Wednesday: March 17, 2010
- Ars Technica reviews Sony's much-anticipated motion control scheme for PlayStation 3.
It's bad news when you reveal a product this large, with so much riding on it, and within an hour people are putting down the controller and walking away from the demos.
- Turns out that more and more employers are using tech to track workers.
This post details just how easy (and cheap) it is in this day and age to monitor exactly what people are doing in the workplace. If you happen to have some sort of job in a tech-related field - it's even easier. If you think Big Brother is watching you - well, he probably is.
Thursday: March 11, 2010
- New survey shows that 12% of employees knowingly violate IT policies.
With 12 percent of those people actively working outside of stated IT policy (and plenty more who do so out of ignorance), IT admins certainly have their work cut out for them if they want to maintain a tight ship.
Monday: March 8, 2010
- Ars Technica explains why blocking ads is devastating to the websites you love to visit.
Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn't pay. In a way, that's what ad blocking is doing to us. Just like a restaurant, we have to pay to staff, we have to pay for resources, and we have to pay when people consume those resources.
Friday: March 5, 2010
- YouTube now has captioning for millions of videos thanks to new technology.
So how did they do it? Each video now uses speech recognition technology to pick up potential spoken words from the audio track. It not may be a perfect solution but it's a great start. The technology only works on videos that contain English audio at present time.
Monday: March 1, 2010
- Internet manages to overtake print consumptionin the U.S. according to Ars Technica.
Only 17 percent said they read the print version of a national newspaper, however, and 50 percent said they read local papers. According to Pew, newspapers were most likely to be read by people who were over 50 or those who don't own cell phones — yikes.
Thursday: February 25, 2010
- Behold the world's greenest skyscraper recently constructed over in China.
These types of buildings even have their very own acronym, ZEB, which stands for zero-energy building. This particular building is 58% more energy efficient than your run-of-the-mill conventional skyscraper.
Friday: February 19, 2010
- Turns out that Steve Jobs is not a big fan of Flash. Who knew?
...a source of 'security holes.' He also referred to Flash as dying technology, likening not supporting Flash on the iPad to Apple dropping support for floppy drives, ditching legacy data ports, and replacing CCFL backlighting with LEDs.
Monday: February 1, 2010
- Hacking cable modems for profit and advertising this fact publicly not the smartest idea.
Each charge carries a maximum of 20 years in jail and a $250,000 fine. Selling hacked cable modems and advertising them openly may have been a decent business model a decade ago, but it hardly seems worth bothering about today.
Friday: January 29, 2010
- PETA calls for replacement of Punxsutawney Phil in favor of animatronic version.
According to legend, if Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow, six more weeks of winter weather will follow. If he doesn't, expect an early spring. But PETA has had enough of the tradition that dates back to 1886, and believes robotic technology could be the solution.
Monday: January 25, 2010
- Your brain just might be to blame for your bad video gaming skills.
The researchers recruited 39 healthy adults (10 men, 29 women) who had played fewer than three hours of video games each week during the previous two years. They then examined their brains with the aid of an MRI machine.
Thursday: January 14, 2010
- Intel sales promotion snafu reveals Macbook Pro about to get an upgrade.
A sales promotion for Intel retailers offers a chance to win a MacBook Pro featuring a Core i5 processor during the month of January, though such a machine does not currently exist in Apple's lineup.
Monday: January 11, 2010
- Prolonged 3D sessions may be bad for your eyes. Who knew?
Experts say there are no studies tracking how common it is to get a headache after watching a 3D movie, but Rick Heineman, a spokesman for RealD, a provider of 3D equipment to theaters, said headaches and nausea were the chief reasons 3D technology never took off.
Friday: January 8, 2010
- Palm pulls the curtain back on phones that can create personal wifi hotspots.
Palm says the application will give customers the option of creating a personal Wi-Fi cloud capable of sharing Verizon's 3G network with up to five Wi-Fi-enabled devices.
- Will 3D television technology save the industry?
Many however believe 2010 really is the breakthrough year for the technology, helped in large party by the growing number of 3D movies at the theatre and the success of James Cameron's sci-fi epic Avatar.
