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If you’re a gadget-lover fed up of filling your home
with ice white this and brushed aluminum that, then check out this selection of totally
stylin’ items offering a design blast from the past.
Retro, vintage, old school or just classic, whatever your interpretation, we’ve dug out ten
gadgets that boast classic good looks as well as bang-up-to-date functionality.
Olympus’ Pen E-P1 is chock full of digital goodness in a design that harks back to the SLR
glory days and the original Pen’s release back in 1959, which made a big impact on the
camera market with its small dimensions. With a 12-megapixel sensor and capable of capturing
movies at 720p, the modern micro four thirds snapper offers digital SLR-standard pics in a more
compact format with those vintage looks that are good enough to lick.
Science and Sons’
Phonofone II is a wickedly old-fashioned iPod speaker, or in the words of its creator
“audio console.” Using no power, the gramophone-styled device utilizes passive
amplification and cunning acoustics to boost the audio output of standard earphones to around 55
decibels. With an entirely ceramic construction, it’s as much sculpture as it is
speaker.
So far only released in Korea, LG thrilled fans of retro style when it revealed a classic CRT
television, complete with bunny ears aerial and channel-changing knobs. The 14-inch set stands on
chrome legs and if you’re doing the back-in-time trip all the way, can display in black and
white or sepia. Despite its vintage appearance it offers a digital tuner and does come with a
remote control for when you get bored of fiddling with the knobs.
A professional USB mic, the Snowball from Blue Microphones claims to offer plug’n'play ease
of use with both Macs and PCs but the power to capture anything from the softest vocals to the
loudest garage band. Angled as ideal for podcasting, the vintage appearance of this modern
peripheral may serve to remind users of the rich heritage of broadcasting and inspire them to
podcast about more than the hilarious antics of their cat. That, and it will look wicked-cool on
your desk.
Available in black, white, red and an outrageously retro avocado green, say goodbye to fiddly
modern earbuds with these totally cool cans from Panasonic. The Panasonic Old School Monitor
Stereo Headphones, to give them their full title, offer leather-cushioned listening comfort you
can only dream of if you’re used to in-ear audio efforts and look so darn cool you’ll
be tempted to wear them out — even when you’re not listening to music.
Sure, headsets are all well and good but there’s no romance in looking like a call center
phone operator. The P*PHONE from Hulger will give you the satisfying feel of a proper chunky
handset in your hot little paw and turn a VoIP call into a conversation. Available in white,
black, red and green, the P*PHONE is offered on its own for $50 and with a cool desktop base for
$99. As well as working with certain mobiles (and certain others with adaptors) the P*PHONE
offers easy USB hook-up to a PC.
Back in the olden days folks would create real-life music “tapes” with
playlists recorded on to them to either share with a friend or loved one or enjoy themselves
(“Best Driving Songs Ever”, “My Breaking Up With Dave Tape”, etc). Help
make sure the art of the mixtape is not lost with this USB effort that takes on the form of an
old analog blank audio cassette tape (complete with sleeve that you can scrawl the track list on)
but with a brand spanking new USB flash drive nestled in the middle.
Mathletes with a penchant for the past will enjoy this retro calculator’s baby blue looks
and oversize dimensions. Whether you’re totting up the cost of your new flared jeans, or
calculating how much cheese you’ll need to melt to make the perfect fondue, your numerical
queries will be solved in Seventies style.
You’d be forgiven for mistaking this for a vintage deck, but in fact it offers more modern
tech than many music systems. Sure, there’s the option to take your vinyl for a spin, but
there’s also playback from SD memory cards and USB storage devices as well as from iPods
and other MP3 players. In addition to normal playback this turntable can record your records to
your computer, which means you won’t have to re-purchase all your vinyl to get it
digitized, and it has an FM radio.
While the wider world gets hyped up about Sony’s Move and Microsoft’s Project Natal,
sit back, relax and enjoy some 8-bit gaming with the Retro NES USB Controller from ThinkGeek,
described as perfect for creating old school gaming nostalgia on your laptop. With a USB
connection, it’s perfect for MAME and other emulators and is sooo much cooler than trying
to save the princess using your keyboard.
Ten years ago this week, online music pioneer Justin Frankel released a little application dubbed
Gnutella that enabled file sharing through a distributed P2P network. Frankel, whose previous
claim to fame was programming the then hugely-popular Winamp MP3 player software, supposedly named the client after his favorite hazelnut
cream spread, and the first version published online was really more of a proof of concept than
anything else.
Still, Gnutella hit a nerve. Napster had been sued three months before, and many file sharers were rightfully
fearing that the music industry would eventually prevail in court and force Napster to switch off
its servers. With Gnutella, no such switch existed, as the client was allowing direct P2P
connections without the help of any centralized server. Add to it the fact that Gnutella, unlike
Napster, allowed users to swap videos and software as well as MP3s, and you begin to see why many
immediately viewed Gnutella as the next step in P2P file sharing.
A step, one should add, that made Frankel’s employer AOL more than a little nervous. It
only took the Internet giant a day to force Frankel and his colleagues to take down
Gnutella – but even that was too long, as countless sites quickly started to first
mirror, then build upon Frankel’s official Gnutella client. There’s always been a
little bit of mystery surrounding the exact happenings of those days, but some people have been
musing that a person with a surprising amount of insider knowledge showed up in one of the first
IRC chat rooms dedicated to Gnutella soon after AOL pulled the plug, only to provide some very
detailed information about the inner workings of the client’s P2P protocol.
Speaking of IRC: Early versions of the software didn’t really have any way for users to
connect, save for entering another user’s IP address, which is why IRC quickly became an
integral part of the early days of Gnutella. It was also in those IRC chat rooms that the myth of
Gnutella as a seemingly invincible P2P protocol was born, and the fact that AOL tried but
couldn’t contain the software seemed to fit right into that picture. Gnutella was one of
the very first P2P apps I ever wrote about, so I lurked in those chat rooms as well, where people
were cheering the fact that someone finally found a file sharing solution that couldn’t be
shut down. I still remember one IRC user saying: “We’ve started a damn cult
again!”
Only Gnutella wasn’t really ready to be a cult. The network routed search requests from
peer to peer, leading to an exponential growth of traffic as its network became bigger. Napster
programmer Jordan Ritter described the problem early on in a paper titled “Why Gnutella Can’t
Scale. No, Really,” and Frankel himself, who has hardly ever gone on the record about
Gnutella, once stated that he was
fully aware of “how poorly it would scale” when he released the client.
Still, Gnutella captured the imagination of many, one of them being Mark Gorton, founder of the
New York-based Lime Group. Gorton was at
the time pursuing a vision of automating businesses through structured data, and Gnutella, as
something that could, for example, distribute real estate listings wrapped in XML, seemed to fit
that image quite nicely. Early versions of the Gnutella client of Gorton’s LimeWire venture were still written with this
vision in mind, hoping to build a P2P network that could eventually be used to do all kinds of
things with which we’re now familiar on the web, thanks to web services.
LimeWire’s engineers joined a growing group of developers loosely connected through web
sites like the long-defunct Gnutella.wego.com (whose admin Gene Kan tragically committed
suicide in 2002) and mailing lists like the one for the Gnutella Developer Forum, and one of
the first issues to be tackled was scalability. The introduction of a two-tiered system of
ordinary clients and so-called Ultrapeers helped grow both the network as a whole and each
user’s search horizon. The idea was also later adopted by the developers of KaZaA, whose
own take on this two-tiered approach still lives on in Skype’s P2P network.
