Technology
Unless you live in a remote mountain cabin, you might never be without an Internet connection in the world of the future. Members of the public could form the backbone of powerful new mobile networks, by wearing sensors being researched at Queen's University Belfast.
According to researchers, the sensors could create new ultra high bandwidth mobile internet infrastructures and reduce the density of mobile phone base stations. The engineers from Queen's Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT), are working on a new project based on…
With virtual keyboards so common, it's should be easy for alternative, more efficient keyboard layouts to make headway, since, as we've all heard, the default QWERTY layout was designed to slow typists down. So why aren't more devices (or at least the iPhone) giving you options, like the Dvorak layout? From the Hartford Advocate:
If you consider all of the ways that technology has changed, even in the past four or five years, it seems strange that the majority of us continue to use something as outmoded and inefficiently designed as the QWERTY keyboard.
Our things are constantly being…
Wow; I haven't gotten one of these in a long time:
ATTENTION!A message you recently sent to a 0Spam.com user with the subject "[redacted]" was not delivered because they are using the 0Spam.com anti-spam service. Please click the link below to confirm that this is not spam. When you confirm, this message and all future messages you send will automatically be accepted.
I wrote about challenge/response anti-spam systems about three years ago, but probably haven't seen a challenge message in at least two years. I thought people had given up on them.
Alas, no. But if the last two years is…
Hank |
The worst thing government has done is get into the recycling business but even worse than that is over-doing it. Where I live, the local government recently started 'separating' garbage, declared more things recyclable, then made the recycling collectible only every two weeks. Result: Government employees are getting paid to come by and empty garbage containers that are 20% full and the recycling one is stuffed after 10 days. Meanwhile, the delay in recycling is so huge it is basically a landfill anyway.
At "Discovery", columnist Tracy Staedter discusses RecycleMatch…
Newswire |
LONDON, October 22, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Northrop Grumman Corporation has formally opened the first commercially available federated cyber test range in the UK at its Fareham facility. The cyber range will be used for emulating large complex networks and for conducting cyber experiments and assessments of infrastructure survivability and assurance within a safe and controlled experimental environment to evaluate their resilience to cyber attacks. The UK cyber range has been designed to be federated with other cyber ranges anywhere in the world to create the capability for large-scale…
comScore, Inc. , a leader in measuring the digital world, today released a study of Internet usage in Russia based on August 2010 data from the comScore Media Metrix service and the data revealed that Russians are the heaviest social networkers worldwide in terms of time spent per user and that Yandex is the leading property in the Russian Federation.
Russia #1 Worldwide in Time Spent on Social Networking Sites
In August 2010, 34.5 million Russian Internet users (74.5 percent of the online population) visited at least one social networking site. With an average of 9.8…
M4Y0U |
Most Facebook users think they see all their friends in the news feed and everything is okay, they just think some are just not posting. Well it might not be the case.
Facebook use algorithms, whether it be to select what is the top news, what friends to suggest or what photo memories to show but the most disturbing fact is that there is also an algorithm for the people who appear in your news feed whether it be in "Recent Post" or "Top News". In fact that old friend you haven't spoken in a while could be not appearing in your news feed when he/she is posting.
I studied the…
If you've commented anonymously on this site or thousands of others where you are not a registered member, you've come across the Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) box - and maybe you dread it because, when it doesn't recognize the letters you think you are seeing, you are stuck.
Venu Govindaraju, a computer scientist at the University of Buffalo who pioneered machine recognition of human handwriting, says a 21st-century solution to CAPTCHA problems may rest in the early days of human culture - handwriting. Govindaraju and colleagues did…
Hank |
I don't have a Kindle or any other e-reader. It isn't that I am a Luddite, and it isn't that I wouldn't prefer something easier to hold than a large, hundred-year old print copy I don't want to ruin - it's mostly that online books are costly, I only get a 'license' to read them, the resolution is far lower than what eyes can see and, most of all, there is no enhanced value to compensate for any of the other shortcomings.
Sourcebooks, an Illinois company, would like to change all of that. iDrakula, for example, is another in a long list of vampire rehashes but it is separated from…
Hank |
The HRP-4C from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan, a descendant of the HRP-4 humanoid robot that sent normal people into uncanny valley creepiness territory last year, can sing now.
Clearly catering toward Japanese men, this new fembot is a waif-like 5'2", looks really, really young and likely will have lasers or at least Vulcan cannons that come out of her arms in future models - you know, for fighting off the vampires who will be resurrected after an atomic apocalypse in the future that happens in every Japanese story these days.
To do the…