In 2008, Steve Jobs famously panned Amazon's Kindle: "The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don?t read any more." Now that Amazon is one of Apple's top competitors, Apple knows that despite its problems, publishing and education are still worth taking seriously.
Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang has resigned from the company?s board of directors and from all other positions with the company, effective Tuesday, according to a press release issued Tuesday.
Opposites attract. It's a convincing adage, but in the social world it couldn't be further from the truth. Our quest for similarity shapes our social world, constraining the reach of our personal network. Frontal Cortex blogger Jonah Lehrer explains why.
An evolutionary transition that took several billion years to occur in nature has happened in a laboratory, and it needed just 60 days.
It's one thing to hear about the powerful new 3-D tools coming to CSS, but it's a very different thing to actually see them used creatively in the wild. Developer Steven Wittens recently did just that when he redesigned his Acko.net website. Wittens turned to the 3-D features in CSS 3 -- with a little JavaScript help -- to create a visually stunning 3-D page header.
Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez claims the U.S. gave him cancer. No. Just -- just no. It's another edition of Tinfoil Tuesday, our weekly exploration of the planet's least-likely conspiracy theories.
High-ranking members of the OpenStreetMap project -- an open source mapping project that competes with Google Maps -- have claimed that user accounts attached to a range of Google internet addresses in India have been maliciously tampering with its data. Google said that two people behind the accounts were contractors using machines on Google's network, but a spokesperson for the search giant added that these contractors were "acting on their own behalf." The spokesperson also said that the contractors "are no longer working on Google projects."
Minority Report, here we come. At CES last week, Samsung demoed a 46-inch, transparent, touchscreen LCD that evoked direct comparisons to the display Tom Cruise manipulated in the dystopian movie thriller from 2002.
One of the consequences of the extreme secrecy surrounding the U.S.' drone war is that there hasn't been much opportunity for Americans to protest it. And when the online organizing group Avaaz solicited a petition urging the White House to stop the drone bombings, it was greeted with a yawn. So on Tuesday, Avaaz said it was ending its anti-drone campaign after two months.
The European Space Agency's Herschel space telescope has captured this gorgeous new view of the famed Eagle Nebula.
Writer Ben Marcus unleashes a speech-borne epidemic in his latest piece of unsettling fiction. An interview with the author of previous stunners .
The Supreme Court declined Tuesday to decide to clarify on what grounds public schools may punish students for their off-campus online speech. The justices have not squarely addressed the student-speech issue as it applies to the digital world, with the advent of social-networking tools such as Facebook, MySpace and others.
Google has some advice for anyone who would like to black out their site to protest the SOPA/PIPA/OPEN legislation, while ensuring that doing so doesn?t harm their Google search rank or indexed content.
An organization that has historically defended the teaching of evolution announced that it's broadening support to include that of climate change education.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the franchise, 50 vehicles from the James Bond films will be on display as part of .
Forget about the Air Force's new super-powerful camera system. The Army just one-upped it: its ARGUS camera suite sees up to 100 sq. km. in a single blink, and collects a lifetime's worth of video every day. And it's mounted on a drone helicopter.
Of all the buzz-worthy films coming to the Sundance Film Festival this week, new documentary might speak most strongly to the hearts of nerds everywhere.
On the fringes of Hollywood, comics, singers, and goofballs are building a studio system for viral video, hoping to turn one-click wonders into valuable brands.
With the Cold War at its height, a mid-air collision results in several deaths and a near nuclear holocaust along Spain's Mediterranean coast.
Parents are always concerned about the media their kids consume and the messages it codes on their developing minds. So when it comes to the grand animated stories, who does a better job at delivering the messages you think are important: Disney or Miyazaki?
Let's assume for a moment that the Mayans were wrong and the world won't end on Dec. 12 this year. How might the world actually end? Here are some scientifically valid doomsday scenarios.
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
Watching Yellowstone's seismometer activity from the web can be a fun hobby, but following the data too closely without perspective can lead to a paranoid obsession. Volcanologist and Eruptions blogger Erik Klemetti explains why recent activity doesn't support recent rumors of an imminent eruption.
Peace talks with the Taliban are just getting started. But one major component of the Afghanistan conflict ? the air war ? is rapidly winding down on its own. In December, NATO planes flew 133 missions in which they fired off their weapons. That's the lowest monthly total in three years, and more than a 50% drop from last December's tally.
When the San Francisco 49ers started thinking about selling seats in their new $1 billion stadium in Santa Clara, California, they knew they'd need something special to win over fans in the tech savvy Bay Area. So when HP invited 49ers Sales VP Al Guido over to its Cupertino Campus to check out a wall-sized touchscreen monitor it was developing, he jumped at the opportunity. The VantagePoint is six 47-inch HP 4730G displays stuck together. They fit into a big aluminum frame with an infrared touch overlay that can recognize 32 fingers simultaneously, all programmed to work as one giant, 11-foot touchscreen.
The best way to watch a television series is quickly and all at once, says Mary J. K. Choi.
"Is anyone else's head exploding right now?" That's the question posed by Jorge Garcia's character midway through the premiere episode of , the latest TV series to spring from the mind of J.J. Abrams.
sciencehabit writes "Is climate change education the new evolution, threatened in U.S. school districts and state education standards by well-organized interest groups? A growing number of education advocates believe so, and yesterday, the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California, which fights the teaching of creationism, announced that it's going to take on climate change denial as well."
bonch writes "Apple is expected to announce e-book creation and social interaction tools at their January 19 media event taking place in New York, the heart of the publishing industry. Along with expanded interactivity features such as test-taking, the event is expected to showcase an ePub 3-compatible 'Garageband for e-books' to address the lack of simple digital publishing tools. Steve Jobs reportedly considered textbook publishing to be 'an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction' and was directly involved with Apple's efforts in this area until his death."
