Just imagine -- yapping for hours on end to your dream lover could actually leave your cellphone with more juice than what it started with. This completely bizarre scenario could theoretically become a reality according to new research from a professor at Texas A&M University, and it's all thanks to the magic of nanoscale piezoelectrics. If you'll recall, we've seen this technology generate energy in wearable devices before, so it makes sense that sound wave energy could also be captured and converted into electricity. Of course, we're still a good ways away from this being ready for commercialization, but who knows how quickly this could come together if placed in the capable (albeit unpredictable) hands of Dr. Walter Bishop.

[Via phonescoop, image courtesy of Rutgers]

Filed under: Cellphones

Piezoelectrics could lead to voice-powered cellphones originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Dec 2008 07:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081201162127.htm#"img vspace="16" hspace="4" border="1" align="right" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2008/12/12-4-08-cellphone-battery.jpg" alt="" //aJust imagine -- yapping for hours on end to your dream lover could actually leave your cellphone with more juice than what it started with. This completely bizarre scenario could theoretically become a reality according to new research from a professor at Texas Aamp;M University, and it's all thanks to the magic of a href="http://www.engadget.com/tag/piezoelectric/"nanoscale piezoelectrics/a. If you'll recall, we've seen this technology generate energy in wearable devices a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/28/piezing-dress-generates-power-attracts-nerds-as-wearer-moves/"before/a, so it makes sense that sound wave energy could also be captured and converted into electricity. Of course, we're still a good ways away from this being ready for commercialization, but who knows how quickly this could come together if placed in the capable (albeit unpredictable) hands of Dr. Walter Bishop.br /br /[Via a href="http://www.phonescoop.com/news/item.php?n=3684"phonescoop/a, image courtesy of a href="http://www.eden.rutgers.edu/~hess/425/final/img/battery.jpg"Rutgers/a]pFiled under: a href="http://www.engadget.com/category/cellphones/" rel="tag"Cellphones/a/pp style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/05/piezoelectrics-could-lead-to-voice-powered-cellphones/"Piezoelectrics could lead to voice-powered cellphones/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.engadget.com"Engadget/a on Fri, 05 Dec 2008 07:30:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./ph6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href=http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081201162127.htm#Read/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/05/piezoelectrics-could-lead-to-voice-powered-cellphones/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/forward/1391876/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/05/piezoelectrics-could-lead-to-voice-powered-cellphones/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/Ir__YRDpiInels83DdM-0dKHhH8/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/Ir__YRDpiInels83DdM-0dKHhH8/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?a=jitqEJCU"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?i=jitqEJCU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?a=nJPwL5OZ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?i=nJPwL5OZ" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~4/KynmqcPUBas" height="1" width="1"/

Category: Games
Released: Dec 02, 2008
Price: $0.99

Description:
Virtual Pirate lets you use your iPhone or iPod Touch to transform yourself into a pirate. Virtual Pirate assigns different attacks, insults and taunts to your moves using your device's accelerometer. In addition to working as a sound effects generator, Virtual Pirate can be played as a game. One Player Mode (Timed)You have 60 seconds to demonstrate your fighting skills. You will be scored on both physical attacks and your use of insults and taunts. Two Player Mode (Duel)Take on an opponent in a mock pirate fight! Choose to play either Calico Jack or Blackbeard. The loser must walk the plank! Note: Two player mode requires two iPhones or iPods each with their own copy of Virtual Pirate. Free PlayMake like a pirate and Virtual Pirate will provide the soundtrack. Tips:- For best results, hold your device in your right hand with the volume controls facing away from you.- Thrust forward or back to attack with your musket.- Swipe left or right to attack with your sword.- Quickly raising your device activates taunts, insults and threats.- Quickly lowering your device lets you access special pirate attacks. Warnings:Playing this game can be physically demanding. Excessive game play may result in injury. If you find yourself feeling strained, discontinue game play immediately. Failure to hold on to your iPhone or iPod tightly while playing may result in you inadvertently throwing and damaging it or other property. The creator of Virtual Pirate cannot be held liable for any damages brought about by either of the above or other scenarios.

Website: http://www.spambutcher.com/pirate/
Support Website: http://www.spambutcher.com/pirate/

Note: The description above is the official one supplied by the application developer and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of this site or its staff.


