Tuesday: August 4, 2009
Robot band obsessed with online popularity.Wow, just like in real life.
Monday: January 7, 2013
Disney unveils next generation guest experience in the form of digital wristbands.The new wristbands will work in tandem with a new Disney app that you can use on your smartphone. The wristband (officially called MagicBand) can be used as your rooom key, theme park ticket, photopass, payment information and even access to FastPass for quicker access to rides and attractions. So long Key to the World cards!
Tuesday: December 18, 2012
Why Google's GMail outage may be a sign of things to come.The answer is that most of the coders behind today’s popular websites and services are deploying their code when it’s ready—not at some pre-determined point when downtime may not be noticed. It’s called continuous code deployment, or some variation on that theme, and everyone from Facebook and Netflix to smaller services do it. While it may occasionally cause a few blips, those blips should be shorter and less catastrophic.
Monday: December 10, 2012
Google Fiber not coming to your neighborhood any time soon.Turns out that Google would need about $140 billion to roll out their fiber network to the entire continental United States. At present time, they only have about $45 billion in the bank and that doesn't begin to include other associative costs. Long story short, if you really want to try out Google Fiber you should think about moving to Kansas.
Monday: November 14, 2011
Five future technologies for passenger air travel presented by National Geographic.What does the future hold for passenger air travel? National Geographic takes a look at some future technologies being developed right now. You just might be commuting at twice the speed of sound in a dart-like airplane and then arriving at the airport of the future. Do all airplanes of the future all have free in-flight wi-fi? That would be totally cool.
Wednesday: November 9, 2011
Bret Victor's not-so-brief rant on the future of interaction design.If you haven't seen Microsoft's video entailing what they think the future of technology holds, you should watch it (readily available on source URL as an embedded clip). So watch that video and then read Victor's thoughts on the matter. That being said, I do have a minor point of contention. I did get some hands-on time with a Kinect-enabled Xbox 360 this past weekend and it was a fun, dare I say, semi-magical experience. I highly reccomend Double Fine's Once Upon a Monster (even the demo is fun).
Nintendo hard at work to find way to use more than one tablet for their next console.It seems that Nintendo had originally planned to have only one controller / tablet accessible to the Wii U at launch time (the other controller would have been your standard Wii-mote variety). Someone at Nintendo must have realized that this would probably be a bad idea so they have been hard at work at trying to make two tablets work for the console. The console's processor and RAM constraints may have played a part in pairing a singular tablet. However, Nintendo may have solved this so multi-tablet gaming may be coming to a living room near you.
Adobe gives up on trying to get Flash to work on mobile devices.Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations.
Wednesday: August 3, 2011
An interesting video showing off the impressive CGI used in Game of Thrones.Andy Gavin has written a post with a behind the scenes video from HBO's Game of Thrones depicting how most of the locations are built using modern CGI and clever scouting. If you've watched the show (and I highly recommend that you do) some of the per-CGI moments in the video may actually take you by surprise, once you see their post-CGI counterparts.
Friday: July 15, 2011
Disney testing out new mug technology in an effort out to stop drink refill abuse.The rampant use of hotel guests taking advantage of their refill privelages have finally put Disney over the edge. DIS Unplugged reports that they are currently testing new mugs that have embedded RFID chips in them. If you've exhausted your free refill privelages for that day, no soda dispensed for you. Take that, thrifty guests!
Tuesday: May 18, 2010
Brand new computer algorithm actually capable of detecting sarcasm....the team scanned 66,000 Amazon.com product reviews, with three different human annotators tagging sentences for sarcasm. The team then identified certain sarcastic patterns that emerged in the reviews and created a classification algorithm that puts each statement into a sarcastic class.