Tech

IdolHands takes a look at BarackObama.com and JohnMcCain.com to see how they stack up against each other in standards-compliance and design. The verdict? Republicans still have work to do.

Hasn't been updated in a while, but an interesting idea:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/robots.txt

This technology uses photographs to enhance the resolution, exposure and other aspects of a static video scene. It can also be used to add, remove or alter objects in the scene.

Here is a video of the technique in action:

I've been using a couple of different rechargeable wireless mice for a while now. They're crap.

Yeah, I'm lookin' at you, Logitech.

Seriously. Any product that requires you to have a completely different duplicate product as a backup really needs to be re-thought. When the battery dies on a rechargeable mouse, what are you supposed to do? Stop using your computer? That may be fine if I'm just screwing around, but otherwise, it basically means I have to have a backup mouse available to use while the rechargeable is sitting in the charge-cradle for half an hour.

I love the features of my Logitech MX Revolution - the free-spinning wheel, the multitude of programmable buttons, the resolution, et al., but when the damn thing dies, I have to pull out the clunky old Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 to use while the Logitech charges. The Microsoft may not be as sexy, but at least it uses standard batteries that I can replace (and I use rechargeables there too, so...)

Anyways... Mental note: the next mouse I buy, if it is wireless at all, will utilize replaceable batteries.

10% of home users still on dial-up, broadband availability still an issue in rural communities

Home broadband adoption continues to grow, with 55% of Americans now having broadband connections at home.

Just 10% of Americans are still using dial-up. Broadband growth was also strong with lower-income Americans as well as in rural communities, according to the Pew Research Study. Unfortunately, 24% of would-be rural broadband users say they can't get service.

While broadband is finally becoming the norm in America, speeds are still very low compared to other countries. The US lags far behind countries like Japan, France and Korea which have download speeds of up to 93Mbps. Typical broadband download speeds in the US are less than a 10th of that.

Undress4Success - Slap In Face Of Telecommuting:

Seems the Democrats have their nose out of joint because the Connecticut Republican leader Lawrence Cafero has proposed a telecommuting plan, and they didn’t think of it first. At least that’s what I gather from a piece Christopher Keating wrote today in the Hartford CT Courant.

In fact, of 50,000 Connecticut state employees only 140 telecommute. Our numbers suggest something like 40% could.

But Slap doesn’t seem to have a clue, “”The reality is that the GOP plan would not save taxpayers any money and would not ease congestion. In fact, the only people the plan would help would be Republican caucus staff members.”

Really? “A good starting place would be to document how much money a telecommuting plan might save taxpayers,” Slap said, according to Keating.

Okay, using national average numbers for time and distances for the commute, and $4/gallon for the price of gas, if 5,000 Connecticut employees started telecommuting it would save over 1.1 million gallons of gas or almost 4.5 million dollars in fuel bills. State employees are taxpayers, remember.

You'd think the self-proclaimed saviors of the planet would be all over this.

Google's campaign for complete ownership of all things information marches on:

A few months ago we announced that we were testing a new product called Knol. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Today, we're making Knol available to everyone.

Basically, Knol is (or at least will be when it really gets going) Wikipedia without the vandalism and questionable content. Unlike Wikipedia, the general public will not be able to edit Knol articles. Each article is owned by an author who has editorial control.

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It's their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.

With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call "moderated collaboration." With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it!

And of course, there's a monetization angle:

Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements.

(never forget that above all else, Google is in the business of selling ads)

On the surface, it sounds like a good alternative to Wikipedia, whose articles frequently suffer from vandalism and lack of proper sourcing, but some worry that Google is beginning to compete with its partners and services like Knol will push blogs and smaller content publishers even lower in search rankings.

The Commodore 64 is celebrating it's 25th anniversary!

What memories. The C64 hit the shelves in August of 1982 and brought computing to millions that previously couldn't afford it.

I think I got my first C64 sometime in 1983. It wasn't technically my first computer - I had a Timex-Sinclair TS-1000 and a couple of eval boards before - but the C64 was definitely the machine that got me into writing code.

My former employer and patent troll, Forgent Networks (I worked for VTEL, part of which became Forgent after I left) was denied a new trial by a Texas court in a suit against EchoStar Communications (parent company of DISH Networks). Forgent had claimed EchoStar violated its patent relating to DVR playback. The jury handed down a unanimous verdict against Forgent and this ruling re-affirms that verdict and hopefully ends this particular chapter of Forgent's patent-extortion escapades.

More at Slashdot and Engadget.

The patent in question.

...is, of course, the donut:

In a paper published in the latest issue of the Physical Review journal, the scientist offers a theoretical model, based on mathematical equations describing conditions that, if established, could help lead to the development of a time machine of sorts. But rather than building an actual device, Ori explains that "the machine is space-time itself."

Time travel research is based on bending space-time so far that the time lines actually warp back on themselves to form a loop.

"We know that bending does happen all the time, but we want the bending to be strong enough and to take a special form where the lines of time make closed loops," explains Ori. "We are trying to find out if it is possible to manipulate space-time to develop in such a way."