Get it on iTunes: Virtual Pirate

Gameplay
In Left 4 Dead, the dreaded zombie apocalypse has finally occurred, and most of humanity has turned into a ravenous swarm hungry for succulent human flesh. A handful of survivors are immune to the zombie virus and, armed with weapons real and makeshift, must battle their way to a series of safe houses that ultimately lead to salvation and rescue. It's a thrilling tale of survival and horror, punctured by plenty of bullets and explosions.

In Call of Duty: World at War, you don't have much time to pat yourself on the back after crushing the Third Reich, because after the credits roll you find yourself facing hordes of Nazi Zombies. So you and three others must defend a bunker against unending waves of Nazi zombies, with each successive wave more challenging than the previous one. You gain points for killing zombies and repairing barricades and these points can be spent to purchase weapons, ammo, and to unlock rooms to the bunker. However, there is no salvation at the end of this game, as the zombies are a metaphor for the inescapable nature of death. You can fight to prolong your life as long as possible, but eventually the zombies will get you.

Winner: Left 4 Dead. There's a lot more depth and adventure to it. Plus, the fact that you can win makes it slightly less morbid.


Setting
If there's one weakness to Left 4 Dead it's the limited number of scenarios. Still, each of the four scenarios in the game has five levels that cover everything from forests, cities, sewers, and even an airport. There are 20 level totals, which is a boatload compared to Nazi Zombies' lone level, which is set in a drab bunker in the middle of a torn-up battlefield. Think of it as a concrete tomb.

Winner: Left 4 Dead. Not much of a contest here.


Zombie Variety
It's easy to feel sympathy at times for the zombies in Left 4 Dead. Clad in the clothes they were wearing when they got infected, you encounter former cops, soldiers, stylish young women, grandpas, and more. In the airport levels, it's not unusual to blast zombie pilots and TSA personnel, as well as a flight attendant or two. You run into the whole fabric of society, all now the walking dead. On the other hand, there aren't many qualms about blasting the zombies in Nazi Zombies, especially when they're wearing Wehrmacht uniforms. Take that, Fritzy!

Winner: Left 4 Dead.


Zombies Behavior
Nazi Zombies adheres to the original zombie concept, which is basically a shambling, walking corpse with poor coordination. Sure, the zombies get faster and tougher the further you get into the game, but ultimately they look and move like zombies should. Left 4 Dead goes for a more modern, revisionist take on zombies. These zombies are less like walking dead and more like enraged people. They sprint at you, leap over fences, and have a rage and purpose to their movements. Then there are the boss zombies, like the corpulent boomer that vomits on you, or the lanky smoker with his frog-like tongue. It's just not what you expect when you think zombie.

Winner: Nazi Zombies. What can we say? We like old fashioned zombies.



Single-Player Gameplay
It's possible to play Left 4 Dead by yourself, as the game will provide three decent bots to fill out the rest of your team. These bots are competent enough that you could make it through the scenarios on the default difficulty level, but at advanced and expert it becomes very difficult. Nazi Zombies, on the other hand, doesn't offer bots to help you out, and that makes things a lot harder, not to mention less fun. You definitely need to be playing with at least one other player in Nazi Zombies to really enjoy it.

Winner: Left 4 Dead.


Weapons
Since it is set during World War II, Nazi Zombies naturally features an arsenal of weapons appropriate to the era. There's the M1 Garand, the StG44 (the first major assault rifle), German "potato masher" grenades, and more. They're all solid weapons, and the only departure from reality is the ray gun, a sci-fi weapon straight out of 1940s movie cereals. And the bunker does have a handful of explosive barrels outside, but once you use them up, that's it.

Left 4 Dead relies on more generic weapons. Sure, the assault rifle looks like an M16 and the submachine gun looks like an Uzi, but they're referred to as merely "assault rifle" and "submachine gun." Then there's the shotgun, the combat shotgun, the hunting rifle, and the pistol. There are no proper grenades, but Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs make short work of the zombie horde. And Left 4 Dead also lets you use objects in the environment as weapons, such as gasoline containers and propane tanks. There's no shortage of mayhem, here.

Winner: Left 4 Dead. Sure, World at War's ray gun is cool, but give us exploding propane canisters any day.


