Photovoltaic Eye Implant Could Give Sight To the Blind

 "Researchers at Stanford University recently announced that they have developed a new artificial retina implant that uses photovoltaic power and could help the blind see. The problem with previous implants was that there was no way send power to the chip in order to process light and data inside the eye, so the new device uses miniature photovoltaic cells to provide power the chip as well as to transmit data through the eye to the brain. The new device has great promise to help people afflicted by the loss of photoreceptor cells by using the power of the sun.

Nokia Claims Patent Violations in Most Apple Products

Nokia is broadening its legal fight with Apple, saying almost all of the company's products violate its patents, not just the iPhone. Nokia Corp. said Tuesday that it has filed a complaint against Apple Inc. with the US International Trade Commission. The Finnish phone maker says Apple's iPhone, iPods and computers all violate its intellectual property rights.

Google Might Get Into Hosted Gaming Via YouTube

"A recent patent application from Google describes a way to provide 'the collaborative generation of interactive features for digital videos, and in particular to interactive video annotations enabling control of video playback locations and creation of interactive games.' Get into the description and you find it's about building games on top of video submissions, making it sound that Google plans to extend its YouTube site into an associated gaming site."

MS Issues Word Patch To Comply With Court Order

"iTnews reports that Microsoft has begun offering what appears to be a patch for its popular Word software, allowing it to comply with a recent court ruling which has banned the software giant from selling patent-infringing versions of the word processing product. The workaround should put an end to a long-running dispute between Canadian i4i and Redmond, although it has hinted that the legal battle might yet take another turn."

Following In Bing's Footsteps, Yahoo! and Flickr Censor Porn In India

"Following recent news on how Bing decided sex was too sensitive for India, Yahoo! and its associated site Flickr have decided to do the same. While it's true that this is because of India passing laws that prohibit the publication of porn, no complaint was ever launched (and never will be), and glorious Google still continues to return accurate and unbiased results. So why is Yahoo! doing this? Is it because of its tie-up with Bing? I assume this is the case. Indian ISPs have already told the government and the courts that it's not their job to restrict porn and it's technologically infeasible too. In the absence of a complaint, I can only assume that Yahoo! has decided to do this of their own volition. Given that the 'sex' search term is searched more in India than in any other country, isn't it the duty of Yahoo! to provide accurate results to its customers? It can always plausibly deny control of its results and claim that filtering porn is infeasible. Since Yahoo! already has a low search market share in India, this will drive it even lower."

OnLive, the remote gaming system is one step closer to become reality

"It looks like OnLive, the remote gaming system that streams HD video over the Internet, is one step closer to becoming reality, according to an article on DSL Reports in response to a lengthy video presentation by founder & CEO Steve Perlman at Columbia University. Perlman demonstrated the UI, spectating, using the service on an iPhone, and other features."

Is OpenOffice.org a Threat? Microsoft Thinks So

Most people regard OpenOffice.org as a distant runner-up to Microsoft Office, and certainly not a serious rival. Microsoft seems to feel otherwise, judging by a new job posting on its site for a 'Linux and Open Office Compete Lead.' According to this, competing with both GNU/Linux and OpenOffice.org is 'one of the biggest issues that is top of mind' for no less a person than Steve Ballmer. Interestingly, a key part of this position is 'engaging with Open Source communities and organizations' — which suggests that Microsoft's new-found eagerness to 'engage' with open source has nothing to do with a real desire to reach a pacific accommodation with free software, but is simply a way for Microsoft to fight against it from close up, and armed with inside knowledge

Why Do So Many Terrorists Have Engineering Degrees

Why so many of the terrorists have engineering degrees?

Survey done came to the conclusion that engineers and engineering students are much more likely to hold strong conservative and religious views than a general cross section of the public. Further, engineers tend to hold a particular mind-set that disdains ambiguity and compromise. Terrorist organizations have long recognized that engineering departments are fertile ground for recruitment and have concentrated their efforts there. A 2005 report from British intelligence noted that Islamic extremists were frequenting college campuses, looking for 'inquisitive' students who might be susceptible to their message. In particular, the report noted, they targeted engineers."

