Ynetnews:
Rocket barrage hits northern Israel  —  At least two Katyusha rockets fired from southern Lebanon land in Western Galilee region Thursday morning, in and around town of Nahariya; two people lightly wounded in attack; school day cancelled in town.  IDF shells rocket launching sites in southern Lebanon in response

À quelques jours des 80 ans de Tintin, le site Ain’t it cool croit savoir que le duo Simon Pegg / Nick Frost, à qui l’on doit les déjantés Shaun of the dead et Hot Fuzz, incarneront Dupont et Dupond dans la trilogie Tintin, réalisée par Steven Spielberg et Peter Jackson. Info qui reste à confirmer, on se souvient qu’une source proche du dossier s’était emmêlé les pinceaux dans le nom des réalisateurs

RealView unveils three 3D desktop scanners originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Jan 2009 03:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

• Projection Panel: HVGA (480 x 320)
• LCD: 2.2” QVGA(320 x 240)
• Storage: microSD slot (up to 16 GB)
• Picture Viewer: JPEG, GIF, Animated GIF, MBP
• Audio Playback: MP3, WMA, OGG, AAC, WAV
• Video Playback: DivX, Xvid, WMV9 Simple Profile, MPEG-2, MPEG-4;
• File Viewer: Adobe PDF (.pdf), MS PowerPoint (.ppt), MS Word (.doc), MS Excel (.xls), Text (.txt)
• DMB support in Korea
• Size/Weight: 107.3 x 48.8 x 19 mm / 160 g

Sur ce coup là, je ne vais pas vous en faire des kilos. Vous savez ce qu'est une calculatrice, et vous savez qu'il y a un peu plus de touches quand elle est qualifiée de scientifique.

Ben là, c'est une calculatrice avec un peu plus de touches dans un navigateur.

Nul le truc ? Ben non.

Ayons une pensée pour le gentil lycéen qui a oublié sa calculatrice... mais pas son portable communicant avec le forfait internet illimité. Avec ça, il s'en sort, il fait chier son prof qui l'a vu utiliser son portable en classe. Par voie de conséquence, il est doublement content[1]. Merveilleux !

Voilà. Ca s'appelle web2.0calc, ça sert presque à rien mais ça peut sauver des jeunes.

[1] le lycéen

In October we wrote “Joost Turns On Its All-Flash Website. Is Anybody Watching?” It turns out that yes, it appears that they are.

A year ago the online video site was a ghost town. Then in September, when the company moved away from the use of downloaded software to an all-browser video experience, viewership spiked. Compete says they had 550k U.S. visitors in November 2008. Comscore gives an even more robust 1.4 million worldwide monthly visitors in November (a chart below compares Joost to Hulu). Google Trends also say things are going well for Joost, and points to strong traffic growth in Northern Europe.

If this data is accurate (at least the three services agree on dramatic growth), Hulu may have a competitor coming up from behind, even as they look ahead to YouTube.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

David Neiwert / Crooks and Liars:
BillO: Panetta at CIA means another terrorist attack on USA soon  —  I guess Bill O'Reilly decided he'd had enough of being just a demagogue last night and made the leap into his new persona as an unmistakably dangerous demagogue.  —  His Talking Points Memo segment is almost always amusing …

Fighting over the remote could get a lot more brutal in the years to come. At CES today, Hitachi is showing off its gesture-based television. That’s right, you use your hands — no remote required. But will this tech — essentially cameras installed in TV that monitor your moves — scare people off?

Here’s a video demo of the Hitachi TV in action from a Japanese trade show last fall:

Two companies were influential in the creation of Hitachi’s gesture-controlled TV. Canesta provided the single-chip-based 3-D sensors, and GestureTek created the software.

Hitachi’s TVs will have Canesta’s sensors built into them, looking out at the room, collecting a 3-D image of everything it sees. Having this depth of field is key to getting the gesture technology to work, as a 2-D sensor might not be able to tell the difference between your real hand and one printed on your T-shirt. This detailed 3-D look allows the Canesta chip allows the TV to see when you stick out your hand to control the TV. It also is able to recognize different people in the room.

