January 2008
95 posts
Apple-Stanford promotion on iTunes →
Filed under: iTS, iTunes
Apple and Stanford University’s Lively Arts have teamed up to bring a new promotion to iTunes and iTunes U. This new promotion will allow people associated with Standford in some capacity (students, faculty, and staff) and Lively Arts patrons to download free songs from artists participating in SU’s Lively Arts. On Stanford’s website, they list all of...
Shape-shifting magnetic bots take a page out of... →
Filed under: Robots
Research is still in the early stages, but the concept renders are straight out of science fiction. Some friendly folks at Carnegie Mellon University are working towards electromagnetic microscopic bots that cling together and can assume virtually any shape. Down the line that means rapid prototyping, the promise of “claytronics,” and the mysterious deaths of...
File Action: a free, light-weight alternative to... →
Filed under: Productivity, Freeware, .Mac
Many of us here around the TUAW home office love Hazel ($21.95), the great folder-based automation utility that you can set up to run various rules to process (e.g. move, copy, sort) your files. However, we also like free, and so I was intrigued by a new application called File Action that is basically a kind of Hazel-light. File Action concentrates on...
Tool Use Is Just a Trick of the Mind →
TwistedOne151 writes to recommend a ScienceNOW article describing the work of a team of Italian neurobiologists who have found the roots of the capacity for tool use in the primate brain: the brain treats the tool as part of the body. The experiment as described is passing clever. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Staged Reuters Photos Prove People Of Palestine... →
Reuters might have another little problem with dramatic photos from the Middle East. The wire service sent this photo out last week with the caption “Palestinian lawmakers attend a parliament session in candlelight during a power cut in Gaza January 22, 2008.” The photo—taken, along with a couple similar ones, by Gaza local Reuters photog Mohammed Salem—purports to show how...
How The Government Kept Countrywide Afloat →
There’s little in Countrywide’s earnings announcement that seem likely to shake Bank of America from its desire to own the home lending giant. Indeed, shares of Countrywide moved up this morning and the merger arb gap narrowed to 80% or so, implying that traders are getting more confident the deal will eventually close. This morning the Wall Street Journal carried an interesting article that...
Looking For Risk In All The Wrong Places →
In the demonological pantheon of the subprime crisis orthodoxy, the deepest level of hell are reserved for unscrupulous lenders. Uncreditworthy borrowers live at a slightly higher plane, nearby unvigiliant regulators. But the cant and caterwauling of the orthodox overlooks that much of the world was focused on quite different concerns before the mortgage bills for the ownership society came due....
The Autumn of the Multitaskers →
Pretty good article by Walter Kirn in The Atlantic on the neuroscience that shows that multitasking makes us less effective, not more effective. At least I think it was a good article; I read it last night on my iPhone while watching a movie. (Via Rands.)
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Google Contest Winner Delivers Clean Water via... →
You may not have heard of Google’s Innovate or Die competition, but it was a $5000 contest for coming up with a method to provide rural communities with water—an endeavor that doesn’t sound glorious, but is quite important to thirsty people. Aquaduct, the winning team, created a bicycle that can both help transport water quickly and easily, but clean that water at the same time!...
Ghostly Voice Gives Mitt Romney Some Debate Help... →
What exactly was that weird, whispery voice we heard between last night’s question to Mitt about Reagan and Social Security and Romney’s answer? Either Ronald Reagan is giving help from beyond the grave or Mitt was wearing a wire. The question, from Tim Russert: “I know you’re a big fan of Ronald Reagan. Will you do for Social Security what Ronald Reagan did in 1983?” The ghostly voice says...
New York Times To McCain: It's Not You. It's... →
Besides pledging their time to Hillary Clinton, the New York Times also endorsed John McCain as the Republican presidential candidate. Though they were suitably adoring of McCain (war hero, integrity, blah blah blah) the real reason might be found in the paper’s furious and almost purifying rage against former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani: “The real Mr. Giuliani, whom many New Yorkers came...
PARIS - club sandwich, la scala, 01/24/08 →
Scoble Sells Out →
Robert Scoble, who has long been proud of the fact that his popular blog remains free of advertisements or sponsorships, will soon put ads on his site, he told me yesterday.
The change comes as part of his move to Fast Company, who will sell the ads on his behalf and will also be redesigning the site.
Scoble and Dave Winer have been the main proponents of advertising-free blogs over the years,...
