Double Whammy! Another Sony Case (And it's Not BioShock)
Topic: Technology
5:54 am EDT, Aug 28, 2007
Hypothetical: Imagine that you visit your local mall and browse around for stuff to buy. And you decide to buy a new CD from your favorite artist and you also buy a brand new cool USB stick thingy on an impulse. You go home and stick the CD into your laptop's CD drive. It prompts you to install some software. You do so and while you are listening to the music, you open the USB stick package and start experimenting with your new toy. It has a fingerprint reader so you install the software for that as well. Guess what… you might have just installed, not one, but two different rootkit-like software on your laptop.
It seems that Sony are at it again with their nasty software - you would have thought they would have learnt from the last time...
Episode 1 Summary: Russell Shoemaker wakes up in a New York hotel room the morning after a catastrophic phenomenon wipes out technology and all signs of life. And then the rains begin...
Run down 41 flights of stairs with a laptop and you gain a new appreciation for elevators.
It made no sense. A big, 4 star hotel and not a soul in sight.
If you haven't seen Afterworld you are missing out. Very cool; watching the episodes I'm reminded of Day of The Triffids
In Evocative Objects, Turkle collects writings by scientists, humanists, artists, and designers that trace the power of everyday things. These essays reveal objects as emotional and intellectual companions that anchor memory, sustain relationships, and provoke new ideas.
This volume's special contribution is its focus on everyday riches: the simplest of objects--an apple, a datebook, a laptop computer--are shown to bring philosophy down to earth. The poet contends, "No ideas but in things." The notion of evocative objects goes further: objects carry both ideas and passions. In our relations to things, thought and feeling are inseparable.
Whether it's a student's beloved 1964 Ford Falcon (left behind for a station wagon and motherhood), or a cello that inspires a meditation on fatherhood, the intimate objects in this collection are used to reflect on larger themes--the role of objects in design and play, discipline and desire, history and exchange, mourning and memory, transition and passage, meditation and new vision.
In the interest of enriching these connections, Turkle pairs each autobiographical essay with a text from philosophy, history, literature, or theory, creating juxtapositions at once playful and profound. So we have Howard Gardner's keyboards and Lev Vygotsky's hobbyhorses; William Mitchell's Melbourne train and Roland Barthes' pleasures of text; Joseph Cevetello's glucometer and Donna Haraway's cyborgs. Each essay is framed by images that are themselves evocative. Essays by Turkle begin and end the collection, inviting us to look more closely at the everyday objects of our lives, the familiar objects that drive our routines, hold our affections, and open out our world in unexpected ways.
The laptop is mightier than the sword - International Herald Tribune
Topic: Current Events
7:19 am EDT, Jun 16, 2007
In Vietnam, the mobility of the Vietcong guerrilla forces was eventually crippled by a laborious hamlet-level census completed by hand in 1968. Biometric tracking and databases have since made extraordinary advances, yet our vaunted technical experts have failed at this elementary task in Iraq.
Any time a car is stopped in the United States, the police run an immediate check. The New York Police Department tracks criminal trends by neighborhood and block in a real time database called Compstat. The Chicago police have handheld devices that send fingerprints over the airwaves and get a response in minutes. So do America's border police. But in Iraq, for four years American military units have been forced to concoct their own identification databases using laptops, spreadsheets and poster boards. At any one time, the military is conducting dozens of separate census operations. Houses are labeled by one unit and re-labeled by the next.
Meanwhile, it is common for an Iraqi civilian to carry two or three IDs with different names. The result: Last year 400,000 coalition and Iraqi troops made fewer than 40,000 arrests; in contrast, 22,000 New York City patrolmen made more than 500,000 spot checks and 313,000 arrests.
AS3O is an open coffee group for entrepreneurs, freelancers, renegade venture capitalists, creative types, developers, etc. – anyone who would like to get together outside of the office/house on a laptop – to work. We looked around Atlanta for a community of startups, artists, small businesses, etc., and not finding the exciting, entrepreneurial nexus of our dreams, we figured we’d start one of our own.
Wish I didn't have a day job. :) You guys hang out down there on Saturday?
10 Startup Marketing Commandments - Startupping Forums - Mark Fletcher
Topic: Business
11:10 pm EDT, Jun 14, 2007
# Don’t believe what you read. Don’t EVER believe what you read about yourself.
# "The Press" is no longer the most important source of coverage; the bloggers are today’s opinion makers, especially when it comes to coverage of technology innovations and, more importantly, the gossip that fuels the buzz of which products are hot, which are duds.
