Tag: duncan geere
VIDEO: Japanese exoskeleton suit called "HAL".
There’s a long comic book tradition of people going slightly doo-lally, building massive robot suits in their garage, and then stomping all over their enemies. Well, the Japanese just did it. They’ve built HAL, who looks like he’ll stomp all over you in an instant.
HAL is worn over your arms and legs, and uses eight motors to attached to your shoulders, elbows, knees and waist to control your movements. Let just hope that whoever’s controlling it has the same ideas about what you want to do as you do. Still, longer term, this could be an incredible help for the disabled.
(via WeirdAsiaNews)
Jessops announces two Olympus cameras
Olympus has just announced two digital cameras that’ll be exclusive to photo retailer Jessops. One’s pictured over there to the right – that’s the X915 – and then there’s the X890 too.
The X915 wears the trousers, so let’s examine him first. A 12-megapixel sensor, 2.7″ LCD screen and 5x optical zoom are packed into a 137g body. It’s XD and MicroSD compatible, and there’s a red eye editing feature, too.
It’s slightly younger brother is the X890, which has to make do with its older brothers cast-offs. A 10-megapixel sensor, 3x optical zoom and the same 2.7″ LCD are in the offing, as well as the aforementioned compatibility and editing settings.
The X915 costs £300 and the X890 costs £260. Both will be available on 21st February from your local Jessops.
Orange customer wins no phone signal lawsuit
An Orange customer named Tom Prescott is now £500 richer than a week ago, thanks to a court ruling in his favour.
He took out an 18-month contract with Orange, but found that he couldn’t get signal in either his home or his office. He then tried to cancel, but Orange told him it was his problem, not theirs. As you can imagine, he wasn’t too happy.
The court’s now ruled in his favour – saying that if you sell an 18-month contract to someone who doesn’t live or work in a place where you can provide coverage, then it damn well is your problem.
It could end up being a massive headache for the big phone networks as they suddenly become inundated with lawsuits. It also means that manufacturers of mini phone masts that exist in your home – called Femtocells – are suddenly rubbing their hands with glee.
(via News Wireless)
CO2 emissions data mapped on Google Earth
A team of scientists at Purdue University have mapped carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels across the USA. The mega-high-res map will show you CO2 emissions in metric tons per state, county or capita.
The project, which took three years to complete, also breaks down emissions by their source – offering the option of viewing only emissions from electricity production, travel, or residential homes, for example.
To check out the map you’ll need the Google Earth browser plugin, and a bit of patience because it takes a while to load.
Meanwhile, an erstwhile group of Google Earth explorers that thought that they’d found Atlantis have been disappointed. Metro is claiming that the vast city that observers had spotted on the floor of the Atlantic to the west of the Canary Islands is actually just an artifact of the sonar scanning process on the ocean floor. Pity.
(via AFP and Metro)
Thousands of MySpace sex offender "refugees" booted off Facebook
Since last May, Facebook has removed 5,500 registered sex offenders from its social network, many of whom are claimed to be ‘refugees’ from MySpace who themselves have booted 90,000 sex offenders in the last couple of years.
Last year, the Attorney General of the USA forced both sites to implement considerably more stringent safeguards – preventing older users searching profiles of sub-18-year-olds, and finding better ways of age verification.
Facebook relies on using people’s real names, and that helps, but the amount of people I know on Facebook who aren’t using their exact real names makes that reliance rather concerning. There’ll always be sex offenders on the sites, I suppose, and what’s most needed is a bit of common sense, and education, in kids of the dangers.
(via AP and TechCrunch)
SHINY VIDEO REVIEW: 3M MPro 110 projector
I’ve been playing around with 3M’s MPro 110 projector for a couple of weeks now, and I’m not sure what it’s for. It will throw a (small) picture onto a wall in a dark room, sure, but it seems to be built to be portable. The problem is that I can’t see a situation that you’ll encounter on a regular basis where this thing will be useful.
Even in lights-down conditions, it simply isn’t bright enough for you to see what’s going on – a pitch-black room would be fine, but on-the-move – where this product is intended to be used – you’re not going to run into those conditions.
