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Some old enemies, new friends, and a brand new dynamic with cooperative play are just a few of the things you can expect from "Portal 2."
By the editors of Laptop Magazine
During the last year at Laptop Magazine, we’ve examined every aspect of 10 of the biggest notebook manufacturers and their products. We’ve published 145 laptop reviews, waited 392 minutes on the phone with technical support and spent countless hours evaluating laptop keyboards, touchpads, pre-loaded software and design. The tests we run and the conclusions we reach while spending this time with individual notebooks help us identify the strengths and weaknesses of each brand.
Our ultimate goal? To help you find the perfect laptop, because a machine is only as good as the company that stands behind it.
We’ve compared each of these companies across eight categories, including reviews performance, technical support, design, keyboards and touchpads, value and selection, software, innovation, and customer satisfaction. The most weight was given to the most important category: reviews.
You can see how all ten of the major brands did in the chart above. Below, we give you more details on those at both ends of the spectrum — the companies that are on top this year ... and those that need improvement.
Winners
1st Place: Apple
Taking home top honors for the best notebook reviews, design, technical support, software, innovation and customer satisfaction, Apple is the best overall notebook brand around. The only category where Apple didn’t shine was value and selection, because the company uses its iPad to compete in the $500-to-$700 range. Add it all up and Apple takes top honors. [Read Apple’s complete 2011 report card]
2nd Place: Lenovo
There’s no disputing that Lenovo offers the best keyboards and touchpads in the business. The company also tied with Apple for first place in customer satisfaction, and tied with HP for second in technical support. The business notebooks are stellar, and the consumer models are improving. [Read Lenovo’s complete 2011 report card]
3rd Place: HP
Earning the bronze, this mega-giant in the industry jumped up two spots from last year’s fifth-place finish, largely due to solid scores in the reviews and design categories. It scored top marks in value and selection, and came in second or third in four other categories (though not in customer satisfaction). [Read HP’s complete 2011 report card]
Losers
7th Place: Samsung
Samsung brought several strong systems during the past year, but the brand was dragged down by poor online tech support and lackluster software. Hopefully the new 9 Series ultraportable and other upcoming 2011 notebooks will improve the company’s standing. [Read Samsung’s complete 2011 report card]
8th Place: Acer/Gateway
Acer/Gateway scored points for a large selection of models and high customer satisfaction ratings. However, the combined company suffered from weak keyboards, boring designs and the industry’s worst tech support. The company has started innovating in the touch space, however, releasing the unique Acer Iconia 6120 dual-touchscreen notebook just this week. [Read Acer’s complete 2011 report card]
9th Place: MSI
The past year hasn't been great for MSI, as lackluster performance scores across the board prove. With weak tech support, mediocre reviews and not-so-hot keyboards, the brand's last-place ranking isn't a huge surprise. [Read MSI’s complete 2011 report card]
Related Links:
Summit Entertainment
By 2015, the amount of mobile data traffic generated by phones and tablets will exceed 14,000 petabytes, or the equivalent of 18 billion movie downloads, or 3 trillion music tracks.
That's according to the recent "Mobile Data Offload & Onload Report" from Juniper Research, which says despite the efforts to offload data, "migration of data traffic from fixed to mobile will exacerbate the strains on the cellular network." Which cellular network? Any network, basically.
Confused? Trying to wrap your head around 14,000 petabytes is tough. But one petabyte — and maybe it should be called a "pigabyte" — is equal to 1,024 terabytes. Some of you who have moved to newer computers in recent years find yourselves with terabyte-sized hard drives of 1- and 2 TB, and some consumer-level, external data storage drives can hold more than 5 TB.
"A petabyte, which was once thought to be an absurdly large amount of data, is currently not an uncommon amount of aggregate storage in the IT departments of enterprise and large entertainment companies," notes Mix magazine, for those in the recording and sound production technology business.
Those bytes can add up quickly. As Rosa Golijan noted recently, an average song is about 5 megabytes, and an average movie about 750 megabytes.
"It is important for network operators to be cognizant of the net impact that both offload and onload have on the total data traffic through the network," said Nitan Bhas, the author of Juniper's report.
One solution, Bhas says: Femtocells, those little cellular base stations that look like cable or DSL modems and can offload data from the network. Of course, it comes at an extra monthly cost to customers.
"Although currently Wi-Fi accounts for over 90 percent of the traffic offloaded, femtocells will account for a steadily increasing proportion ... and both will contribute to be a flexible solution that will co-exist and provide a ‘big-win’ opportunity for the (network) operators," writes Bhas.
More about digital stuff and the space it takes:
Check out Technolog on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Suzanne Choney.
Do you wish that people could "like" you on Facebook instead of having to "friend" you? Well, Facebook is offering a way to make that happen by converting your profile into a fanpage.
Mashable reports that Facebook's new conversion tool will permanently turn a profile into a Page in just a few clicks:
Though the terminology is often muddled, a key difference between the two features is that users can simply “like” a Page while they must “friend” (establish a mutual relationship with) a profile, which makes Pages a much better solution for businesses and public figures.
Before you rush off to use the tool, I want to repeat that this is a permanent and irreversible switch. Once you change your profile into a Page, there's no going back. All your friends will turn into fans and everything but your profile pictures will disappear.
If that doesn't make the idea of the switch unappealing, then please make sure that you back up your profile first. You can do so by heading into your Facebook account settings and finding the "download your information" link. That'll at least leave you with a copy of all your photos, wall posts, messages and your friend list.
We're glad that Facebook is finally offering this tool, because in the past there have been plenty of people who had a good reason to make the profile-to-Page switch but no way to do it — unless they were personal friends of a Facebook staff member. Those people include businesses or public figures who set up regular profiles before Pages were available or individuals who hit the 5,000 friend limit and needed more wiggle room.