5th Underhanded C Contest Now Open

"The next Underhanded C Contest has begun, with a deadline of March 1st. The object of the contest is to write short, readable, clear and innocent C code that somehow commits an evil act. This year's challenge: write a luggage routing program that mysteriously misroutes a customer's bag if a check-in clerk places just the right kind of text in a comment field. The prize is a gift certificate to ThinkGeek.com."

Google Nexus One Phone Likely to Launch Jan. 5

Google’s much-anticipated new phone, the HTC-designed Nexus One, could make its debut next week.

Google has scheduled a press event for Tuesday, January 5 at its Mountain View, California, headquarters. Though the company hasn’t mentioned Nexus One, the invitation mentions Android, Google’s mobile operating system for phones, and the company is widely expected to show the device that has had smartphone industry watchers buzzing for weeks.

The invitation-only event will be held two days before the Consumer Electronics Show begins in Las Vegas and just one day before many CES exhibitors have scheduled major press conferences.

It’s a move straight out of the Apple playbook. In January, 2007, Apple famously upstaged CES when it unveiled the first iPhone at an event in San Francisco — even as most technology journalists and executives were huddled in Las Vegas for the trade show.

Huuman Built Fastest Object (Space Probe) is very close to Pluto...

The fastest man-made object ever built, the Pluto-bound New Horizons probe, is now closer to the former planet than Earth, just a little under four years after its launch.

It’s currently traveling at about 31,000 miles an hour and is located about 1.527 billion miles from Earth.

“Today, 29 Dec 2009, New Horizons crossed a milestone boundary– henceforth we’re now closer to Pluto than to Earth. Go New Horizons!” the mission’s controllers tweeted Tuesday.

The spacecraft will be the first to flyby Pluto, the planet or dwarf planet or plutoid, and on to the other objects lurking in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of the solar system.

While the craft is hibernating most of the time while it awaits its July 2015 rendezvous with Pluto, it was roused for a Jupiter flyby that yielded some gorgeously detailed images of that planet and its satellites.

Unlike an orbiter, much of the New Horizons action will come in an action-packed nine day period around July 14, 2015 when the craft approaches and then passe by Pluto. During that time, the probe will capture 4.5 gigabytes of data, which it will have to keep sending the four-and-a-half hours back home for months.

With its main mission accomplished, the craft will keep moving away from the sun, following in the extrasolar footsteps of the earlier Pioneer and Voyager missions, drifting ever farther away from us.

Instead of the plaques attached to the earlier ships, which presumably identify the spacecraft as artifacts of Earthly civilization, New Horizons carries a DVD inscribed with 450,000 names of supporters and some of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930.

Embrace China’s Homegrown Computer Chips

China's creating a computer chip that can drive anything from an industrial robot to a supercomputer is succeeding. It's going to have a profound impact on computers everywhere.

pediatric dentistry myrtle beach

Blogging

China Debuts the World's Fastest Train

"China unveiled their new high speed train that clocks in at an average of 217 mph. 
Seimens, Bombardier and Alstom worked together to design and build this feat of modern transportation, which topped out at a whopping 245mph (394km/h) during trial runs earlier in December."

Escaped Convict Continues To Update Facebook

Craig "Lazie" Lynch has been on the run from a U.K. prison since September. However, he continues to taunt police by updating his Facebook status. Now he is threatening to quit. From the article: "It seems, though, that late Sunday, Lynch began experiencing a little emotional pain. In what must have been an almost teary update, he posted: 'right I'm coming off this page as I have better things to do.' Who might have imagined that, in his mysterious hideaway, Lynch had something better to do than continue his run as a Facebook attraction?"

Google Chrome OS-based netbook tech specs or rumors are out

London - Believe it or not - the tech specs of the rumoured Google Chrome OS-based netbook are already out and by the sound of it, the netbook looks to me like a high performance machine.

Google plans to launch in 2010 its very own Chrome OS-based netbook that would boast of powerful specs.

Even as rumours grow that Google has tapped several hardware manufacturers about making its netbook as per its specifications and design and has sent out RFPs (request for proposal), tech bloggers have already begun speculating about the netbook's specs.

