Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds
Screen: Babylon A.D.
28-Aug-08
In the near future, out in the chaotic nether regions of Eastern Europe, a lone-wolf mercenary named Toorop (Diesel) does his lone-wolf thing, bumming cigarettes from a kid, beating up a gun dealer who sold him a faulty weapon, entering his spartan apartment, rustling up some dinner and dining alone with a glass of wine hinting at a touch of civility.
Obama Speech Sets Internet On Fire
28-Aug-08
Voters and pundits hungry for the details of Barack Obama's vision of the future for America in the 21st century got them on Thursday when Obama formally accepted his party's presidential nomination.
Those bloggers quick off the mark in the hour after Obama delivered his speech offered a snappy analysis. Not all were thrilled by his solutions. Obama both hammered Republican rival John McCain and at the same time offered policy details that covered national security, taxation and energy, among other things.
"It was a deeply substantive speech, full of policy detail, full of people other than the candidate, centered overwhelmingly on domestic economic anxiety," notes The Atlantic magazine's Andrew Sullivan, who's a Republican disillusioned with his party, and an outspoken Obama admirer.
"What he didn't do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric," he writes on his blog The Daily Dish. "If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check."
The McCain campaign had in the past few months derided Obama's rock-star status and released a web video that compared Obama to two people famous for being vacuously famous -- Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.
Traffic on the micro-blogging service Twitter immediately surged in the wake of Obama's acceptance speech, which Obama delivered in a football stadium in Denver with a capacity for 75,000. The stadium looked as if it were full. Obama is the first African American to win the nomination of the Democratic party.
Thousands of Tweets poured through the micro-blogging service -- all brief, two-line assessments of their candidate's performance on a historic night -- the 45th anniversary of civil rights leader Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. (Obama is the most popular person on Twitter, according to the tracking service Twitterholics.)
More than 6,500 tweets on the subject poured in in about 20 minutes Thursday evening.
"Obama nailed it tonight for me," writes swhitley, "I may not agree with all of his policies, but I think his message of hope for our country means more."
"I want to have Barack Obama's babies," tweets "fluxrad."
"It's hard to imagine there are people in this country that can not at least feel inspired by Obama even if they do not plan to vote for him," observes Brian Lerner.
Obama effectively hit back at the Republicans on all of the major fronts on which they've been attacking him, Sullivan noted: National security, his personal patriotism, and his ability to relate to the average middle-class family.
"I've said it before - months and months ago. I should say it again tonight. This is a remarkable man at a vital moment. America would be crazy to throw this opportunity away. America must not throw this opportunity away," Sullivan concludes.
A colleague of his wasn't so generous. A blogger on economics, she blasted Obama's promise to end America's dependence on Middle East oil as more empty political rhetoric.
"It doesn't matter what we do: drill, research alternative energy, raise CAFE standards . . . in 2018, we'll still be using oil," writes Megan McArdle on her blog Asymmetrical Information. "Even if we discovered a magic source of clean renewable energy tomorrow, we'd still be using a lot of oil, because transitions of that magnitude take time."
Nevertheless, like Sullivan, there were plenty of other Twitterers and bloggers who appreciated Obama's deliberate effort to make a case for competent, effective government -- an unusual decision, they note after decades of Democrats trying to campaign and win over a Republican-leaning electorate.
"From a Democratic perspective, he made the argument for government, something we haven't heard in a while," writes Robert Arena, a web marketing strategist who blogs at the left leaning AMERICAblog.
Voicing the concerns of many Democrats, Arena noted: "(Obama) moved into ample detail on what he wants to do with the economy and made the case for a failed Bush/McCain foreign policy ... I've been looking for the details for a while, and while not a wonky speech, there was enough there there to hang your hat on."
He went on:
And, perhaps most importantly, he defended himself and put the screws to the Republican Party for the failure of the last eight years. On the question of being ready to be commander in chief, Obama answered the question with a clarity and passion I haven't seen from him yet.
All in all, a very Presidential speech.
Americans want a strong President and Obama brought that tonight.
DOG BITES MAN: Media Cheers Obama Speech. "Several members of the media were seen cheering and clapping for Barack Obama as the Illinois senator accepted the Democratic nomination Thursday. Standing on the periphery of the football field serving as the Democratic convention floor, dozens of men and women wearing green media floor passes chanted along with the crowd."
DOG BITES MAN: Media Cheers Obama Speech. "Several members of the media were seen cheering and clapping for Barack Obama as the Illinois senator accepted the Democratic nomination Thursday. Standing on the periphery of the football field serving as the Democratic convention floor, dozens of men and women wearing green media floor passes chanted along with the crowd."
