Apple has the chops to seriously disrupt the burgeoning smart TV space, so when there's any indication that an Apple-branded television could actually exist, well, we can't help but get excited. The latest: Sharp is reportedly supplying the displays for Apple's dedicated TV, which is bound for a Q3 release.
Measure twice, cut once, the old saying goes. But if you¿re in a hurry, designer Pål Rodenius saves you the tape and the time with these pre-measured patterns for plywood furniture.
The Obama administration swears it's not arming the Syrian uprising. But the CIA reportedly is doing the next best thing: helping other nations figure out which rebel factions ought to get weapons shipments. And the revelation that the U.S. is involved more deeply in Syria than the Obama team has let on is starting to stir some misgivings amongst powerful legislators.
DIY music videos made on iPhones are awesome. (Well, sometimes.) But the makers of Trumpeter Swan's "Fools Parade" clip went above and beyond, using the go-to gadget to shoot the video and handle visual effects.
Beginning Thursday morning, 140 characters started burning a hole in the virtual pockets of Twitter users the world over as the social network began experiencing intermittent outages.
A U.S. District Court judge has ruled that an iPhone is infringing on the copyright of the Tetris Company, which could have repercussions on copycat games elsewhere.
After 18 months of pre-trial wrangling, millions of dollars in legal expenses, six weeks of jury arguments, testimony from chief execs Larry Ellison and Larry Page, and umpteen attempts to explains what the hell an API does, Oracle's copyright and patent lawsuit over Google's Android operating system has resulted in the database giant winning exactly zero dollars in damages.
Researchers who track flu's evolution lack reliable data on a vast, teeming viral reservoir. It's a hog-sized blind spot.
Mitt Romney wants a border fence. But he doesn't just want to finish the physical fence that's already there in bits and pieces. He wants a high-tech fence: you remember, the one that was tried, wasted a billion dollars, and didn't work.
Effective October 1, downloading a song or copying a DVD in Japan could result in up to a two-year prison sentence or a $25,000 fine.
After months of anticipation, the second of two controversial experiments to increase the virulence of H5N1 avian influenza has been published.
A whopping 50 percent of folks now say they have "complete confidence" in the cloud -- up from 13 percent just a year ago, according to a new North Bridge Venture Partners survey.Wow, right? There's more, of course, by way of Forbes: Cloud computing just isn't as scary as it once was to companies and ...
HTC is working on three Windows Phone 8 devices. Here's what they're called and the specs you can expect.
If your stylesheets are a mess, fear not, the Firefox and Opera extension Dust Me Selectors can help you cut the cruft and get a handle on your code.
If director Nacho Vigalondo.
Google Play now gives developers the ability to respond publicly to app reviews -- as long as you're a "Top Developer," that is.
Be still my beating heart! Andrew O'Malley's pulsing heart lamp looks alive with two Arduino-controlled settings: soft beating and cardiographic wave.
Thirteen cases of the NDM-1 superbug, which originated in New Delhi, have been documented in the United States. Superbug blogger and author Maryn McKenna reports how a hospital spread at least one of these infections.
Beginning Friday, Tesla will begin delivering the first batch of Model S sedans to buyers who have pre-ordered the svelte EV, but before the first all-electric Model S rolls out of the automaker's Fremont, California, factory, .
The Supreme Court on Thursday set aside indecency rulings against Fox and ABC for airing fleeting expletives and nudity on the public airwaves, but declined to rule on the constitutionality of decency standards for broadcast television and radio.
During a 2009 effort at cataloguing Sri Lanka's forests, scientists noticed four unusual toads on rocks in a fast-flowing stream: Sri Lankan Kandyan dwarf toads, or Adenomus kandianus, long thought to be extinct.
Satellite Eyes updates your background image based upon your current location. Perfect for travelers and giving directions to lost family members.
In the past, high setup costs (several million dollars) and long maturation time (at least four years) made it hard to break into whiskey distilling. A revolution in aging techniques has addressed half of that problem, allowing decent whiskey to be made in just 16 months.
All those web applications finding their way into the world's businesses? Zapier wants to help them talk to each other.