The Google netbook, it is reported, will run on Chrome OS (what else?) and will boast of a chipset from Nvidia's Tegra line and it will be powered by an ARM CPU (which reportedly performs better than Intel Atom and consumes less power)

Apple: Steve Jobs Crowned "Person of the Decade"

"Apple CEO Steve Jobs won over 30% of the vote in an online poll published by personal finance and investing news site SmartMoney.com, enough to earn their "Person of the Decade" title by a solid margin over luminaries such as Warren Buffett (17%), Ben Bernanke (13%) and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (12%). From the article, 'Certainly, Jobs accomplished more than probably any other CEO since he returned to Apple in the late 1990s: Not only did he revive sales at the failing computer company, he led the stock to a more than 700% increase in value, and forever changed the way people buy and listen to music.'"

Mozilla’s JetPack Coming out Soon...to help users to make their own add-ons...

Mozilla Labs has announced the release of JetPack 0.7, an update to the new extensions framework for Firefox. It lets people use common web development tools like HTML, CSS and JavaScript to build browser add-ons.

Eventually, Mozilla plans to incorporate JetPack into a future Firefox release.�� JetPack will most likely make its way into Firefox 3.7, which is due during summer 2010, or Firefox 4.0, due at the end of next year. At the moment, however, interested developers can grab the JetPack add-on that allows JetPack to work within current version of Firefox. Yes, for now JetPack is an add-on for installing add-ons.

Firefox 3.6 Delayed, Mozilla Adjusts Road Map for Browser’s Future

It’s looking like Firefox 3.6 will miss its 2009 release goal, but the browser should arrive shortly after the start of the new year.

Apple Bought iSlate.com domain — Perhaps for a Tablet rumored lately?

Clever online sleuthing over the weekend led to the discovery of iSlate.com, a domain Apple purchased in 2007. Could the company’s rumored tablet device be called the iSlate?
The website is currently inactive, but according to information Apple could be reserving the domain for a tablet product, which is rumored for a January 2010 announcement.
The “Whois” record of iSlate.com provides solid evidence that Apple bought the domain in 2007 and subsequently transferred the address to MarkMonitor.com, a registrar that handles domain registrations for several companies, including Apple. The purpose of the move is presumably to help obscure products prior to release.

identify the Programmer...

HDD Manufacturers Moving To 4096-Byte Sectors from 512

"Hard disk drive manufacturers are now ready to bump the size of the disk sector from 512 to 4096 bytes, in order to minimize storage lost to ECC and sync. This may not be a smooth transition, because some OSes do not align partitions on 4K boundaries."

World's First Production Hybrid Motorcycle To Hit Market In India

 "The Indian company Eko Vehicles has announced the development of the world's first production hybrid motorcycle, called the ET-120. In a short time this motorcycle will run on the Indian streets, offering about 280 miles per gallon with a top speed of 40 miles per hour."

Security In the Ether

"Technology Review's David Talbot says IT's next grand challenge will be to secure the cloud — and prove we can trust it. 'The focus of IT innovation has shifted from hardware to software applications,' says Harvard economist Dale Jorgenson. 'Many of these applications are going on at a blistering pace, and cloud computing is going to be a great facilitative technology for a lot of these people.' But there's one little catch. 'None of this can happen unless cloud services are kept secure,' notes Talbot. 'And they are not.' Fully ensuring the security of cloud computing, says Talbot, will inevitably fall to emerging encryption technologies."

German Wikipedia Passes One Million Article Mark

"The German Wikipedia, the second largest language edition behind the English Wikipedia, just reached its 1,000,000 article milestone. Combined with 3.1M English articles and 240 other language editions, this adds up to a total of 14 million Wikipedia articles. Interestingly, there is a request for deletion on the millionth article. German Wikipedia has been criticized for its rules on notability, which are stricter than on the English Wikipedia. Quality though, is often considered to be higher on the German Wikipedia."

What's Happened In Mobile Over the Past 10 Years

 "recombu.com has an article examining what's happened in mobile over the past ten years, including BlackBerry launching its first smart phone in 2002, Motorola launching the Razr in 2004 and Apple launching the iPhone in 2007. As a commenter points out, the first camera phone (Sharp J-SH04), which was released in 2000, featured a 110,000-pixel (0.11MP) CMOS image sensor, and a 256-colour (8 bit) display."