Now between this tool and the ability to create Pages in the first place, there should be few issues for anyone.
Related stories:
Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's a bit obsessed with Twitter and loves to be liked — on her Facebook page.
Two friends diagnosed with leukemia turned to their social networks to try to save their own lives, and with help from their friends and family, showed just how much can be done in a short period of time. Their methods could easily be replicated to help others.
So many things go viral nowadays, many of them not having anything to do with anything serious. But when someone's life is at stake, social media can prove to be more important than ever in efforts to save them.
A Stanford professor brought the friends' project to the attention of the audience at the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco Wednesday. The business school's Jennifer Aaker presented a slideshow, "Creating Infectious Action: The Dragonfly Effect," that highlighted the effort of one her students, Robert Chatwani.
Chatwani's two close friends, Sameer Bhatia and Vinay Chakravarthy, were in danger of becoming casualties to a disease that claimed nearly 22,000 lives in 2009 and their friends were going to do everything they could to try to prevent that from happening.
They concentrated on bone marrow drives, because for most patients, that's the only cure. And because marrow infusions require a "near perfect genetic match," the highest probability for a match lies within a patient's ethnic pool. For Chatwani's friends, that meant South Asians, who comprise only 1 percent of the minorities who comprise only 20 percent of the 7.5 million registrants in the national bone marrow registry. That's a one in 20,000 chance. For Americans of European descent in the registry, there's an 80 percent chance of finding a donor in the registry.
And even though they came from a country with more than 1 billion people, India had no national bone marrow registry.
In the slide, Chatwani explained the path to their action: "Friends got together. We all knew that we needed to do something. What were our options? Do nothing. Do something. Do something SEISMIC. Our simple answer: If the odds were 1 in 20,000, then all we needed to do was ... hold bone marrow drives and register 20,000 South Asians. And then we'll find a match."
Of course, the clock was ticking. They only had two weeks to get this done.
"THE CHALLENGE: We needed to move fast. We needed to scale. We could not fail."
Methodically, they created a model that could serve other campaigns well. They focused on their goal and formed teams to help each friend. Each team had a leader, a marketing person, someone to drive operations, someone to handle education and a person in charge of regional leads. They built brands: "Help Sameer" and "Help Vinay."
They created form letters that introduced Bhatia and Chakravarthy, and asked recipients to register, spread the word and learn more.
Viral videos for the campaign
They harnessed social media, using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google Docs, even MySpace. Their strategy built an instant brand and incorporated blogs, videos, widgets, viral email and pledge lists that they coordinated with outlets in traditional media and through their real life connections at universities, work, temples and downtime pursuits.
They made it easy for others to host bone marrow drives, with step-by-step guides, including in the guide banner ads and viral videos.
The payoff, in those two weeks: 470 bone marrow drives and 24,611 South Asians registered.
VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi wrote about Aaker's presentation, which included more details about the drives, which drew corporate sponsors such as Adobe, Accenture, IDEO and Cisco.
Bhatia found a perfect match, while Chakravarthy found a close match. Bhatia continued to blog prolifically from the hospital. Videos were made of the bone marrow transfer.
The organizers shared their lessons from the campaign:
Sadly, this story doesn't have a happy ending. Bhatia died in March 2008, three months after his transplant. Friends made a memorial slideshow they shared with the rest of the world. Chakravarthy also relapsed after his transplant and succumbed to death in June 2008.
But their legacy is that they helped match 266 other South Asians to donors in one year through these drives.
As professor Aaker describes the Dragonfly effect, they did it: "Small acts can create big change."
More social media stories:
Check out Technolog on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Athima Chansanchai, who would like more lives to be saved, by social media, or other means.
As seen in this screenshot of Rob Matthews' website, printing a large portion of Wikipedia results in a gigantic tome.
We're not sure what motivated him to do it, but we do know that a London-based photographer supposedly printed out all 2,559 of Wikipedia’s "featured articles" and had them bound into a book.
Rob Matthews posted photos of his 5,000-page Wikipedia tome well ahead of April Fools' Day, but we're almost secretly hoping that the whole thing is some sort of joke — because just like pop culture site Flavorwire, we're left wondering whether a project like this is a total waste of paper and ink or a clever demonstration of just how much information the Internet helps us store.
We have reached out to Matthews to confirm that this project truly isn't a joke of any sort and will update as soon as we hear back from him.
Related stories:
Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's a bit obsessed with Twitter, loves to be liked on Facebook, and wonders if her bookshelf would be able to support a printed version of Wikipedia.
Adobe Photoshop Express has been available as an iPad app for quite some time, but — despite being quite powerful and feature-filled — it hasn't been as appealing to most image-editing beginners as some other apps.
Based on Adobe's keynote presentation during Photoshop World 2011 though, that might be changing soon.
Photography Bay reports that Adobe demonstrated its plans for the Photoshop for iPad app on Thursday and that there is a lot to be excited about. Based on the presentation, the future app will be a great deal more powerful (probably thanks to the fact that the iPad 2 is a graphics powerhouse), have nearly every menu option under the sun, take advantage of more multitouch gestures, and include a clever layer animation feature.
As you can see in the slightly blurry video of the demonstration above, the layer animation feature is one of those things that initially seems to have little reason for existence other than to show off how nifty an iPad's user interface and touch screen are, but there's more to it than that.
This showy feature will probably help make the app — and Photoshop itself — far more accessible to amateur image editors.
Sam Spratt, a professional digital artist for whom Photoshop is a key tool, explains that image editing beginners often struggle to comprehend features such as layers in particular. For those individuals, "the ability to see the layers of an image deconstructed to their individual shapes and transparencies almost instantly makes a difficult concept simple to grasp and utilize."