Thursday: January 7, 2010
- New survey shows IT job satisfaction now at an all-time low.
Free food always helps to bolster my overall mood and in some cases overall job satisfaction. Let this be a reminder to any of you who happen to have an IT staff on call, bring them food and help shall come.
- You'll soon be able to tweet from your automobile thanks to the Ford Sync system.
Yet another way that technology is going to make the roads safer. As if cell phones, smart phones, app phones, GPS, XM weren't enough to distract from you from you know, actually driving.
Monday: January 4, 2010
- Technology not quite as advanced by 2010 as some would have hoped.
Nope, turns out we're not living like The Jetsons quite yet; shockingly some people aren't too happy with that. Although we still have another fifty years to go before any real complaining should go on (The Jetsons live in the year 2062 according to Wikipedia).
- A list of the top ten mind hacks for making your resolutions stick.
Lifehacker covers a variety of methods in which you can attempt to try and keep to your brand new New Year's resolutions via some tips and tricks. Personally, I find that making no new resolutions at all is a great way to keep resolutions. Plus, there is a lot less disappointment that way.
- Ten technologies that will somehow manage to rock 2010.
This covers all the bases that you've probably heard about somehow. For example, the soon-to-be-released-not-so-fabled-after-all Apple tablet, the perils of net neutrality, the hazy goodness of cloud computing, and mind altering views that you can see with some augmented reality. Woohoo.
Monday: December 28, 2009
- Ford would like to turn your automobile into a wifi hotspot on the highway.
Great, so now you wardrive for wifi by actually wardriving for wifi. 'Quick, follow that blue car, they've got a good signal!' Something about this whole thing tells me that all roads will be a little less safer.
Wednesday: December 23, 2009
- CSS techniques that you wished you knew about prior to designing websites.
This is a great for anyone who happens to be looking to dive into CSS based web design. Read this, learn it, and eventually try to love it. Yur forray into web design just might be a little smoother as a result.
- The top ten tech trends of 2009 according to CNN.
app-laden phones helped us manage our on-the-go lifestyles; books fell off the shelves and into e-readers; televisions and video games unchained themselves from home entertainment centers; mobile updates helped organize protests and even threaten governments.
Tuesday: December 22, 2009
- Why it's better to pretend you don't know anything about computers.
Another illustrated guide from the folks at TheOatmeal.com on a subject most geeks know all too well about. Good luck to all of us this holiday season.
Monday: December 21, 2009
- Nine of the worst tech movies according to CNN.
OK, I can agree with most of the choices on this list but said list could have easily been doubled due to the amount of silly technology that has appeared in movies over the years. Case in point: Independence Day. In which Jeff Goldblum's character manages to hack an alien computer... using Mac OS 9.
Monday: December 14, 2009
- Five technologies that will continue to shape the web in 2010.
The browser wars is in full force, and unlike the preceding browser wars where Internet Explorer dethroned other browsers to take hold of a majority browser share, IE is shaping up to being the 'dethronee' this time around.
Friday: December 11, 2009
- An extensive list of bad decisions made by some notable companies in 2009.
InfoWorld takes a detailed look (six pages worth) at the many blunders by some of your favorite brands including Microsoft, Pepsi, and Amazon just to name a few. Here's to hoping they learn from their mistakes next year.
- The TechCrunch tablet debacle as explained by the puppet of Walt Mossberg.
Arrington said this was like Foxconn telling Apple the night before the launch that they'd take care of the iPhone by themselves. This is ingoring the part where Apple actually built the software for the iPhone and TechCrunch is just a blog.
Wednesday: December 9, 2009
- Everything you always wanted to know about wireless HD video streaming protocols.
If everything goes well, all the bits are reassembled into a glorious, 60Hz 1080p signal at the receiving end. If they're not, the first things to go are subtle details that aren't likely to be noticeable.
Monday: December 7, 2009
- FCC quite curious about some of Verizon's questionable fees.
There's much more along these lines. The FCC also wants a detailed accounting of the 'the cost differentials that Verizon pays for advanced devices over what it charges its customers.'