Chinese Pirates Launch Ubuntu That Looks Like XP

"Ylmf, famous for pirating Windows XP, have just released a version of Ubuntu that looks just like Windows XP. Really, really similar. Apparently because Microsoft were cracking down on the actual Windows XP pirating — though I think they will still suffer for ripping off the GUI exactly."

December 28, 1969 (age 40) Linus Torvalds Birthday..

 "The birthday of Linus. Just under 19 years ago, on the first day the shops in Helsinki were open after the holidays, Linus rushed out and spent all his Christmas and birthday money on his first PC: a DX33 80386, with 4 Megs of RAM, no co-processor, and a 40 Megabyte hard disc. Today, the kernel he wrote on that system powers 90% of the fastest supercomputers, and is starting to find its way into more and more smartphones — not to mention everything in between. What would the world look like had he spent his money on something else?"

Instrument Approach Will Help Santa Land in Bad Weather today..

Everybody knows tonight’s the night Santa departs the North Pole on his round-the-world trip delivering presents. What you might not know is that because the weather at the North Pole can be challenging this time of year, Santa has an instrument approach procedure available for his arrival back home.

Pilots use an instrument approach procedure to guide them to an airport in lousy conditions like, say, an Arctic storm. When flying in clouds, known as instrument meteorological conditions or IMC, there are no ground references available to navigate by. Pilots must rely on instruments. Radio signals have been used for decades, but these days, GPS is the most common navigation aid.

First Functional Molecular Transistor is Here...

Nearly 62 years after researchers at Bell Labs demonstrated the first functional transistor, scientists say they have made another major breakthrough.

Researchers showed the first functional transistor made from a single molecule. The transistor, which has a benzene molecule attached to gold contacts, could behave just like a silicon transistor.

The molecule’s different energy states can be manipulated by varying the voltage applied to it through the contacts. And by manipulating the energy states, researchers were able to control the current passing through it.

“We’re not about to create the next generation of integrated circuits,” he says. “But after many years of work gearing up to this, we have fulfilled a decade-long quest and shown that molecules can act as transistors.”

Dec. 23, 1947: Transistor Opens Door

1947: John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, with support from colleague William Shockley, demonstrate the transistor at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

It’s been called the most important invention of the 20th century. The transistor, aka point-contact transistor, is a semiconductor device that can amplify or switch electrical signals. It was developed to replace vacuum tubes.

Wurld Map: A Guide to Short-URL Services

Domain hacks aren’t exactly new, but with a bumper crop of URL shortening services doing business under two-letter country domains these days, we wanted to know: Where exactly is that? And is the government over there any good?

Thank Twitter for the hubbub. The popular microblogging service’s 140-character post limit first created the need to cut down on link sizes. Services like tinyurl.com were quick to oblige, allowing users to create short strings on the fly and use them in their tweets to save space.

It didn’t take long before people realized little-used, two-letter country domains were even more efficient, and offered the chance for some cute wordplay. The race was on. New URL shortening services launched this month include Google’s Goo.gl, Facebook’s FB.me, YouTube’s youtu.be and the Republican party’s GOP.am.

Ph.ew.

That’s barely the tip of the iceberg. All told, we tracked down more than two-dozen URL shorteners using domains from 21 countries scattered across the globe, from tiny island nations to G7 members, and at least one former Soviet bloc country.

To help you navigate the mess, we put together an interactive map of the countries where today’s URL shortening services registered their wacky domain names, the authority that registered them and a short political summary of each country. The results might surprise you. Bit.ly — the most popular URL shortener in the world — is registered in Libya, a dictatorship with historical ties to terrorism. What about GOP.am, is.gd and blip.fm?

If you’ve got ideas about how the Firefox home page should look, now is the time to let Mozilla know.

Mozilla is hosting a new design challenge focusing on how to improve the home tab for Firefox 4.0.

The current plan for Firefox 4.0 is to move the home button down into the tab bar as a standalone and always-accessible tab. If that’s not to your liking, you’ll still be able to disable the home tab, or simply set it to a web page as you might be doing now, but Mozilla is hoping to make the home tab a bit more powerful.