Production Values
Left 4 Dead is built on the Source Engine, which originally powered Half-Life 2. Granted, Valve has added many improvements and features over the past four years, and the graphics have a very clean and crisp look to them. Call of Duty: World at War is built on the gorgeous engine that powered last year's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and it offers plenty of eye candy itself. Both have great audio effects when it comes to weapon noises and zombie moans, but Left 4 Dead adds top quality voice acting and a rich script.

Winner: Left 4 Dead. This one is mainly due to its edge in the sound department.



Overall Winner
Left 4 Dead.

On paper, Left 4 Dead is the superior zombie game. Of course, that makes sense, since it's an entire game while Nazi Zombies is merely a bonus mode tacked onto the end of Call of Duty: World at War. Still, that's not to say Nazi Zombies isn't fun; it takes a little while to build up, but once the German zombies amp up the pressure you'll be caught up in the undead-killing action. But keep in mind that both games are a blast if you play with others online. And the upside is that both will prepare you well for whenever hell does fill up, and the dead do end up walking the Earth.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/935/935739p1.html

Adobe officially unveiled the P2P video streaming capabilities of Flash 10 to developers this week. The technology itself is still in its infancy, but the mere fact that Adobe decided to embrace P2P for Flash 10 made a lot of headlines earlier this year. Many people, including Om over at GigaOM, wondered whether Adobe was taking aim at the CDN market with this technology and whether we will soon all watch our YouTube videos in a P2P fashion.br / br / The short answer is: We won’t — at least not with Adobe’s help. The current P2P implementation, which goes by the name Real-Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP), isn’t really suited for mass-scale video delivery. Instead, it focuses solely on scenarios in which one client exchanges live video or audio data with another client. Think video conferences, Flash-based VOIP or even multi-player games. Just not YouTube. Not anytime soon.a href="http://newteevee.com/2008/12/04/adobe-makes-p2p-flash-video-available-to-developers/" target="_blank" Continue reading on Newteevee.com./abr / br/div class="tagblock"small class="ttags"Tags: a href="http://technorati.com/tag/adobe" rel="tag"adobe/a, a href="http://technorati.com/tag/flash" rel="tag"flash/a, a href="http://technorati.com/tag/flex" rel="tag"flex/a, a href="http://technorati.com/tag/air" rel="tag"air/a, a href="http://technorati.com/tag/rtmfp" rel="tag"rtmfp/a, a href="http://technorati.com/tag/newteevee" rel="tag"newteevee/a/smalldiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/p2pblog?a=rsmuO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/p2pblog?i=rsmuO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/p2pblog?a=i22aO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/p2pblog?i=i22aO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/p2pblog?a=zk4do"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/p2pblog?i=zk4do" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/p2pblog?a=sCLVo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/p2pblog?i=sCLVo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/p2pblog?a=AeDpO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/p2pblog?i=AeDpO" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/p2pblog/~4/475132265" height="1" width="1"/

Adobe officially unveiled the P2P video streaming capabilities of Flash 10 to developers this week. The technology itself is still in its infancy, but the mere fact that Adobe decided to embrace P2P for Flash 10 made a lot of headlines earlier this year. Many people, including Om over at GigaOM, wondered whether Adobe was taking aim at the CDN market with this technology and whether we will soon all watch our YouTube videos in a P2P fashion.

The short answer is: We won’t — at least not with Adobe’s help. The current P2P implementation, which goes by the name Real-Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP), isn’t really suited for mass-scale video delivery. Instead, it focuses solely on scenarios in which one client exchanges live video or audio data with another client. Think video conferences, Flash-based VOIP or even multi-player games. Just not YouTube. Not anytime soon.

RTMFP is essentially based on the idea that real-time video or voice interaction between two users of Flash or Air applications shouldn’t have to deal with the latency and bandwidth burden of a server-based relay. It’s just faster and cheaper to let the kids talk amongst themselves. Adobe does use a central server to authenticate users and facilitate the exchange of the data, but the actual video streams flow directly between the users of the application in question.

Graphic from Adobe’s RTMFP FAQ.