There are no details as to when amateurs and professionals will be able to take advantage of the features shown off in Adobe's keynote, but for the sake of better image memes, we hope it's soon.
Related stories:
Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's a bit obsessed with Twitter, loves to be liked on Facebook, and needs to brush up on Photoshop basics.
The next time Facebook acts up on you, it may not be a change slipped in under the radar, but an experiment to test how you react to different Facebook features.
Should Facebook be able to just take away your features anytime it wants, without telling you? Would that make you mad enough to quit it? Is being messed with worth whatever gain the company gets?
As explained by Facebook product designer Adam Mosseri to a group of Yelpers earlier this week at a Design Drink Up event in San Francisco, (and as relayed to us via ReadWriteWeb's Mike Melanson), the Facebook design team ran studies during 2010 that focused on user engagement and what factors drove increased engagement.
Do you think Facebook should tell you when you're the subject of a study?
One thing that definitely drove down a Facebook user's engagement with the site: not being able to do the things everyone comes to expect from Facebook, such as filling that need for connection and feedback through comments and likes.
While some studies were what you'd expect — the "Yo Momma" study interviewed new moms about their Facebook experience — other studies just messed with "a small percentage of users," inexplicably shutting off their "ability to like or comment on friends' status updates." Mosseri admitted that "small percentage" amounted to several million people. (One percent of Facebook's 600 million users is, after all, still six million users!)
Those who experienced this irritation suffered for two weeks, and only had their abilities reinstated because they "were getting so annoyed at their situation." Mosseri said this glitch — or what some might call a bug — "caused a 7 percent drop in sessions and a 10 percent drop in time on the site for affected users."
Of course, they did what many on Facebook do to complain: create pages like "Friends Can't Like or Comment" to voice their displeasure and drum up some support to get the much needed validation temporarily taken away from them.
There is an episode in "Star Trek: Voyager" in which the crew is being experimented on, unbeknownst to them. And after awhile, they start flipping out, especially Captain Janeway. Looks like Facebook stopped short of that, which is good, because you never know how people are going to react when you take away something they've come to expect and/or depend on. (And yeah, we know, Facebook isn't the end all be all. But it does figure in a lot of people's lives, in various degrees of importance.)
More on Facebook:
Check out Technolog on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Athima Chansanchai, who will be more suspicious when Facebook problems arise.
The slurs of war are an ugly fact of life, but usually done privately, between soldiers, and not shared in comments, photos and videos on Facebook. But some Australian soldiers in Afghanistan couldn't keep it to themselves, and took their behavior to the social networking site. And they're now being investigated for it.
Australia's Seven Network News recently broadcast "expletive-laden video footage posted on Facebook that included soldiers using racist terms among themselves to describe Afghans ... They used several derogatory terms to refer to Afghans. One solider described them as 'smelly locals,' " according to an AP report. Also, "Australian soldiers are heard cheering and laughing as an Afghan man, described as a 'scared ... mufti,' is videotaped fleeing a bridge explosion."
"When you put words into the public domain, you will be held accountable," acting Australian army chief, Major General Paul Symon, told the network.
Australia has 1,550 troops in Afghanistan, and they're in country to back the United States' difficult war there.
"Combat provides a lot of stress, but that’s no excuse for this type of behavior, particularly in a counter-insurgency war, where the support of the local people are important, and you don’t want to give the enemy propaganda," Neil James, of the Australian Defence Association, a think tank, told Seven Network News.
Trying to do damage control, Australian Defense Minister Stephen Smith called Afghan Defense Minister Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak last Thursday to apologize and assure him an investigation is underway, along with likely disciplinary action.
"This action by a small number of people is appalling," Smith told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio Friday, according to AP. "I condemn it absolutely."
It's not clear how many soldiers were involved in the Facebook postings. But as Symon told Seven Network News, many soldiers aren't amused by the behavior. "There will be thousands of soldiers disgusted at what you’re hearing," he said.
More about Facebook on msnbc.com:
Check out Technolog on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Suzanne Choney.
via Urlesque
Happy World Backup Day! Don't put off the festivities and secure your data before it's too late!
Good at solving puzzles and cracking codes? The FBI needs your help in cracking a code connected to a homicide in Missouri.
After seeing Facebook pleas and flash mobs, and even cities temporarily renaming themselves "Google," the search engine giant picked Kansas City, Kan., as the first place to get its new ultra-fast broadband network.
Speaking of Google, it's totally going after Twitter and Facebook with its new +1 button.
And in preparation of April 1 (the most annoying day on the Internet), here's a look at Google's "most hilarious" April Fool's pranks through the years.
Attention PETA: GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons went on an African vacation and shot an elephant. He recorded the whole thing on video.
That Skittles'Touch the Screen' video quickly goes from cute to creepy ... right?
Here are six socially conscious actions that are pretty much useless.
And here's 15 gnarly natural wonders that will totally freak you out!
Gizmodo.com
Google is introducing a new feature in Google search results today: +1. But what is it? A new social network? A social thingy? A social search engine? Is it even social?
When you're signed into your Google account, every Google search result will now have a +1 icon next to it (right now you have to activate in Google Experimental). If you find the search result useful or just enjoy the linked site, you hit the +1 icon. Google says by +1-ing a result you're giving it a recommendation, a stamp of approval. More +1's on a result means the site is more interesting.
You can see what your friends +1'd which ideally lends more credence to a particular search result. Since Google displays so many sites, these little +1's will help you sift out the crappy ones (if you didn't banish them already). Imagine if your best friend found a link interesting and +1'd it. When you stumble upon that in the future, you're probably going to click it.
...but isn't a social network...