# Traditional PR firms only marginally "get" the blogosphere. Unless you have true Wall Street Journal worthy news, or are stupid, don’t bother paying $20,000 a month for an ineffective PR agency. You are far better off to hire a 21 year old who understands your stuff, give him/her a laptop and a six-pack of Crunk!!, and having them start chatting online about your firm/product.
# If an article claims your company is a loser, your product is a failure or that you eat goats for lunch, don’t kick the story forward by responding; better pour your energies into creating the best business model, the most elegant business solution, and go out and sell your company for a fortune. Unless you actually do eat goats for lunch.
# Describing a product as "revolutionary, but with an evolutionary bridge" only makes sense to a journalist who will never actually use your stuff; your customers will think you have been smoking crack. Go "leverage your synergies" and "shift your paradigms" somewhere else, marketingdroid.
# Never, ever, even if you have a term sheet from Google on the table, tell a journalist that your goal is "a billion dollars or bust" unless you want the next headline to read "Bust" when your sale/merger/IPO falls apart.
# Journalists are like teenagers, they have their collective crushes, then move on. Really. I'd give an example, but I've already forgotten about them all.
# The best quote in an article is from your customer telling the world why they love your product. The worst is you telling the world why they should love your company. That is unless the quote is from your mother telling the world how hard you work, that you are such a nice boy/girl and that her greatest wish is for a grandchild.
# If you are being interviewed by a journalist, read their recent articles. There is no better way to deflate an interviewer than to suggest they cover a topic they just wrote a story about the week before.
# You do keep track of what people are saying about your company, right? Subscribe to blog searches through Google or Bloglines and pay attention. Leave comments to blog posts where appropriate. It ain't rocket surgery.
Tiny thermoacoustic engines pave the way for screaming gadgets - Engadget
Topic: Technology
10:07 am EDT, Jun 6, 2007
Looks like all that heat generated by your laptop may finally be useful for something other than frying eggs -- a group of grad students led by professor Orest Symko at the University of Utah has unveiled an array of "thermoacoustic" engines that turn heat into sound, which can be directed at a piezoelectric mechanism to produce electricity. The US Army-funded research seems promising but is obviously still in its infancy -- one of the designs the researchers demonstrated is half the size of a penny but pumps out 120dB of noise (about the same as a siren), while another bumped out over 135dB, (which is roughly equivalent to a jackhammer). The team expects that future, smaller designs will work at ultrasonic frequencies outside the range of human hearing. Although we're not expecting hybrid-siren-powered laptops to hit anytime soon, you Utes out there may want to invest in some earplugs -- Professor Symko says they'll be testing these designs at the University's water-heating facility in the next year.
BE YOURSELF Desktop gizmos and lava lamps express Google's laid-back ethos.
ASK THE HELP DESK Laptop on the fritz? Google keeps experts on site to fix computers and other digital gadgets.
GOOGLER WITH GOGGLES A lifeguard sits on duty as an employee works out in one of two swim-in-place pools at Google's headquarters.
GOOGLE GRAFFITI Two employees break for coffee beside the "idea board," a canvas for playfully grand designs like Google spaceships.
HANGING OUT Googlers can shoot pool while taking a break in one of several employee lounges.
GOOD-HAIR DAYS Google contracts with stylists to give its employees cut-rate haircuts.
RULING THE NET Google employees take an afternoon volley ball break. The corporation's Mountain View campus is at once a flurry of playful activity and creative technological innovation.
MARCHING ON ITS STOMACH Google is obsessive about food, offering its employees three free gourmet meals a day that can be eaten in a cafeteria adorned by artwork created by Google employees.
KIDS' PLAY There are toys for employees' children and for the young-at-heart Googlers like this one.
HANDS-ON CARE The work-weary can unwind with a Google-subsidized professional massage.
DOGS ALLOWED Googlers are permitted to bring their dogs (but not cats) to the workplace.
I'll make this quick, as it incenses me to the point of wanting to fly out to El Reno, Oklahoma and throw my laptop at the first person who looks at me the wrong way.
It's within that quaint, Midwestern town that a scandal is raging which has attracted the attention of hack news managers from coast to coast. It concerns a local school teacher who's under fire after a topless picture of her began circulating among students. Parents are of course calling for her immediate death by immolation, and school administrators are trying to decide how to judiciously handle the situation.
Did I mention that the topless picture was tucked away among the digital photos on her personal cell phone, and that the innocent and wholly unimpeachable lambs whom the parents are so desperate to shield from corruption never could've seen the offending image without taking -- or at least finding -- the phone and going through it? Or that upon discovering the picture, they then text messaged it to half the school?
This project is the sick, sick work of Instructables member canida and company. It is a real mouse, gutted and fitted with parts from one of those small laptop mice.
so wrong and sick but i couldn't resist memeing it so if Norman Bates had a computer