New submitter forkfail writes "If further proof were needed that copyright law was out of control in the U.S., it can be found in the fact that it costs 10 dollars to view Martin Luther King's famous Dream Speech. You might think you could find it on YouTube or other public venues, given its importance in American history. But no — the rights are firmly locked away until 2038."
astroengine writes "Chances are, when you pop open a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, you expect to savor certain aromatic flavors, or 'notes,' depending on the wine: fruit forward, perhaps, with hints of pepper and leathery tannins, and just the faintest whiff of... meteorite??? At least that's what you'd savor if you were drinking a bottle of Meteorite, possibly the very first wine on the market aged with a meteorite that fell to Earth from space. It's the brainchild of Ian Hutcheon, an Englishman now working in Chile, who thinks the infusion of a bit of meteorite gives his wine a 'livelier taste.'"
angry tapir writes "Women's participation in open source development is at a far lower level than women's participation in proprietary software development. One of the groups that aims to change this is the Ada Initiative: A non-profit organization formed last year. I recently caught up with its two founders, Linux kernel developer Valerie Aurora and comp sci PhD student Mary Gardiner, to discuss the project."
New submitter 9re9 writes "The NY Times describes what may be the beginning of an actual cyberwar between a pro-Palestinian group and Israeli companies, specifically El Al and the Tel Aviv stock exchange. From the article: 'A hacker identifying himself as oxOmar, already notorious for posting the details of more than 20,000 Israeli credit cards, sent an overnight warning to Israel's Ynet news outlet that a group of pro-Palestinian cyberattackers called Nightmare planned to bring down the sites in the morning.' Though the article is skimpy on technical details, the group appears to have engaged merely in a DDOS attack. Hamas praised the attack as opening 'a new resistance front against Israel.' Is this the first acknowledged cyberwar?"
LinuxScribe writes "As predicted last September, Samsung has announced plans to merge Tizen with its own Bada platform to create a new mobile OS that will fit well on low- and high-end smartphones. Last year, Bada had more global phone deployments than Windows Phone 7. The merger means each Linux-based platform will have access to more native- and HTML5-based apps."
New submitter Man Eating Duck writes "Guru3D describes how the activation system in Ubisoft's RTS game Anno 2070 also tracks hardware changes: 'So yesterday I started working on a performance review. We know (well, at least we figured we knew), that the game key can be used on three systems. That's fair; the first activation is used on my personal game rig. The second we installed on the AMD Radeon graphics test PC and the 3rd on our NVIDIA graphics test PC. ... For the NVIDIA setup I take out the GTX 580, and insert a GTX 590. When I now startup the game, 'BAM', again an activation is required. Once again I fill out the key, and now Ubisoft is thanking me with the message that I ran out of activations.' Guru3D subsequently discovered that Ubisoft was less than helpful: 'Sorry to disappoint you — the game is indeed restricted to 3 hardware changes and there simply is no way to bypass that.' I, and many with me, will never buy games with such a draconian DRM scheme, as it's very likely that I'll swap out enough components to run into this issue. Even the Steam version includes this nice 'feature.' It's probably a good idea to let Ubisoft know why we'll pass on this title."
New submitter tguyton writes "Apple is going after Samsung again in Germany, this time over 10 phones including the Galaxy S II. It should come before the courts in August, a month before their tablet case in September."
stephencrane writes "NYC is to open The Academy for Software Engineering, with a focus on software design and college preparation. It'll be a 'limited, unscreened' high school, which means admission won't be tied to grades or test scores; solely on interest (and presumably a lottery, once words gets out)." Would you want to go (or have gone) to such a school? Would you want your kids to attend?
GMGruman writes "A bug in Oracle Database that could take down large databases — or let a hacker do so — has been found, and Oracle promises a patch later today. When InfoWorld first heard of the bug two months ago, its investigation revealed how dangerous this bug could be, and after convincing Oracle to address the issue, InfoWorld held the news until a patch was available, so hackers could not exploit the bug in the meantime. Paul Venezia details just how this bug exposes companies to the possibility of databases going offline, and Eric Knorr asks Oracle users to help test the patch in their complex environments. (InfoWorld's tests in simpler environments show the patch works there.)"
New submitter MrEricSir writes with some scary speculation from a BBC article about the confluence of climate and disease: "A correlation between illness and cold weather is nothing new but this one is very specific: La Nina changes the migratory patterns of birds which can (and often does, according to this theory) cause flu pandemics."
New submitter theonlyholle writes "Naked Security, the Sophos IT security blog, has published an article about the authors of the Koobface malware that plagued Facebook users in 2008 and the investigation that led to their identification. Apparently the botnet was created by five Russians from St. Petersburg."
Sir Mal Fet writes "iTunes Match, Apple's service that allows re-downloading all your music, ripped CDs, and other music files across all your libraries using the iCloud service, has been made available in most of Latin America, the Netherlands, and the Baltic states. " Here's one user's review of the service. Is it worth the $25/year? Do you use the service?"
bonch writes "Microsoft has shared details about its new filesystem called ReFS, which stands for Resilient File System. Codenamed 'Protogon,' ReFS will first appear as the storage system for Windows Server and later be offered to Windows clients. Microsoft plans to deprecate lesser-used NTFS features while maintaining 'a high degree of compatibility' for most uses. NTFS has been criticized in the past for its inelegant architecture."