I had thought advertising might finally die out as a business model, but with the success of the Internet, it seems to have just intensified. We have streaming video content supported by ads, text content supported by ads, and, of course, the daddy of all advertising: Google. But can you do something useful with advertising? Like, say, use it to pay for your cellphone bill.
Why, yes, you can, thanks to Virgin Mobile. The company's new SugarMama service (you have to admit, they don't shy away from the bizarre names over in the UK) allows you to watch web commercials for free airtime on their Virgin Mobile service. A 30-second commercial will net you a minute of airtime; but don't think you can just stream a bunch of them: you'll have to answer questions to prove you were paying attention. The program launches on June 14th.
Virgin Mobile's pay-as-you-go service is surprisingly good. I bought my parents one for their first phone a couple years ago, and they got a new phone this past Christmas. Overall, I think they're pretty happy with the service; for as little as they use the phone, it works out to about $8/month, which is far cheaper than any of the competing pay-as-you-go services. I'm not sure I'll be telling my mother to watch 30-second ads to offset her $8, though.
[via Gizmodo]
My best friend from college got married just last week. Instead of presents, he asked a number of his friends and family to shower him with Best Buy gift certificates so he and his lovely wife could buy the huge flatscreen television of their dreams, probably Panasonic's 50" plasma, which is currently going for under $3500.
But after seeing Trusted Reviews's critique of Panasonic's 65" plasma entry, the TH-65PV500B, I may have to advise that he save his pennies. The 65-incher boasts a native resolution of 1,366 x 768, compatible with both 1080i and 720p HD streams (but not, sadly, the holy grail of 1080p). Standard definition programming also looks a treat, due probably to Panasonic's image scaling technology. In addition, TR reports that "colours are driven off the screen with excellent vibrancy and superb subtlety," and blacks are "superbly dark." Indeed, when it comes to the TH-65PV500B, the word of the day seems to be "superb."
Where do I get one, you may ask? Right next to the bank you'll have to rob in order to afford the set's approximately $13,000 retail price. But if you're having second thoughts, I'll leave you with Trusted Reviews's verdict: "For the fact is that until you’ve seen a pure HD signal running on the 65PV500, you arguably haven’t seen HD at all." What are you waiting for?
[via Engadget]
Yes, the PS3 is très expsensif. But let's get to the heart of the issue: why? Does Sony just enjoy having a console priced out of reach for mere mortals, or is there something more to it than that.
Joystiq's Christopher Grant has posted a piece about how the PS3 got to be $600, and it's worth a look, if for nothing other than curiosity. Grant points to two specific components whose development was done primarily by Sony: the Cell processor and Blu-Ray.
We already knew that Blu-Ray was going to be expensive, and some have pointed out that the PS3 at $600 is going to be around $400 less than competing Blu-Ray only players; so you get a game machine and a Blu-Ray player for just over half the price of a Blu-Ray player alone. In that sense, not a bad deal.
Grant goes on to quote Slate's Tim Harford, who wondered in the days after the Xbox 360's release why Microsoft wasn't charging more, since due to the scarcity of 360s, they were regularly going for well above retail price on EBay. Will we see a repeat of this phenomenon when the release of the PS3 comes nigh, or will the high initial pricetag scare off gamers? I would be unsurprised to see either eventuality, come November.
The I, Robot movie adaptation aside, Isaac Asimov's works of fiction are among the most influential in science fiction. Now they may become influential in fact as well. In Japan, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is prepared to enact new safety guidelines for robots, which will include a version of Asimov's First Law of Robotics.
In 1942, Asimov posited the existence of three laws that would govern robot-human relations:
1. A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.There have, of course, been numerous stories of robots and other technology running amok in books, video games, and, of course, film. Evidently, Japan hopes to cut down on real-life instances of this by enforcing these rules. I remain skeptical: rules can always be circumvented. In Asimov's mythology, this was most famously accomplished by robots inferring a fourth law, the Zeroth Law, which took precedence over the First Law: "A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm."
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.(From Wikipedia)
And all I have to say is: danger, Will Robinson, danger.