Technical improvements like these helped Gnutella to grow, but the competition was quick to catch
up. Bram Cohen unveiled a first version of
BitTorrent only two years after Frankel had published Gnutella, and BitTorrent quickly became the
file sharing client of choice for sharing videos online. Part of BitTorrent’s quick rise to
fame was its modular simplicity: Cohen had outsourced much of the search and indexing of files to
torrent web sites, only handling the actual distribution of data within the client. Gnutella on
the other hand was meant to work without any web server. That made it much more invincible, but
also much less accessible to users who migrated from apps and clients to a world of web services.
Another issue that has plagued Gnutella from the beginning is not technical, but legal. The
protocol was supposed to outsmart trigger-happy lawyers, but the mere fact that there
wasn’t a central switch to turn off the Gnutella network didn’t stop rights holders
from going after people and companies associated with it. Lawsuits and legal threats forced Morpheus, Xolox, Bearshare and
a number of other companies and developers to throw the towel.
LimeWire got sued by the music industry as well in 2006, but that hasn’t
stopped the company from continuing with the development and monetization of its client.
LimeWire’s client also utilizes BitTorrent these days, but LimeWire’s VP of Product
Management Jason Herskowitz told me during a phone conversation that Gnutella has “worked
really well” for the company, and that its engineers are looking into ways to make Gnutella
once again more attractive to developers by exposing some of its functionality through web
services. “There is still a long future ahead for Gnutella,” he predicted.
Not everyone agrees with that outlook. Adam Fisk, who was hired by LimeWire as one of its first developers in the summer of
2000, but left the company in 2004 to eventually start his own P2P venture dubbed Littleshot, believes that some core assumptions
of the Gnutella protocol are outdated. “I don’t think that distributed P2P search
makes any sense,” he told me, explaining that the very server-less search functionality
that made Gnutella superior to Napster also ended up being its biggest burden, and that it would
be much easier to have servers handle search and just use P2P to deliver data – a recipe
that has already helped BitTorrent succeed.
Sure, LimeWire and some other Gnutella clients could still stick around for a long time, Fisk
admitted, but he was skeptical that we would ever see any significant new project based on
Gnutella. “That would be shocking,” he said.
In early January, 27-year-old artist Mike Mitchell was hopping between sparse freelance gigs,
wondering if he'd soon have to leave Los Angeles. Instead, fate stepped in.
Comme son entraîneur, Didier
Deschamps, Souleymane Diawara, le défenseur central de l'OM ne prend pas aux sérieux
les déclarations de Jean-Michel Aulas, faisant de Marseille le favori dimanche soir. Par
ailleurs, le Sénégalais a également eu une conversation avec Mbia au sujet du
désir de ce dernier de ne jouer qu'au milieu.
Our top story this week was about bad news for the big guys: Google,
Facebook, Digg's top users. As you catch up on the news, be sure to watch the conversation about China, tech and
democracy that took place between activist/artist Ai Weiwei, Twitter's Jack Dorsey and
ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet
trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web and Internet of Things.
Note: We've refreshed the format for our longest running feature, the Weekly
Wrapup. It now focuses more explicitly on the key trends that ReadWriteWeb is tracking in 2010,
as well as giving you the highlights from the leading story of the week. Let us know your
thoughts on the new format.
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Story of the Week: Nexus One's woes, spies love Facebook, top Diggers lose power
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During my recent trip to India, I flew down to Bangalore for one
reason: To meet N.R. Narayana Murthy. Murthy is the co-founder, executive chairman and former CEO
for 21 years of Infosys, the first Indian company to go public on Nasdaq and effectively the
company that began the $30 billion Indian IT outsourcing market.
Murthy’s idea was so successful that it quickly became controversial—not
only within the United States where some Americans feel Indians are “stealing jobs,”
but also in India where many are concerned about a tech economy that doesn’t make
anything. I wanted to meet with Murthy, because in many ways he’s the best person to
address what Indians at home and abroad are facing and where Indian entrepreneurship goes from
here.
Here are a few highlights from our meeting:
His Day Job. Murthy thought he was stepping down from Infosys back in 2002, but
he couldn’t fully let go. As such, he still works pretty much full time for the company,
traveling to meet with customers and running a lot of the company’s mentoring and training
programs. The more surprising aspect of his job: He personally signs off on the architecture of
every building on each one of Infosys’ campuses that employ some 17,000 people around the
world. The one we were sitting in was spread of eight acres and had some remarkable buildings,
including one that looked like the Luxor casino in Las Vegas.
I asked why this was a top priority—after all, many Valley campuses are plush
but from an architecture standpoint look about the same. He said when GE and other American
multinationals were starting to come into his business everyone thought Infosys would lose the
local talent war. So Murthy studied why people want to work at a particular place. One of the
results was the comfort and design of the facilities. That was in 1994 when Infosys was designing
the very building we were sitting in as we had this conversation. “I’ve been in
charge of every building since– all over the world,” he says.
Hurting or Helping Local Entrepreneurship? Given exactly how plush Murthy and
his colleagues have worked to make Infosys, has he indirectly hurt Bangalore’s
entrepreneurship scene by making the risk of leaving so daunting? He smiled when I asked this and
said, “We may have unwittingly. But I do feel like the spirit of entrepreneurship is alive
and kicking in Bangalore.”
Further, I asked about Bangalore’s Zippo-flipping, free-spending generation of young
techies who’ve graduated to a huge wave of multinational jobs that pay them far more than
their parents ever made, in many cases more than the rest of their families combined. Murthy
didn’t deny that that instant-gratification, “gimmie” contingent was strong in
the city he helped build, economically speaking. But he blames the Internet and the
mass-cross-pollination of Western pop culture, not the bigger paycheck from companies like his.
“We are moving towards a uniform, global culture with an intense competitive spirit and an
intense desire for instant gratification,” he says. “But I have a firm belief that
each generation is better than the previous one. The Indian entrepreneurs today are more daring
than we were.” (This from a man who became a capitalist after after hitchhiking across
communist Eastern Europe and getting thrown in jail for chatting up someone’s girlfriend on
a train. “More daring” is a tall order, young Indian techies.)
Is India’s Tech Community Too Addicted to Services? Clearly, services has
been a great business for Infosys and the hundreds of dollar-millionaires and even more
rupee-millionaires that the company’s generous stock program has created. But a lot of
Indian CEOs and investors complain that in most cases services-based tech businesses are a great
way to get revenues quick, but not a way to build a huge, high-growth business. There’s a
big question of whether India’s tech sector has a worrying lack of product-building
know-how.
Murthy says it’s a progression. “India missed the industrial revolution, but Indians
had intelligence,” he says. “We had to make do with pen and paper. We were always
forced to look at the abstract. What is happening in India today is the creation of jobs.
Let’s create jobs as long as they are legal and ethical, it doesn’t matter, as long
as we make money. The time will come for creating products. I wouldn’t lose sleep over
this. If we create enough jobs we’ll raise the confidence of the youngsters and
they’ll create products.”
India’s Infrastructure. Here’s something it’s hard for even
Murthy to be upbeat about: India’s shoddy physical infrastructure. Murthy has traveled the
world and it’s frustrating that so much money has poured into the country he loves, and
yet, the infrastructure is still so shockingly bad.
There is progress—Infosys for instance has benefited from a new overpass that
cuts down on the drive to the campus by more than thirty minutes. (See!) But it’s
not moving nearly fast enough, he says. “I don’t know if we will reach the level of
the United States or China,” he adds.