So who is running that server? RTMFP will eventually be supported by future versions of Adobe’s Flash Media Server, but the company wants to first integrate it into its new Cocomo cloud services, which went into beta last month. For now, only a subset of all Cocomo servers run by Adobe support RTMFP, but Adobe developer Nigel Pegg assured me that his team hasn’t seen any capacity problems just yet.

Pegg first wrote about the new protocol earlier this week on Adobe’s Collaborative Methods blog, detailing how Flex developers can add RTMFP support to their applications with a few lines of extra code. He told me that one of the big advantages of this solution is that it switches effortlessly between centralized and P2P data delivery. “We tend to see performance degradations after a certain number of receiving participants is reached,” he said.

One example for such a problem would be if you use a Flash P2P video chat and your broadband connection simply can’t support to serve all participants. “What’s cool about how Cocomo approaches this is that, once that limit is reached, Cocomo’s foundation classes swap down automatically, in mid-stream (to server-based video delivery)”, Pegg explained.

Speaking of video delivery: Adobe goes to great lengths to dispel the myth that it plans to P2P-ify all web-based Flash video with this new protocol. “Flash player 10 will not enable swarming, multi-cast or broadcast quality live video,” the protocol’s FAQ (PDF) reads, and it goes on: “RTMFP will have no impact on the business of a CDN.” The company even tries to avoid the acronym P2P completely, instead talking about client-to-client streaming.

Of course, the fact that Adobe doesn’t support any YouTube — or even Ustream-like environments — with RTMFP doesn’t mean that the company won’t go down that road eventually. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch told Om earlier this year that the company is “taking small steps” and “using P2P in a very basic form” to make sure it doesn’t break web video. Which could mean that this is a first step down a potentially very disrupting path.