Pulling the “home” concept out of the menu bar and putting it in its own tab means that the page can access much more than just the web. It could, for example, filter through your history, add-ons, bookmarks — or pretty much anything stored in Firefox — and present that data in novel ways. What sorts of novel ways is the part that Mozilla is leaving up to you.

While some browsers are using the blank “new tab” page to display a gallery of thumbnails of favorite sites or recently visited pages — Chrome, Opera and Safari do this — the dedicated “home tab” is a new twist on browser interfaces.

One thing worth mentioning: Mozilla isn’t looking for a My Yahoo or iGoogle-style start page. That use case is pretty well covered by iGoogle and its ilk. Instead Mozilla is interested in seeing what a browser start page can do with full access to your browser.

Forgot your Windows XP password here is how to crack it...

Ophcrack

If you're feeling brave, or like to play hacker, you can download the free Ophcrack program from another PC, and burn it to a CD.

With Ophcrack, you can create a live CD that has a bootable operating system that will let you start Windows. From there, the program automates the retrieval, decryption and cracking of Windows passwords. If your password has 14 alphanumeric characters or fewer, the program should be able to crack it within minutes.

Dec. 24, 1968: Christmas Eve Greetings From Lunar Orbit

1968: The crew of Apollo 8 delivers a live, televised Christmas Eve broadcast after becoming the first humans to orbit another space body.

Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders made their now-celebrated broadcast after entering lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, which might help explain the heavy religious content of the message. After announcing the arrival of lunar sunrise, each astronaut read from the Book of Genesis.

Opera pushes Out Next Version of its browser...

Opera has pushed out a pre-alpha build of the next version of its flagship desktop web browser. For Opera 10.5, as the next version will be known, the focus is on speed, and while this pre-alpha release is a long way from done, the speed boost is already noticeable.

This pre-alpha release is currently only available for Windows and Mac OS X users. Opera says a Linux version will be released soon. If you’d like to test out Opera 10.5, download links can be found at the bottom of the Opera Labs announcement page.

Browser Stats: Firefox 3.5 Is More Popular Than IE 7 or IE 8

Firefox has finally achieved one of its main goals, surpassing Internet Explorer as the most popular web browser.

This latest shift is illustrated by a new batch of browser share stats from analytics firm StatCounter, which is making the rounds on tech news blogs Tuesday.

There is, however, one big catch to StatCounter’s numbers — to arrive at the conclusion that Firefox is bigger than IE, you have to break down both Firefox and Internet Explorer’s share into separate version numbers.

Convert Your audio Cassettes to MP3....

Requirements:

One cassette player – any kind will do, from an old Walkman to a cassette deck

• One computer with a sound card and input jack
• One male-to-male 1/8-inch mini-jack cord (or an RCA-to-mini-jack cord)
• One digital audio recording program

Software:

There are a variety of audio recording and editing programs you could use – some free, some not – but for the purposes of this exercise, let's assume you're using Audacity, one of the most popular freeware recording programs available on the web.

Audacity is an open-source audio recording and editing program that works on both Macs and PCs, and creates raw WAV files that you can edit and mix to your heart's delight. You can also use it for burning CDs and creating podcasts or soundtracks. If you want to convert your WAV files to MP3s, you'll need the LAME MP3 encoder, a separate plug-in that works with Audacity.

Recording Steps:

Regardless of which audio recording software you're using, these steps should work pretty well (there are minor differences in menus and terminology from program to program):

1. Hook your tape player up to the computer using a mini-jack cord. There should be a headphone or line-out jack on the cassette deck, and a line-in input on your computer's sound card.
2. Go into the Control Panel and make sure the Line In Source is checked. In Windows, the menu path is Control Panel/Multimedia/Multimedia Properties/Devices. You should also check the input panel in your audio software. In Audacity, it's the I/O tab in the Preferences dialog box. Also make sure the output is set to go through your sound card.
3. Check the recording settings in your software program. If you are recording music, check the Record in Stereo box (for voice recordings, that's not necessary). Under the Quality tab you need to set the sample rate – the higher, the better. For CD quality, use 44,100 Hz.
4. Now that your settings are dialed in, press play on your cassette deck, and press the record button in your software program. Audio should be coming from your PC speakers, if you have them connected. Now click the input level meter and enable Start Monitoring to see a recording meter. Adjust the volume to your liking, and then restart the recording.
5. When you stop the recording, go to the file menu and save the file to your hard drive. From here you can edit and convert the file to MP3.

