FocuSoft Tech Blog

Kondo bot battles rage in Japan, vision of humanity’s imminent destruction crystallize Posted: 10 May 2009 02:16 PM PDT You may be familiar with the modular line of Kondo robots sold in Japan — but are you aware that a “Kondo Battle” exists where the bots duke it out to the death (or until they fall over)? Well, now you know… which is half the battle. You can pretty much see where this is headed — life-size (or larger) Gundams going totally crazy on cityscapes across the globe. A picture says a thousand words, and video says billions and billions, so feast your eyes on the IDG News clip after the break, and to sweeten the deal, we’ve included a few videos of the actual fights as well. Read the rest here: Kondo bot battles rage in Japan, vision of humanity’s imminent destruction crystallize

Taga Stroller/Bike Combo Might Launch Your Tots Into the Stratosphere [Strollers] Posted: 10 May 2009 02:00 PM PDT Bike, stroller or wheeled trebuchet? Whatever it is, the Taga takes kid-carrying in a new direction. I just can’t help thinking those two smiling kids are one wheelie away from joining the ISS. Luckily for the kids, the Taga trike stroller comes with a range of custom safety options and accessories, like the pictured double child seat, car seat, basket, and wooden double-seat trailer. Oh, and it transforms from trike to stroller in a few seconds, which is actually incredibly innovative and convenient. I’m going to go ahead and assume you take little Timmy out first. The 44 to 64-lb. Taga kit tops off with a Shimano gear system (found on most mid-range bicycles), as well as front, rear, and parking brakes. The whole kit folds down to car trunk size. Again, take Timmy out first. Europe only for now with a sky-high $2,500 base price. [Taga via Treehugger via DVICE] Original post: Taga Stroller/Bike Combo Might Launch Your Tots Into the Stratosphere [Strollers]

For your edification: More Terminator Salvation action Posted: 10 May 2009 01:09 PM PDT Instead of hugging your mother, hug this TS trailer instead. The new one - apparently official - shows that this summer might be the golden age of shoot-em-ups and sci fi. More: For your edification: More Terminator Salvation action

SlashGear Week in Review - Week 19 2009 Posted: 10 May 2009 12:26 PM PDT We’ve had some much-anticipated and long-awaited gadgets land at SlashGear this week, so we’ve gone overboard with unboxing videos and hands-on galleries.  The Verizon MiFi 2200 only had its official announcement earlier this week, but we’ve been waiting for the Novatel EVDO-hotspot for so long you must forgive us some excitement.  Meanwhile the Vodafone HTC Magic has the honor of being only the second Android phone to the market, while the Tonium Pacemaker manages to offer something unique in a sea of PMPs. Outside of unboxings, we spent some hands-on video time with Sony’s Walkman X with its luscious OLED display, and reviewed the T-Mobile Sidekick LX 2009 with a pretty special LCD screen of its own.  Finally the Pro Cyc MyStudio 20 tabletop photo studio turned up for its own review, and proved an excellent - if not especially cheap - way to take high-quality product images. The other big news of the week has been the announcement of the Amazon Kindle DX, big 9.7-inch brother to the Kindle 2 and an attempt by the retailer to clean up in the textbook and newspaper markets.  Check out our hands-on video and photos here. In software, Microsoft set free the Windows 7 Release Client (RC), and spawned a whole new wave of upgrades as users get to grips with the fresh OS.  We were particularly interested to see how Windows 7 RC runs on netbook hardware, and weren’t disappointed; sadly, the same can’t be said for the performance of the Acer Aspire One 751, which manages to chug along miserably even with just XP thanks to an underpowered processor.  Still, at least it looks pretty, though whether that will be enough to stave off the competition from ASUS’ tipped 11.6-inch Eee PC - expected to launch this month - remains to be seen. In mobile devices, Bell Mobility announced that they’ve snapped up the Palm Pre for its exclusive Canadian launch, though our friends north of the border will have to wait until an unspecified date in the second half of 2009 for its actual release.  Meanwhile we saw a video demo of the Samsung Alias 2 with its unique E Ink keyboard - the phone itself lands in stores on Monday - and leaked shots of what’s purported to be the Nokia 5900 XpressMusic. Finally, if you thought plasma TV was a dying technology, think again; it still has the power to surprise and impress when it comes to sheer inches.  Samsung took minimalism as their prompt with the 850 PAVV HDTV, going for a set just 29mm thick, while Shinoda went to screen-size extremes with a 145-inch plasma display.  Perhaps not the most sensible of launches in today’s economic times, but as headline grabbers they take some beating. Relevant Entries on SlashGear SlashGear Week in Review - June 23rd SlashGear TV Week in review Episode 1 PS3 the “console war king” in Australia, or is it? SlashGear week in review, issue 1 PS3 Sales up 300 percent last week Read the original here:  SlashGear Week in Review - Week 19 2009