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div class="rxbodyfield"p page="1" class="ArticleBody"a target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com/subnets/microsoft/"Microsoft/a has seen the future of the datacenter, and oddly enough it#39;s missing a roof./pp align="right"a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" target="_blank" /img src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" width="336" height="280" border="0" alt="" align="right"//a/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"The company#39;s future a target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/120408-gartner-top-10-disruptive-technologies.html?informamp;ap1=rcb"datacenter design/a, which will be its de facto standard in five years, is a cross between an electrical switching station, an RV-park and the closing quot;warehousequot; scene from the 1981 film emRaiders of the Lost Ark/em ./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"b[ Stay ahead of advances in technology with InfoWorld#39;s a href="http://weblog.innfoworld.com/yager/?source=fssr"Ahead of the Curve blog/a and a href="http://www.infoworld.com/newsletter/subscribe.html?source=fssr"newsletter/a. ]/b/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"The company envisions a set of prefabricated containers the size of a semi-trailer filled with as many as 2,000 preconfigured servers. The containers can be parked next to and plugged into pre-built mechanical, electrical, cooling and security components. In essence, it is a giant collection of a target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/tech/2008/082708-tech-update.html"boxes and pluggable components/a that can grow and shrink based on need./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"The container portion of the idea is nothing revolutionary. Microsoft is installing them in its Chicago datacenter. a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/financial/sun.html"Sun/a introduced a server container called Project Blackbox in 2006 and a target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com/subnets/google/"Google/a received a patent in 2007 on its quot;mobile datacenterquot; stored in a standard shipping container, which unlike Sun#39;s Blackbox, could be clustered in the same modular fashion that Microsoft is proposing./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"The container idea also has its a target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/050908-why-microsofts-approach-to-data.html"critics/a who say they are rife with electrical and mechanical concerns, have power management and cooling issues, present a single point of failure, and are susceptible to damage during shipping./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Microsoft, however, is not just talking about containers, but the configuration of the entire datacenter./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"The company this week unveiled what it is calling its quot;Generation 4 Modular Data Centerquot; plan, a blueprint that will define its cloud datacenter infrastructure in the next five years./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"The datacenters have four walls and a sophisticated perimeter security system, but are open to the elements as they lack a roof. Trucks wheel the boxes into the enclosure where they are connected to power/cooling stations before being brought online./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"It#39;s a bold plan to drive industry thinking about how to construct and operate datacenters in a world of capacity spikes, real-time needs for computing power and expanding green initiatives./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"quot;We believe it is one of the most revolutionary changes to happen to datacenters in the last 30 years,quot; said Michael Manos, general manager of global foundation services for Microsoft, in his blog introducing Microsoft#39;s Generation 4 plan./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"emBusinessWeek/em reported last month that Microsoft said it was going to quot;reinvent the infrastructure of our industryquot; by building some 20 datacenters that can carry a price tag as much as $1 billion apiece./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"quot;In short, we are striving to bring Henry Ford#39;s Model T factory to the datacenter,quot; Manos said. quot;In our design process, we questioned everything. You may notice there is no roof and some might be uncomfortable with this. We explored the need of one and throughout our research we got some surprising (positive) results that showed one wasn#39;t needed.quot;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Microsoft says all the pieces needed to construct the datacenter would be built off-site and assembled once they arrived at the datacenter location, much the way planes, cars, and computers are built today. The company says the process would mean a target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/062608-microsoft-sees-little-data-centers.html"less time and money/a to erect a new datacenter. #160;/pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"And Microsoft expects efficiencies in power usage that blow away even the best-rated facilities today based on PUE (power usage effectiveness), a metric developed by The Green Grid and used to determine the energy efficiency of a datacenter./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"quot;A key driver is our goal to achieve an average PUE at or below 1.125 by 2012 across our datacenters,quot; Manos said on his blog./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"Achieving such a low PUE average would be a breakthrough given that the typical datacenter has an average PUE of 2.5, according to the Uptime Institute. The Institute says that a best-case scenario today could produce a 1.6 PUE average if the datacenter is using the most efficient equipment and best practices./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"Manos added: quot;More than that, we are on a mission to reduce the overall amount of copper and water used in these facilities.quot;/pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"Operationally, the datacenter would offer different classes of service defined to meet the needs of applications and services deployed and to create cost efficiencies. The classes include ala carte options, such as uninterruptible power supplies and backup generators, temperature controls, and redundancy./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"Microsoft says the varying configurations will drive engineering innovations that will lower operational costs for applications./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"And to show that Microsoft is aiming toward industry interoperability the datacenter#39;s containers would have common interfaces so others can plug their wares into them including computer vendors, UPS vendors, and generator vendors./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"Manos admits that a 2005 memo written to Microsoft employees by now chief software architect Ray Ozzie was the trigger for thinking about how Microsoft would evolve deeper into an operations company rather than a provider of packaged software./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"What grew out of that were Generation 2 facilities, now operating in Quincy, Wash., and San Antonio, Texas, which took into account sustainability, energy efficiency, and total cost of operations./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"Generation 3 facilities, which are represented by Microsoft#39;s mammoth datacenter in Chicago, feature containers and a modular design./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"Microsoft has posted a short a target="_blank" href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-usamp;vid=b4d189d3-19bd-42b3-85d7-6ca46d97fe40"video/a to show how its Generation 4 datacenters would be constructed and how they would operate./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"emNetwork World is an InfoWorld affiliate/em/p/divbr style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=22f91955bbf377044bf9dcf3b8d6dd4ap=1img alt= style=border: 0; border=0 src=http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=22f91955bbf377044bf9dcf3b8d6dd4ap=1//a img src=http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=22f91955bbf377044bf9dcf3b8d6dd4a style=display: none; border=0 height=1 width=1 alt=/