When the Google +1 project first started (as Google Me), it was billed to be Google's Facebook killer. Clearly, it's not. The +1 system works more like Likes in Facebook or Diggs in Digg, meaning to say it's a bare bones simple way to show that you like something. That's good! Google became the king of search because it was simple. +1 is simple.
You can also +1 ad's, which combined with the data of your usual +1s of search results, will let Google learn more about you and better target their ads. It's sort of like data research masked as a feature, like when Google offered free Google 411s to improve their voice recognition software, Google +1 improves their ad delivery system.
Google isn't done with +1 yet. They've learned from previous mistakes in Google Buzz and Google Wave where they dug a grave for those products by overhyping them. This time, by starting small with a simple +1 icon only available on Google search results, they can quietly go about their business and slowly add to it (like +1-ing directly from a website, from Chrome, from apps etc.).
Google +1 is another sign that Google wants to evolve into a more social search engine. All those +1's they keep track of will not only help Google make their searches better, but also make them more relevant to your social circle. As the Internet gets clotted in cobwebs, having friends personally +1 the best sites keeps Google from falling too far behind Facebook and Twitter in social sharing. [Google +1]
While it's technically not an official holiday, World Backup Day is definitely something we should all celebrate. Don't put off the festivities and secure your data before it's too late!
World Backup Day an initiative dreamed up by a small team of users from social news website Reddit. It was created to serve as a reminder of how important data backups are — and to guide those who have never gone through the motions of securing their files:
Once a year is not frequent enough for backing up data. World Backup Day was created to spread awareness and to get those who have never backed up data to start. Once you learn how easy it is, you can do it anytime you want.
Ok ok, securing files is important — everyone's constantly badgering you about that. But you've never had anything bad happen in all the years that you've used a computer. That means there's no point in bothering with this whole spiel, right?
Wrong.
As the World Backup Day site explains, your computer's hard drive — the part where all your data is kept — is the computer component most likely to break down unexpectedly:
There are a number of ways a hard drive can fail. A head crash is exactly what it sounds like: when the read / write head (the "needle") crashes into the hard drive platter, ruining the drive. The actuator arm can break, so that the arm can't move around and read data. The electrical components inside can fail, the drive could become corrupted etc.
[...]
Furthermore, the hard drive is the only part of the computer that can be damaged by software (without even physically touching the drive).Viruses, malware and accidental deletion can all damage the data on a hard drive. Though this data can sometimes be recovered, the easiest solution is to back up data on the drive before it becomes an issue.
And just how likely are you to have trouble with the component "most likely" to break down, you might be wondering? The statistics are probably a bit worse than you might've imagined:
[Hard drives] fail at an annual rate of 3 percent: every year, 3 percent of new hard drives fail, and this rate gets higher as the drive gets older. With a three year-old hard drive, the annual failure rate is around six percent. And remember: when a hard drive fails, if the data isn't backed up, it's gone.
With a three year old drive, the annual failure rate is 6 percent.
Six percent! You'd probably be living in absolute terror if you were told that something you rely on everyday — seatbelts, elevator safety mechanisms, or even coffee machines —had a six percent chance of failing.
So tell me again, what's your excuse for not backing up your data?
It's not that tedious of a task as you might believe it to be. There are basically three main methods solutions to backing up data:
And to make things extra simple, tip site Lifehacker asked its readers about their preferred backup tools and compiled those into a list of recommendations:
Among the best online backup tools, Carbonite won out over Mozy, Jungle Disk,CrashPlan, and Dropbox (which is not technically a backup service, but can serve as one).
On the offline side, Time Machine, built into Mac OS X, sets the standard for easy, total, reliable backup. Readers also liked how SyncBack, Windows Home Server, Acronis TrueImage Home, and the command line tool
rsyncdo their jobs.Most recently, we took a look at the unlimited online backup options, in light of Mozy's move away from no-limit home backup. BackBlaze, Carbonite, and CrashPlan stood out as the most clear-cut online backup solutions, though we heard good things about LiveDrive, Trend Micro's SafeSync, and DreamHost's free 50 GB space for web host customers.
So, you've got a list of tools — and you can follow the links above to instructions on how to use them — and you know that backing up your data is ridiculously important. So what are you waiting for? Go back those hard drives up!
Related stories:
Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's a bit obsessed with Twitter, loves to be liked on Facebook, and really needs to backup her files.
Capy Games/Superbrothers
Steve Jobs and company have been known to use (read: over-use) the word "magical" when it comes to describing the iPad. While I don’t like to toss that word around quite so casually, I have to admit that the new "Sword & Sworcery" app is the kind of thing that makes one appreciate just how magical playing a game on the iPad can be.
"Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP" is the full name given this game (and no, I didn’t misspell it). But calling it a "game" falls far short in descriptive power. It’s really a mix of adventure gameplay, visual art and music bound up in one tremendously enchanting application.
At its core, "Sword & Sworcery" is an old-school adventure title. Designed by the indie developers at Capy Games, it's a game in which you're charged with leading a warrior woman known as The Scythian on a mysterious, mystical and sometimes psychedelic journey.
Capy Games/Superbrothers
Simply tap on your iPad's screen to guide The Scythian in her pursuit of an enchanted book called the Megatome. Investigation and puzzle solving are the order of the day, and you’ll touch, swipe and rub the screen to examine the environment and interact with objects as a dreamy narrative unfolds chapter by chapter.
Certainly, those of you who’ve ever loved any of the "Monkey Island" or "Myst" games will feel a warm rush of nostalgia as you dive in here.
But that’s just the bones of the thing. It is the skin that will grab you first — that is, the unique pixelated visual style that exists on the surface but pulls you deep into the game's other-worldly universe. With its nod to the 8-bit games of yore, "Sword & Sworcery" is like something you’ve seen before ... and yet never seen before. Fantastical landscapes, supernatural creatures and magical moments are all done in tiny, colorful squares courtesy of the artists at Superbrothers Inc.