Rep. Buck McKeon, the chairman of the House Armed Services committee, absolutely hates cutting the defense budget -- especially when the Pentagon gets cut as part of a high-stakes deficit bill that he voted for. That summer 2011 bill was a mistake, the powerful congressman now says, one that he laid at the feat of the congressional leader of his own party. Not only that, but McKeon thinks the Pentagon is telling him a "fib" about how it'll absorb those huge, imminent budget cuts -- and the only option might be to kick the defense-budget can down the road.
As police stand guard outside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, the Latin American government is expected to decide today whether it will grant WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange asylum to prevent him from being extradited to Sweden.
Gmail users can now add their own images to the background of Gmail themes, making Google's web-based email feel a bit more personalized.
Quantum Conundrum, released on Thursday, is a puzzle-platforming game that asks you to switch between different "dimensions," each of which changes the physical properties of the world around you.
One of the best things about smartphones is how they can create new types of interactions ¿ and even transactions ¿ among strangers. Inspired by its namesake, the Yardsale app is a vehicle through which you sell and buy things from within your community, allowing you to meet your neighbors, all without the chaos and planning that¿s required of an actual yardsale.
The head of an Air Force secretive tiltrotor squadron has reportedly been fired following the near-fatal crash of one of the unit's aircraft last week.
redletterdave writes "About half of all of the languages in the world — more than 3,000 of them — are currently on the verge of extinction. Google hopes to stem the tide with its latest effort that launched Thursday, called The Endangered Languages Project. Google teamed up with the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity, a newly formed coalition of global language groups and associations, to give endangered-language speakers and their supporters a place to upload and share their research and collaborations. The site currently features posts submitted by the Endangered Languages community, including linguistic fieldwork, projects, audio interviews, and transcriptions."
hackingbear writes "While we are importing billions of 'cheap' products labeled 'Made in China,' the fastest growing export from U.S. to China does not even need a label. Chinese parents are acutely aware that the Chinese educational system focuses too much on rote memorization, so Chinese students have flocked to overseas universities and now even secondary schools, despite the high cost of attending programs in America. Chinese enrollment in U.S. universities rose 23% to 157,558 students during the 2010-2011 academic year, making China by far the biggest foreign presence. Even the daughter of Xi Jinping, the presumed next president of China, studies as an undergraduate at Harvard. This creates opportunities for universities to bring American education directly to China. Both Duke and New York University are building campuses in the Shanghai area to offer full-time programs to students there."
Nerval's Lobster writes "A day after Microsoft unveiled Windows Phone 8, a company executive explained why the company never implemented native code in Windows Phone 7, declined to say whether Windows Phone 7.x would be upgraded beyond version 7.8, and said Microsoft has no plans to acquire an OEM to manufacture smartphones in-house. Of course, in theory that wouldn't stop Microsoft from building its own hardware in-house, similar to what Google did with the Nexus One. In any case, Microsoft's decision to construct its hardware and software in-house for the Surface tablet project has led to some chatter that it could do the same for smartphones."
An anonymous reader writes "For decades, researchers have been trying to build boats, submarines, and torpedoes that make use of supercavitation — a bubble layer around the hull that drastically reduces friction and enables super-fast travel. Now a company in New Hampshire called Juliet Marine Systems has built and tested such a craft, and says it is the world's fastest underwater vehicle. The ship, called the 'Ghost,' looks like two supercavitating torpedoes with a command module on top, and can carry 18 people plus weapons and supplies. The company is in talks with the U.S. Navy to build a version of the ship that can guard the fleet against swarm attacks by small boats. The question is how well it really works, and whether it can be used reliably and effectively on the high seas."
crookedvulture writes "Hard drive prices have yet to return to normal after last year's Thailand flooding. There's good news on the solid-state front, though. The current generation of SSDs has steadily become much cheaper over the last year or so. SSD prices have dropped an average of 46% since early 2011. Intel has largely shied away from discounting its drives, but the aggressive competition between other players in the market seems to have forced its hand. There's no indication that competition is waning, suggesting the downward trend will continue. Right now, an impressive number of drives are available for less than a dollar per gigabyte."
Do you have a static IP or two? If so, you might be able to spread some Internet infrastructure well-being with very little effort. An anonymous reader writes "The NTP Pool project is turning 10 soon, and needs more servers to continue serving reasonably accurate time to anyone in the world."