Murthy gave a more nuanced explanation than the usual “it’s corruption” answer
you get in India. He explained that 65% of India’s population lives in rural areas and 35%
live in cities. And there’s such polarity between the quality of life that politicians have
to appear to be doing more for the villages than the cities if they want to get re-elected. That
leaves prosperous economic cities blighted by poor sewage systems, pollution spewing generators
and beggars weaving through traffic tapping on car windows. “Different emerging nations
take different paths,” he says. “In China, they chose to emphasize giving people
economic freedom first and political freedom second. In India we chose the opposite path.”
Hurting or Helping US-based Indians? All you have to do is read the comments on
one of Vivek Wadhwa’s posts to see the ugly, anti-immigrant, anti-Indian fervor
that’s been whipped up in America, post-recession. A lot of it has to do with outsourcing.
I asked Murthy if he felt his company and industry’s huge success has indirectly made life
harder for Indian-Americans. He turned the blame on xenophobes like Lou Dobbs and grandstanding
politicians who use the wedge issue to get viewers and votes.
But it’s an issue he has to address a lot. He answers it by saying every morning he gets up
and gets a Pepsi out of his GE Fridge and drives his American car to work where he sits down at
his Dell computer. India used to have companies that made soft drinks, refrigerators, cars and
computers. But the American ones were better. Allowing them in hurt Indian workers in the short
term, but provided a far better quality of life for a much bigger swath of Indians long term. He
argues outsourcing has done the same thing for US companies. Greater efficiencies and
cost-savings enables these companies to stay competitive and there’s no reason they
can’t—in theory—plow those savings into better local
jobs or job training.
This argument isn’t going to pacify hate-mongers, because nothing will. Murthy knows that
too and while he regrets it, he seems to accept it as reality.
Advice for Entrepreneurs. Murthy has started a $170 million venture fund, so
although he spends most of his time still at Infosys, he clearly cares about encouraging the next
generation of entrepreneurs. He had two big pieces of advice for them. One, be able to articulate
what you do in one sentence. If you can’t, you don’t have a good idea. And two, make
sure the market is ready. Businesses are killed, not congratulated, for being ahead of their
time.
When Terri was diagnosed with cancer, Lionel Shriver was doting – at first.
But as her condition worsened, there always seemed to be a reason not to call...
I met Terri in the early 1980s at an arts camp in Connecticut. We were both in the metalsmithing workshop, and this sharply
featured, appealingly surly Armenian taught me some new tricks. Her speciality was rivets and
other "cold connections", an apt expression in her case. She was a wilful, stubborn woman, more
fiercely so than I first realised; 25 years later, I'd discover just how defiant my closest
girlfriend could be, even in the face of the undeniable.
Terri was full of the contradictions that always captivate me in people: inclined to bear grudges
but incredibly generous (often rocking up with gifts for no reason – why, I
still have half a dozen pairs of her shoes). Harsh but warm. Prone to depression but with a knack
for festivity. I conjure her scowling down the pavement and rolling in laughter with equal ease.
She was tortured and brooding; she was terribly kind. And she was a serious artist in the best
sense: not pretentious, but determined to craft interesting work well.
Back in Queens, where we both lived in our mid-20s, we found common cause in our improbable
aspirations. She wanted to become a famous artist, I a famous novelist –
but Terri had then sold next to nothing and I'd not published more than my phone number. It was a
big, indifferent world out there, and an ally was crucial. We'd conspire over a six-pack in my
tiny one-bedroom flat, jovially certain that we'd still be best friends when we were "cancerous
old bags". It was a running gag. We thought it was funny.
Beware the jokes of your heedless, immortal youth. Fast-forward through two and a half decades,
during which Terri and I survived abusive boyfriends, marital problems, professional setbacks, my
expatriation to the UK and her exile to New Jersey, Terri's painful endometriosis and four failed IVF treatments, as well as, of
course, each other. During my regular summer migration to New York, in 2005, Terri shared her
perplexity that she'd been running a low-grade fever for weeks. I said it sounded like a
tenacious virus. But shortly thereafter she rang from hospital.
She was being tested for a range of ailments, the most far-fetched of these a rare disease called
mesothelioma. Thus it was
quite a shock when the doctors confirmed that peritoneal mesothelioma was exactly what she had – almost
certainly caused by exposure to the asbestos that laced metalsmithing materials when she was in
art school. Her husband Paul reported grimly that the average survival rate for this
ravaging cancer was a single year.
Terri was only 50, and the timing was tragic for other reasons, too. From frustration, malaise
and exactingly high standards, through most of her career she had underproduced. Yet in recent
years something had loosened up, and her output had accelerated. Better still, she was at last
imbuing her creations with the feeling they'd sometimes lacked, the most moving of which was
an elegy to her unavailing IVF treatments. She was finally pulling in big commissions, one
of which was about to go on display at the V&A.
At the same time, her brooding demeanour had brightened; she'd grown more outgoing, energetic and
relaxed. Almost... happy. Well, so much for that.
On the heels of her diagnosis, I was doting. I'm not tooting my own horn. I suspect being a
paragon at the very start of a loved one's illness is pretty much the form. We're on the phone
daily. We stop by regularly, and bring freshly baked scones. We follow every medical twist and
turn. And we're inclined to rash promises. With a flinch, I recall declaring before Terri's
surgery that I'd be willing to move into their house in New Jersey for weeks at a time! I'd
be at her beck and call, running errands, preparing meals and filling prescriptions.
Useful tip: if someone close to you falls gravely ill, at the outset, in the first flush of
anguish and desperation to help? Watch the mouth.
For the timing of Terri's cancer was terrible for me as well. A month after her diagnosis, I was
intending to return home to London, where a host of professional commitments could not
(or so it seemed) be reneged upon. Although for most of my literary career I'd scribbled in
obscurity, my prospects were suddenly looking up. My seventh novel had inexplicably hit the
bestseller list in the UK, and subsequently won the Orange prize earlier that summer. (I
still have the droll good-luck package Terri and Paul delivered when I made the shortlist:
orange marmalade, orange candles, orange oil.) For the first time, I faced a smorgasbord of
opportunities – festival gigs, bookstore appearances, feature assignments
– and I was in the middle of a new book.
So, however reluctantly, I flew back to London. After Terri's surgery, Paul phoned with the
lowdown: the surgeons had discovered a patch of aggressive "sarcomatoid" cells, which meant
Terri's prognosis was bleak.
I will give myself this grudging credit: I did fly back to visit Terri for Thanksgiving that
November, and for a while I kept in faithful touch, ringing weekly and following every grisly
detail of her punishing chemotherapy. But this is not a boast about what a wonderful friend I was in Terri's
time of need. This is a mea culpa.
Little by little, I'd notice that it had been a fortnight since I'd rung New Jersey. I'd
kick myself. But some book review would be due that afternoon, so I'd vow to ring tomorrow. Time
and again some immediate task would seem more urgent, and I'd tell myself that I should ring
Terri when I'm settled and concentrated. Watch out whenever you "tell yourself" anything; it's
the red flag of self-deceit. Long hours of being "settled and concentrated" mysteriously failed
to manifest themselves.
I stuck a Post-it note on the edge of my desk: "RING TERRI!" Over the months, the note faded,
much like my resolve. On the too-rare occasions I acted on the reminder, I had to put a
mental gun to my head. But why? This was one of my closest friends, and she was dying. While she
was still on this Earth, why was I not battling to maximise every moment? Surely the problem
should have been my ringing too often, whizzing back to the States too many times, making a pest
of myself.
