Read a little. Learn a lot. • Tightly-written news, views and stuff • Follow us on Twitter • Be a Facebook Fan • Tumble us!

11 Jun 2010 10:58

tags

Tech: “Rock Band” decides pretending to play music not enough for pros

  • Admit it, nerds, you were waiting for this moment. The “Rock Band” series has always been about fake instruments, but in the upcoming third edition, there’s going to be room for a lot more than just pretending. On top of the traditional style of gameplay, there will be a “pro” version that allows you to play instruments just like the real thing. The keytar, above, reacts like a real keyboard. The “Fender Mustang” has hundreds of buttons and nylon strings, so it acts like a real guitar. But the most killer one? The Squier Stratocaster, which actually doubles as a real guitar. The boys in the “Guitar Hero” labs have some catching up to do. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

11 Jun 2010 10:37

tags

Tech: Experts say we’ll be doing our computing in the cloud by 2020

  • 71%
    think we’ll be working on computers in the cloud
  • 27% think we’ll still be using PCs for most of everything we do
  • 2% think we’ll be using Amigas or running BeOS for some reason source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

11 Jun 2010 01:29

tags

Tech: Google’s real problem with their background images: No balance

Why did everyone hate Google putting background images on their site yesterday? Because, unlike Bing, they grafted the idea onto the old design (poorly). source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

10 Jun 2010 23:41

tags

Tech: One of the neckbeards behind Goatse Security speaks up

  • It’s pretty egregious that AT&T would have it for such a device that probably has known exploit candidates (attack code) on, say, the Russian (underground) markets.
  • Escher “Weev” Auernheimer of Goatse Security • Talking about how his group uncovered a major flaw with AT&T’s security mechanism, which led to Gawker posting about the results. Why did they go to Gawker and not AT&T? “We did want not engage directly with AT&T in case they tried to serve us (an injunction) or something,” he said. How did they do it? It was a simple brute-force attack that required no hacking. And people offended about the group’s hilarious name? “If someone is offended to where they can’t deal with us … then they’re a douche bag and we don’t want to be employed by them anyway.” A fun read. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

09 Jun 2010 22:13

tags

Tech: More on the leaked 3G iPad leak thang: Gawker’s out for blood

  • Gawker’s upset with Apple. They want Apple to feel the pain. Problem is, they’re looking for blood that’s coming out of a different body. The gaffe is clearly AT&T’s, not Apple’s, fault. While it’s great that they exposed it, the portrayal is all wrong. Ryan Tate of Valleywag writes: “Although the security vulnerability was confined to AT&T servers, Apple bears responsibility for ensuring the privacy of its users, who must provide the company with their email addresses to activate their iPads.” We know they’re upset about the raid and the WWDC snub, but doesn’t it seem like they’re fishing with a statement like that? Personally, we have to admit to getting a kick out of the word “Goatse” running in a New York Times article. Best part of the whole story. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

09 Jun 2010 22:02

tags

Tech: “Gawker,” “iPad” and “Goatse Security” forever linked after tonight

Gawker found out that AT&T had a major iPad security hole which exposed the personal e-mail addresses of military officials, celebrities and executives. Oy vey. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

09 Jun 2010 20:52

tags

Tech: The root of Google’s new Caffeine engine: 9/11. No, really

  • The onslaught of news readers that day made them emphasize immediacy. Remember September 11, 2001? We still had the Internet, yeah, but our search engines were super-primitive back then. So when people looked up news on Google, stories weren’t updated. Eventually, Google started caching sites like CNN to offset this, but it taught them a long-term lesson. “That was a real wake-up call, where we said we have to pay a lot of attention to freshness,” said Matt Cutts of Google’s spam team. “We knew that before, but we thought 30 days was pretty good.” Which led the the development of Google News, and later, Caffeine. Now, what was once updated monthly is now thrown up immediately. Neat, huh? source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 

09 Jun 2010 10:24

tags

Tech: An update on Hulu’s grand scheme to charge you money

  • yes Hulu plans to expand its base to the Xbox 360 and iPad very soon. (About time, guys.)
  • yes You will have to start paying for the service soon. (Grr… this is our angry voice)
  • no You won’t have to pay for new episodes of shows, just older, “classic” episodes. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

09 Jun 2010 00:28

tags

Tech: Limp Pulse: New York Times Company screws with awesome iPad app

  • The Pulse app is better than the NYT app. There, we said it. The New York Times didn’t put all of this money and time into an iPad app to see their hard work upstaged by a couple of upstarts. Which is why the Times’ lawyers sent Apple an angry letter asking them to pull the Pulse app – which Steve Jobs had big-upped just yesterday – because of the way it uses their RSS feeds. Apple took it down, and now it’s back up. But these guys have had a pretty miraculous ride. Some quick tidbits on that ride:
  • four number of weeks the app was developed by two Stanford students
  • #1 the app’s peak on the “paid apps” chart since its fairly recent release
  • yes the app has gotten a big wet kiss of a profile in the Times already source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

08 Jun 2010 11:21

tags

Tech: Mozilla dude on Apple’s HTML5 demos: “Not intellectually honest”

  • Apple’s messaging is clearly meant to say ‘hey, we love the web’ but the actual demos they have and the fact that actively block other browsers from those demos don’t match their messaging. It’s not intellectually honest at all.
  • Mozilla evangelist Christopher Blizzard • Regarding a series of technical demos Apple put on their site to test HTML5. While the demos are cool – we particularly dig the font one – we were surprised to find out that the demos didn’t work on Firefox OR Chrome, despite the fact that most of the features were supported by both browsers. In case you don’t want to change browsers but want to test out the technology, here’s a version without the Steve-block. They still work, guys, strangely enough. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 11 Comments • Permalink
 
<< newer 
top tags
older >>