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Josh and Adam interview Kevin Rose and Gary Vaynerchuk at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) 2008 conference in Miami, FL. It's one of the most entertaining interviews in The Web 2.0 Show history...AND this is the FIRST episode in the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) podcast series.

Filed under: Desktops

We've all been waiting to see what ASUS's Eee PC desktop would turn out to look like, and HotHardware is claiming these shots are the real deal. Yeah, we know, it's a bit reminiscent of a certain motion-sensing game console, but besides these kind of grainy photos we've still got almost nothing to go by. Yet!

 

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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The US Patent & Trademark Office has invalidated all 44 claims in Blackboard's patent. While this is a non-final action [PDF], which means that Blackboard will be able to appeal, it does represent a win for the Software Freedom Law Center which had requested the reexamination of Blackboard's patent. It is not yet known how this will affect the $3.1M judgment Blackboard won from Desire2Learn."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Filed under: Cellphones

At this point the Treo 800w has been outed by Bill Gates himself, so while the suspense factor is pretty low, it's nice to know that it'll finally be getting here in June. That's the word according to this purloined Sprint roadmap, which also indicates the newest Treo will have GPS and EV-DO rev. A -- but still run WinMo 6.0, which is pretty sad, especially if that revised version of 6.1 launches at CTIA next week as expected. Oh well, at least it's a new Treo -- let's just hope they can shake some more ugly off this thing before it hits the street.

[Via PhoneArena]

 

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Enews 2.0
Earliest recordings preceded Edison's
Los Angeles Times - 1 hour ago
Isabelle Trocheris / AP Audio historian David Giovannoni examines the Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville phonautograms at the French Academy of Sciences.
Physicists convert first known sound recording San Francisco Chronicle
Oldest Voice Recording, A French Folksong InformationWeek
AFP - The Associated Press - eFluxMedia - BBC News
all 463 news articles

KULR-TV
Gray wolf is removed from endangered list
Deseret News - 2 hours ago
The northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf has been officially removed from the federal list of endangered species, the US Fish and Wildlife Service announced Friday.
Idaho finalizing plans to allow public hunting of gray wolves Twin Falls Times-News
Gray wolf: Still endangered? CNN International
KULR-TV - KPAX-TV - Rocky Mountain News - LocalNews8.com
all 35 news articles

When Victory Baptist School, a small private school in Millbrook, Ala., was struggling to keep its computer network together last year, an 11-year-old student named Jon Penn stepped in as network manager. For Penn, it’s been the experience of a lifetime, even getting to select and install a gateway security appliance largely by himself.

TechSpot
Nvidia to blame for many early Vista crashes
CNET News.com - 3 hours ago
There is a ton of interesting information in the documents that have been released as part of the Windows Vista Capable lawsuit. There's the juicy e-mails that show Microsoft caving to pressure from Intel and lowering the graphics requirements to get ...
MS: Nvidia Drivers Caused 29% of Vista Crashes Shacknews
Was Best Buy To Blame For Vista Capable? CRN
Wired Blogs - Slashdot - TG Daily - DailyTech
all 16 news articles

ngkabra writes "In November 2007, a previously unheard of supercomputer called EKA, built by CRL, India came out of nowhere to become the 4th fastest supercomputer in the world. It is also the only supercomputer in the top 10 that hasn't taken any government funding — which means it has no strings attached against commercial exploitation. That is one of the reasons why Yahoo! chose EKA for the cloud computing research that they announced at the Hadoop Summit earlier this week. Yesterday, I attended a presentation by the team that built EKA, and they touched upon a lot of the technical details of EKA, and the challenges faced in designing and building it, which makes for interesting reading."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablet PCs

We know Apple's had its Inkwell handwriting recognition software in OS X for years now, so we might have otherwise just totally glossed over this Handwriting Recognition Engineer job listing on Apple's site. Except for the part that reads: "The recognition technology you create may extend beyond Mac OS X to other applications and the iPhone." They always love to throw those little tidbits in there, don't they?

[Via Macrumors]

 

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Soldiers in the Bad Voodoo platoon stationed in Iraq carry high-def videocameras and shoot the raw footage for a new documentary, Bad Voodoo's War, by director Deborah Scranton. The film airs Tuesday on PBS' Frontline.

Filed under: Features, Misc. Gadgets, Robots

Ariel Waldman contributes Movie Gadget Friday, where she highlights the lovable and lame gadgets from the world of cinema.

Last week on Movie Gadget Friday we kicked off our two-part series in honor of the late Arthur C. Clarke with 2001: A Space Odyssey. This week continues our tribute as we look into some of the support systems on board Discovery 1 and the Leonov in 2010: The Year We Make Contact. While we hear Dave Bowman proclaim "My God, it's full of stars", we can't help but dig through this film full of gadgets.