Granted, our conversations were sometimes awkward. My own life had never gone more swimmingly,
while Terri's was circling the drain. I was embarrassed. I found myself editing from our
discussions anything I'd done that was exciting or fun. When I returned from an author's tour of
Sweden, I portrayed the trip as a drag. This sort of cover-up reliably backfired. So
apparently I felt sorry for myself – for going to Sweden! When Terri
could rarely leave the house.
I make no apologies for this, since this is what novelists do: at some midpoint in Terri's
decline, I decided that my next novel would draw on this encounter with cancer. At least I
had the humanity to refrain from taking notes during our phone calls, thus relinquishing many a
"telling detail" and much "great material". Consequently, I had to do an enormous amount of
research on mesothelioma later, and this is what I do apologise for: not having done all those
web searches on her treatments – the surgery, the drugs, the side-effects
– when Terri was still suffering through them. Now, I'm mortified to have
Googled "mesothelioma" only once the search was for a book.
When I returned to the US that second summer, Terri had alarmingly deteriorated. Thin to start
with, she'd lost weight. She was gaunt and weak, her skin tinged a dark, unsettling orange: a
chemo tan. It was obvious where this was headed. But whenever anyone acted as if she wasn't going
to make it, Terri grew enraged. She resented the "sentimental" testimonials her friends and
relatives recited at her bedside; she thought they were delivering a death sentence. Though she
wouldn't have put it that way. I wonder if throughout her illness I ever heard her say the word
"death" aloud.
Thus on one count only could I blame Terri herself for my increasingly deficient friendship. Her
refusal to admit she was dying meant we couldn't ever talk about the elephant in the room.
Pretending that the treatments were working and she was going to come through this injected an
artifice in our relationship at odds with the confidences we'd shared for 25 years. Days I did
visit, afternoons I did ring, we'd end up talking, lamely, about recipes. Indeed, on a brief trip
in November 2006, I visited Terri in New Jersey; it was the last time I'd ever see her, and I
knew this instinctively at the time. Yet we spent an appalling proportion of that final visit
talking about mashed potatoes.
When her husband rang me in London a few days later with the news, he was consumed with a steely
rage. Obviously Paul was angry that he'd lost his wife. But he was also angry at other people.
Oh, he expressed his disgust in general terms, as a disillusionment with the human race, a
good-riddance to our whole species. But I knew what he meant. Paul's fury was aimed at
Terri's friends and family, who had almost universally made themselves scarce for months. His
fury was also aimed at me.
I thought I deserved it. I had visited, some. I had rung up, some. But not nearly often enough,
and in truth one of my best friends perishing before my eyes had instilled a deep aversion, an
instinctive avoidance, a desperation to flee.
It would be a far better thing if I were a lone shithead amid an ocean of altruists. And surely
some folks really do step up to the plate when a friend or relative falls mortally ill
– wonderful people who keep popping by with casseroles to the very last day. I
have a new admiration for such stalwarts, as well as a new appreciation for the Christian duty to
"visit the sick". Yet I fear this suddenly-remembering-somewhere-you-gotta-be is a common failing
of our time. In fearing and avoiding death, we fear and avoid the dying.
I'll risk sounding preachy, since I've paid for my sermon with a regret that never leaves
me. Most of us will experience the afflictions of our nearest and dearest perhaps multiple times
before we're faced with a deadly diagnosis of our own. So be mindful. Disease is
frightening. It's unpleasant. It reminds us of everything we try not to think about on
our own accounts. A biological instinct to steer clear of contagion can kick in even
with diseases like cancer that we understand rationally aren't communicable. So the urge to
avoid sick people runs very deep. Notice it. Then overcome it. There will always
be something you'd rather do than confront the agony, anxiety and exile of serious
illness, and these alternative endeavours seem terribly pressing in the moment: replacing
the printer cartridge, catching up on urgent work-related email. But nothing is more pressing
than someone you love who's suffering, and whose continuing existence you can no longer take
for granted. So never vow to ring "tomorrow" – pick up the bloody
phone.
· So Much For That, by Lionel Shriver, is published by HarperCollins on 25 March at
£15. To order a copy for £14, with free UK mainland p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.
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we showed you how to make potato chips in the microwave, demystified the legality of recording
phone conversations, and helped you add Mac-like gestures to your Windows laptop. More »
This week
we showed you how to make potato chips in the microwave, demystified the legality of recording
phone conversations, and helped you add Mac-like gestures to your Windows laptop. More »
GMail vous offre la possibilité de tchatter avec vos collègues et amis. Si vous
avez accepté par erreur certains contacts, vous pouvez tout simplement les bloquer. Cette
action est évidemment réversible, vous pouvez donc réintégrer les
contacts bloqués.
Il y a deux façons de bloquer un contact. Depuis la liste de l’ensemble de vos
contacts ou encore depuis la fenêtre de conversation.
Depuis la liste:
Passez votre souris au-dessus du contact que vous désirez bloquer.
La fenêtre affichant le détail de votre contact apparaît.
Sélectionnez et cliquez sur «Vidéos et autre options».
Au bas de ce menu, vous apercevez «Bloquer».
Voilà, votre contact est exclu de votre tchat Gmail.
Les menus «Vidéos et autres options» – «Bloquer» sont aussi
présents sur la fenêtre d’une conversation.
Maintenant, pour réintégrer un contact bloqué à votre liste de tchat:
Saisissez le nom du contact bloqué dans «Chercher, ajouter, inviter»
(champ de recherche du tchat).
Vous verrez apparaître votre contact.
Glissez votre souris sur ce contact.
Dans le menu, sélectionnez «Bloquer …» pour
réintégrer votre contact.
When I think
about the lowest common denominator of mobile communications, text messaging follows close behind
voice. Obviously, every phone offers voice capability by definition, but texts are
nearly as ubiquitous. Email is catching up as consumers leave basic feature phones for
smartphones — and many feature phones offer either a native or add-on email solution. But
text messaging capability is still farther along in terms of reach across handsets. Brightkite, a
location-based social network service knows that, which explains the company’s new
GroupText feature.
GroupText reminds me of an old-school party line amongst friends that uses text messaging instead
of voice communications. Looking to get a group of friends all together in one location? You
could send emails, make phone calls, or use an online invitation service. But I keep coming back
to that lowest common denominator of the text message since it’s instant and most everyone
has access to the service. GroupText bundles the text message conversation in a chat-like view,
making that lowly text function social and powerful — think threaded text messaging with
multiple people.
The whole concept is perfect fit for Brightkite, given its location-based bent. If I want to chat
with a bunch of folks about a topic, I’ll have the conversation in medium like email. But
if I’m simply trying to get a group in one location, I’m going to shoot venue info
and other event details in brief text — something I can’t easily do in Foursquare,
which is my current LBS service of choice. GroupText doesn’t require my friends to have a
Brightkite account, so there’s no mandatory network registration hassle. Each GroupChat can
handle 25 friends and responses are sent to all in the group — folks can also attach pics
or indicate their location so there’s no need to ask “when are U getting here?”
And the entire group interaction is available on the web for those who aren’t currently
mobile or for “Monday Morning Quarterbacks” that want to replay the conversation
— after a wild night on the town, I see some after-the-fact entertainment value here.
Brightkite recently submitted a software update to Apple that includes the GroupChat feature and
anticipates arrival in the iTunes App Store soon. Until then — the lowly text message lives
on!
Engadget's Joshua Topolsky pens a lengthy article on what has gone
so terribly wrong at Palm over the last year. His solutions aren't perfect, but it's worth
reading.—Ed.
