The days of Apple and Google sitting down for a nice cup of tea are long gone. Now they’re staring across the battlements, just waiting to lawyer bomb each other into the Stone Age. Motorola’s new lawsuit against Apple—which Google had to approve—is the latest stop on the road to the inevitable clash of titans. More »
Uh oh… now we are REALLY in for trouble if this becomes a reality… it’s bad enough that the tuition rates have been climbing incredibly in recent years but to have the student loan rate DOUBLE?! Are we really crazy and that stupid?!!
Oy?! One of my favorite shows, “White Collar”, is now a reality… o.O That’s … weird…
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Last summer, Google had to pay $500 million to avoid criminal prosecution by the US government. Using a convicted con artist, the feds caught Google aiding illegal online pharmaceutical drug sales. The operation—as described by the Wall Street Journal—is movie material. More »
Filesharing as we know it involves transferring 0s and 1s that usually turn into pixels and electronic sounds. But if The Pirate Bay’s latest idea takes off, filesharing — and digital piracy — will get a whole lot more physical.
In what appears to be as much as a publicity stunt as a serious feature, the site has added a new category alongside the usual audio, video, applications, and games. The physibles category is intended for data that either can, or feasibly could, become a physical object.
Specifically the site is thinking of data for 3D printers, a concept that sounds like science fiction but already exists. One company at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show launched, and is now selling, a $1,749 device that can take a computer 3D model and turn it into a physical object using acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, the same plastic material used to create Lego bricks. The machine also works with polylactic acid, derived from corn starch.
Users can create any object up to 300 cubic inches, roughly the size of a loaf of bread. The standard model only produces objects in one color, though for $250 extra users can have two-color printing. Of course, you can’t make either batteries or mains power cables, so we’re not yet at the terrifying stage when these machines are able to self-replicate.
The PirateBay currently has a dozen torrents for “physible†files, which appear to be largely or entirely compliant with copyright laws. It’s certainly at the demonstration novelty stage, with two of the choices including a toy pirate ship taken from the site’s logo, and a 3D picture of MPAA chief Chris Dodd along with part of the encryption key for Blu-ray discs.
Given the nature of the site and its user base, it will be interesting to see if we ever get to the stage when copyrighted 3D printing design files start getting shared. The Pirate Bay predicts that “you will download your sneakers within 20 yearsâ€, which does make you wonder if one day you’ll be able to get counterfeit Nikes without even needing to find a shady street market.
If your life is anything like ours, it’s in sore need of more pseudo-holographic helicopters. Fortunately, YouTube user programming4fun has come up with a solution, using Microsoft’s Kinect beta SDK and a Windows Phone handset. The system, pictured above, basically consists of a Kinect and a 3D engine; the former tracks the position of a viewer and automatically adjusts the image projected by the latter, creating the illusion of a 3D landscape. In this case, that landscape happened to feature a holographic helicopter, which could be controlled using a phone’s accelerometer and a Windows Phone 7 app (apparently called HoloController). Watch it in action, after the break.
If there was one new tech invention of the last year that will actually change the game and can blow the minds of even non-techies, it is easily the Lytro camera. Not familiar with Lytro? I’ll do my best to sum it up.
The Lytro camera takes “living photos†that can be manipulated well after they have been taken. And when I say “manipulated,†I’m not talking about some Photoshop trickery or a hipster filter. I’m talking about refocusing it on a different area over and over again. This camera captures the entire light field “which is all the light traveling in every direction in every point in space†or dimension. The camera itself takes instant photos with no shutter lag and no need to deal with an autofocus. Since the focusing happens on objects of your choice after the photo has been taken, you don’t have to worry about it during the shot. So, you get insanely fast photos and the perfect shot that you decide on afterwards. Make sense?
In an interview with PCWorld, the Lytro executive chairman Charles Chi talked about the future of their product and where they could see it headed. Smartphones are obviously on everyone’s minds these days when it comes to new technology, so Chi provided some thoughts saying:
If we were to apply the technology in smartphones, that ecosystem is, of course, very complex, with some very large players there. It’s an industry that’s very different and driven based on operational excellence. For us to compete in there, we’d have to be a very different kind of company. So if we were to enter that space, it would definitely be through a partnership and a codevelopment of the technology, and ultimately some kind of licensing with the appropriate partner.
So no definitive confirmations on Lytro coming to a cell phone near you any time soon, but can we start a campaign to help make it happen? Some of the top complaints we see time and time again when it comes to smartphones, have to do with cameras. And when it comes to cameras, we see a lot of issues with shutter lag and focusing, something the Lytro bypasses.
The MWE Emperor 200 may be labelled a “workstation”, but don’t let that fool you. It’s being demoed using video games for a reason: this is not for work. It’s for playing video games. In the future. More »
from Kotaku