So...This is how it is done so if you can't find song on your computer but, have it on cassettes you can bring it onto your computer...

Apples Second Attemp to conqueor Video..

Apple is planning to offer television subscriptions over the internet, according to multiple industry sources, and so far CBS and Walt Disney are considering the idea.

The subscription service would involve allowing customers access to some TV shows from participating networks for a monthly fee, anonymous sources have told The Wall Street Journal. The subscription content would presumably be integrated into the iTunes Store and iTunes-compatible hardware. Though Disney and CBS are rumored to be interested, the companies have not officially commented on their plans.

Assuming the rumors are true, a subscription model would be Apple’s second major move to seize the digital video market. The Cupertino, California, company introduced the Apple TV in 2007, which stores and plays video content downloaded through iTunes. However, Apple has repeatedly referred to the Apple TV as a “hobby,” implying the product has not made a serious dent in the entertainment market.

Microsoft got sued by l4i a torronto company for patent infringement

SEATTLE — Microsoft Corp. said on Tuesday it will tweak its Word application to remove a feature judged to be a breach of patent, ensuring that it will be able to continue selling one of its most widely used programs.


The world’s largest software company made the announcement shortly after a U.S. court of appeals upheld a $290 million jury verdict against it for infringing a patent held by a small Canadian software firm(L4i).


Microsoft said it is taking steps to remove the feature from Microsoft Word 2007 and Microsoft Office 2007 put on sale from that date.


The disputed patent feature relates to the use of XML, or extensible markup language, used for manipulating text, in the 2007 versions of Word. Microsoft described it on Tuesday as a “little-used feature”.


“I4i is especially pleased with the court’s decision to uphold the injunction, an important step in protecting the property rights of small inventors,” said Michel Vulpe, founder and co-inventor of i4i, in a statement.

Dec. 21, 1898: The Curies Discover Radium

1898: Radium was discovered by the husband-and-wife team of Pierre and Marie Curie.

World Map Etched on a Tiny Silicon Chip

Researchers at Ghent University in Belgium have etched a tiny world map–on a scale of 1 trillion—on to a optical silicon chip. They reduced the earth’s 25,000-mile circumference at the equator down to 40 micrometers or about half the width of a human hair to fit it on the chip.

The map is put in a corner of a chip designed for a project at the University’s Photonics Research Group.

The idea is to successfully demonstrate scale reduction so complex optical functions can be included in a single chip. Such a chip could find applications in telecommunications, high-speed computing, biotechnology and health care.

Volvo Promises Electric Cars in 2011

You can add Volvo to the list of companies promising to roll out electric vehicles to “selected customers” to test the waters before diving in.

The Swedish automaker announced today that it is heading into the Detroit auto show with a spiffy electric C30 prototype that delivers 93 miles on a charge.

Firefox 3.6 Nearly Complete, Fifth Beta Available Now

Mozilla has released the fifth, and reportedly last, beta version of the next Firefox browser.

Firefox 3.6 has seen more than 100 bugfixes since beta 4, including improvements in Firefox’s performance, stability, and security. If you’d like to take beta 5 for a spin, head over to theMozilla downloads page or just wait for your current Firefox 3.6 beta to automatically update.

Five betas is an unusually high number for a Firefox release, but the latest package clears most of the remaining blocking bugs. This means the final release of Firefox 3.6 is likely just around the corner.

Given that we’re so close to the final release, Firefox 3.6 beta 5 doesn’t contain any significant new features. It does, however, bring some very welcome bug fixes, including a couple of annoying scrolling bugs we’ve had to deal with in previous beta releases.

This release also fixes a bug that would occasionally cause Firefox to crash on the Twitter login page, and worse, would expose passwords in plain text.