Oh Palm. Just a little over a year ago your future seemed so bright, so renewed. You walked away
from CES 2009 reborn, held aloft by a completely innovative new mobile operating system, a
striking piece of hardware, and a feeling amongst the press and investors that you were back in
the game and playing to win. Now, less than a year and a half later, you've nearly returned to
the
dark and desperate place you'd found yourself in at the
end of 2008; a rapidly declining mindshare, the bottom falling out of your stock, and bad
dips in phone sales.
Over the past few months, mobile ad networks have reported substantial growth in ads from devices
running Google Android, presenting mobile marketers with an increasingly viable alternative to
Apple's iPhone and iPod touch devices.
When you watch Stupid
for Movies, an independently-produced movie chat show live-streaming weekly on Ustream
at 8 PM PST, you see Los Angeles-based film critics Mark Keizer and Wade Major sitting side by
side on a red-curtained set that invokes the golden days of Siskel and Ebert at the
Movies, reacting to an enthusiastic audience’s applause. Keizer and Major banter back
and forth about the week’s new releases and films the audience should “Buy, Burn or
Rent,” while director Mike Rotman chimes in occasionally on the banter.
With five cameras, a small crew and live-streaming technology provided by NewTek, Stupid For Movies has been running for two months
now, with the live episodes archived on Blip the following day. Last night’s
episode’s stream received a total of 5,799 views, with 300 live viewers tuned in around
8:40 PM PST — a viewership number that is only built upon once the episode is archived and
spread around to its distribution partners.
The magic all happens in a converted garage up in the San Fernando Valley — one of Los
Angeles’ most suburban sectors, where most of the houses look the same. Inside that garage,
though, is a surprisingly professional operation crammed into a space that would barely be able
to fit two Volvos.
The exterior of the studio/garage.
The production behind-the-scenes was a mix of laid-back and professional, with the breaks
provided by short clips from films used to adjust camera angles and touch up makeup. On screen,
that attitude carried through: Both hosts were confident and relaxed on camera, with only the
occasional moment of hamming on the part of Major. (Mocking Major’s shirt appears to be a
running theme.)
I consider myself a movie nerd, but watching Keizer and Major identify random obscure films from
the last 40 years made me feel ignorant — their film knowledge is wide and
all-encompassing, to the point where it seemed that many of the films suggested by viewers for
the Buy/Rent/Burn segment were submitted just in the hopes of stumping them (which only sort of
happened once with the old Wes Craven film Deadly Friend, though they quickly recalled
it once given a hint).
Major and Keiser get ready for their close-ups.
The key to Siskel and Ebert’s dynamic was always that they weren’t prone to agreeing
with each other, but while Keizer and Major (who also host IGN’s Digigods podcast) do demonstrate some distinctively
different taste in films, Major estimated in a post-shoot conversation that they agree with each
other about 65 or 70 percent of the time. What that contributes to, though, is a very distinctive
point-of-view about the film world, one that has no patience for video game movies and dismisses
the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films out of hand — but does genuinely love film.
The audience attracted to such a perspective is thus pretty specific, but with real potential for
loyalty.
Rotman, who’s known Keizer and Major for years, has been working in web video for some time
and currently directs The Kevin Pollak
Chat Show on Sundays. When he came up with the idea for Stupid For Movies, he
shopped it around to a few different parties but wasn’t happy with any of the deals he got
— hence deciding to produce the show on his own, a decision made easier when he found a
house for rent that had a soundproofed garage, thanks to its former tenant, a musician.
Chad Vader waits to chime in via Skype.
Currently on Stupid for Movies, online video
legend Chad Vader does a weekly news rundown and at least once so far, Kevin Pollak has
Skyped in to give the guys grief. Future plans for the next few weeks include bringing in
celebrities to discuss their favorite movies ever, more giveaways, and possibly a sponsorship by
one of the obvious movie-related brands online, leaving Stupid poised to become a much
bigger player in the live-streaming world — especially for those who love movies.
The name John DeLorean is synonymous with the
automotive industry. From his days at General Motors,
where he turned Pontiac into the automaker's de
facto performance division with the creation of the GTO, and, therefore, the muscle car genre in general, to
his days running his eponymous car company that gave us the classic stainless steel gullwing wedge
that became an iconic time machine through the magic of the movies, DeLorean was at the forefront
of the industry for three decades.
Sadly, John DeLorean died in March of 2005. We'll never know what exactly he may have had in store
to bring DeLorean Motor Company back to the market, though a telephone call two weeks before his
death gives us a few clues. Apparently, DeLorean was planning to relaunch DMC with a new take on
the classic DMC-12, complete with an engine from Renault with an optional hydraulic hybrid drivetrain and
carbon fiber panels to keep it all lightweight.
The above information comes courtesy of our sister site AOL Autos' Maintenance Editor Tom
Torbjornsen, who had planned an interview with John DeLorean that was to take place one week after
his death. Torbjornsen pieced together information from a conversation he had with DeLorean and his
"best guess at what [he] thought John might have said based on [their] conversation." It's an
interesting read, and you can check the whole thing out by clicking here.
From GigaOm: The first
time you walk into an Apple Store and pick up an iPad, you’ll understand the hype: Apple
has managed to create a beautiful, thoughtfully designed, compelling product in a space where
mediocrity was, until now, status quo. But odds are you probably won’t buy one — at
least not yet. And that’s OK.
A non-profit organization
called Reboot has a mighty challenge for you this
Friday night: Power down your cellphone, let your FarmVille crops languish and sign out of Skype
for a full 24 hours. What do you think: Can you hack a single day sans technology?
We’re seen efforts of this nature before — remember when John
Mayer wanted you to make like a Luddite for the first week of 2010?
But this event, which Reboot is calling The National Day of Unplugging, goes the extra mile with
promotions (ironically enough) through Facebook, Twitter and
a website called the Sabbath Manifesto (the day itself is part of a larger movement called the
Sabbath Manifesto, a movement started by a group of Jewish artists, writers, filmmakers and
social media professionals seeking to integrate traditional rituals into their modern lives).
There will also be a series of events in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco (according to
Reboot, they’re private and space is limited). All guests at these events will be asked to
check their phones at the door, where they will sleep the next 24 hours away in a cell phone
sleeping bag [pictured above].
Tanya Schevitz, a Reboot rep, told us that the idea is spreading. “We are hearing from
people all over the county –- and beyond –- that they will
create their own events, gather with friends, family, etc. to embrace the Sabbath Manifesto and
the National Day of Unplugging,” she said.
Participants are also encouraged to sign on to the Sabbath Manifesto website and report back on their technological withdrawal
experiences.
This venture is certainly interesting in light of recent stats that point to our society’s
obsession with technological
communication and increasing fascination with social media.
“There’s clearly a social problem when we’re interacting more with digital
interfaces than our fellow human beings,” said Dan Rollman, Sabbath Manifesto creator and
founder of the Universal World Record Database. “Rich, engaging conversations are harder to
come by than they were a few years ago.”
What do you think? Do you think digital communications are eroding our ability to truly connect
with others? Or do you think Twitter, Facebook and the like serve as channels to bring people
together? Let us know in the comments.
Productivity is plummeting this week. Everybody (well, 3 million people) are watching March
Madness instead of doing work, according to CBS Sports and the NCAA's March Madness stats for
CBSSports.com.