HAL 9000 and SAL 9000
Designed as an artificial emotional intelligence machine, the HAL 9000 and SAL 9000 require human interaction for enhanced performance. Represented by a blue camera eye and female voice, SAL 9000 served as a guide to monitoring potential reactions by the previously disabled HAL 9000. Both machines incorporate keyboard and audio input to communicate with intelligent carbon-based lifeforms (read: us). The HAL 9000 is adept at facial, vocal, and vital sign recognition and makes decisions based on a strict understanding of logic. HAL maintains numerous responsibilities while acting as the brain and central nervous system of Discovery 1. Though HAL appears to be programmed to protect the crew, there are obvious and inherent flaws in his logic programming, resulting in -- spoiler alert -- in committing homicide to resolve conflicting commands. More after the jump.

Continue reading Movie Gadget Friday: 2010: The Year We Make Contact

 

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Nature is reporting that a new distributed computing application is looking to monitor earthquake data using the accelerometer in many computing devices. In the long run, "Quake-Catcher" will hopefully be fast enough to give warning before major earthquakes. "If it works, it will be the cheapest seismic network on the planet and could operate in any country. It wouldn't be as sensitive as traditional networks of seismometers, but Lawrence says that's not the point. 'If you have only two sensors in an area, you have to have a perfect system. If you have 15 sensors in a system it [can] be less perfect. One hundred, one thousand, ten thousand -- your need for the system to be perfect becomes much smaller,' he says. 'That's really our approach -- just to have massive numbers.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Business Wire (press release)
Blu Note: Dell Adds Blu-ray to Sub-$1000 NoteBook (or Does It?)
PC World - 6 hours ago
The immediate benefit of the end of the high-definition DVD format war--spoiler: Sony's Blu-ray won--is that you'll be able to cram much higher density optical storage into a laptop or computer without worrying about obsolescence.
Dell Launches Sub-$1000 Blu-ray Notebook InformationWeek
Dell Gets Down to Basics With Low-Cost Blu-ray Laptop TechNewsWorld
CRN - DailyTech - PC Magazine - Computerworld
all 61 news articles

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

Well, it's no surprise that it was going to happen, but the HD DVD Promotion Group officially dissolved today, leaving behind nothing but this terse message directing us to individual "selling agencies." And so, with literally nothing left of HD DVD, we formally close the sad chapter of consumer electronics history known as the HD Format War, remembering those times when HD DVD rode high, with low prices, more features and less restrictive rights management as its rallying cries, and the rantings of Michael Bay still only the delusional fantasies of a fool. May the resistance live on, and our PS3s always be reminded of a time when their ascension was not guaranteed. Red's dead, baby.

 

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se7en writes "VeriSign is jacking up prices for the .com and .net domains for the second year running, increasing both by the maximum 7% allowed under its exclusive contract with ICANN. 'Assuming that VeriSign continues the 7 percent rise each year (which seems reasonable given the company's history), registrars will be looking at $9.00 for .com domains by the time the current contract ends in 2012 — a 50 percent increase in six years.' Registrars have no choice but to pony up, and chances are they'll pass the pain on to customers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Filed under: Gaming

The last time we heard someone proclaim the death of the game console, it was EA's head of international distribution saying that an open gaming platform distributed within cable and satellite set-top boxes would take over within 15 years -- a prediction at which we laughed pretty heartily, given that most cable companies can't even manage to get a functional DVR out the door. So it's fairly surprising to hear the former VP of Xbox Europe make the exact same prediction, and bump up the timeline pretty dramatically: Sandy Duncan, who was with MS for 15 years, recently said that dedicated game devices "will die in the next five to 10 years," and that "most of this stuff will be 'virtualized' as web services by your content provider." Of course, Duncan's now with YoYo Games, which is a web-based gaming company, so he might be a little biased, but there's truth in his statement that the console gaming market is risky and that launch costs of new hardware are incredibly high. Still, as Duncan should know first-hand, it's an investment that can definitely pay off, and we think consumers are always going to demand choice and quality -- two things that aren't exactly synonymous with cable and satellite hardware.

[Via GameDaily]

 

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This watch has been dubbed the "Accurate" not so much for its abilities to keep accurate time, but for its reminder about our inevitable demise. Following in the tradition of memento mori, the Accurate watch continuously alerts us to the fact that life is short and that we should strive to seize the day.

Dutch politician Geert Wilders' 15-minute video is taken offline by LiveLeaks after garnering more than 3 million views. The website cites "threats to our staff of a very serious nature."