Plaid Military Coat →
He must have been expecting to be flash photographed. I often wish I could comment on the attitude, voice, or vibe of a certain person I photograph. Stylites is not a platform for my thoughts and criticisms though. With so much Burberry print covering China - in collars, fake scarves, ties, and window curtains - this ranks as a use of the plaid that I like. The young entrepreneur’s plaid...
Journal →
Talking About AT&T’s Internet Filtering on... →
Boing Boing Gadget’s Joel Johnson: Yesterday, I was invited to talk about gadgets on The Hugh Thompson Show, a television-style talk show sponsored exclusively by AT&T for distribution on the online AT&T Tech Channel. I eventually did talk about gadgets, but in light of AT&T’s shocking and baffling announcement of their plans to filter the internet, I thought that a much more...
Top 5 GMAT Test-Taking Strategies →
by Chris Ryan, Director of Instructor and Product Development, ManhattanGMAT
You’ve studied all the content, you’ve done hundreds of problems, you’ve taken practice test after practice test. And now, it’s GMAT game day. You’re following all the logistics tips: you got enough sleep last night, you’ve shown up early, you haven’t eaten anything funny, you plan to take the breaks while giving...
Office 2008 Installer Assigns Most Files to User... →
Joel Bruner on a bizarre bug in Office 2008’s installer: First things first: They’ve moved to Apple’s Package Maker (.pkg) installer files, good news for the enterprise rollouts? Well, unfortunately they’ve created all the packages to install most all of the files with the owner set to 502.
This will grant a non-admin user — if that user is the second one created on the machine — ownership of...
Edward Tufte: Interface Design and the iPhone →
Smart video presentation by design genius Edward Tufte, demonstrating the cleverness of the iPhone’s UI, with particular emphasis on the way it maximizes available screen space by eliminating pixel-wasting “computer administrative debris” (e.g. scroll bars). (Thanks to David Magda.)
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Pownce Opens To Public Tonight At Midnight; Early... →
Pownce, a service that lets users send messages, files, links, and events to friends, first launched into private beta over six months ago. It was founded by Leah Culver, Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka (Rose and Burka of Digg fame).
Tonight at midnight PST Pownce leaves private beta and anyone can join. There are 150,000 or so users in the service now - users have been waitlisted so that the sole...
Airport Extreme owners not happy to be left out of... →
Filed under: Storage, Networking
It’s no secret that most of you aren’t exactly pleased with Apple’s decision to charge $20 to add in Mail, Maps, Stocks, Weather, and Notes to the iPod touch, but there’s another segment of Apple users feeling burned by last week’s announcements: Airport Extreme owners. Seems like Apple’s only enabled network support for Time...
New Firmware Fixes Previously Bricked iPhones →
drcagn writes “Ars Technica reports that Apple’s new 1.1.3 firmware update unbricks iPhones damaged from unlocking and updating the firmware months ago. In September, users who hacked their iPhone’s firmware to unlock it found their iPhone bricked when they updated to new firmware, creating a massive upset and internet furor. Although Apple claimed this was not an intended effect...
Great moments in movie stealing: Netflix and Apple... →
Two hacks came to light last night that enable the overly excitable to grab streaming and rented movies for longer than the alloted time period. First, you can add a bit of Greasemonkey code to Mozilla to download streaming video from Netflix.
1. install the Greasemonkey add-on for firefox. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748. restart firefox after installing.
2. unzip the...
AT&T's Retarded Plan to Filter the... →
Tim Wu’s fantastic piece on Slate, describing the inanity that is AT&T’s plans to try and filter all its internet traffic for copyrighted works. Wu lays out the various reasons why this is a bad idea, but I really like how he focuses primarily on why this would be bad business. AT&T is much more likely to respond to financial pressure than ethical if history is any guide....
A Sticky Intellectual Property Saga →
One of the most amazing intellectual property rights stories out of China is the saga of an American adhesive manufacturer who accuses a Hunan-based company of ripping off their product line and their corporate identity. The Hunan company’s boss was arrested in London last fall. He faced extradition to the U.S. and was scheduled to appear at a hearing last week, but he skipped bail and...
★ Keynote Roundup →
Miscellaneous thoughts and observations from yesterday’s Macworld Expo keynote: Office 2008 I was interested to see whether Microsoft would get some demo time during the keynote to show Office 2008. The Mac BU hasn’t always gotten stage time, but, I think, they have always gotten stage time in keynotes when they have a brand-new major version of Office. Not this year. Jobs did mention the Office...