According to their NCAA March Madness on Demand traffic figures through Thursday, March 18:
3.4 million total hours of live streaming video and audio consumed
3 million unique visitors to the NCAA March Madness on Demand video players
1.7 million clicks of the "Boss Button" - over 60% of the total clicks of the
Boss Button for the entire 2009 tournament. (2.77 million)
The most watched game from 3/18 was the double-overtime Florida vs.
BYU game with 521k hours of streaming video and audio. That's +50% over 2009's most
watched game from the first day of the first round (Washington vs. Mississippi State) which had
348k hours of streaming.
The most watched hour yesterday was 2:00-2:59 p.m. ET with 533k streaming
hours (16% of the total for the day). It peaked at 2:45 p.m. with 147k streaming hours between
2:45 and 2:59 p.m. ET.
After news broke this
week that that Yahoo's ad boss Joanne Bradford was quiting, EVP Hilary Schneider quickly emailed
employees to say that she'd hold down the fort in the interim, a spokesperson tells us.
The e-book war between Amazon.com and Apple
is getting uglier. Dennis Johnson cites a report in
Publishers Marketplace (subscription required) that alleges that Amazon.com is
telling publishers that if they switch to an agency model (ala Macmillan) , they
will lose Amazon as a platform for both e-books and print.
This battle, which in many ways mirrors similar struggles between record labels and online music
stores, underscores some of the challenges that moving into widespread digital distribution for a
formerly non-digital product can bring.
The Agency Model Conundrum
Recently, Macmillian’s CEO John Sargent explained the agency model, as it relates to e-book
sales, in his blog:
“Starting at the end of March, we will move from the ‘retail model’ of selling
e-books (publishers sell to retailers, who then sell to readers at a price that the retailer
determines) to the ‘agency model’ (publishers set the price, and retailers take a
commission on the sale to readers).”
In other words, Macmillan wants to be able to control how much digital books are sold for on a
per-book basis. Much like music publishers fought (and eventually won) the right to sell certain
digital tracks or digital albums for more (or less, in some cases) than the $0.99 per track/$9.99
per album standard, publishers want that same control.
Amazon disagrees. And while it did acquiesce to
Macmillan’s position at the end of January, it apparently has no plans of making those
same concessions for future publishers.
In the Publishers Marketplace report, Michael Cader writes:
“At least one independent publisher of scale was told categorically by Amazon in a recent
phone call initiated by the retailer that Amazon would not negotiate agency selling terms with
any other publishers outside of the five initial Apple partners. This publisher was told that if
they switched to an agency model for e-books, Amazon would stop selling their entire list, in
print and digital form. In conversation, Amazon is said to have reiterated that as matter of
policy they are declining to negotiate an agency model with any publisher outside of the five who
have already announced agreements with Apple’s iBookstore.”
In other words, the agreements that have been made with the five publishers signed to work with
Apple — Macmillan, Harper Collins, Penguin, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster — will
not be passed on to smaller publishers.
It seems even the agreement with the other four publishers outside of Macmillan (known as Agency
Four) isn’t set in stone.
Cader also writes:
“The indications are that if the Agency Four have not finalized new digital sales
agreements with Amazon prior to the launch of Apple’s iPad, they could face delisting from
direct sale at Amazon, as Macmillan did.”
Translation: If those publishers don’t finalize a new digital agreement with Amazon before
the launch of the iPad, they risk being removed from
Amazon.com
Amazon Is Biggest Now, But For How Long?
Because it is both the biggest seller of e-books and print books, Amazon has enormous power in
the publishing industry. However, it’s unclear how long it will be able to play hardball
with publishers, especially as formidable competitors like Apple (with iTunes) and Google emerge.
Apple, interestingly, held a reverse stance with music executives for many years before finally
changing course in January of 2009 with the introduction of variable pricing. However, one reason
Apple was able to exert so much influence over record labels pricing was because until Amazon
launched its service (again, Amazon took the reverse approach with music, letting publishers set
variable pricing for tracks and albums), there was no real competitor in the digital music space.
Amazon isn’t quite as lucky. First, e-books have been around for years and are available in
a variety of formats from a variety of different storefronts. In fact, Amazon sold digital books
long before it introduced the Kindle.
The e-book market has evolved much more quickly than the digital music space, which leaves less
wiggle room for retailers, like Amazon, to exert pressure.
However, make no mistake, for smaller publishers, the risk of losing listings on Amazon.com is
still probably a big enough threat to have an effect.
We’ll keep following this situation as it develops.
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable
regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small
business.
Google Apps for business has a number of
benefits over traditional business IT and desktop software. Using the full suite essentially
places all of your data and entire workflow in the cloud, meaning you can access it all anywhere,
any time, from any Internet connection.
At $50 per year per user, the fully integrated apps system is certainly cost-effective, and even
adding the free versions of Gmail, Calendar, and Google Docs into your workflow can keep your employees
coordinated.
For more casual users, or even those who might not be acquainted with Google Apps, here’s a
guide to how the software can benefit your small business.
The many advanced features of Gmail really make it a
leap forward in the web-based e-mail space, and a lot of these are ideal for business.
If you’re not ready to take the full plunge into the paid Google Apps suite, you can still
configure Gmail to function as your business e-mail client through your existing domain name by
following the steps outlined in my post, “How to Set Up Gmail as Your Business E-mail Client.”
The first big advantage of Gmail, like all the apps discussed here, is that it functions
in the cloud. You don’t have to worry about downloading messages to multiple
locations or syncing various devices. Your inbox will look the same from any web or mobile
connection. And with 25 gigs of e-mail storage per user (with a paid apps account), it’s
unlikely you’ll ever have to clean your inbox or delete old messages.
Gmail works a bit differently than traditional desktop clients and webmail services in that
conversations are “threaded.” This means that e-mails with the same
or related subject lines are grouped together in a thread so you can see all the messages sent
and received on a topic in one place. When a new message is received, the entire thread is bumped
to the top of your inbox, making tracking complex and multi-party conversations easy.
Gmail also has a chat feature built right into the interface that lets you send
a quick update or discuss a project with an employee if you’re not in the same office.
Chats are also stored in Gmail so that you can search and refer to them later.
Google search, the asset that started it all for the company, is of course built
right into Gmail, which makes finding information from e-mail conversations (even very old ones)
extremely efficient.
Additionally, Gmail Labs offers some extra settings for your inbox that can be extremely valuable
for business use:
Signature Tweaks puts your e-mail signature before the quoted text in a reply
the way that Outlook would.
Default ‘Reply to All’ allows you to reply to group e-mails with
one click, instead of from a drop-down menu.
Forgotten Attachment Detector will notify you if you’ve mentioned an
attachment in an e-mail, but forgotten to add one.
Undo Send gives you a few seconds after sending a message to click
“undo” in case you forgot something, or sent it to the wrong party by mistake.
Title Tweaks is a great feature that puts your unread message count first in
the title of the inbox web page. If you have many windows open while you’re working,
you’ll still be able to see when new messages arrive.
Google Docs is a web-based suite for word processing, presentation building (similar to
PowerPoint), spreadsheets, and web forms. All the work is done in a web browser, and all the data
is saved in the cloud.
The software can be a bit quirky at times, which may frustrate users of more stable products like
Microsoft Office, but the payoff in online storage, shareability, and collaboration options may
be worth the adjustment for many small businesses.
Because the data is online, streamlined document sharing and collaboration are
big perks with Google Docs. Any file you’re working on can be shared with individual team
members, or the entire group within the apps system. You can also set permissions for specific
users to view and edit documents. And, multiple users can simultaneously view and edit documents,
which can be useful for real-time collaborative projects or presentations during conference
calls. You can also grant permission for those outside your office network to view and edit
documents, which can be especially useful for sharing information and presentations with clients
or colleagues.