As you watch a pixelated stag jump through pixelated woods, you'll see just how breathtaking this old-meets-new art style really is.
But if the gameplay is the bones and the graphics are the skin, then it’s Jim Guthrie’s music that is the heart and soul here. The singer/songwriter composed and performed all the music for the game and it is absolutely sublime in the way it both accompanies the player's actions and responds to them. Haunting and utterly beautiful, it will make you expect more from all your future video game scores.
It’s so good, in fact, you might want to pick it up on iTunes in April, when you’ll find it for sale as "Sword & Sworcery LP: The Ballad of the Space Babies."
And there’s much more to this game — a nifty battle mechanic in which you rotate your iPad to unsheathe your sword and launch into combat ... the way the real world's lunar cycle affects the game's digital world ... a built-in Twitter tool that has already inspired a growing legion of players to tweet cryptic phrases from the game.
"Sword & Sworcery" is experimental and arty as hell in all the best ways, and yet it doesn't take itself too seriously. The dialog is often hilarious. Indeed, this curious mystical adventure walks a perfect tonal line between eerie and amusing.
While it was still in the works, "Sword & Sworcery" won the Achievement in Art award during the 2010 Independent Games Festival's mobile gaming competition. After finally launching on the iPad late last week (for a totally worthwhile $4.99), it has already climbed the charts and, at this writing, sits in the No. 4 spot on the paid list.
If you don’t happen to own an iPad, rest assured that "Sword & Sworcery" is coming for iPhone and iPod Touch in April. That's right, keep your eyes open and your swords ready. Steve Jobs may have promised all you Apple fans some magic ... but it's the Superbrothers and company who are delivering it.
Tune in each week for a new installment of App Addicted. Meanwhile, check out this story for a look at a few more iPad games to help you wile away the end of your week.
For more gaming news, check out:
Winda Benedetti writes about games for msnbc.com. You can follow her tweets about games and other things right here on Twitter.
Remember kids, just because someone types something into the computer, that doesn't mean they don't have shoulder hair or a porn moustache.
That's the big takeaway from "vintage" Internet safety video making the viral rounds – "vintage" as in "the 90s." (A fair adjective, considering 1 hour is 20 bajillion years in Internet time.)
"I was surfing the net last night and I saw some things … some things came up that made me feel really lousy," a Slurpy-sucking kid tells his friend (pretty much describing my entire Facebook experience).
"Oh, I think I know what you mean," she replies, cut off by Mr. Authority Voice before she gets to the good stuff, leaving us to wonder what dangers threatened ancient youth in a pre-Facebook world with no Chris Hansen in it. (danah boyd FTW!)
A lot's changed since then. For example, back then predators could infiltrate homes directly through Microsoft Word documents (apparently). That seems to be what's going on when "Lisa" (who is really the aforementioned shoulder hair, porn moustache) messages Sandy, later in the film.
"Of course, today's kids are reading Pokémon tumblrs on their PSPs and posting pics of themselves to Facebook at the same age when their '90s counterparts were still nervously typing "A/S/L?" into AOL chatrooms and actually believing the responses they got," writes Urlesque's irreplaceable Jay Hathaway.
"Internet and Street Smarts is a dated artifact of a more innocent time, but it does give us something we can use today ... a hilarious animated gif." Check it out!
Sigh. We've had a lot of fun tonight, but remember: Internet Safety is serious business. (The more you know!)
More on the annoying way we live now:
Helen A.S. Popkin goes blah blah blah about the Internet. Join her on a Facebook or Twitter, won't you?
It's a small world, after all, when you can Skype from your classroom.
But now, Skype is not just the means by which far away students and teachers can communicate with each other, it's also a destination for teachers to exchange resources and ideas, as well as collaborate on projects.
The video conferencing company has launched Skype in the classroom, a free community created to help teachers all over the world who use Skype to help their students learn. In this virtual space, teachers can connect with each other, find classes to partner with and share each other's stories.
Skype declares, "This is a global initiative that was created in response to the growing number of teachers using Skype in their classrooms."
It's been in beta mode for a little while, but now that it's live, it's taking off. More than 5000 teachers have embarked on 70+ projects and shared or provided more than 300 resources (videos, links, tips, etc.).
The newest 100 teachers are pinned on a global Google map on the main page. Clicking on any of those will bring up the teacher's profile. Looks like teachers are signing in from all over the world, with a high concentration in the U.S., Europe and South America. There are also a smattering of teachers in places like Guam, China and Russia.
If they don't already have one, teachers create a Skype account. Then, they can tag themselves in several categories, including Classroom exchange, Lesson examples, Guest speaker and Hints and tips. All the major school subject areas are covered too. Then, they describe what they're looking for from other teachers. Teachers also need to identify their location and language, provide a website or blog if they want to and student age ranges.
Skype in the classroom teacher directory
The forum is already bubbling over with all kinds of projects, which range from language lessons to building leadership to "the use of real-time 3D computer graphics rendering engines to create a cinematic production."
Skype in the classroom has a few objectives in this open forum. It hopes to facilitate a few things:
More stories on educators and technology:
Check out Technolog on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Athima Chansanchai, who needs to Skype with her friends more often.
MIT/University of Washington
Run for your lives! Kinect-controlled helicopters want to take you to The Matrix.
Looks like researchers at MIT and the University of Washington are busy signing over humanity's future to our robot overlords.
Yeah, it seems the brainiacs at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and UW's Robotics and States Estimation Laboratory have gone and attached Microsoft's motion controller to a freakin' helicopter. Ok, a very small helicopter (a "quadrotor" if you want to get nitpicky about it).
