Video Games Are Just Too Good
Published on August 21, 2008 by
Wii Fit Calls 10-Year-Old Girl Fat
Published on August 21, 2008 by
Is this girl fat?
Obesity experts today slammed Nintendo after its Wii Fit game told a 10-year-old girl she was fat.
They fear the game could damage children’s body image and called on the company to warn parents it is not suitable for their offspring.
Vista Woes Continue
Published on August 20, 2008 by
This story dugg at digg.com
A third of new PCs being downgraded to XP, says metrics researcher
Vista may be what Microsoft sells, but XP remains popular
By Gregg Keizer
August 18, 2008 (Computerworld) More than one in every three new PCs is downgraded from Windows Vista to the older Windows XP, either at the factory or by the buyer, a performance and metrics researcher said today.
According to Devil Mountain Software Inc., which operates a community-based testing network, nearly 35% of the 3,000-plus PCs it examined had been downgraded from Vista to XP.
“Either these machines were downgraded by [sellers like] Dell or HP, or they were downgraded by the user after they got the machine,” said Craig Barth, chief technology officer at Devil Mountain. “In any case, these machines are no longer running Vista.”
Barth used data provided by users to Devil Mountain’s Exo.performance.network - which it kicked off last year and has expanded by partnering with InfoWorld, a Computerworld sister publication - to come up with his numbers. Infoworld first reported the data earlier today. By collating such things as the vendor and system model number with manufacturers’ catalogs, Barth was able to identify machines that were probably shipped within the past six months, a period when virtually every new PC was offered with Vista preinstalled.
“The 35% is only an estimate, but it shows a trend within our own user base,” Barth said. “People are taking advantage of Vista’s downgrade rights.”
TorrentFreak and New Search Site
Published on August 19, 2008 by
Many torrent users search on just one site, like Mininova or The Pirate Bay. Some sites will let you search more than one torrent site. Usniff is a new site that has a good user interface and searches multiple sites.
If you dowload torrents then you need to subcribe to TorrentFreak. It is the best site to stay updated with BitTorrent news. They offer RSS feeds and daily email. IF nothing else, the ongoing battles between downloaders and the RIAA or MPAA is good soap opera. The following is from TorrentFreak.
Usniff, Torrent Search Made Easy
Written by Ernesto on August 17, 2008
BitTorrent’s popularity is increasing with new sites seemingly launched every day. Usniff is one such site, offering a fast real-time torrent search engine where users can search four of the most popular BitTorrent sites.
Usniff combines a great looking design with fast, real-time search results. The site currently allows users to search The Pirate Bay, Mininova, isoHunt and BitTorrent, and the search results can be sorted by file size, torrent name, search engine, upload date, peers and seeds.
TorrentFreak asked Samo, the founder of Usniff, why he started the site. “My inspiration was YouTorrent.com, before it sailed to clean waters,” he told us. “It is simple to use, responsive and has loads of good results for almost any search query. At that time I didn’t know about other similar meta-search engines, so I decided i’d try to make one myself - mostly for fun.”
The list of sites that can be searched through Usniff is currently limited to four, but Samo told us he plans to add more torrent sites in the near future. “I have not yet made a complete wish-list, but btmon.com, bitenova.nl and torrentbox.com will definitely be added in September,” he said.
Read more here.
Tags: search, TorrentFreak, torrents, Usniff
Posted in miscellaneous
“reCaptcha” Uses “Human” Brains
Published on August 19, 2008 by
A web bot is a virtual robot. Usually it is a program someone has designed to do repetitive tasks on the internet. They can surf the net looking for something specific and then perform some type of action based on what it finds. Google uses web bots to collect data from web sites to help improve searches. Spammers and criminals use web bots to find web sites to exploit by posting ads or links, finding personal data, or to deliver some sort of malware. To combat these bad web bots, a website can use a “captcha.” Captchas separate humans from machines. They present a test that is very difficult for a web bot to pass, but fairly easy for humans. Usually the tests resembles someone’s bad penmanship and you have to figure out the letters or words. They can be an obstacle for people, but they are a proven method for maintaining the integrity of a wesite.
Carnegie Mellon University is using captchas to help digitize books. Their version is called”reCaptcha” They are providing free captcha programs to websites and in exchange users help identify words computers have difficulty recognizing.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
Example of OCR errors
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
To learn more about captchas go here. To learn more about reCaptchas go here.
Tags: bot, captcha, Carnegie, digitize, OCR, security, spam
Posted in Free software, New tech
Smart Check-Out Scales
Published on August 18, 2008 by
Smart self-service scales by ZDNet’s Roland Piquepaille — German researchers have developed new self-service scales able to automatically recognize fruit or vegetables placed on them. As says the lead scientist, ‘The scales automatically recognize which fruit or vegetables are to be weighed and ask the customer to choose between only those icons that are relevant,’ such as various kinds of tomatoes. These scales are equipped with a camera and an image evaluation algorithm which compares the image with other ones stored in its database. These scales are now being tested in about 300 supermarkets across Europe. Read more here.
Alternative Energy Idea
Published on August 14, 2008 by
Solar Collector Could Change Asphalt Roads Into Renewable Energy Source
ScienceDaily (2008-08-14) — Scientists have found a way to use asphalt’s heat-soaking property for an alternative energy source by developing a solar collector that could turn roads and parking lots into ubiquitous — and inexpensive sources of electricity and hot water.
In the lab, small slabs were exposed to halogen lamps, simulating sunlight. Larger slabs were set up outdoors and exposed to more realistic environmental conditions, including direct sunlight and wind. The tests showed that asphalt absorbs a considerable amount of heat and that the highest temperatures are found a few centimeters below the surface. This is where a heat exchanger would be located to extract the maximum amount of energy.
Read more here
Tags: alternative, asphalt, road, Science Dailly, solar energy
Posted in New tech
Rat Brain in Robot
Published on August 13, 2008 by
Exclusive: A robot with a biological brain by ZDNet’s Roland Piquepaille — University of Reading scientists have developed a robot controlled by a biological brain formed from cultured neurons. And this is a world’s premiere. Other research teams have tried to control robots with ‘brains,’ but there was always a computer in the loop. This new project is the first one to examine ‘how memories manifest themselves in the brain, and how a brain stores specific pieces of data.’ As life expectancy is increasing in most countries, this new research could provide insights into how the brain works and help aging people. In fact, the main goal of this project is to understand better the development of diseases and disorders which affect the brain such as Alzheimer or Parkinson diseases. It’s interesting to note that this project is being led by Professor Kevin Warwick, who became famous in 1998 when a silicon chip was implanted in his arm to allow a computer to monitor him in order to assess the latest technology for use with the disabled. Read more here.
International Space Station News
Published on August 13, 2008 by
Astronaut Suspects NASA Using Him To Test Space’s Effects On Fat People
Indoor Grill
Published on August 11, 2008 by
Indoor BBQs - Ariete SteakHouse Grill (GALLERY)
(TREND HUNTER) The makers of the SteakHouse Grill promise that food will cook in half the time without coming into contact with fats, as is true with traditional grilling. The Ariete leaves behind neither smoke nor smell… [More]
Tags: grill, steakhouse
Posted in Gadget
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