[via Engadget]
With all the calamities that have befallen NASA over the past few years, it's good to know that something is going their way. The Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity were supposed to run for about three months, an estimate they've long since surpassed.
Now, in their astounding sixteenth month, Spirit and Opportunity are destined for a software upgrade. The new algorithms will allow them to search through their photos, and select the best examples of Mars windstorms and dust devils to send back to mission control in order to increase the productivity of research.
"The idea now is to collect as much data as the instrument can, analyse them onboard for features of specific interest, and then down-link only the data that have the highest priority," [Rebecca Castano of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory] told BBC News.I've got a personal interest in the rovers, as one of my friends from college has worked on them in the past; the robotics firm he currently works for built the rovers' tools for collecting rock samples, and he also had a hand in designing an early model of the rover. Hopefully Spirit and Opportunity will continue to run for months more.Currently, the rovers are allocated time to look for clouds and dust devils, which may or may not appear - they are naturally transient events. And getting humans to sift the images is time consuming.
[via Slashdot]
I missed the boat on the classic LucasArts games like the Monkey Island series, or Sam & Max, but I have a number of friends who recall these games with the same wistful expressions of nostalgia that I usually reserve for Darkwing Duck.
Apparently, the folks behind Screen 7 missed them too, so they've created a brand new adventure in homage to the classic games. Even better? It's an Indiana Jones game.
Indiana Jones and the Fountain of Youth features original artwork, a MIDI-based score, and level of puzzle-solving adventure. It draws inspiration from the classic Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, another in the line of older LucasArts games, but this one is made entirely by fans. The game hasn't been released yet, but you can find a demo on their site (though the installer is for Windows, they claim that Mac users might be able to run the game anyway. Check out Joystiq's coverage below for another Mac hint).
Unfortunately, how long will the game last before George Lucas's legion of litigious stormtroopers lawyers descend upon its developers? Snap it up while you can.
[via Joystiq]
Wired Magazine is running an article about the very real dangers of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips. The average consumer best knows this technology as what makes systems like ExxonMobil's SpeedPass and automatic thruway toll paying possible, but in the next few years the prevalence of these chips will be increasing dramatically as they're integrated into everything from price tags to the forthcoming US passports.
The danger of RFID chips is that most of them are not encrypted, and will yield up whatever information they carry to anyone with the right hardware. This makes it possible not only to clone chips (and, say, buy gas with someone else's SpeedPass), but also to read and write data to these chips (perhaps making it possible to track a car via its EZ Pass transponder).
Most worrying, the next generation of US passports will integrate RFID technology that, though it is claimed as secure by the government, may actually be hackable, according to technology experts.
"We believe the new US passport is probably vulnerable to a brute-force attack," [says Ari Juels, research manager at the high tech security firm RSA Labs]. "The encryption keys in them will depend on passport numbers and birth dates. Because these have a certain degree of structure and guessability, we estimate that the effective key length is at most 52 bits. A special key-cracking machine could probably break a passport key of this length in 10 minutes."
[via Slashdot]
The future is a weird, wonderful place. To celebrate the technological advancements that come along with our progress as a species, TechEBlog has compiled a list of the "Top 10 Strangest Gadgets of the Future." Comprised of both concept devices and actual forthcoming inventions, the top 10 list features everything from the All-Terrain Motorized Board (#8) to the Self-Cooling Beer Can (#4).
Some of my favorites were in the honorable mention section, including the Intelligent Spoon pictured at right:
It’s equipped with sensors to measure temperature, acidity, salinity, and viscosity. Download the recorded data to any computer via a cable for further processing.Eating Cheerios just got a hell of a lot more fun. That's pretty much the coolest spoon since the color changing ones you could get a while back.
One of the items, I happen to have some firsthand experience with: #3, the VirtuSphere. It's basically a giant gerbil ball that you walk in to control a video-game avatar. I was at the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) last August, and the folks who made the VirtuSphere were demonstrating it in the exhibit hall. I didn't use it myself, but I watched several people try to use it with mainly frustrating results. While it's an interesting idea, it seems that it needs a little more refinement in its execution.
[via Slashdot]