Scambaiting at its finest: Tricking Nigerian... →
Wow. Nothing better than seeing a scammer get scammed. There have been some pretty ingenious scambaiting techniques throughout the ages, but getting a scammer to rewrite all 293 pages of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by hand has got to be in the top ten of all time. Kudos to the 419 Eater web site for all the great trickery.
Harry Potter & The Well of Scammers [419 Eater] via...
Apple Introduces Manila Case—The World's... →
MACWORLD SAN FRANCISCO—January 16, 2008—Apple® today unveiled Manila® Case®, the world’s thinnest case for the world’s thinnest laptop, theMacBook Air. When empty, Manila Case measures an unprecedented 0.07-inches at its thinnest point, but its dynamically adaptable height goes up to a maximum of 6.9-inches, adapting perfectly to the MacBook Air shape as well as to a standard* Reuben...
MacBook Pro Woes: What Should I Do Now? [Buyer's... →
Alright, so I was fairly impressed with the Macworld keynote. Lots of neat little bits, and the MacBook Air is a pretty amazing sliver of a machine. But it’s not what many of us had hoped for. All I really wanted for Macworld was a 13-inch MacBook Pro. A serious but compact workhorse, not a sexy will-o-the-wisp. And now I’m too scared to even buy the current 15-inch MacBook Pro. Why?...
The Kitchen Sink Does Not Include $37.3 Billion In... →
So this is the much vaunted kitchen sink? Citigroup took a $18.1 billion write-down in sub-prime related assets. But as they just discussed on the conference call, Citi still had $37.3 billion in direct and indirect subprime exposure at the end of the quarter. That’s still a lot of risk on in asset classes that no-one can confidently value. Even Citigroup admits that it is just looking at...
'War on Terror' Allies Form Information... →
Wowsers writes us with a story from The Guardian about FBI interest in connectivity between its own database resources and those abroad. It’s spearheading a program labeled ‘Server in the Sky’, meant to coordinate the police forces of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to better fight international crime/terrorist groups. The group is...
Long SARS →
SARS is trading near all-time lows. It’s been dead money for a few years. Our analysis indicates that a resurgence is due and would lead to an absolute killing for longs, especially when you consider the potential for investor sentiment to become infected with exuberance when institutional money flows in. We think it is highly likely that SARS will really take flight in 2008; don’t be surprised if...
WSJ.com - Trader Made Billions on Subprime →
John Paulson made a spectacularly successful bet against the housing market at the right time. The little-known hedge fund manager reaped what’s believed to be the largest one-year payday in Wall Street history. Here’s how he did it.
Wealth and Fame →
At least in contemporary finance culture (is there such a thing?) the interplay between money and fame is most glaringly apparent in the world of hedge funds. Be this as it may, some recent incidents have caused me to wonder to myself if this dynamic, like many in contemporary finance culture (if there is such a thing), isn’t more complex than it first appears. Incentive fees (and...
Comment bait →
By David Roberts
Duck! An official report from People for The Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), submitted nine months after a Virginia government agency’s deadline, shows that the animal rights group put to death more than 97 percent of the dogs, cats, and other pets it took in for adoption in 2006. During that year, the well-known animal rights group managed to find adoptive homes for...
NewerTech intros USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter →
Filed under: Peripherals
Sure, we’ve seen similar adapters in the past, but NewerTech’s latest is quite a few rungs higher on the attractive scale than its most formidable rivals. The inelegantly named USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter allows users to easily connect any 2.5-, 3.5- or 5.25-inch HDD / optical drive to a computer via USB, enabling folks to transfer critical data or...
Giz Banned For Life and Loving It: On Pranks and... →
A Gizmodo writer has been
banned from CES for a prank. But when I see some fellow press
damning us for the joke, I feel sorry for them: When did
journalists become the protectors of corporations? When did this
industry, defined by pranksters like Woz, get so serious and
in-the-pocket of big business? This is totally pathetic.
Consumer electronics Tech journalism is very tricky. Those who
strictly...
1960s Braun Products Hold the Secrets to Apple's... →
The year 2008 marks the 10th Anniversary of the iMac, the computer that changed everything at Apple, hailing a new design era spearheaded by design genius Jonathan Ive. What most people don’t know is that there’s another man whose products are at the heart of Ive’s design philosophy, an influence that permeates every single product at Apple, from hardware to user-interface...