pstronga href="/article/news/38110-animal-collective-plan-live-box-ep-tour" target="_blank"Way the eff back in August 2006/a/strong, word was the mighty stronga href="http://www.myanimalhome.net/" target="_blank"Animal Collective/a/strong were "starting to film for a very special release next year." When we stronga href="/article/news/39909/Panda_Bear_Talks_Animal_Collective_Solo_Work" target="_blank"talked to Noah "Panda Bear" Lennox/a/strong a few months later in November, he affirmed that filming for the project had begun and added that "AC will make the music for it" once director Danny Perez (who also did the stronga href="http://www.pitchfork.tv/videos/animal-collective-who-could-win-a-rabbit" target="_blank""Who Could Win a Rabbit"/a/strong video) was "done editing all the footage." So far, so good.br /br /Fast forward to a stronga href="/article/feature/142389-pitchfork-music-festival-2008-saturday" target="_blank"Saturday afternoon at this year's Pitchfork Music Festival/a/strong (also stronga href="http://www.pitchfork.tv/interview/animal-collective-" target="_blank"captured for Pitchfork.tv/a/strong), where Dave "Avey Tare" Portner spoke of filming assorted "scenarios" inspired by art/experimental films and apparently featuring the acting talents of the AC guys. Portner also claimed "we've been coming up with music ideas" and noted the "visual record" would ultimately surface on DVD.br /br /All caught up? Great. That brings us to a stronga href="http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/animal-collective-going-visual-in-studio-1003919508.story" target="_blank"Billboard.com report/a/strong today, in which Portner teases a bit more about the project in question. "This year, we got to a place where we can start doing demos and nailing all the sounds down, while we're at home," he told Billboard.com. "It's something new for all of us. It's been a work-as-we-go process." Portner again refers to the thing as a "visual record."br /br /Still no word whatsoever on when we'll actually emsee/em the thing, but it's not like Animal Collective don't have plenty else going on in the meantime. stronga href="/article/news/146944-first-listen-animal-collectives-merriweather-post-pavilion" target="_blank"emMerriweather Post Pavilion/em/a/strong and its stronga href="/article/news/146724-animal-collective-unveil-trippy-merriweather-cover" target="_blank"trippy cover art/a/strong (speaking of "visual" records...) descend in January, and AC have a stronga href="/article/news/147164-animal-collective-announce-winter-tour" target="_blank"short run of live dates/a/strong surrounding the release.br /br /That's all for "Animal Collective Non-News" today, folks. Tune in tomorrow for a non-update on the AC box set that's been "due to arrive soon" for stronga href="/article/news/38110-animal-collective-plan-live-box-ep-tour" target="_blank"approximately 55 years now/a/strong. Or, hell, have it today: according to a late October post on label stronga href="http://www.catsupplate.com/" target="_blank"Catsup Plate/a/strong's website, "All we can say is that it's coming."br //ppa href="http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/node/147941" target="_blank"read more/a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/n3kxep0mEo_Er49YhdYvtH8Zdvs/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/n3kxep0mEo_Er49YhdYvtH8Zdvs/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/pitchfork/today/~4/3PBdIYl6vFM" height="1" width="1"/

The AMD 790FX was a solid platform, but for many boards, including one MSI 790FX board we looked at earlier this year, struggled a bit on the overclocking side of things. Fooling around with the MSI DKA790GX Platinum for the last couple weeks has certainly showed us the newer SB750 South Bridge has improved on this a lot. The South Bridge aside though, what else does this AMD board show us?

"From a performance standpoint, the MSI DKA790GX performed on par with the 790FX in a stock speed scenario. Overclocking tells a different tale as the 790GX was a very good overclocker. The new SB750 South Bridge is a lot more stable in this department and for those of you looking to squeeze more out of their CPU, you will want to think about this if you’re due for a motherboard upgrade.
Full Review @ Viperlair.com

div class="image"a href="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/big_show.php?/avaxhome/d2/fc/0009fcd2.jpeg" target="_blank"img src="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/d2/fc/0009fcd2_medium.jpeg" id="external_img_654546"//a/divbr/ div class="center"b Nikon School presents A Hands-on Guide to Creative Lighting [Tutorial] | 2,6 GB /b br/ ASIN: B001KJ91V4 | Full 2½ hours of entertaining hands-on instruction/divbr/ Learn how to make light work for you with the power and versatility of the Nikon Creative Lighting System, featuring the SB-900, SB-800, SB-600 and SB-R200. Nikon Speedlights deliver the ability to turn an ordinary subject into a striking image or even into a stunning work of art. Bob Krist will lead you on a tour of lightingfundamentals and techniques in the studio, joined later by Joe McNally in the field. Watch and learn as the amazing potential of Nikons Creative Lighting system is unleashed in a variety of real world shooting scenarios-from the Boston Ballet School to the charm of Gloucester, Massachusetts.

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.pa href="http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/04/1922249amp;from=rss"img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=08/12/04/1922249"/a/ppa href="http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/04/1922249amp;from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/ywwOhoSqMvnwk4wO0X-Fc8JCmSo/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/ywwOhoSqMvnwk4wO0X-Fc8JCmSo/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/ZFtRbVA4Hi0" height="1" width="1"/

Any Google App could be unavailable for more than 21 hours on a given day, and the company could still claim they had 100% uptime. That’s the gist of an analysis penned by Pingdom, who took a closer look at the Service Level Agreement for Google Apps.