Yahoo! Mash Has Been Quashed
28-Aug-08
Nearly one year after the launch of Yahoo’s answer to Facebook, Yahoo Mash has decided to close it’s doors. The news comes to us from one of our readers, Mark Palmer who received a terse email from the service, giving the date they’ll end service:
Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it.
Please note that we will shut down Mash on September 29, 2008. As a result, your current profile on Mash will no longer be available. We strongly recommend that you return to http://mash.yahoo.com and copy the content that you wish to save onto a separate document.
Matt Warburton
Yahoo! Community Manager
I can’t say I’m particularly surprised. The few times I ever played with the service, I didn’t see anything particularly enthralling about the service over and above what was already offered by the pre-existing social network offering from Yahoo 360, and judging from the traffic patterns, most of the rest of you felt the same way.
I took a look at the Quantcast numbers, which showed an embarrasing slope in usage over the year since it’s launch, ending with an estimated monthly pageview count for the service around 2,000. Not two million. Two thousand.
Clearly not the home-run they were looking for.
I took a poke around on the Yahoo 360 system, which was almost a spitting image of Mash, and they’ve made sure to alert their userbase that it, in fact, will be sticking around in the absence of the newer social network.
Other than that, it’s pretty hard to give the service a decent eulogy. It launched to a false start, was recieved with fairly ho-hum reviews, seemed to be a copy of not only offerings Yahoo already had but others’ social networks, failed to acheive any sort of momentum, was poorly marketed, and was used by virtually no one.
Rest in peace?
---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:
Yahoo’s Playing with our Mashing Emotions Today
Yahoo Mash: Yahoo Tries to Be Facebook
MediaBistro Circus is Coming to Town
Breaking: Yahoo Announces Earnings, Updates on Progress
Wow: AOL Acquires Bebo For $850 Million
The Daily Poll: Catching Up Socially
Yahoo Offers Limited Peek Into BrowserPlus Project
OBAMA'S SET REALLY DOES LOOK LIKE George W. Bush's "game show" set from 2004.
OBAMA'S SET REALLY DOES LOOK LIKE George W. Bush's "game show" set from 2004.
Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment
[Via Akihabara News]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment
[Via Akihabara News]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
HERE'S THE FULL TEXT OF OBAMA'S SPEECH. As with McCain, I have to go to The Corner for these things.
UPDATE: The trademark five-minute take from PoliPundit.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Hmm. Will this line play well with Hillary fans? "And when I hear a woman talk about the difficulties of starting her own business, I think about my grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle-management, despite years of being passed over for promotions because she was a woman." Maybe, maybe not.
I liked the pro-nuclear line.
ANN ALTHOUSE IS liveblogging the Invesco festivities.
UPDATE: So is Randy Neal.
ANOTHER UPDATE: And Stephen Green is drunkblogging.
MORE: Stephen Green: "Did Obama REALLY just accuse McCain of being unwilling to pursue bin Laden? I don’t like McCain. I don’t (yet) plan to vote for McCain. But I would NOT go around impugning John McCain’s manhood."
STILL MORE: Don Surber parses.
I'd say not bad, but not as good as Bill Clinton's speech last night.
TalkLeft: "The language did not soar. The rhetoric, tone and demeanor were down to Earth. I give this speech, in this place, at this time, an A+. " Stephen Green is less enthusiastic.
Josh Marshall: "I think he's doing a good job inoculating against next week's attacks (and responding to the earlier ones) without appearing defensive or reactive."
Jim Lindgren liked the text.
Megan McArdle: "I was disappointed by the speech. Your mileage may vary, of course. But it was basically standard Democratic Convention Boilerplate: nothing we haven't seen before from Obama, or for that matter, every Democratic presidential candidate in living memory."
SPY PHOTOS of the production Chevy Volt.
SPY PHOTOS of the production Chevy Volt.
T-Mobile has won its request for testing to see whether the FCC's proposed smut-free broadband plan will mess with its nearby services.
Good Riddance To Albums
28-Aug-08
One of my fondest memories as a kid was saving up my money and making trip to the record store where I would spend what seemed like hours going through the LP bins. Finally I would narrow down my selection to what money I had in my pocket. Sometimes I would be able to get only one album, maybe two or on those rare occasions when there was a sale going on I’d get more. I can still remember the very first album that I bought was YesSongs by Yes which was followed a couple weeks later by a purchase of Brain Salad Surgery by Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
Even though the 45 singles market was the most popular way to get the current hits albums were the my personal preference and over the years amassed quite the collection; especially of specialty coloured vinyl pressings. Sure albums where more expensive but at that time the quality of the music being produced generally meant the the majority of the album would be stuff that you liked. In the majority of cases there might one or two songs on the album that you might not like so the price we paid seemed to be a fair exchange.
