Billy Gates was on the Today Show this morning showing off his fancy new table. Want to see it in action rather than just in photos? Check the video for all sorts of goodness of it being used for all sorts of applications, such as playing with photos, wirelessly pulling photos off a camera, and ordering and paying for food using credit cards.
Oh my, the 5-0 won’t like this one bit. Meet The Slurpr, a WiFi access point which aggregates up to six ‘available’ (read: unprotected) 54Mbps WiFi channels into one bigazz, ‘free’ connection. It’s the latest invention by Dutch hacker, Mark Hoekstra and his new sidekick (or is it the other way around?) Boris. Of course, use of the Slurpr in its current incarnation will likely violate wardriving laws in at least few countries. So the inclusion of Mark’s next feature — 64/128-bit WEP-cracking — could well land you in a Turkish prison. Still interested, Billy? Then head on over to Mark’s site where you can pre-order the €999 / $1,347 box today.
[Via Bomega]
Google Maps just released a new feature that lets you actually look around the street. Seems to only be working in major cities for now.
Mac Pilot 2.2.8 - Enable over 300 hidden features in Mac OS X & other apps. Mac Pilot can enable and disable hidden features in Mac OS X, optimize and repair your system, and perform numerous routine maintenance operations with the click of a button!
Pro user or not, you can now increase computer performance with only a few clicks of the mouse. Optimize your network for broadband connectivity, completely customize Apple File Sharing, perform essential maintenance without having to remember mind boggling acronyms, and much more. However, those are just a few of the many reasons why Mac Pilot is your choice over Cocktail, TinkerTool and Onyx.
Enable the ‘cut’ option in the Finder, disable menu items for security, disable icon caches, set history limits, erase recently used files, prevent your dock from being modified, turn off all system animations, increase the speed at which windows resize, change which format screenshots are taken in, set a default name and location for screenshots, disable a secondary processor, the startup chime, and even change the login window picture.
“
(Via MacUpdate - Mac OS X.)
So you find out that everyone in on your block is using your network without your permission. Do you lock it down or…? Or maybe you want to have a little fun. A little creativity with squid and you could turn your everything they browse upside down (literally)
Man, you gotta love it when Apple and Microsoft take these little swipes at each other. Rex Sorgatz apparently visited Microsoft’s Zune HQ and spotted this plastic ‘iPod Amnesty Bin’ sitting at the entrance, complete with its not-so-subtle message. We’re leaning towards the Microsoft stunt end of things (you think they had a ‘PowerBook Amnesty Bin’ outside of J Allard’s office?) since if you look closely, you’ll notice all the full size iPods look like the same 4G model. Oh, someone also seems to have dropped in a 2G shuffle — maybe a staffer with access to one of those rumored
[Via TUAW]
Better “lifecasting” with Veodia: “Funny, instead of heading up to the big Facebook shindig I went down to Veodia. Never heard of them? Well, Rafe Needleman, who runs the Webware blog, used Veodia to broadcast the Facebook shindig to the world.
Unfortunately the video that Rafe did is totally useless and doesn’t show off Veodia very well. If we’re going to do live cameras we need to have microphones that are directional. They are expensive. The one I used at CES cost about $900 but only picked up whoever you aim at.
Anyway, Veodia is aiming their service more at corporate types than competitors like Justin.tv, Ustream.tv, or the just-announced Blogtv.com.
What makes it better than those? For one, it uses standard MPEG, not Flash. So it works on Apple TV and iPods. For two, the quality usually is a lot better (if you have enough bandwidth to send a decent signal, which Rafe didn’t have).
Also, it does a lot better job at recording what’s being sent than Ustream does (it does it on the server side automatically and automatically replaces the video stream with the recording at the end of a broadcast).
Some cons against Veodia? They aren’t going with an advertising-based business model. That means they are going to charge the content providers if they use more than a preset amount of bandwidth (which hasn’t been set yet). While it’s free it’s a great service (and there will be a free version, even after they come out of beta) but it could get pricey for someone like me who can get thousands of people to watch a single show.
Also, they don’t yet support 16:9 video format so on Apple TV the video doesn’t fill the screen the way that my show, for instance, does. But they are working on that.
Oh, and you can only encode video from a PC so far, they are working on a Mac version.
Anyway, I’m running about three to four week lead times on my show, so this interview will be up in about a month.”
(Via Scobleizer.)
40 Beautiful Church Sites: "So not all of these are church sites, a few of them are simply church related. None the less, this set of sites is pretty impressive and very inspiring. It is great to know that churches in general take the web serious as a means to reach people.
(Via Design Melt Down.)
Google and dell installing spyware?
Gates and Jobs to meet and, like, talk about stuff next Wednesday: “Xeni Jardin:
The meeting is actually part of the Wall Street Journal’s ‘D’ conference, and the session will be moderated by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Surprise! News of the meeting broke in the WSJ. Snip from item by John Shinal:
For more than two decades, Apple Inc. (AAPL) Chief Executive Steve Jobs and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates have sparred over the issues that were crucial to the development of the technology industry. Issues such as whether it is wiser for a company to partner or build everything itself. Or the primacy of software versus hardware in personal computers. Or which is more important: how easy it is to use a product or what it can do once you figure out how?
This jousting over big ideas, sometimes friendly but often not, has always been from a distance. Until now.
Although Gates made a famous phone call to Jobs in 1997 and the two shared a stage briefly at a 1983 Apple promotional event, the two industry icons have never had a public conversation.
So when they sit down next Wednesday for a 75-minute joint interview in front of a gathering of tech executives, their long history and competing philosophies should make for an interesting - if not history-making - discussion.
Link to WSJ item (sub required), and here’s the WSJ/D press release (not much difference from the item in the WSJ, which amounts to a promotional announcement, too). The ‘D’ conference takes place at Aviara resort, north of San Diego.
Reader comment: Colin Nekritz says this isn’t the first time. Given that fact, it seems kind of tacky for a Dow Jones/WSJ reporter to describe this meeting — organized by the WSJ, taking place at a WSJ conference, promoted on the WSJ’s own editorial pages — as ‘historic.’
Steve and Bill sat down at the All Things Digital WSJ executive
conference in 2005 and chatted. It wasn’t official per se but they had
a nice conversation.When I worked for Adobe in the 90s I had the, well, wouldn’t call it
privilege, to talk to both of them. Though they’re rivals they
actually have quite a bit of respect for each other, did ask them
about the other and both got these wry smiles. Though not first hand
info, scuttlebutt was they do talk a couple times a year, and not
about geek stuff, simply they know each other and have since the dawn
of computers. Think about it, these two old war horses pretty much
have the entire planet’s technological industry in the palms of both
of their hands, arguably both are responsible for the fact PCs are so
prevalent today. (My personal take being a Linux/Mac person is
basically Jobs invented everything, Gates copies it then marketed his
cheap imitation to the masses).You can see they do get along actually fairly well, check out the pics here: Link
”
(Via Boing Boing.)
Ian Scott
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