The most interesting tidbit in the SLA, which applies for Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and more (emphasis ours):

“Downtime Period” means, for a domain, a period of ten consecutive minutes of Downtime. Intermittent Downtime for a period of less than ten minutes will not be counted towards any Downtime Periods.

…

“Monthly Uptime Percentage” means total number of minutes in a calendar month minus the number of minutes of Downtime suffered from all Downtime Periods in a calendar month, divided by the total number of minutes in a calendar month.

True enough, this exempts Google from admitting it had up to 21 hours of downtime in one day (worst-case of course, see Pingdom’s calculation for more information about that as well a more likely scenario), because it ignores all unavailability under 10 minutes, which by today’s standards is a very long period even for free services.

Google’s Apps SLA may guarantee 99,9% uptime, but this little loophole makes it darn easy for the company to honor that.

CrunchBase Information Google Information provided by CrunchBase

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Use FileSystemWatcher in a practical scenario

If you said that they both posed topless, well, you’d be correct.  The actual answer I was driving at was that they’ve both had their Facebook accounts deleted.

According to Nick O’Neill at All Facebook, there are (not surprisingly) quite a few Lindsay Lohans on Facebook.

So, what did Lindsay do as soon as she found out her account was shut down?  The same thing Robert Scoble did, she blogged about her experience, only at her MySpace profile:

okay, so i love myspace, because it is secure, and the people at myspace don’t disable your account because they think that you are a fake you.

[..]

when i typed my password and “log in” name in, a red sentence came up saying..

Account Disabled
Your account has been disabled by an administrator. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page here.

wow! i was in shock. i clicked on the link that they told me to click on and then to another link that said: my account may of been disabled by mistake. once i got to that it gave a note saying why it was disabled which stated the note saying that it was disabled because they believe that i was a fake of myself. genius.

Lohan, in her own way, criticized the vaunted Facebook Connect, the account management system that the social network has opened up for other blogs and sites to use as a way of managing their site’s userbase.

To paraphrase Lohan, it’s infuriating that Facebook arbitrarily decides who is and isn’t the real account holder, and it’s equally infuriating that they don’t at least offer account holders the opportunity to respond to the company’s accusation before the account is shut down.

The sentiment is almost identical to the insight of Scoble’s reaction to his account being deactivated:

Facebook claims it is a “utility.” Well, I like how Kara Swisher put it. Hint: “utilities” have due process and don’t just shut down someone’s account without a warning. You should see the comments on my last post. Some people didn’t even knowingly break the rules and never got a good answer for why their accounts were shut down.

Turning away from the amusing similarities between Scoble and Lohan for a moment, it’s interesting to note the echo outside the bubble on this one.

As social networking tools go more and more mainstream, people who are real celebrities as well as those with real world influence (and not just the “Internet Famous”) will have the same scenarios have happen to them we’ve experienced a year prior. For more proof of this, see CNN’s epiphany over Twitter’s Mumbai coverage versus our epiphany over Twitter’s earthquake coverage a year earlier.

The difference here is this bad bit of PR could be avoided for Facebook.  They’ve had a year to figure out how to straighten out their account deactivation process, and they’re in the midst of talking up how awesome Facebook Connect is to everyone. Any bit of blowback they get on this is well deserved.

---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

What Would You Ask Robert Scoble?
LiveStream: Pete Cashmore and Robert Scoble at CommunityNext!
SXSW Plague Takes Down Twitterers
Scoble Lands Channel 9 interview with Bill Gates!
Loic Lemeur’s “Video Twitter” to Announce Funding [Video]
PicApp Makes it Easy to Legally Blog the Latest Britney and Lindsay Pictures
Robert and Shel: Making New Media Less Hippie; More Naked

Grim scenario in India The Mumbai attack has brought to fore the fecklessness in terms of national security. It has also exposed the utter lack of coordination between the various intelligence agencies at the Central and State levels. A blame game is now going on and some dirty linen is being washed by the RAW and IB. The NSA, who heads the security set up and directly reports to the Prime