Basically, what I’m saying is that I don’t have a real problem with the product (beyond the cable length issue mentioned in the video) – I just don’t see any demand for it. I guess that’s 3M’s problem, not mine. It can be yours (the product, not the problem) for £299, and it’s available now.
SHINY VIDEO PREVIEW: Canon IXUS series
While Dan was mucking about with the Powershots, Susi took a shine to the IXUS range. Her conclusions are in the video above, but can basically be summed up as “more of the same with some gimmicky features”. Thanks to its svelte profile, her favourite of the lot is the 100IS.
SHINY VIDEO PREVIEW: Canon PowerShot range
Yesterday, Dan got to check out Canon’s PowerShot range of cameras in person in Soho. You can see his thoughts in the video above – the conclusion of which is basically “they’re alright”. His favourite was the SX200 thanks to the decent zoom, wide angle lens and fully manual operation.
At the same event, Susi got her hands on Canon’s IXUS range. I’ll have that video up momentarily.
Pirate Bay trial day four – mockery of Windows users
The lols continue at the Pirate Bay “spectrial” in Sweden, with day four of the court case seeing the prosecutors make yet another mis-step. Movie industry lawyer Monique Wadsted attempted to introduce completely new, previously-unseen, evidence – something which didn’t go down well with either the defence or the judge.
Most of the morning revolved around questioning defendant Fredrik Neij (TiAMO) individually, with the prosecution trying to link the four administrators to the actions of their users and to advertisers.
At one point, Fredrik was asked whether advertiser Oded Daniel was involved in the technical running of the site – Fredik’s response was “No, he’s not good at that. He uses Windows, so…” and there was a massive burst of laughter through the wall from bloggers next door in the listening lounge.
Fredrik also explained how Anti-p2p companies like MediaDefender manipulate statistics, with their actions making certain torrents appear far more active than in reality. Fredrik claimed that he had no ideological connection with the site – he simply wanted to play with the Bittorrent technology.
Later on, a crucial point was elaborated upon in detail – how .torrent files can be shared in many different ways – via email or FTP, for example. This is important, because the role that the Pirate Bay performs in the Bittorrent process could just as easily be done by Google. In fact, here‘s a how-to.
The story’s still developing today, and in the latest developments the prosecutors have tried to link the Pirate Bay to child pornography – a favourite tactic of anti-p2p activists. Gottfrid said that they report the ones they spot to the police, but that it isn’t up to the site to investigate: “We can’t do investigations of our own. And if the police says we should remove a torrent, we will”.
More tomorrow. In the meantime, hackers have been defacing sites owned by the IFPI, playing the following message on ifpi.se:
Stop lying HÅKAN ROSWALL!:
The ruthless hunt conducted by the IFPI, Anti-Piracy Office, Warner Bros., and all the other companies with a pawn in the game has now resulted in a trial in which four innocent men are accused of copyright infringement. This is a declaration of war against anti-piracy outfits and the industry players behind them, and we urge the public to boycott and lynch those responsible. IFPI is just the beginning. To be Continued.
The New Generation
The defendants in the trial, however, aren’t too happy about it, with Peter Sunde (brokep) saying:
“Our case is going quite well as most of you have noticed. In the light of that it feels very bad that people are hacking web sites which actually puts us in a worse light than we need to be in. If anyone involved in the acts going on is reading this – please stop, for our sake. We don’t need that kind of support.”
All IFPI sites are now back online.
Yahoo! clawing back market share from Google?
If the latest figures from traffic-trackers comScore are correct, it would appear that Yahoo! is slowly but surely clawing back some of Google’s utter dominance of the search sector, in the USA at least.
After many years of decline, Yahoo!’s search numbers have been increasing now for six months in a row, and in January they jumped up half a percentage point to 21%. Simultaneously, Google dropped half a percent to 63%.
It’s great news for Yahoo!, because it means that despite the acquisition dance around the company last year hasn’t had any negative effect on their core offering at all. Meanwhile, MSN Live Search is languishing at 8.5%, while Microsoft pours money into it, and Cuil is nowhere to be seen.