As you create and share documents, your Google Docs dashboard may start to get a little messy. Be
sure to create folders to keep your work organized just as you would on your
desktop. You can also share entire folders if you need to collaborate on multiple documents
related to the same project.
Google Calendar provides an efficient and intuitive way to keep appointments and events synced
across your entire business. With calendar sharing and permissions (similar to
those in Docs), you can add other employees’ calendars to your own, and vice versa, in
order to see and manage the big picture of your team’s time.
For example, if an executive has an assistant, their calendars may be shared so that the
assistant could manage his boss’s appointments remotely from his own account. It’s
also a smart tool for coordinating meetings, calls, and shift staffing for multiple employees to
avoid scheduling conflicts. Sharing multiple calendars with one “master calendar”
creates a color-coded scheduling table for the coordinator that updates automatically when users
make changes or additions.
The Calendar app can also be used to create events through Gmail. By adding your
employees’ e-mail addresses to an event, they will receive an invitation to respond.
Responding ‘yes’ automatically adds a shared event to your calendar that each invitee
can view and add notes to. It’s a smart way to coordinate meetings and keep everyone in the
loop.
Google Sites is a drag-and-drop web development tool that you can use within your
business’s apps to create online information hubs for employees. The
websites you create exist within your Google Apps domain, can be public or private, and
permissions for employees to add, change, and contribute information can be set from the main
account.
Beyond simply being a WYSIWYG web editor, Sites makes it easy to integrate data from
other Google Apps into dynamic pages that team members can use to collaborate on
projects. Integrating spreadsheets or data charts from Docs, a deadline schedule from Calendar,
and team-specific messages from Gmail could essentially create a one-stop project dashboard full
of dynamically updating information.
Sites here can be purely functional or informational, or with the aid of some built-in templates
or a good designer, a full-fledged dynamic public website for your business that
team members have easy access to.
Google Groups have long been public forums where users across the web gather to discuss specific
interests or get technical support. Groups for business brings that same functionality into your
private internal network.
E-mail can sometimes be cumbersome when coordinating a team. When you need a central space to
collect ideas and share documents (but you’re not interested in building a web page in
Sites), Groups offers a solution.
Employees can create discussion groups on their own and subscribe, either by
e-mail or via a Groups dashboard, which lists new posts like a news reader.
Rather than e-mails going out to individual inboxes, a group thread remains visible to all of
your subscribed team members, and users can go back to it for reference, to add more information,
and even share docs and calendars.
Using Groups for business discussions and project management creates a communal and
searchable database of information that employees can go back to whenever needed.
Google’s recently launched Google Apps
Marketplace allows developers of other business web apps to integrate their offerings with
Google and sell software directly to Google Apps users. The marketplace currently has over 50
partners, including Intuit, Zoho, and Aviary. This additional space for third-party software
means that Apps users will have even more options to tailor their suite for specific business
purposes.
Smart Integration Across the Board
While each app has worthwhile features, perhaps one of the best advantages is the way that they
all integrate with one another. Documents and appointments can be easily shared via e-mail, and
your inbox can be used as a portal for productivity via embeddable widgets, chat, and other
notifications.
If your small business is ready for a web-based, collaboration-minded IT solution, Google Apps is
certainly a cost-effective way to go, and you can investigate the free versions simply by signing
up for a Gmail account to determine if the suite is right for your workflow.
Motion Fighter, l’un des projets compatibles PS Move les
plus prometteurs qui soient à l’heure actuelle disposera en effet d’un
compteur de calorie, sensé indiquer au joueur le nombre de calories perdues après
chaque session de jeu. Un peu le même principe que celui proposé par Wii
Fit me direz-vous. Oui, mais cette fois, les tâches à accomplir sont quand
même nettement plus viriles (et balancer dans une conversation “j’ai perdu 300
calories en défonçant 15 gus”, c’est quand même plus glorieux que
“j’ai perdu 300 calories en sautant sur ma Wii Board…)
"According to reports, Choi crashed the rally, hosted by the gay rights group the Human Rights
Campaign and comedian Kathy Griffin, and asked attendees to join him in a march to the White
House, turning the event into more of a protest. Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese
did not march to the White House, in an illustration of the split in the gay rights movement
between establishment organizations like the HRC, which generally support the Obama
administration, and activists like Choi, who are pushing more aggressively for action."
"Let me be quite clear about one thing: what Dan Choi did yesterday was of questionable
sincerity, most likely intricately plotted as to gain the most amount of press and attention, and
undoubtedly will dominate the conversation going into the next Don't Ask, Don't Tell news cycle.
It's big, over the top, political theater of the type that is destined to get tongues wagging
about the issue once again and will definitely secure Lt. Choi's place as a major figure in gay
activism. What it won't secure, however, is the title and rank that his entire public career thus
far has been about retaining, which is why the behavior is simultaneously inspiring and baffling.
There are some severely mixed signals here that need to be addressed."
Watch AmericaBlog's full video of Choi's speech during which Kathy Griffin says she'll go with
him to the White House (she didn't),
AFTER THE JUMP...
Réunion à la
rédaction de Paquet Fedora du Jour: "- L'autre jour, ton article sur Frozen Bubble - Oui et alors? - Ben un lecteur nous a dit
d'essayer MonkeyBubble, parce que c'était plus fun? J'ai testé et il a raison -
M*****, on passe pour des !#§*ù$ là, qu'est ce qu'on fait? - On publie un
article discrètement sur ce jeu, l'air de rien, et tête basse - Ok, ok... - Au fait,
ça va avec ta femme? -..."
La suite de la conversation n'a que peu d'importance pour le sujet qui nous concerne.
Dans la famille des clones de Puzzle Bobble, je demande le petit frère, Monkey Bubble! Le
principe reste identique: Tirer des bulles de couleur sur les amas situés en haut de
l'écran. Si au moins trois bulles de la même couleur se touchent, elles tombent en
entrainant toutes les bulles retenues seulement par elles. Si les bulles atteignent le bas de
l'écran, vous perdez. Si au contraire vous arrivez à vider l'écran, vous
gagnez.
Monkey Bubble présente de simples graphismes cartoon en 2D, mais très bien finis.
La petite bande son roots est des plus agréables et vous donnera envie de vous jeter
furieusement vers votre bar pour vous préparer un mojito.
Monkey Bubble prévoit également le multijoueur avec un mode deux joueurs sur le
même écran ou le jeu en réseau.
Ne vous trompez pas, Monkey Bubble est bien le jeu de Puzzle qu'il vous faut, si vous n'avez rien
à faire pendant les deux heures suivantes bien entendu, car vous allez forcément y
rester accroché.
Installation en ligne de commande : yum install monkey-bubble
Installation avec l'interface graphique : Jeux > Game in the spirit of Frozen
Bubble
Localisation dans le menu : Applications > Jeux > Monkey Bubble
Lancement en ligne de commande : /usr/bin/monkey-bubble
Early February, Google
launched its new Buzz
service for mobile and desktop which is Google's way to start conversations about the things you
find interesting. From the start, it was built right into Gmail as well as Google released new Google Maps Mobile clients with
Buzz support. Google Buzz integrates photo, video and link-sharing and makes it easy to share it
either publicly or privately. Now, Google has released a Buzz widget for Android phones that lets you post text and
photos with a single tap, straight from the Android home screen. Like other mobile access points
for Google Buzz, the widget lets you choose to tag your post with the location or place from
which it was posted.