As they explain in great geeky detail on their webpage, they "have developed a real-time visual odometry system that can use a Kinect to provide fast and accurate estimates of a vehicle's 3D trajectory" all of which enables "fully autonomous 3D flight in unknown GPS-denied environments."
Blah bla bla. The important thing is, now this mechanical marvel can navigate around a room all on its own. Look ... see for yourself:
Sadly, this isn't the only Kinect-controlled 'copter on the scene. Back in December the folks at the Hybrid Systems Lab at UC Berkeley used the game controller to get their own mini-helicopter in the air.
Personally, I'd love to see these two gadgets duke it out in an airborne battle to the death. But I have a feeling that, instead, they'll soon be corralling us soft, squishy land mammals into cages. Next stop: The Human Battery Farm.
That's right, you start here:
UC Berkeley
And you wind up here:
Warner Bros. Pictures
Thanks robotics nerds. Thanks a lot.
(And thanks to The Escapist for the heads up.)
For more paranoid ramblings masquerading as news, check out:
Winda Benedetti writes about games (and the end of the world as we know it) for msnbc.com. You can follow her tweets about games and other things right here on Twitter.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Microsoft
Microsoft Hotmail has added a few more partners — including Posterous and LivingSocial — to its Active Views feature. This means that the email service is just a bit more interactive than it used to be when it comes to emails containing links to third-party services.
TechCrunch reports that Posterous, and LivingSocial are joining Hotmail partners such as Netflix, Orbitz, and LinkedIn in order to improve the Active Views feature. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)
What the feature does is recognize links to content from certain third-party providers and converts them to an embedded item. For example, if a friend emailed you a link to a YouTube video, you'd see the actual embedded video instead of a link which you'd have to open in a new window.
Convenient, no?
Hotmail is not the only email service provider which has a feature like Active Views — Gmail offers something similar when it comes to YouTube videos and certain types of links, including LivingSocial — but it's definitely focusing on steadily improving the product and appears to have built up a large partnership group.
Related stories:
Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's a bit obsessed with Twitter and loves to be liked on Facebook.
On Facebook, fans called for the Bronx Zoo Cobra to host Saturday Night Live. On CafePress, this "slithery escape artist" inspired mugs, t-shirts, thong underpants, baby onesies and more. (Does she get a cut?!) And on Twitter, @BronxZoosCobra seemed to be enjoying more of what New York City had to offer ... but she should have never gone back to the Bronx.
Shortly before 3 p.m. ET the news broke on Thursday, the Bronx Zoo announced that the cobra that went missing on Friday had been found. It was good news for the zoo and in the long run, the snake. On Twitter however, @BronxZoosCobra more than 200,000 fans mourned.
After a mere three days with a (still) unverified Twitter account, the notorious @BronxZoosCobra amassed more than 200,000 followers on her virtual travelogue of New York City.
All the while, Bronx Zoo officials said they were confident the venomous snake remained in the Reptile House — closed to the public since she went missing on Friday (and where she was eventually captured). Yet @BronxZoosCobra tweeted otherwise, allegedly providing full disclosure on her alleged whereabouts.
Though, you may have needed to log some time as a "real" New Yorker to decipher her coordinates.
Meanwhile, @BronxZoosCobra caused some consternation on another new Twitter account, @BronxZooKeeper, also not officially associated with the Bronx Zoo.
Another Twitter tourism mascot, @Banff_Squirrel, busted out "new look" while the snake was on the loose, shared this inside info with Digital Life in a not-so-exclusive Twitter interview.
(Thing is, @Banff_Squirrel hasn't posted on Twitter in more than 15 hours ... this is the last we heard. If you see him, tell him to check in!)
Perhaps @BronxZoosCobra is hoping to land her own city contract in the tourism department. She certainly hitting all the hot spots, even giving shout-outs to local businesses.
Further, @BronxZoosCobra answered personal questions from her fans.
She's even addressed the unavoidable Harry Potter references.
Meanwhile, human celebrities on Twitter did darndest to hitch their wagons to the cobra's Twitter star. Some were more successful than others.
Though it appears @BronxZoosCobra wasn't above getting a little star struck herself.
Despite her capture, can a pivotal role in a "Law & Order" episode be far behind?
More on Bronx Zoo's Cobra:
Helen A.S. Popkin is a close personal friend of @Banff_Squirrel. You can be too on Twitter and/or Facebook!
Sgt. 1st Class Michael Guillory/U.S. Army
The drone listed on eBay was similar to the one shown in this photo.
A man was recently arrested after selling a U.S. military spy plane on eBay. Apparently the Homeland Security Department was not amused by his attempt to make a buck.
Reuters reports that the plane in question is an unmanned light-weight drone which 47-year-old Henson Chua tried to sell for $13,000:
The Raven is a four-pound plane equipped with three cameras that U.S. troops use for battlefield surveillance. It can be taken apart and carried by troops and then reassembled for use.
Unfortunately for Chua, his buyers turned out to be undercover federal agents:
They exchanged messages with Chua over several months, and he sent the Raven to them in separate packages in exchange for the money, officials said.
Once busted, Chua was arrested and charged. He faces up to 20 years in federal prison — assuming that he is convicted of smuggling and violating the Arms Export Control Act.
Related stories:
Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's a bit obsessed with Twitter and loves to be liked on Facebook.
The more recent Dell Streak 7-inch tablet, as offered by T-Mobile, which uses the Android OS.
Dell is not on a streak with its Streak tablet, so it's understandable that the company would be critical of Apple's iPad, especially in the enterprise market, where Dell is a huge player.
In an interview with CIO Australia, Andy Lark, Dell's v-p of global marketing for Dell's large enterprise group, said while he "couldn't be happier that Apple has created a market and built up enthusiasm" for tablets, over the long haul, "open, capable and affordable will win, not closed, high price and proprietary" such as Apple's operating system.