As the years passed and vinyl changed to cassettes which then changed to CDs that fair exchange of money for quality music began to shift. Eventually it got to the point that you were lucky if there were two or three songs on that CD that you just paid $20.00 bucks for were any good. During this time along comes the Internet and ways to convert those CDs into single files that could be played on any computer. People began to discover that no longer were they having to buy a whole CD to have only the good songs from it. They also found ways to be able to share all those songs with people around the world.
It didn’t matter if it was legal or not to a great many of these people because they felt; right or wrong, that the record companies had been stealing from them for years. After all weren’t the musicians themselves saying that they made next to no money from CD sales – it was their record companies who were really 
making all the money. Into this fray then came Apple and their iTunes store with the radical idea of selling single songs for .99¢ and in short order it became almost the defacto standard for buying legal music on the Internet.
Music distribution had changed and for a change the people had the ability to buy exactly what they wanted for a fair prices without being forced to pay extra for garbage tracks. The album concept was slowing losing ground and once more the single track; the modern day equivalent of the 45, was the most popular way of buying your music.
For some musicians though this isn’t what they wanted and while some quite justly felt it ruined the musical experience they were trying to provide throughout the CD as a whole for others it was all about the money. Or is really the musicians that are concerned about this in the end after all aren’t they ones trying to tell us all that they don’t make any money from CD sales.
While some big bands have shown that it is still possible to produce quality CDs that is meant to be listened to as a whole and that people will buy them the majority of musicians still only produce one or two good songs per CD. It is case like this where in my opinion the album CD concept is just a con job from the record companies to make us spend more money for less quality. This is why some record companies are pulling songs from iTunes under the pretense of artistic merit so that they can return to the album CD model and the larger dollar figures they make from it.
Unfortunately thought those same record companies risk further damaging both theirs and the artists incomes by forcing this issue the way they are. The single track genie is out of the bottle and there is no way that it is going to go back in. People are getting use to being the ones finally in control of how they buy and listen to their music and the simple fact is that they aren’t going to pay for garbage tunes anymore. If the record companies push hard for a return to the album CD with only one, two or maybe three songs worth paying for people will give them the middle finger and return to the P2P networks in droves.
Using the argument that artists deserved to be paid for their work is partially correct. What is correct is that the artist – not the record label – is the one who deserves the lion’s share of the income. That comes with a caveat though – they only deserve the money if the product is worth what you are being charging for it.
At one time the album model worked giving you the best value for your money but that is no longer true in the vast majority of cases. As with the 45 the single tracks today is the customers best value and if the musicians want to make more money then start producing better music and less garbage.
The day of the album is gone unless the musician provides enough value for the fan so that they are willing to pay for an album format. If not the single track is what we will be buying for a very long time to come. It’s up to the musician.
---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:
Photobucket (Finally) Launching Group Albums
Orkut Adds Photo Albums
Ask Facebook Friends for Missing Pictures with Kaltura Group Albums
EMI Releases George Harrison’s Solo Albums DRM-Free
Jamendo - Review, Rate and Tag Music
MySpace Photo Albums, Multi-Photo Uploader
Amazon Selling Sellaband Artists, and You Get a Profit
Filed under: Ask Engadget, Gaming, Laptops
Although netbooks seem to be all the rage right now, there's still a lot of demand out there for laptops that are only able to be labeled as such due to their design. Take a look at Paul's question as he attempts to locate the best desktop replacement on the market today. "I am currently looking to replace my desktop PC with a high spec laptop. Portability isn't a concern as it will spend most of its life on a desk. Here are a couple of things I am looking for: biggest screen possible, plenty of HDD space, plenty of RAM, and plenty of GHzs. Cheaper is better, but my budget is up to around $3,000."
This fellow didn't specifically mention gaming as a concern, but we'll go ahead and assume he's not buying a 9+ pound laptop to tinker on Minesweeper all day. So, what's the preferred laptop that weighs more than some mini-towers? And what's a question that's been on your mind? Send it in to ask at engadget dawt com.Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: Ask Engadget, Gaming, Laptops
Although netbooks seem to be all the rage right now, there's still a lot of demand out there for laptops that are only able to be labeled as such due to their design. Take a look at Paul's question as he attempts to locate the best desktop replacement on the market today. "I am currently looking to replace my desktop PC with a high spec laptop. Portability isn't a concern as it will spend most of its life on a desk. Here are a couple of things I am looking for: biggest screen possible, plenty of HDD space, plenty of RAM, and plenty of GHzs. Cheaper is better, but my budget is up to around $3,000."