[In a
GameSetWatch-exclusive set of blog posts covering the week of GDC
2010, Magical Wasteland blogger and Game
Developer magazine columnist Matthew Burns concludes his journey through the San Francisco-based
show. Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and
Part
6.]
For me, the 2010 Game Developers Conference was a little like standing in the center of a
three-way collision between art, technology and business– three trains
barreling into each other with the full weight of their cross-cultural inertia behind them, the
impact releasing tremendous energy and particles of a new, unknown type.
The trend-spotters registered, of course, the noise around social media (most of it seemed little
more than just that: noise) and the still-echoing boom of free-to-play with real money
transactions.
Three-dimensional displays requiring glasses continued to confound me as to their worth, even
though a man in a business suit I randomly encountered at the Intel booth told me he thought in
no uncertain terms it was the future. Strange “virtual reality” peripherals,
exhibited at shows like this year after year and to no subsequent momentum, persisted in their
search for relevance.
Many of sessions had to do with going or being independent in a world dominated by increasingly
monolithic publishers. There was also tangible worry about layoffs, accompanied by an
unsubstantiated hope that casual games or serious games might magically pick up the slack in
available openings. Cell phones were an accepted, legitimate platform that nobody thought once to
deride. Game developers are still mostly white males.
I must remind myself, however, that the eighteen-thousand strong attendance was only a fraction
of the total developer community. For everyone who was there, many more stayed at home for
monetary reasons, or because were stuck at work, unable to come because all hands were needed on
deck for an upcoming milestone.
Some companies are willing to accept only a limited number of “slots,” ensuring that
only the most important or most desirous were able to get one. I’d even heard tales of
studios discouraging their employees from going at all because they were afraid networking at the
show could lead to their finding better jobs elsewhere.
Back home in a familiar bed, recovering from the flu I picked up, I have trouble falling sleep
even though I’m exhausted. There’s simply too much for me to be spun up about from
the last six days. I drift in between wakefulness and dreams of a type I’ve never had
before, feverishly plotting my next steps towards the realization of ideas both new and old. Like
a student in a martial arts class, I’m beaten up, but oddly invigorated by it.
“Video games.” Someone started saying the phrase to punctuate the end of
conversations: conversations about Bayonetta’s addiction to lollipops, forum-organized
Activision “boycotts,” or Sonic the Hedgehog fans. Video games. The usage spreads,
because what else can you say about this wide-ranging, incomparable, baffling land, with its
sublime peaks and dispiriting trenches, its rich veins and its unexplored territory?
For every promising, flag-waving triumph of there are ten facepalm moments, but we stick with it
regardless. We know that despite every disappointment, that there is something special to be
found here.
Even Senator Yee in his amicus brief wrote that “the interactive nature of video games is
vastly different than passively listening to music, watching a movie, or reading a book.”
In this case the video game advocates and their would-be censors agree: games are a medium apart,
something uniquely powerful (and perhaps, due to that very power, dangerous).
The natural instinct is to try to take its reins, and steer it like a beast in the direction we
want it to go: to wrestle it into a career, or into money, or into the approval of others. We
want to take what we see in video games and make it about us; or try to sum it all up in a few
easy words or split it into overly simplistic categories. Agendas are advanced, ulterior motives
lurk, and everyone holds in his or her mind some kind of ideal state.
But the whole of the thing– this gigantic ball of ideas and expectations and
initiative called the game industry– is much too big, too disparate and too
absurd to understand in any rational way, except as a inexorable force of nature. So to believe
one could somehow control it is nothing more than fantasy.
[Special thanks to Simon Carless and Darius Kazemi for making this series possible.]
We have launched a blog focused on fall protection – not on fall protection equipment
– but on all elements that contribute to enhancing fall safety. (PRWeb Mar 19, 2010)
Honestly I don’t know why I’m on a journalism kick lately, but here I go again:
Colin Marshall, host of a podcast and radio show
called The Marketplace of Ideas
recently posted an
excellent list of interview techniques, including things like “have a
conversation” and “reveal your ignorance”. Two things are interesting: 1)
journalists, like anthropologists, frequently fall prey to an ideological sense of what makes a
“scientific” or objective interview (a rote list of questions asked like the
advancing front of a battle), and it often makes for bad journalism, by which I mean, journalism
that doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know; and 2) everything Marshall lists
might be understood as ways to get outside the “framing” of discourse. This latter
point is essential to me: anthropologists are doing good work when they figure out how to
de-frame discourse, i.e. how to work a conversation out of the frames that restrict people from
thinking. The salience of “framing” is obvious to sociologists, linguists, political
scientists and others today, and there is much quality research on framing… but very little
research on resisting the framing of discourse and enabling the progress of thinking. I read
these tips as clear strategies for doing just that.
Le vendredi, c'est 5
liens !... 5 liens vers des notes lues, 5 notes qui symbolisent selon moi ce que
j'ai parcouru dans la blogosphère cette semaine...
Le premier lien, je
l'avais raté, parle du pouvoir des conversations : Là.
Le deuxième lien, je l'avais raté aussi, explique le modèle de circulation
des contenus :
Là.
Le troisième lien apporte la réponse à : "Qui est lady Gaga ?" :
Là.
Le quatrième lien est pour ceux qui se posent encore des questions sur le
Transmédia : Là.
Le cinquième lien renseigne enfin sur ce qu'est une bonne suceuse : Là.
» Twitter analytics: The service has a 40 percent retention rate,
may only reach 10 percent of all internet users and for the most part, is comprised of pointless
babble and conversations. [Mashable]
» Would you go back to buying CDs if they were $10 or less?
[MediaMemo]
» Rightsholders say the term “piracy” is too sexy.
[ars
technica]
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Find here the history of the stories you found interesting.
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If you’re a gadget-lover fed up of filling your home
with ice white this and brushed aluminum that, then check out this selection of totally
stylin’ items offering a design blast from the past.
Comme son entraîneur, Didier
Deschamps, Souleymane Diawara, le défenseur central de l'OM ne prend pas aux sérieux
les déclarations de Jean-Michel Aulas, faisant de Marseille le favori dimanche soir. Par
ailleurs, le Sénégalais a également eu une conversation avec Mbia au sujet du
désir de ce dernier de ne jouer qu'au milieu.
Our top story this week was about bad news for the big guys: Google,
Facebook, Digg's top users. As you catch up on the news, 
We
recently launched the official 
Our channel 
Our channel 
Our channel 
![gmail tchat contact Comment bloquer ou réintégrer un contact sur le tchat de GMail [Astuce 101]](http://descary.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/2010/03/gmail-tchat-contact.jpg "gmail-tchat-contact")
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Engadget's Joshua Topolsky pens a lengthy article on what has gone
so terribly wrong at Palm over the last year. His solutions aren't perfect, but it's worth
reading. —Ed.
From GigaOm: The first
time you walk into an Apple Store and pick up an iPad, you’ll understand the hype: Apple
has managed to create a beautiful, thoughtfully designed, compelling product in a space where
mediocrity was, until now, status quo. But odds are you probably won’t buy one — at
least not yet. And that’s OK.
After news broke this
week that that Yahoo's ad boss Joanne Bradford was quiting, EVP Hilary Schneider quickly emailed
employees to say that she'd hold down the fort in the interim, a spokesperson tells us.
The 
Billet original de 
Early February, 
[In a
GameSetWatch-exclusive set of blog posts covering the week of 
Recommandations
)
and reject those that you are not interested in
(
)
