tagged w/ Technology News
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New Zealand inventor Glenn Martin has built what he describes as the ultimate personal flying machine, the world’s first practical jetpack. Modern-day attempts to build jetpacks have evolved from the 1940’s and 50s comic book marvels and early television-series heroes. Since the 1960s, science geeks have built a number of real jetpack designs, but none has been able to fly for more than a minute.
Martin’s JetPak is said to be able to run for 30 minutes. The contraption doesn’t look much like the classic jetpacks of science fiction. Martin's JetPack has somehow been able to make the future look very, very nerdy. It is also not, to put it bluntly, a jet. A gasoline-powered engine runs the Martin JetPack, not really jets as we know them today. According to Martin, all that counts is that it flies.
And just how well does this very, very noisy dream machine actually fly? Well, so far the ultimate personal flying machine, priced at $100,000, has not flown any higher than six feet. That’s about $17,000 a foot!!
Photographs and two humorous videos of Martin's geeky personal flying contraption are included.New Zealand inventor Glenn Martin has built what he describes as the ultimate personal... more
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European regulators have filed fresh charges against the world's biggest computer chip maker Intel over alleged abuse of its dominant market position.
The European Commission accused the firm of paying a leading European retailer not to stock products containing chips made by rival AMD.
It is also accused of giving incentives to PC makers to switch to Intel chips.
Intel, which has eight weeks to respond to the allegations, said it was disappointed with the EC's claims.
The Commission has also accused Intel of paying the PC maker to delay the planned launch of a product containing AMD chips.
European regulators have filed fresh charges against the world's biggest computer... more
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When Steve Jobs first introduced Apple’s iPhone at Macworld last year, the feature that evoked the most excitement was its touch-screen interface, allowing more than one touch at a time. The multi-touch technology added innovative new functions, such as allowing the user to easily zoom in and out of pictures and web pages by pinching the screen with two fingers.
But now, a more significantly advanced version of the amazing power of multi-touch technology has been unleashed upon screens much larger than those on the iPhones. Jeff Han, a research scientist at New York University, has developed Pespective Pixel. It's a relatively inexpensive technology that makes large multi-touch screens, which can accommodate 10, 20, or even more fingers.
This article includes photographs and two amazingly spiffy videos (one gives a fascinating music video demonstration of Han’s "Pespective Pixel", the other is a presentation that he made of “Perspective Pixel” at the annual TED Conference in Aspen, Colorado).When Steve Jobs first introduced Apple’s iPhone at Macworld last year, the... more
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Nokia will pay $410 million for the remaining shares in UK-based smartphone software maker Symbian and make its software royalty-free to other phone makers, in response to new rivals such as Google.
The world's biggest cell phone maker said on Tuesday it would contribute Symbian's assets to a not-for-profit organization in which it would unite with leading handset makers, network operators and communications chipmakers to create an open-source platform with wide industry appeal.
Symbian software is used in two-thirds of smartphones -- mobile handsets with computer-like capabilities -- but Apple's iPhone or new categories of phones based on Google's Android software could challenge that dominance.
Symbian was formed exactly a decade ago to the day in London by a consortium of top mobile handset makers looking for a standardized way of building software to run new phones. It was the descendant of software used to run Psion electronic organizers popular with business professionals in the 1990s.
Nokia will pay $410 million for the remaining shares in UK-based smartphone software... more
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New mobile phones being developed by Google and more than 30 partners based on software called Android will arrive in the fourth quarter, a schedule that some cellular carriers and program makers are struggling to meet.
Google had said in November that the phones would come out by the second half of 2008. Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile USA expects to deliver an Android-powered phone in the fourth period, but Sprint Nextel will not be able to.
China Mobile, the world's largest wireless carrier with nearly 400 million subscriber accounts, likely will have its launch delayed until late this year or early 2009.
Android also has not won broad support from large mobile-software developers, and some said it is hard to develop programs while Google makes changes as it finishes its own software.New mobile phones being developed by Google and more than 30 partners based on... more
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A commercial network launched in Amsterdam on Tuesday is the first in Europe to use a mobile version of the Wimax standard to allow users to surf the Web at high speeds while on the move, operator Worldmax said.
he broadband wireless network is aimed at competing with telecoms operators KPN, Vodafone, and T-Mobile .