Nokia, cheesiness featured in new Star Trek movie Posted: 10 May 2009 12:14 PM PDT Do you like your Star Trek movies riddled with Beastie Boys songs and Nokia product placements? Yeah, neither do we. Still, if you’ve been to see the reboot of the franchise, then you probably noticed the outrageous spot for the Finnish phone-maker. Said ad comes in the form of a futuristic “Nokia ring” coupled with a large, touchscreen device placed in the dash of the totally tubular Corvette a young James T. Kirk is about to smash up but good. Seriously. Do yourself a favor and check it out in the soon-to-be-pulled-by-the-studio clip after the break. More here: Nokia, cheesiness featured in new Star Trek movie

Why We Need to Reach the Stars (and We Will) [Space] Posted: 10 May 2009 12:00 PM PDT We reached the Moon in a tin can, built a humble space station, and have a plan to reach Mars in a bigger tin can. But we need to reach the stars. And we will. Yes, I know what you are thinking: “It’s impossible.” And right now, you are right. Our current propulsion engines are, simply put, pathetic. We are still in the Stone Age of space travel. As cool as they are, rocket engines—which eject gas at high speeds through a nozzle on the back of a spacecraft—are extremely inefficient, requiring huge volumes of fuel that runs out faster than you can say “Beam me up, Scotty.” We have cleared the tower Solid boosters, hybrid, monopropellant, bipropellant rockets… all these would be impossible to use in interstellar travel, with maximum speeds going up to a maximum of 9 kilometers per second. Rockets won’t work even using the effect of planetary gravity to gain impulse. Voyager—the fastest man-made spacecraft out there racing at 17 kilometers per second—would need 74,000 years in deep space to reach Proxima Centauri, the red dwarf star located at 4.22 light-years in the Alpha Centauri system, the closest to our Sun. But even if we were able to build a massive spacecraft with today’s experimental—but feasible—propulsion technology, it will still take thousand of years to reach Alpha Centauri. Using nuclear explosions—like the ones proposed in the Orion project—would be more efficient than rockets, achieving a maximum of 60 kilometers per second. That’s still a whopping 21,849 years and a couple months. Using ion thrusters—which use electrostatic or electromagnetic force to accelerate ions that in turn push the spacecraft forward—would only reduce that amount marginally. Even theoretical technology—like nuclear pulse propulsion, with speeds up to 15,000 kilometers per second—won’t cut it. And that’s assuming we can find a way for these engines to last all that time. And let’s not even get into the resources and engineering needed to create a vessel capable of sustaining life for such a long period of time. All to reach a stupid red dwarf with no planets to explore. We may as well not go, really. You know, let’s just save Earth from our own destruction and colonize Mars or Titan or Europa (if the aliens let us do that.) Our ignorance is our only hope It gets even worse. Our current understanding of physics—which says that nothing can travel faster than light—basically establishes that we will never be able to achieve space travel in a way that is meaningful to Humanity. In other words, even if we are able to discover a propulsion method that could get a spacecraft close to the speed of light, it will still take hundred of years to reach an star system with planets similar to Earth. By the time the news get back to us, we all will be dead. And that’s precisely the key to our only hope to reach the stars: Our ignorance. As much as we have advanced, we are still clueless about many things. Physicists are still struggling to understand the Universe, discovering new stellar events that we can’t explain, and trying to make sense of it all, looking for that perfect theory that will make everything fit together. That fact is that, since we don’t know how everything works, there still may be something that opens the way to faster-than-light space travel. Discovering the unknown—like physicists have been doing since the Greeks—and harnessing new math and theories into new technology is our only way to spread through the Universe in a way that makes sense to Humanity as a whole. You