Google's Android operating system, which Dell uses on its 5- and 7-inch Streaks, is "outpacing" Apple, Lark said. That is true in terms of the smartphone world; tablets, not yet. But while other Android tablets, like Motorola's Xoom and Samsung's Galaxy Tab, are receiving more favorable reviews, the Streak is not.
Lark said Apple "is great if you’ve got a lot of money and live on an island. It’s not so great if you have to exist in a diverse, open, connected enterprise; simple things become quite complex."
Lark said Dell's business approach to tablets will ultimately give it the edge in the business world:
“We’ve taken a very considered approach to tablets, given that the vast majority of our business isn’t in the consumer space,” he said. “[A company] like Samsung has to aggressively go after their business, but we’ve got a far more diversified footprint than some of these players.”
The cost of Apple products was another deterrent to iPad deployments, with Lark claiming that a the economics on a fully kitted iPad did not add up.
“An iPad with a keyboard, a mouse and a case [means] you’ll be at $1500 or $1600; that’s double of what you’re paying," he claimed. "That’s not feasible.”
Not sure how Lark came up with those figures, even based on the most expensive model of the iPad, which is $829. A mouse and case might add $100. Apple's Wireless Keyboard is $69 (although there are other, more expensive keyboards you can buy).
So the math isn't quite right.
"Nice try Dell, but your desperation is starting to show," wrote Jim Dalrymple on The Loop:
As Macgasm points out the price of getting these items is far less than what Lark says. iPad = $499; Apple Wireless Keyboard = $69.00; iPad Dock = $29.00; and an iPad Smart Cover = $69.00.
The grand total is $666.00, not $1,500 or $1,600.
Furthermore, says Dalrymple: "Apple is also great if you want to get things done without rebooting your crappy machines like you get to do with a Dell."
More about tablets:
Check out Technolog on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Suzanne Choney, who has both Apple and Dell in her household (but not in the same room).
Once Google's new ad system begins rolling out, you'll have the ability to opt-out of it through your GMail settings.
What if your email service gradually learned from the emails you send and read so that it could show you ads which you might actually be interested in?
That's exactly what Gmail will be doing soon.
TechCrunch reports that Google will soon begin rolling out a new ad system that will serve up more personalized ads to Gmail users. This new system basically means that you should get more ads which are relevant to you and fewer entirely random ones:
Google says that the system uses signals similar to those utilized by Priority Inbox, the automated system launched last August that attempts to highlight which of your incoming email is most important. These signals include things like who sent the message, whether or not you read it, and keywords that appear in the message.
For example, if you frequently email with your friends about cooking (and you actually read those messages), Gmail might start showing more ads related to cooking classes or a local merchant that specializes in cookware. Google says that by improving its existing ads its reduced the number it shows to users by a third, and it hopes to continue that trend with this new system.
Now before you panic and worry that someone is snooping through your email and handpicking ads for you, know this: The system is fully automated — as in, no human is actually reading your messages and no personally identifiable information is handed to advertisers.
All that's happening is that Google's improving the chances that you'll want to click an ad.
Like many other Google features, this new ad system is turned on by default, but you will be able to opt-out of it via your Gmail settings once it's up and running.
Related stories:
Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's a bit obsessed with Twitter, loves to be liked on Facebook, and barely even notices ads in Gmail anymore.
Eversave
Top complaints about Facebook friends
Ladies, turns out Facebook is probably not the happiest place on Earth for many of you.
Sure, there's happy family activity/picture sharing and snarky comments that can make your day. But, a recent survey shows that many of you are probably annoyed by your online friends and the reasons are usually because you're sick of hearing those friends whine and complain, overshare their politics and bragging about their perfect lives.
Eversave — a 10-year-old couponing website that jumped on the Groupon bandwagon last year to offer in-email daily deals called "Saves"— conducted a survey of 400 women that reveals a love/hate relationship with the social network.
Most of the women surveyed (79 percent) use Facebook to keep friends informed about their goings-on and 64 percent use it to share links and videos. And on the receiving end, 91 percent of those surveyed appreciate Facebook for allowing them to see friends’ photos and videos, and 76 percent see it as a means for searching (though not necessarily friending) long-lost friends.
What bothers you most about your Facebook friends?
But the other shoe drops when it comes to what they don't like about Facebook friends. A whopping 85 percent of those surveyed claim they have been annoyed by their online friends, and mostly because of these reasons:
Eversave
Personalities on Facebook
The survey respondents opened up about their online friends, and placed them into categories provided on the survey. Here are the top types:
It's a Facebook frenemy-eat-friend world, folks! But then again, there's probably a good likelihood we've all been in those categories, at some time. I admit to sometimes being an incessant liker and a documentarian, for instance. But I have far from a perfect life and would never project that, but I also won't share every crisis in my life either. I have plenty of friends who are proud mamas, but their sharing is nothing I find annoying. Actually, their takes on daily childcare give me hope for the future! Everyone's got a different way of sharing on Facebook. Take our survey and tell us what you think.
More Facebook stories:
Check out Technolog on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Athima Chansanchai, who is blessed with being real friends with most of her Facebook friends.
College is a place where casual sex and arranged "hookups" are the primary objective — or at least that's the impression someone would get after browsing through a new site called eduHookups.
The site is a limited and exclusive network of college students — who can only become members after proving that they belong to one of the eligible schools — and it seems to nurture an atmosphere filled with casual sex with no strings attached.
While a bit messy-looking at first glance, the eduHookups website will easily let you sift through listings based on whether they are "casual," "serious," or "platonic." You can also filter listings based on the gender of the person posting it (as well as the gender the listing is meant to attract).
