MAC SOFTWARE
Posted by on under time microsoft, th time, microsoft office, developers, microsoft | 
Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference continues to roll out exciting new announcements; this time, Microsoft announces the next version of Microsoft Office will include a web component that...Posted by on under sony batteries, laptop batteries, th time, hagerman, product safety, lenovo, milli, timeframe, laptops, dell, toshiba, hp, sony |
Scott Hagerman passes along news of yet another recall of Sony laptop batteries. The batteries in question, manufactured in the same timeframe as those involved in the massive 2006 recall, are in laptops sold by HP, Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo, and Acer. Neither Apple nor Sony itself used these batteries in their laptops. This time 100,000 batteries are involved — 65,000 of them sold outside of the US — vs. the 10 million recalled in 2006. The Consumer Product Safety Commission fielded 19 reports of batteries overheating and/or catching fire.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Posted by on under av comparatives, austrian team, test scenario, th time, slashdot, reference point, unkown, team of experts, avira antivir, addendum, aim |
KingofGnG writes "AV-Comparatives, the Austrian team of experts dedicated to antivirus tests acknowledged as a reference point in the field, has published the second part of the mid-year comparative, an ideal addendum to the one already released in the past September. This time the aim is to evaluate the antimalware tools effectiveness against unknown threats, in a test scenario meant to prove the heuristic part and the generic markers of the on-demand scanning engines." The best in show (of 16 anti-malware packages evaluated), Avira AntiVir was able to find 71% of the unkown malware it was exposed to in the first week, dropping to 67% after the fourth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Posted by on under menlo park ca, hci researchers, stanford research institute, douglas engelbart, innovatis, th trip, public debut, menlo park, video interface, modern computing, th time, computer mouse, sessi, douglas c, human computer, trappings, menlo, two books, ground |
I like to take one or two books with me when I travel, and one of the books I chose for this trip is HCI Remixed.
Sometimes the books I choose are a bust. Fortunately that didn't happen this time.
HCI Remixed covers all the major milestones in the field of human computer interaction. And when I say major, I mean it: things like Douglas Engelbart's famous demonstration, now referred to as The Mother of All Demos:
On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session in the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.
So, all those trappings of modern computing that we take for granted today? Engelbart demonstrated them all two years before I was born. It just took a while for the rest of the world to catch up to his vision.
That's the lesson of many of the groundbreaking HCI discoveries presented in this book. Some people see further. Engelbart was so far ahead of his time in 1968 that his demonstration wasn't taken seriously -- it seemed absurd and impractical. It really makes you wonder which of today's HCI researchers we're ignoring but shouldn't be.
The book also takes an interesting approach; it doesn't summarize the papers, instead, it presents the reflections of current working HCI professionals on the papers. It's a little bit meta. You're hearing the impact of these HCI discoveries -- some big, some small -- as related by young researchers who were heavily influenced by them.
As a primer and overview of the field of human computer interaction, it's tough to beat. Reading this reminds me how far we've come, and yet how far we have to go.
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Tagi: menlo park ca, hci researchers, stanford research institute, douglas engelbart, innovatis, th trip, public debut, menlo park, video interface, modern computing, th time, computer mouse, sessi, douglas c, human computer, trappings, menlo, two books, ground
Posted by on under chemical engineering department, piezo technology, piezoelectric film, harvesting energy, old science, piezoelectrics, sound waves, th time, phone voice, profound effects, new science, sound wave, nanometers, communicators, low energy, nanotechnology, sen |
The surge of systems devised to re-capture bodily output continues, this time with a nano-piezo technology that could use sound waves to charge cellphones. But how long must you talk before you can... talk? Science Daily reports that Tahir Cagin, a professor in the chemical engineering department at Texas A&M, has merged the really old science of piezoelectrics with the very new science of nanotechnology to discover that a technique for harvesting energy actually gets way more efficient at the nano level. Specifically, when a piezoelectric film used to convert vibrations into energy is reduced to around 21 nanometers in thickness, it's suddenly twice as good at converting the energy. There's not a lot of detail on the uses for this technology just yet, and—like other vibration-power systems—the earliest uses would probably be in very low energy applications such as sensors. But the article does suggest this could have "potentially profound effects for low-powered electronic devices such as cell phones, laptops, personal communicators and a host of other computer-related devices," though I wonder if that wasn't just thrown in to make people like me excited about it. It worked. I am. [Science Daily via TreeHugger] 