know, like Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica or Star Wars. I’m giving her all she’s got! One of those yet-to-be-unraveled things is the Big Bang, the origin of the Universe itself. Our origin, the final question that we have been trying to answer since we came out of the cave and looked up the night sky. We still don’t know exactly what happened, but the observation of the Universe from Earth and space probes have caused some physicists to propose many different models. One of these models says that, during the initial inflation period of the Universe, space-time expanded faster than light. If this turns out to be the case, it would make possible the creation of warp drives. Yes, the warp drives. Warp drives were first proposed in a logical way by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre. He theorized that, instead of moving something faster than the speed of light—which is not possible under Einstein’s relativity theory—we could move the space-time around it faster than the speed of light itself. The spacecraft will be inside a warp bubble, a flat space that will be moved by the expansion of the space behind it and the contraction of space in front of it. The spacecraft won’t move faster than light: Inside the bubble, everything would be normal. A way to understand the effect, as Marc Millis—former head of the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project at NASA’s Glenn Research Center—explains, is to look at the way a toy boat reacts in the tub when you put some detergent behind it. The bubbles will expand the space behind the boat, impulsing it forward. In the same way, a spaceship with a warp drive would be able to do the same thing. Expand and contract space to get to any place in the Universe faster than the speed of light. But while there have been already experiments in the laboratory that suggest that this may indeed be possible, we are still far, far away from developing the technology that would make warp drives a reality. To start with, the amount of energy necessary to bend space like this is way beyond anything we can produce today. Some scientists, however, suggest that antimatter may be the fuel that will make this possible. Again, there are a lot of question marks surrounding antimatter, but this is precisely part of our only hope: Somewhere, still hiding, is the breakthrough that will make interstellar travel possible. The possibility is still there. Why should we go to the stars? So call me an optimist if you have to. It may be all this sun shining in New York right now. Or maybe it is because I saw Star Trek yesterday (and it was as good as I hoped it to be and then some more.) The fact is that I’m convinced that interstellar travel will happen. You and I will probably not see it, but if Humanity can survive our self-annihilation, I’m sure we will achieve it. No, “will we reach the stars?” is not the question to answer. We will. The more important question is why do we need to go? The answer to this is the reason why we have celebrated humans in space all this week, now coming to its end. As I said when we started Get Me Off This Rock, space exploration is the most epic and most important adventure Humanity has ever embarked upon. When we travel to space we are opening the way to the preservation of Humanity. We are trying to contact other civilizations. We are trying to answer the biggest questions of them all: Who are we? Why are we here? How did we get here? Are we alone in this rock we call Earth? But ultimately, the most important thing will not be getting the answers to these eternal questions. The most important thing will be the process of reaching for the stars. If we manage to get there, it would mean that we managed to survive as a species. That is the only way we can develop the engineering and the resources needed to build something like the Enterprise. Only if we manage to go beyond our petty fights and stupid wars, only if we work together towards a better future, we will be able to go where no one has gone before. And be back to tell about it before dinner gets cold. Recommended reading: Wikipedia, The Warpdrive: Hyper-fast travel within general relativity by Miguel Alcubierre (PDF), Assessing Potential Propulsion Methods (PDF) Read more here: Why We Need to Reach the Stars (and We Will) [Space]