The other big of good news for this release is that Add-on developers are getting ready for the final release of Firefox 3.6. Mozilla reports that over 70 percent of Firefox Add-ons have now been upgraded to be compatible with Firefox 3.6 Beta, including the ever-popular Greasemonkey.

Sadly two of our favorite web development add-ons, Yahoo’s YSlow and Google’s recently released Page Speed tool have yet to update for Firefox 3.6. If you’d like to help out the developers of your favorite add-on, grab the Add-on Compatibility Reporter, which, among other things, allows you to run add-ons that haven’t yet been updated.

18-Gigapixel View of Prague by 360 Cities....

Exploring a new city is always fun. But if you can’t get there, a gorgeous, zoomable 360-degree view photo can be an acceptable substitute.

360 Cities, a Dutch company, has created a stunning panoramic photo of Prague in the Czech Republic.

“The creation of this image represents my previous five years’ obsession with all things panoramic,” says Jeffrey Martin, founder and CEO of 360 Cities. “If you’re stuck at home over Christmas, feeling humbuggy and don’t feel like hanging out with your family, you can explore Prague instead.”

What makes this panoramic photo interesting to viewers is that you can zoom in and out, move up or down or change your view–much like with Google Street View maps.

The photo has been assembled from 600 shots clicked by a 21-megapixel Canon 5D Mark II camera and a 70-200mm lens, set to 200mm. The camera was mounted on a special robotic device that turned it tiny increments every few hours. The resulting data from the camera was about 40-gigabytes.

The finished Photoshop file is 120 GB. Loading the raw files into a computer and stitching the photo took about a week. Martin used a four year-old Windows PC with two single-core 3 GHz Xeon processors and 8 GB of RAM. He also bought a solid state drive to speed up some tasks.

“The final image exists as a 120 Gigabyte Photoshop large (PSB) file,” says Martin on his blog. It cannot exist as a TIFF or JPEG file because of their size constraints.”

The photo measures 192,000 x 96,000 pixels, or 18.4 billion pixels altogether.

So start exploring Prague. If you zoom in enough, you can even see laundry hanging out to dry in some of the buildings.

This image is the largest spherical panorama in the world as of Dec. 2009.

Kobo International E-Book Store Launches: Why Amazon Should Be Afraid

Kobo is a rebranded Shortcovers, which sells e-books that can be read on almost any device, from Macs and PCs to the iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Palm Pre and any e-reader that can work with EPUB-format books, such as the Barnes & Noble Nook or the Sony Reader. Notably, the Kindle is absent from the list.


To accompany the launch, there are a slew of new applications. I tried out the new iPhone app, which is, like the Shortcovers app before it, free. You log in with your existing Shortcovers ID and from there you can browse, sample and buy books.


Apart from a name change, Kobo has some new features. Now you can browse by category, choose from a new Top-50 e-books list, New York Times bestsellers, Oprah’s book-club picks and more. The app also has recommended reading lists (right now there is a “Season’s Readings” section, and a splendid “Canadian, eh” list) and a better search function

“slow earthquake” Problem In america occur every 14 Months...Well Steps are taken to find out what they are...

Every 14 months or so, a “slow earthquake” rumbles quietly across the Pacific Northwest. Over the course of weeks, it releases energy equivalent to a 6.5-magnitude jolt, but no one feels a thing. And scientists aren’t sure why it happens. That’s just one of the long-standing mysteries now being tackled by the US Array Project. With the aim of creating a complete 3-D view of the North American tectonic plate, researchers have deployed a fleet of 400 mobile seismic stations, which they’re slowly relocating eastward. (They should reach the Atlantic in 2013.) The sensors are spitting out over 200 gigs of data a month — more than the seismology community has ever had to work with. The initial $68 million price tag would be “peanuts for Wall Street,” says project member Göran Ekström of Columbia University, “but it’s huge for the earth sciences.” And worth it, too, if it can tell us how the Rockies were formed and why Africa broke up with New England.

17th Dec 1903...A day which made the Transportation easy for 21st century...

1903: Orville Wright successfully makes a flight in a heavier-than-air machine that takes off from level ground under its own power and is controlled during flight. He flies the first airplane.