Students from select colleges — Columbia College Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago, though others will soon be granted access — are able to register for the site by using their official school email addresses as proof that they are eligible to become members of eduHookups.
After signing up, students are can post listings to search for their ideal casual hookups — note that there is a section dedicated for those looking for something "platonic" or "serious" as well — and participate in a member-only live chat.
A brief look through the current listings — which can be viewed by unregistered members — reveals that the eduHookups differs little from the personals section of CraigsList. There are listings which are sad, serious, raunchy (we won't reproduce those here!), and everything between — with the occasional bit of satire thrown in:
After sifting through some of these listings, TODAY's Matt Lauer talked about eduHookups with Robi Ludwig, a psychotherapist, and Jeff Gardere, a psychologist, in an attempt to better understand how a site like that could affect young adults.
Ludwig plainly explained that "we don't know the short-term or long-term effects of a site like this."
Instead she focused on the fact that college students are seeking out a website in order to have sex in the first place. "It's not that hard to lose your virginity," she remarks. She doesn't think "we need a site like this to help college students have sex with each other."
What's worse than the fact that students are using a website like this, as Gardere explained, is that "when kids are in college, their identities are still forming. They don't necessarily know what they want." These kids might seek out casual sex because they believe that's what they want and need, but the reality might be entirely different.
He added on that he suspects that many will log on to eduHookups not just for the sex, but instead to see if they "can find a relationship or whatever is missing in their lives."
So aside from these worries and cautions, what's the general reaction to this site?
Based on the postings in eduHookups' ShoutBox section — a spot where anyone can anonymously post quick 150 character messages — it's a mix between moral outrage and concerns regarding the membership base of the site:
It remains to be seen just how eduHookups and its 800 or so members will develop. This project could turn into the CraigsList of colleges — or it could fizzle out and become little more than a pile of desperate and forgotten late-night personals.
Related stories:
Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's a bit obsessed with Twitter and loves to be liked on Facebook.
via Urlesque
Yesterday, we were all a dither over Amazon's Cloud Player that allows users to upload music to stream to computers and Android phones.
Today, we wonder how the record labels will try to shut it down.
If you're wondering how women really feel about their Facebook friends, your answer is here!
If you'd like to see how MIT researchers how to measure emotions with technology, your video is here!
Students, if you're trying to decide whether to pull an all-nighter, your flow chart is here.
Meanwhile, NASA needs your help picking out far-out tunes for the astronauts.
If you thought Google ads were a little too personal before, wait til Gmail rolls out ads that learn from your inbox.
Speaking of personal, your cell phone totally knows where you are ... at all times.
Speaking of inappropriate, you shouldn't sell your spare military spy drone on eBay.
If you think that's impressive, check out this dog that controls the volume of his barks ... on command!
If it seems like you keep seeing the same people over and over on Twitter, it's not just the fact that they're the people on your "follow" list — not everyone you follow tweets with the same frequency. You know the folks I'm talking about. They seem to live on Twitter, either on their laptops or out and about. You worry about them, wondering if they have real lives.
Well, now a study confirms what you've probably suspected for awhile, if it ever crossed your mind in a pseudo socio-anthropological "Bones" kind of way: that 50 percent of tweets that other people pick up are generated by only 20,000 "elite users," in which "the media produces the most information, but celebrities are the most followed." So those that squawk on Twitter a lot, dominate the conversation a lot, even if they are fewer in numbers.
The 10-page study, a joint project by Cornell University researchers and Yahoo! Research, elaborates on this finding:
Clearly, ordinary users on Twitter are receiving their information from many thousands of distinct sources, most of which are not traditional media organizations even though media outlets are by far the most active users on Twitter, only about 15 percent of tweets received by ordinary users are received directly from the media. Equally interesting, however, is that in spite of this fragmentation, it remains the case that 20K elite users, comprising less than 0.05 percent of the user population, attracts almost 50 percent of all attention within Twitter. Even if the media has lost attention relative to other elites, information flows have not become egalitarian by any means.
The study also makes three big observations:
These "elites" have learned to cut through the middlemen of mass media, reaching their fans directly.
Then there are those "semi-public" individuals that include bloggers, journalists, authors and experts of every kind, contributing heavily to the Twitter stream. The study also looked at those big media corporations, governments and NGOs (non-governmental organizations), which are not only extremely active, but well followed.
"And finally, Twitter is primarily made up of many millions of users who seem to be ordinary individuals communicating with their friends and acquaintances in a manner largely consistent with traditional notions of interpersonal communication."
These researchers used all five BILLION tweets "generated over a 223-day period from July 28, 2009 to March 8, 2010 using data from the Twitter 'rehose,' the complete stream of all tweets."
That's a whole lot of tweets. I can barely keep up with my daily allotment! (Twitter celebrated its fifth birthday on March 21 and announced that "Twitter users now send more than 140 million Tweets a day which adds up to a billion Tweets every 8 days — by comparison, it took 3 years, 2 months, and 1 day to reach the first billion Tweets. While it took about 18 months to sign up the first 500,000 accounts, we now see close to 500,000 accounts created every day." As of September 2010, there were 175 million registered users.)
The study reinforces other findings, as previous academics have also found that the loudest squawkers in the Twitterverse are but a few, compared to the vast numbers of Twitter users out there.
In 2009, a Harvard Business School study found that 10 percent of Twitter users generated more than 90 percent of the content, as reported by Reuters. That research found a significant divide between the Tweets and Tweet-nots: "More than half of all Twitter users post messages on the site less than once every 74 days." Now, I know some people who might go into shock if they haven't posted a tweet in the last 20 minutes. (They might need some social media detox. See link below!)
More Twitter stories:
Check out Technolog on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Athima Chansanchai, who tweets just enough to prove she still has a life outside of social media.