Monday, July 25, 2005

Cell Phones Predict the Future

"Wired News reports that cell phones were used in a recent project at MIT to both document and predict the lives of 100 MIT faculty and staff members. During the Reality Mining Project at MIT, Researcher Nathan Eagle logged 350,000 hours of data over nine months about the location, proximity, activity and communication of volunteers through cell phones carried by the participants. From the article, "Given enough data, Eagle's algorithms were able to predict what people -- especially professors and Media Lab employees -- would do next and be right up to 85 percent of the time."

source:http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/25/1751234&tid=158&tid=215&tid=193&tid=137

# posted by dark master : 7/25/2005 01:03:00 PM  0 comments

Russia's Biggest Spammer Brutally Murdered

"Vardan Kushnir, a notorious russian spammer who headed the English learning centers, the Center for American English, the New York English Centre and the Centre for Spoken English, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday, Interfax reported Monday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head."

source:http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/25/1745212&tid=111&tid=218

# posted by dark master : 7/25/2005 01:02:00 PM  0 comments

Full-Motion Ads Come to Videogames

"'Advertising in videogames, dominated in the past by static ads such as billboards and signposts, is beginning to look more like TV commercials,' according to the Wall Street Journal. Massive, the company that brought still ads to videogames last year, is now introducing full-motion ads to PC-based games (not yet console titles). Massive CEO Mitchell Davis 'says Hollywood movie studios have shown particular interest in running 15-second movie trailers in online games.' Also of note: 'One problem with the full-motion ads is that gamers can easily avoid watching them. The full-motion ads start playing when a player moves near the ad spot on the screen -- and stop playing when the player moves away. As a result, gamers may see only a few seconds of the 15-second ads. Massive says it won't charge advertisers unless the full ad has been viewed.'"

source:http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/25/1429229&tid=206&tid=1


# posted by dark master : 7/25/2005 10:20:00 AM  0 comments

Beginning Of the End For PC Noise

"If you work around computers a lot you are probably pretty tired of the noise they produce. The cutting down on computer noise has grown from the pet-peeve of a few people to a major segment of the hardware industry. If you are looking to cut down on noise there are a lot of ways to go, but one of the easiest and most effect is to upgrade to a silent power supply. This guide goes over and tests the four most popular ones on the market right now." A few years back, I had also written a piece about making silent machine as well. Any other hints from people?

source:http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/25/1059231&tid=222&tid=1

# posted by dark master : 7/25/2005 10:18:00 AM  0 comments

AMD and Intel Notebooks Head to Head

"The two chip giants go head-to-head in this review of notebook computers which features 10 different models." From the article: "To be blunt, sourcing high-performance AMD-based notebooks for this test was less difficult than extracting teeth from a fully grown chicken -- but only just. After much chasing, only two vendors submitted an AMD-powered product -- MSI and Asus. Interestingly, both vendors had their Intel-powered notebooks at the Lab with no chasing needed. We should point out that the rarity of AMD product is not the fault of AMD, rather vendors, in Australia at least, do not seem to stock adequate quantities of high-performance AMD-equipped notebooks. Acer, for example, has a humdinger of a notebook the Acer Ferrari 3400 that is equipped with a mobile Athlon 64 but the company was unable to ship a single unit to the lab during the entire month of May."

source:http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/25/0629235&tid=142&tid=118&tid=137&tid=218

# posted by dark master : 7/25/2005 10:18:00 AM  0 comments

Yahoo! acquires Konfabulator

Yahoo! Inc. on Monday will announce the acquisition of Konfabulator, a Macintosh and Windows application that allows users to run mini files known as Widgets on their desktop -- the same model used by Apple for its Dashboard application. Yahoo! company executives said they would also be giving Konfabulator away for free, completely doing away with the US$19.95 currently charged for the product.