First time accepted submitter MtownNaylor writes "I graduated high school two days ago and am currently enrolled to attend college for studying Computer Science. I spent last summer working as a contractor, programming in Java doing work for a single company. I am looking to further either my career, my education, or both this summer. The problem is that I have found it difficult to find summer employment or internships programming for a multitude of reasons (lack of opportunities, lack of experience, lack of degree.) So what is a high school graduate who wants to work as a programmer to do?"
tekgoblin writes "Well this is pretty awesome, Valve has made an entrance into the education sector. They plan to release a new version of Steam for education uses in schools. Valve will call this service Steam for Schools, an education version of the Steam client that allows administrators to limit what its users can access. The idea of Steam for Schools is to use the platform as a teaching aid. Valve has already put together a number of educational lesson plans for using Portal 2 and its level editor to teach math and physics."
Gottesser writes with this excerpt from Bev Harris's Black Box Voting: "I have found and posted the actual voter list software used widely throughout the USA (TN, WI, PA, CO, KS...) for Accenture voter registration and voter histories. I located the files on a magnetic backup tape of the hard drive of a county elections IT employee, part of a 120-gig set of discovery files. The Accenture voter registration / voter history software is highly problematic, and has been reported switching voter parties in Colorado, and losing voter histories in Tennessee. Although it is now widely known that Accenture voter list software gets it wrong, just WHY the program misreports voter information so often has never been explained. I am hoping that by releasing this software to the public, it may shed light on what's really going on with our voter registration systems. I also posted a Tennessee file with work orders and release notes which shows the Accenture software has a history of tripling votes in certain ('random') voter histories, going back to 2004. Except it is not random: Other files I discovered prove it is with primarily suburban Republican precincts that votes are somehow being recorded twice and sometimes three times for certain voters in the voter history report, and this didn't just happen in 2004; it also happened in the 2008 presidential primary and in May and August 2010, and according to election commission notes in Shelby County, also in the 2012 presidential primary. Computer buffs, have at it. Much source code exists within the structure because it is built on MS Access. I do not read source code, though I can see some structural problems with the software (for example, it allows political party ID to be set differently from one precinct to another)."
phy_si_kal writes "The open source Opa project just released its 1.0 version. Opa appeared last year and was discussed a few times. Throughout the year, Opa adopted a JavaScript-like syntax, gained support for MongoDB and now Node.js. Opa positions itself as the enterprise JavaScript framework due to the safety and security provided by its strong static typing system. Indeed, Opa checks the type safety of the application over the whole application, from client, to server, to database. Opa also provides many automation algorithms, such as the automated use of Node.js fibers at runtime, automated client/server and server/database dialog. The site of the project also announces a developer challenge."
sean_nestor writes "Back in October, an article appeared in The Wall Street Journal with the headline 'Why Companies Aren't Getting the Employees They Need.' It noted that even with millions of highly educated and highly trained workers sidelined by the worst economic downturn in three generations, companies were reporting shortages of skilled workers. Companies typically blame schools, for not providing the right training; the government, for not letting in enough skilled immigrants; and workers themselves, who all too often turn down good jobs at good wages. The author of the article, an expert on employment and management issues, concluded that although employers are in almost complete agreement about the skills gap, there was no actual evidence of it. Instead, he said, 'The real culprits are the employers themselves.'" The linked article is an interview with Peter Cappelli, author of the WSJ piece, who has recently published a book on the alleged skills gap.
chicksdaddy writes "Software failures were behind 24 percent of all the medical device recalls in 2011, according to data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) Office of Science and Engineering Laboratories (OSEL). The absence of solid architecture and 'principled engineering practices' in software development affects a wide range of medical devices, with potentially life-threatening consequences, the FDA warned. In response, FDA told Threatpost that it is developing tools to disassemble and test medical device software and locate security problems and weak design."
YokimaSun writes "Following on from the news that RIM's partner was pulling the plug on its BlackBerry phones, RIM announced it was discontinuing the 16GB version of its playbook, PC Gaming News are reporting that the PlayBook is being discounted down by as much as 66% which is adding to the demise of RIM's attempt at the tablet market. Can anything stop the all conquering iPad?"