Mercedes Brings Hydrogen to the Highway Next Spring

Fuel cells are highly interesting bits of tech. Literally moon shot technology brought to earth, they’ve been the darling of some green energy types and certain car companies for awhile now. Mercedes-Benz for instance, arguably the people who invented the automobile, has been making great strides putting fuel cell technology into street cars.

Mercedes Brings Hydrogen to the Highway Next Spring

Fuel cells are highly interesting bits of tech. Literally moon shot technology brought to earth, they’ve been the darling of some green energy types and certain car companies for awhile now. Mercedes-Benz for instance, arguably the people who invented the automobile, has been making great strides putting fuel cell technology into street cars.

1996: John Tu and David Sun, the founders of Kingston Technology, share the wealth. They take $100 million from the sale of their privately held enterprise and give it to employees — a spontaneous gesture to those who had helped make the memory-module company a market leader.

1996: John Tu and David Sun, the founders of Kingston Technology, share the wealth. They take $100 million from the sale of their privately held enterprise and give it to employees — a spontaneous gesture to those who had helped make the memory-module company a market leader.

12 years after Titanic James Cameron is betting he can change forever the way you watch movies..

In 1977, a 22-year-old truck driver named James Cameron went to see Star Wars with a pal. His friend enjoyed the movie; Cameron walked out of the theater ready to punch something. He was a college dropout and spent his days delivering school lunches in Southern California’s Orange County. But in his free time, he painted tiny models and wrote science fiction — stories set in galaxies far, far away. Now he was facing a deflating reality: He had been daydreaming about the kind of world that Lucas had just brought to life. Star Wars was the film he should have made.

It got him so angry he bought himself some cheap movie equipment and started trying to figure out how Lucas had done it. He infuriated his wife by setting up blindingly bright lights in the living room and rolling a camera along a track to practice dolly shots. He spent days scouring the USC library, reading everything he could about special effects. He became, in his own words, “completely obsessed.”

He quickly realized that he was going to need some money, so he persuaded a group of local dentists to invest $20,000 in what he billed as his version of Star Wars. He and a friend wrote a script calledXenogenesis and used the money to shoot a 12-minute segment that featured a stop-motion fight scene between an alien robot and a woman operating a massive exoskeleton. (The combatants were models that Cameron had meticulously assembled.)

The plan was to use the clip to get a studio to back a full-length feature film. But after peddling it around Hollywood for months, Cameron came up empty and temporarily shelved his ambition to trump Lucas.

Over the next 10 years, Cameron helmed a series of daring films, including Aliens, The Abyss,Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and True Lies. Generating $1.1 billion in worldwide box office revenue, they gave Cameron the kind of clout he needed to revisit his dream of making an interstellar epic. So in 1995, he wrote an 82-page treatment about a paralyzed soldier’s virtual quest on a faraway planet after Earth becomes a bleak wasteland. The alien world, called Pandora, is populated by the Na’vi, fierce 10-foot-tall blue humanoids with catlike faces and reptilian tails. Pandora’s atmosphere is so toxic to humans that scientists grow genetically engineered versions of the Na’vi, so-called avatars that can be linked to a human’s consciousness, allowing complete remote control of the creature’s body. Cameron thought that this project — titled Avatar — could be his next blockbuster. That is, the one after he finished a little adventure-romance about a ship that hits an iceberg.

Titanic, of course, went on to become the highest-grossing movie of all time. It won 11 Oscars, including best picture and best director. Cameron could now make any film he wanted. So what did he do?

He disappeared.

Cameron would not release another Hollywood film for 12 years. He made a few underwater documentaries and did some producing, but he was largely out of the public eye. For most of that time, he rarely mentioned Avatar and said little about his directing plans.

But now, finally, he’s back. On December 18, Avatar arrives in theaters. This time, Cameron, who turned 55 this year, didn’t need to build half an ocean liner on the Mexican coast as he did with Titanic, so why did it take one of the most powerful men in Hollywood so long to come out with a single film? In part, the answer is that it’s not easy to out-Lucas George Lucas. Cameron needed to invent a suite of moviemaking technologies, push theaters nationwide to retool, and imagine every detail of an alien world. But there’s more to it than that. To really understand why Avatar took so long to reach the screen, we need to look back at the making of Titanic.