if you don't believe me (although, I admit that people on eBay will pay more for anything just for the joy of buying on ebay, but you can still make the comparison).

I will use my own set up as an example:
I have 4 Macs. My mp3 server is a Performa 6400 (200 MHz 603ev processor) from 1996. It runs OS 9.1 and serves as my stereo system and sometimes backup file server. My intranet web server is a Powerbook G3 (233 Mhz PPC 750 processor) with 288 MB of RAM. It runs apache and a host of other apps through OS 10.1.2 and is connected to my lan with a wireless ethernet pc card. It was purchased in 1998. My ftp, hotline and test box is a Beige G3 (266 MHz) with 640 mb of RAM and a 30gb maxtor hd. It runs OS 9.2 and webstar's ftp server. I've had it since early 1998. My everday machine is a G4 titanium which is the absolute best piece of hardware I have ever owned. :)

So, I have machines that are 6 years that still fulfill a worthwhile purpose on my home network. Excluding the oldest (the 6400) machine that will probably be donated to someone else in the near future, I still have 4 and 5 year old Macs that I have no need, and no foreseeable need, to replace.

Comparing Apples to BMWs is an old cliche, but it is quite appropriate in this argument. They cost a little more in the beginning but they hold their value for an amazing length of time.

Frank

there's a link to a video clip of Taco and Hemos This Page if you just want to see what they look like. (on the screensavers)

I just heard it announced on TechTV, VA Software (Slashdot's parent company) has filed for bankruptcy! I'm sure we'll be hearing more about it later today, and it will be hard to notice when the site shuts down. It's really a shame to see such a great resourse as this go out of business. Hopefully another company will soon step forward and offer to host Slashdot.

I just heard it announced on TechTV, VA Software (Slashdot's parent company) has filed for bankruptcy! I'm sure we'll be hearing more about it later today, and it will be hard to notice when the site shuts down. It's really a shame to see such a great resourse as this go out of business. Hopefully another company will soon step forward and offer to host Slashdot.

http://www.techtv.com/news/computing/story/0,24195 ,3369727,00.html

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-824392.html

Reuters story can be found here and there is a story here on The Guardian.