Calling All Coders: Journalism Schools Want You To Save The News Industry Posted: 10 May 2009 11:30 AM PDT As newspapers struggle for viability, and media managers attempt to shift presence to the web, a need has arisen for talent with the technical skills of a programmer and the creative skills of a journalist. Over at TechCrunch, we are fortunate to have talented developers who have poured their blood, sweat and tears into making the site what it is today. Northwestern University's journalism school is offering free scholarships to software developers so they can further hone their journalism skills and possibly integrate the two for a media company down the line (disclosure: I attended this journalism school). The idea of creating programmers who understand journalism is compelling and brings attention to an important trend taking place in the industry. Hyperlocal news site Everyblock and the St. Petersburg Times' truth finding political database Politifact were both built by developers with journalism backgrounds. Their model falls on the heels of Politifact, started by coder-turned-journalist Matt Waite, which won a Pulitzer Prize this year for national reporting. Some question whether a journalism degree is critical to success as a reporter. A talented programmer certainly doesn't need a journalism background to create successful digital platforms. And journalism school may be irrelevant for programmers who are more interested in coding than writing. Both sides of the journalism school debate can agree on the definite need for programmers in the news space. As more news publications shift their focus from print to the web, management increasingly feels pressure to to invest in talented coders, sometimes even more so than talented journalists. Northwestern would argue that investing in one group does not need to come at the expense of the other. Perhaps the future of print is in the hands of hackers. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0 Read the original post: Calling All Coders: Journalism Schools Want You To Save The News Industry

Samsung i7500 Android Smartphone Surfaces Again In Singapore Video [Samsung] Posted: 10 May 2009 11:15 AM PDT If you have seven minutes to spare this fine Sunday afternoon (at least here in Beantown anyway), there’s another Samsung i7500 hands-on video making the rounds today. The first video from April is here. [YouTube via DailyMobile via BGR] View post: Samsung i7500 Android Smartphone Surfaces Again In Singapore Video [Samsung]

Design Or Data? Ex-Googler Spills All After Landing At Twitter [Design] Posted: 10 May 2009 11:00 AM PDT All you designers out there, here’s a quandary, courtesy Google: When it comes to determining the direction of a company, just how much design control should one cede to the consumers? At Google, data is king. Charts, focus groups and hard data determine what goes into the company’s customer-facing products and services, and that was the issue. At least, that was the issue for former Googler Douglas Bowman. Bowman, now at Twitter, recently wrote on his personal that, put simply, Google is not friendly to designers. When he would come up with a design decision, no matter how minute, he was asked to back it up with data. Before he could decide whether a line on a Web page should be three, four or five pixels wide, for example, he had to put up test versions of all three pages on the Web. Different groups of users would see different versions, and their clicking behavior, or the amount of time they spent on a page, would help pick a winner. “Data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions,” Bowman said. Google, for its part, is “unapologetic” about the decision to have little 1’s and 0’s back up all major design decisions. “We let the math and the data govern how things look and feel,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience. As a blogger and self-described free thinker, I’m initially inclined to side with Bowman a bit on this one. When a company becomes wholly dependent on data and customer feedback to drive the company forward there is, by the nature of such an approach, a tendency to take fewer risks. On the other hand, Google is Skynet made real, and it sits high atop a pile of money, power and influence precisely because of its proven data-driven approach to product design. And then there are companies like Apple, which no doubt focus test and whatnot, but for the most part have made design and product decisions based on bold leaps and tweaks of existing tech that users didn’t even know they wanted. Alternatively, the company has even left out features that the Net’s more vocal denizens (read: we geeks) deemed completely necessary for the phone’s success. Oh, and they’re big fans of that “secrecy” thing too. “Customers sometimes do not know what they want,” said John Seely Brown, the co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation, in an interview with the NYT. “It can be dangerous to just listen to what users say they need.” I’d be interested to hear what art directors, graphic designers and the Google Analytics sect have to say about this, because it’s definitely sounding like a case-by-case argument, given the success of both data- and design-driven examples cited above. At Twitter, where Bowman now happily resides, design changes are often culled from user’s tweets. How incestuous! But it led to Twitter trends and search being integrated into my account, so there. [New York Times] Continued here: Design Or Data? Ex-Googler Spills All After Landing At Twitter [Design]

Street Fighter IV PC Bundle Includes Half-Price MadCatz Fight Pad [Dealzmodo] Posted: 10 May 2009 10:30 AM PDT For $60, you can abandon the keyboard while playing Street Fighter IV on a PC, and pick up the MadCatz Fight Pad bundle. Pad and game are normally $40 apiece, so you’re saving $20. [Capcom] See original here: Street Fighter IV PC Bundle Includes Half-Price MadCatz Fight Pad [Dealzmodo]

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