This fellow didn't specifically mention gaming as a concern, but we'll go ahead and assume he's not buying a 9+ pound laptop to tinker on Minesweeper all day. So, what's the preferred laptop that weighs more than some mini-towers? And what's a question that's been on your mind? Send it in to ask at engadget dawt com.Permalink | Email this | Comments
DANNY GLOVER ON the McCain online video machine.
DANNY GLOVER ON the McCain online video machine.
HAPPY 100TH BIRTHDAY to Lyndon Johnson.
HAPPY 100TH BIRTHDAY to Lyndon Johnson.
TIM CAVANAUGH WONDERS WHAT HAPPENED to the "new Democrats."
TIM CAVANAUGH WONDERS WHAT HAPPENED to the "new Democrats."
AN EXCERPT from the prepared text of Obama's speech.
If LimeWire doubles its library in the woods, does it make a sound? The company recently added another 1.2 million tracks from independent artists and small labels to its library, but it'll have to do more than that to gain an audience.
Filed under: Transportation
Tire monitors are nothing new, but Pirelli's taking the idea a step farther by inserting sensors and microchips directly into the tires themselves. The Cyber Tire and Cyber Tire Lean can measure pressure, temperature and vehicle load, sending the information along using RFID. The self-powered Cyber Tire Lean, which will hit the market first in 2010, embeds the sensors in strip glued to the inner lining of the tire and communicates in one direction only; the proper Cyber Tire with directly embedded sensors will arrive later, and is being billed as an "intelligent tire" that will interface with vehicle systems like ABS and traction control to "correct wrong behavior in advance." Sure, okay -- but please tell us all this stuff can get switched off when we need to do some wicked burnouts, okay?[Via Autoblog]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: Transportation
Tire monitors are nothing new, but Pirelli's taking the idea a step farther by inserting sensors and microchips directly into the tires themselves. The Cyber Tire and Cyber Tire Lean can measure pressure, temperature and vehicle load, sending the information along using RFID. The self-powered Cyber Tire Lean, which will hit the market first in 2010, embeds the sensors in strip glued to the inner lining of the tire and communicates in one direction only; the proper Cyber Tire with directly embedded sensors will arrive later, and is being billed as an "intelligent tire" that will interface with vehicle systems like ABS and traction control to "correct wrong behavior in advance." Sure, okay -- but please tell us all this stuff can get switched off when we need to do some wicked burnouts, okay?[Via Autoblog]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
DAVID BERNSTEIN ON THE AARP'S "ridiculous claim that 1.85 million Americans go bankrupt every year due to medical bills. In other words, the AARP is claiming that every single bankruptcy in the U.S. is due to medical bills. Even Elizabeth Warren doesn't go that far. The AARP has launched a mass media campaign, including television ads, based on this blatantly dishonest premise. One can only hope it will damage its credibility." Yeah, every time I turn on the TV I see this commercial.
DAVID BERNSTEIN ON THE AARP'S "ridiculous claim that 1.85 million Americans go bankrupt every year due to medical bills. In other words, the AARP is claiming that every single bankruptcy in the U.S. is due to medical bills. Even Elizabeth Warren doesn't go that far. The AARP has launched a mass media campaign, including television ads, based on this blatantly dishonest premise. One can only hope it will damage its credibility." Yeah, every time I turn on the TV I see this commercial.
Overjoyed civil rights leaders say that Barack Obama has paved the way for future black politicians to be smeared as country club snobs.
PROGRESS WITH POLYWELL FUSION: A report from Alan Boyle. Faster, please.
PROGRESS WITH POLYWELL FUSION: A report from Alan Boyle. Faster, please.
Filed under: Gaming
Well, it looks like all that experience Nintendo has half-explaining Wii supply issues isn't going to waste -- the company just issued a statement regarding shortages of Wii Fit that sounds awfully familiar. Seriously, follow along with us here:- Wii shortages, Nov. 14, 2007: "The demand for Wii hardware globally has been unprecedented and higher than Nintendo could ever have anticipated."
- Wii Fit shortages, Aug. 28, 2008: "Nintendo had a substantial supply nationwide for launch, though some stores saw spot shortages due to unprecedented demand for this unique product."
[Via Slashgear]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
The Black Eyed Peas' Will.I.Am just finished performing his Emmy-Award-winning online hit "Yes We Can" at Invesco Field in Denver on the last evening of the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
The music video debuted on DipDive.com and YouTube on Super Tuesday in February, and it quickly went viral. As of Thursday, it's been viewed more than nine million times on YouTube.