Yahoo! said the reason they purchased Konfabulator was that they wanted an easy way to open up its APIs to the developer community and allow them easy access to the information on the Yahoo! Web site. In doing this, Widgets could be built without having to scrape sites in order to get information.

“What we can do with Konfabulator is wrap these services that we are opening up into an environment that is really easy for people to now become developers,” Tony Schneider, vice president of the Yahoo! Developer Network, told MacCentral.

Schneider also confirmed that Konfabulator would be available for free. In addition, Yahoo! plans to refund customers that purchased the product in the last two months.

The acquisition of Konfabulator may not be the last Mac compatible product users see from Yahoo! While Schneider wasn’t specific, he did say that there was interest in the Mac.

“There is a move at Yahoo! -- in addition to Konfabulator -- to move more onto the Mac,” said Schneider. “We want to make sure we find a way to be more cross platform.”

What does it mean for Mac users?

Arlo Rose, Longtime Macintosh developer and CEO of Konfabulator parent company Pixoria, will be staying on to head the development of Konfabulator at Yahoo! With the title Director of Widget Technology, Schneider said that, “Arlo is going to continue to drive the vision for Konfabulator and push the envelope of the platform.”

Rose also confirmed that the two engineers that worked on Konfabulator with him will also take jobs at Yahoo! to continue their work on the product, as well.

Rose said that Konfabulator would not be going away as a Macintosh application. In fact, he said it is quite the opposite as they look at new avenues of growth for Konfabulator.

“Our focus is to never stray from multiple platforms,” Rose told MacCentral. “As a matter of fact, one of our goals is to investigate ways to open up Konfabulator to things like cell phones and maybe even Linux and your Tivo device. It’s about complete multi-platform distribution.”

With the acquisition by Yahoo! Konfabulator’s developer base could soar many times beyond what it was at Pixoria. This, said Rose, is a good thing for the Mac platform.

“I think this is going to be a great opportunity for Mac users because it is opening up Konfabulator to such a huge audience that we never had the ability to do as a three person company,” said Rose. “Having Apple there with Dashboard is going to continue to drive us to make a better product.”

What about the Widgets

Yahoo! currently makes two Widgets for Apple’s Dashboard: My Yahoo! and Yahoo! Local Traffic. While the company will continue to develop those Widgets for Dashboard in the short term, no decision has been made on the future development for those products.

“Right now we will definitely continue doing those, but we haven’t fully decided yet,” said Schneider. Yahoo! will be making those Widgets available for Konfabulator and that is our focus.”

“We won’t be taking the core set of Konfabulator Widgets and making them work on Dashboard, but we will work with the people that made the Dashboard Widgets here at Yahoo and make those work with Konfabulator,” added Rose.

Rose said that there would also be opportunities at Yahoo! for some of the best Widget designers in the community. Although he could make no promises, Rose said he would also like to see a cross platform tool, so that you could convert Dashboard Widgets to Konfabulator Widgets.

For longtime Konfabulator developers, Rose believes this move will be better for them, giving them access to more resources than ever before.

“Hopefully it [developer reaction] will be positive,” said Rose. “What we’re doing is integrating ourselves into Yahoo’s developer network, so we’ll be giving them a lot more information and help than we have in the past because we will have more resources to be able to do that.”

Rose said that Yahoo! anticipates millions of downloads of Konfabulator over the next few weeks. Whether on the Windows or Mac side, both Rose and Schneider see this as a good thing for the Mac platform.

“The thing that is really important to us is that by opening it up to such a huge Yahoo audience, we get all of these Windows people that are into creating all of these amazing Widgets without scrapping sites -- that spills over to the Mac universe,” said Rose. “It takes what the Mac currently has with Dashboard and opens it up to this massive amount of people to start developing these things. It’s not just being developed on a Mac for a Mac, it’s being developed by everybody for the Mac.”

source:http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/07/24/konfabulator/index.php


# posted by dark master : 7/25/2005 10:14:00 AM  0 comments

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