The New Fed Model →
Here’s an actual email from my trader Thursday:
Bernanke says 2008 outlook worsened, risks “pronounced”
Bernanke says housing demand “weakened further”
Bernanke says Fed “paying particular attention” to housing
Bernanke says Fed to monitor inflation, price expectations
Bernanke says job deterioration would raise spending risk
Bernanke says Dec job data “disappointing”
Bernake says...
F-15 Eagle Literally Breaking Apart [Crash] →
As part of the on-going investigation on the accident that has nearly one third of the US F-15 Eagle fleet grounded, Boeing Phantom Works has released this simulation reconstructing the “structural failure of a US Air National Guard F-15C, caused by fatigue cracking of a forward fuselage longeron, slowed down to one-fifth the actual speed of the event!” In other words: “ZOMG!...
Astonishing, flabbergasting, mindblowing fact of... →
According to the Financial Times… EMI, the big music company, spends 25 million pounds a year “to scrap unsold CDs”. That’s about $50 million — a year. To destroy unsold physical inventory in a world of ubiquitous digital distribution. Oh my.
I Should Give Up Now.. →
because i don’t think it gets much better than this. You may or may not like his stylistic choices but the execution of his choices are flawless. I bet his sweater is bespoke because the length is perfect. The flower, come on, thats great. I have this gentleman’s contact info now so we can soon learn more about his sartorial secrets let not spend this post trying to nitpick any little...
Netflix Online Video Becomes All-You-Eat Tomorrow;... →
We had heard that unlimited online viewing had been granted to select Netflix subscribers last month, and suspected it’d get a full rollout soon. Well, soon is tomorrow—as the AP notes, a day before MacWorld, where Apple is expected to unveil its video rental-killer rendition of iTunes. The only people who aren’t getting cut in to the infinite viewing parade are the cheapos who only...
Chinese beat blogger to death; ban Paul Walsh for... →
Yesterday, Paul Walsh reported that Wei Wenhau, 41, a Chinese construction company executive, was beaten to death by Chinese authorities for unauthorized video blogging. This, he reported has led to thousands of Chinese expressing outrage on internet chatrooms. He also admonished Google’s “disgraceful behavior” in it’s policy of complicity with the Chinese government...
iriver Ebook Concept Takes Notes, Looks Suave... →
We did not spot this ebook concept from iriver at CES, but their website is showing it off nonetheless. To say details are light would be true. So, details are light, but what the concept ebook does promise is a color display and the ability to accept handwritten notes.
Other than that we have nothing to go on, the information is from iriver’s Korean website, so the news is a little...
What Do Cell Phone Reception Bars Mean? →
Excellent—and I’m going to presume accurate because it has the Stink of Science™—answer from an Ask Metafilter reader about what those five bars actually indicate on your phone.
The technical term is “EC/I0” (pronounced “ee-see-over-eye-naught”) and it refers to the amount of the signal which is usable. In CDMA you can have strong signal (4 bars) and lousy EC/I0 and...
US Satellites Dodging Chinese Missile Debris →
GSGKT writes “Today’s Washington Times runs a story about the increasing problem with space junk orbiting the earth. Debris from the anti-satellite missile test by the Chinese military last year threatens the integrity of more than 800 operating satellites, half of them belonging to the US. Two orbiting U.S. spacecraft were forced to change course to avoid being damaged soon after the...
XKCD Inadvertently Causes Googlebomb →
MrCopilot writes “As I noted yesterday (and was joined by many others)… in an offhand observation xkcd has singlehandedly changed a small section of the Internet. Changing the results from a Google search for “Died in a Blogging Accident” from 2 to (at this writing) over 7,170 in a little more than 24 hours.” If you aren’t reading xkcd, you’re missing out....
Chinese Blogger Beaten To Death By Government... →
A Chinese blogger has been beaten to death by Government authorities for the crime of attempting to record a protest on his mobile phone.
When Wei was present at some sort of confrontation or protest by local villages against municipal authorities when more than 50 municipal inspectors turned on him, attacking him for five minutes.
According to CNN, the killing has sparked outrage in China,...
Switchgrass Makes Better Ethanol Than Corn →
statemachine writes to mention that the USDA and farmers took part in a 5-year study of switchgrass, a grass native to North America. The study found that switchgrass ethanol can deliver around 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, as opposed to corn ethanol which can only yield around 24 percent. “But even a native prairie grass needs a helping hand from scientists and farmers to...