The tune is set to the words of Barack Obama's concession speech after he lost the New Hampshire primary to Hillary Clinton. The Obama campaign has adopted the tune as a sort of a theme tune.
The audience at Invesco is expected to number up to 75,000 people when Obama makes his presidential nomination acceptance speech in a couple of hours. The stadium during the performance was crowded, but not full.
Will.I.Am's appearance at Invesco Field wasn't the only interesting connection to the internet this evening.
Straight after the pop star fired up the crowd, Obama Colorado state director Ray Rivera urged everyone to text message the campaign so that officials can sign them up to volunteer to get out the vote. A map with stars flashed behind him. The size of the star indicates the number of people from that area that had signed up to volunteer. As he urged the supporters to sign up, the stars throbbed and grew bigger on the screen.
Earlier Thursday, the New York Times reported that the campaign's event planners scrapped the idea of a giant collective phone bank by the crowd of 75,000 on Thursday night because they worried that it would crash cell phone networks.
The campaign instead sent out a text message reminding supporters to watch Obama's speech this evening, which is scheduled to take place 8 pm Mountain time. The message also urged its recipients to volunteer by sending the campaign their location information so that local party officials could get in touch with them.
As Democrats partied down and fought their way through the sweltering summer heat and crowds to get into the stadium, Republicans tried to tamp down the euphoria by mocking Obama online.
John McCain's campaign released an mock advisory Thursday recommending a dress code -- they suggested that Democrats attend the evening's speeches in togas -- to go with the white columns that have been set up to frame the podium. The McCain campaign's calling it "Barackopolis."
The McCain campaign also released a grim web video that continued to question Obama's credentials -- at the same time as it aired a television ad that features McCain congratulating Obama for winnning the nomination.
In a first for the leaks site, Wikileaks hopes to raise cash and attract attention by auctioning off a high-profile new leak: a collection of e-mails allegedly gleaned from a senior Hugo Chavez aide.
Now that the statute of limitations has lifted on many of his crimes -- as well as a seven-year court ban prohibiting him from writing about them (the ban ended midnight on January 28, 2007) -- former hacker Kevin Mitnick is telling his story in a book to be published next year.
Mitnick, the Mumia Abu-Jamal of the hacker world who inspired a "Free Kevin" movement, was imprisoned for four and a half years, beginning in February 1995, before he was finally sentenced to 46 months in 1999, with some credit for time already served. Part of that time he was held in solitary confinement and without bail because the government feared he had the ability to detonate a nuclear weapon simply by whistling a tone through a phone. He was released in 2000.
But don't look for Mitnick to whine in his book about the government's unfair treatment of him or his long-standing feud with New York Times scribe John Markoff, whom Mitnick accused of inflating his stories about Mitnick to get a book deal. Instead, he tells Forbes, he plans to set the record straight about his hacking spree.
Kevin Mitnick: It's pretty much my autobiography, the story of my years as a hacker and a fugitive told from my point of view--starting out from my younger years in telephone phreaking when I was 11-years-old, to my arrest, to my post-arrest career as a security professional. There's going to be a lot of information revealed about hacks I pulled off. The statute of limitations has lifted on a lot of that stuff, so now I can talk about it publicly.
Forbes: Can you give us a preview of the exploits you're going to recount in the book?
I'm trying to save that all for the book. What I can tell you is what won't be in the book--I won't be whining about my trial or my mistreatment by the government or [Mitnick-chronicling] John Markoff.
This book is going to be a kind of Catch Me if You Can in cyberspace. It's going to be what's real in my history and what isn't, what I did and how I did it and how I've since turned my life around.
Forbes: What are some of the myths about Kevin Mitnick that just aren't true?
I never wiretapped the FBI, though I did wiretap an informant who was working with the FBI and chasing me for the bureau. Some other myths: that I hacked into the National Security Agency, that I hacked into NORAD.
Forbes: And some things you did do?
Well, I compromised all the phone companies, essentially. Even when I was a kid I had the capability to disrupt the telephone systems for entire states.
I hacked into the systems of all the major software companies at the time: Digital Equipment, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Silicon Graphics. Also most of the companies that made cellular phones at the time, like Nokia, Motorola, Fujitsu.
Mitnick, whom the government had deemed "the most wanted computer criminal in United States history" was charged with 25 counts of wire and computer fraud and causing nearly $300 million in damages. He eventually pleaded guilty to 7 counts and was ordered to pay only about $4,000 in restitution after his release.
Photo: Neon Samurai