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/distributed_social_networks_puzzle.jpg" /Distributed social networking - where users can connect their profile, friends and other data across multiple sites - is still a relatively new concept and not fully developed. There are plenty of companies and projects vying to be a major piece of the distributed social networking puzzle. The big Internet companies have initiatives such as a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/opensocial_one_year_later.php"OpenSocial/a (Google), a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_connect_coming_soon_t.php"Facebook Connect/a, a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/myspace_data_availability.php"MySpace Data Availability/a, a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yahoo_opens_yos_to_developers.php"Yahoo! Open Strategy/a. There are also smaller company and open source projects such as DiSo and Noserub (we explain these below). /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.openx.org/ck.php?n=12808amp;cb=12808' target='_blank'img src='http://d.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=861amp;cb=12808amp;n=12808' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p pFor the end user, the following scenario (rather simplistically) explains the end goal: in a distributed social networking world you would be able to access your Facebook friends in MySpace, and vice versa. Of course, it's far from a perfect world and the Facebook-MySpace sharing scenario in particular is unlikely to happen any time soon. But slowly social networking is beginning to open up - and not just in the major social networks either./p pWe spotted an interesting screencast in the ReadWriteWeb Friendfeed room, a href="http://friendfeed.com/rooms/rww"The Future of Tech/a, that explains distributed social networking more./p pobject width="400" height="273"param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2378501amp;server=vimeo.comamp;show_title=1amp;show_byline=1amp;show_portrait=0amp;color=amp;fullscreen=1" /embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2378501amp;server=vimeo.comamp;show_title=1amp;show_byline=1amp;show_portrait=0amp;color=amp;fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="400" height="273"/embed/objectbr /a href="http://vimeo.com/2378501"Distributed Social Networking - An Introduction/a from a href="http://vimeo.com/pixelsebi"pixelsebi/a on a href="http://vimeo.com"Vimeo/a./p pThe screencast was created by a href="http://pixelsebi.com"Sebastian Küpers/a, an Open Web and Virtual Worlds Evangelist from Germany. He starts by explaining that profiles are a building block of social networks - for example there's a lot of useful profile data in his Facebook account that he'd like to use elsewhere. Friends/contacts, messaging, groups, and activity streams are other building blocks of social networks, explained Sebastian./p pHe mentioned two projects that are aiming to create distributed social networks by using open standards - a href="http://diso-project.org/"DiSo Project/a (our coverage a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/messina_norris_vidoop.php"here/a and a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wordpress_social_networks_ill.php"here/a) and a href="http://noserub.com/"Noserub/a (a German app). DiSo is basically an umbrella project for many of the leading open standards in the social Web currently - microformats, OpenID, OAuth and more. Noserub describes itself as a quot;protocolquot; and uses standards like OpenID, RSS and FOAF. /p pSebastian outlined the following use case: if you are a MySpace user and want to add someone who isn't a MySpace user to your friends list, right now you can't. But if MySpace supported the open standards that Noserub, DiSo and others are advocating (microformats, OpenID, etc), then it would be possible for MySpace to support that scenario. /p h2Key Differences Between DiSo/Noserub and OpenSocial/fbConnect/h2 pOne question that people have about distributed social networks, which Sebastian might like to address in a future screencast, is what is the relation between open source projects like DiSo and Noserub, and 'open data' projects of the bigcos such as Google's OpenSocial and Facebook Connect? Chris Messina, one of the founders of DiSo, pointed out one key difference a href="http://groups.google.com/group/diso-project/browse_thread/thread/635b58f051b54a56"in DiSo's Google Group in June/a:/p blockquote pquot;Our model is rather different than OpenSocial as I understand it, as we're trying to architect this in such a way that anyone can host their own friends list (for example) and not necessarily defer to Google, MySpace, etc... for starters.quot;/p /blockquote pSo for DiSo, they are using the Wordpress blogging platform as their main vehicle for now. However in the same message, Chris mentioned that he's quot;personally very interested in the overlap between DiSo and fbConnect and OpenSocial.quot; See also a href="http://blog.broadbandmechanics.com/2008/11/the-open-stack-diso-and-all-those-closed-stacks"Marc Canter's comments on DiSo/a, because Marc's quot;open meshquot; theories are very relevant here./p h2If Everything is So Open, Why Can't We Connect Yet?/h2 pThere is confusion right now because all t