But recognizing you is only half of the equation. The fittingly-named GestureTek provides the software that translates those gestures to control the TV. According to Gesturetek, the movements have to be simple enough that anyone can do them, and they need to be consistent across devices so people don’t have to make a mental leap switching from, say, an iPhone to their TV — and the gestures need to be culturally sensitive. (Evidently a wave in China is different than other parts of the world). There are also alternative methods for controlling the TV, in case people are physically prevented from doing so.

For the Hitachi set, a users wave their hand to bring up the control bar, spin their wrist to activate a scroll wheel, swipe left and right to move through options, and use two hands to switch to a different function (check out the video demo, embedded above, to see for yourself).

At NewTeeVee Live last November, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings waxed on about the coming wave of gesture remotes that will control our entertainment. The concept isn’t new. Nintendo uses them for the Wii, and Hillcrest Labs (which is suing Nintendo) has developed motion-controlled TV remotes as well. But Hitachi’s set gets rid of the remote altogether. (I guess instead of “hands-free” you’d call it “hands-up”?)

According to GestureTek, sensors in the TV will also be able to recognize different members of the family, and bring up content associated with that person. While that may be a timesaver, it made me think of a story we did last year on Comcast experimenting with similar technology. The resulting avalanche of comments we got made it pretty clear that users didn’t want the cameras in the cable box watching them back. GestureTek said that, at first, it used a normal web cam to track movements, but Hitachi felt that people’s fears would make it not viable. The current sensor technology can tell people in a small group apart, but not pick one out person from millions of people.

The price and availability of the gesture-controlled Hitachi haven’t been revealed yet. But raise your hand if you want one.

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MOD Systems is betting that you’ll still shop for digital movies at physical retail locations in the future. But instead of browsing the aisles and rows of DVDs, you’ll walk up to an automated kiosk, download video onto an SD card, and plug that card into a device connected to your TV (or into the TV itself). MOD announced today that it is demoing this SD solution with Toshiba at CES.

I rolled my eyes when I first read about MOD. Between DVDs from Redbox, downloading movies from iTunes and streaming through Netflix — does the world need yet another way to get video content? Plus, SD cards are tiny and bound to be something frequently lost. So I talked with MOD Systems co-founder and vice chairman Anthony Bay by phone yesterday to find out more.

“Direct delivery into the home will continue to grow,” said Bay, “But will direct delivery into the home be the only way people get content? People still buy stuff on impulse.”

There are three main reasons MOD believes in its SD card storage solution: Storage, security and openness. Bay believes that optical storage via DVD and Blu-ray has hit its peak, but the silicon-based storage on an SD card can keep growing. Bay pointed out that you can buy a 16GB SD card that will hold 3 HD movies using the same compression as iTunes for $35.

Because security is a big issue with content owners like Hollywood studios, MOD thinks SD cards are ideal. The format has the storage key built in, providing native security. But because SD cards are open, they are not locked into a proprietary format and can be plugged into any device with an SD card reader, allowing for greater transport of content.

Last October, MOD received $35 million in funding from Toshiba and NCR, one of the largest self-service kiosk vendors in the world (NCR is providing DVD vending kiosks for Blockbuster). MOD will leverage NCR’s extensive retail network to deploy its service widely. Bay said MOD-powered kiosks would feature the third-party branding, and that it takes 2-3 minutes to transfer a full-length standard definition movie to the card.

MOD also announced today that it has signed agreements with Warner Bros. and Paramount Digital Entertainment to distribute video content — including new releases. Unfortunately, the agreement only covers standard definition content, not HD. The lack of HD content is a pretty glaring omission for a company looking to get into the movie distribution business. Bay recognizes this limitation, but says the lack of HD was a function of the long download times for content and the capacity of the cards. “2009 is standard def,” said Bay, “2010 is high def.”

MOD Systems’ value proposition make more sense after speaking with them — but I still think they have a lot of obstacles to overcome. There will be a place for shopping at a physical store for purely digital video, but that video could just as easily be beamed directly to your home and be waiting for you when you got back. Plus, people understand DVDs as a way to watc