It is similar to using a mobile phone network and differs from networks using earlier Wimax technology which required users to be stationary.
Worldmax, whose investors include Intel and Greenfield Capital, would not reveal financial or subscriber targets.
A commercial network launched in Amsterdam on Tuesday is the first in Europe to use a... more
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It's true! The internet videos, and the videos that you find on many blogs today, are definitely not so hot!! In fact, they can be just downright horrible!!
An absolutely hilarious video is included for your annoyance.It's true! The internet videos, and the videos that you find on many blogs... more
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Google Australia has announced the launch of gDay, a new beta search technology that will search web pages 24 hours before they are created.
Google's new gDay search engine, developed in Google's Sydney engineering centre, can accurately predict future events and internet content.
According to Google, the accuracy of the artificial intelligence Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation (MATE) system is anywhere between 75 per cent and 95 per cent.
"It depends on the Web site in question and the day of the week, for example, our spiders don't work Sundays" a Google spokesperson said.
gDay creates a sophisticated model of what the Internet will look like 24 hours from now - including share price movements, sports results and news events, from Australian Web sites only. Google's testing of gDay has found that results beyond a 24 hour period are statistically unreliable.
"Google's Australian engineers have a history of major technological innovations, from Google Maps to Mapplets to Traffic for Google Maps. Giving humankind the ability to see 24 hours into the future is just a natural progression - of sorts," said Alan Noble, Head of Engineering for Google Australia & New Zealand.
"Maybe you want to see tomorrow's rugby scores. Maybe you want to see tomorrow's lotto numbers. Maybe this is the greatest freakin' product ever."
Users who like a casual flutter and share traders are said to benefit most from gDay. "All past lotto results are publicly available on the web so gDay can extrapolate tomorrow's results, but supplementary numbers and Super66 are still a bit dicey," a Google spokesperson said.
Early trials of gDay, searching 365 days into the future, predicted Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page as joint winners of the 2008 Brownlow Medal.
source:linuxworld.com.au
Google Australia has announced the launch of gDay, a new beta search technology that... more
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According to Haaretz, an Israeli team of computer scientists has developed a software that ranks facial attractiveness of women. Instead of identifying basic facial characteristics, this software has been designed to make aesthetic judgments — after training. The lead researcher said this program ‘constitutes a substantial advance in the development of artificial intelligence.’ It is interesting to note that the researchers focused on women only. Apparently, men’ faces are more difficult to grade. But read more…
Rating women faces
The picture on the left shows how the system is initially calibrated: “Facial coordinates with hair and skin sample regions as represented by the facial feature extractor. Coordinates are used for calculating geometric features and asymmetry. Sample regions are used for extracting color values and smoothness.” (Credit: Amit Kagian, Tel Aviv University, Israel).
This software has been developed by Amit Kagian, a Tel Aviv University (TAU) student, for his master’s thesis in computer science. He has been supervised by Gideon Dror, an associate professor in computer science at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo and Eytan Ruppin, a TAU professor who manages the Complex Network Systems Lab.
Here are some details about how the software was tested. “In the first stage, 30 human participants were asked to rate from 1-7 the beauty of several dozen pictures. Participants did not say why they ranked certain faces as more beautiful than others. The pictures were then processed and mathematically mapped. ‘We came up with 98 numbers that represent the geometric shape of the face, as well as characteristics like hair color, smoothness of skin and facial symmetry,’ Kagian explains. Participants’ rankings of the pictures were also input in the computer.”
But what was the second stage? “‘We input new pictures of faces into the computer and it graded them based on the information it had.’ Human subjects were then asked to rank the new pictures too. ‘The computer produced impressive results: the rankings were very similar to the rankings people gave.’ According to Kagian, the key achievement is that the computer operated according to certain perceptions of beauty that were not input into it, but learned by processing the data it received.”
According to Haaretz, an Israeli team of computer scientists has developed a... more
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And a price tag of only $300 Million!
Digg recently partnered with the Wall Street Journal, allowing Digg users free access to the website. Is this a sign that News Corp might be interested in the acquisition? Murdoch does seem to have a taste for websites, proving his merit when he bought MySpace.
When Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, was asked about the potential sale, his response was
"We never comment on things related to acquisitions."
Hmmm......And a price tag of only $300 Million!
Digg recently partnered with the Wall Street... more
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