Archive for April, 2012

The unique privilege of jumpsuiting up and prowling the Foxconn factory floor may be reserved for the likes of Tim Cook and Nightline’s Bill Weir , but thanks to American Public Media’s Marketplace , we can all take a peek at the iPad production line. The above video is part of Rob Schmitz’ ongoing look at Foxconn’s factory conditions. Schmitz is partially responsible for debunking Mike Daisey’s “theatrical” deception , and now hopes to educate readers on the reality of Foxconn’s Longhua facility. “When I gave examples of some of the American media coverage of the working conditions at Foxconn, many workers laughed, telling me it’s not really that bad” Schmitz writes. “But that doesn’t mean the workers don’t have complaints.” Through a series of interviews, Schmitz unveils how workers feel about their supervisors, jobs, pay, family back home and their dreams for the future.

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Marketplace takes a look at how the iPad is made and who, exactly, builds it

A prototype model of the original Macintosh 128K with a 5.25-inch Twiggy drive has surfaced on eBay , with a starting bid price of $99,995. Apple planned to use its proprietary Twiggy disk format in the Macintosh, but switched to a 3.5-inch floppy drive for the final production model due to reliability concerns. The model on eBay will power on, according to the seller, but won’t boot without Mac software on a Twiggy disk (which any buyer is unlikely to have). While nearly $100,000 sounds somewhat optimistic on the seller’s part, there’s no doubting the fact that a Twiggy drive-equipped Mac would be an incredibly rare collector’s item, so how would anyone have gotten hold of one? CultofMac is positing that the seller may be none other than..

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Rare Mac 128K Twiggy prototype on eBay probably not being sold by Steve Wozniak

Gawker has launched a new column written by an anonymous Fox News employee who posts under “The Fox Mole.” S/he claims to have been with Fox for “years,” and claims that s/he can’t find work elsewhere because other news organizations view Fox alumni with suspicion. The Mole’s first column describes a particularly nasty piece of

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Fox News whistleblower begins anonymous tell-all series

Microsoft’s been waging legal war against Motorola on several fronts for some time now, and today, team Redmond scored a victory in a federal district court in Washington that’ll have repercussions in Germany. The judge granted Microsoft’s motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction that prevents Motorola from enforcing any injunction it obtains in the parties’ parallel action in Mannheim, Germany. As a quick refresher, this litigation’s all about a bundle of Moto-owned standards-essential WiFi and H.264 patents. Naturally, Motorola claims that Microsoft’s infringing its IP, and has sought to stop sales of infringing products in Deutschland

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Microsoft wins injunction in Washington against Motorola, can keep selling stuff in Germany

The paperback for Welcome to Bordertown is out, this being the most excellent, long-awaited volume of short stories set in the Bordertown shared world, where Faerie has returned to Earth, and the Bordertown is the place where magic and technology meet and mix. To celebrate, the editors are holding a contest: So you’ve already found

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Contest celebrates paperback for Welcome to Bordertown

“We exist in the minds of other people, in thousands of memory clusters, and one by one those clusters fade and disappear.”

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Roger Ebert on losing friends

Sammy’s gone ahead and priced the latest in its Galaxy Tab and Player series, affixing monetary stickers to not only the 7-inch slate we just took for a spin, but to its 10-inch brother and a pair of handheld cousins. $250 nabs you the aforementioned Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 , but an extra $150 will afford you the Tab 2 10.1′s three-inch advantage. Of course, if you’d rather keep that 7-inch beauty and pocket a spare device, that same $150 will buy a Galaxy Player 3.6. If that’s too small , Sammy will let you pick up a 4.2 variant for $200 square. Care to read that straight?

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Samsung prices Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 at $400, rings up a fresh pair of Galaxy Players for $150, $200

Groupon’s new G-Pass wants to get you out of lines. Starting today, you can print your discounted Groupon ticket right at home, and skip the wait at the box office. It’s all thanks to GrouponLive. The service — an amalgam of Groupon and Live Nation — offers Groupon-style deals on events like concerts or baseball games in much the same way that Groupon does.

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Groupon G-Pass is a VIP lane for concerts

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Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 vs. the competition: by the numbers

Intel’s new laptop chips should start hitting shelves soon, packing those new 2500 and 4000 HD graphics chips in a package manufactured using Chipzilla’s new 22nm process. And we’re not talking about just one or two either. The CPU giant reiterated that 75 Ultrabook-branded machines are planned by various manufacturers for 2012, including “many touch-enabled systems.” Which we take to mean some of those convertible tablets we saw at CES may actually see the light of day. If you’re in the mood for a bit of corporate fluff check out the PR after the break. Continue reading Intel says 75 Ultrabooks in the pipeline with 3rd-gen HD 2500 and 4000 GPUs Intel says 75 Ultrabooks in the pipeline with 3rd-gen HD 2500 and 4000 GPUs originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:44:00 EDT.

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Intel says 75 Ultrabooks in the pipeline with 3rd-gen HD 2500 and 4000 GPUs

President Nixon wanted to halve funding for PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Here is one Fred McFeely Rogers, making a better case. [CBP] Previously: Mister Rogers — Podcast appreciationMr. McFeely’s purple panda terrifies children

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Mr. Rogers defends PBS in congress, 1969

In a ruling today it was decided that, under the US National Stolen Property Act (NSPA), electronic code cannot be a stolen good because it cannot be physically obtained. Wired reports that the written decision was handed down today from the US Court of Appeals, overturning a lower court’s ruling that sentenced a Goldman Sachs programmer to an eight-year prison stint for downloading some of the firm’s stock-trading source code. According to the judges, the programmer, named Sergey Aleynikov, could not be guilty under either the NSPA or the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 (EEA), both of which were used by US prosecutors in a 2010 trial to imprison Aleynikov. Since Aleynikov neither obtained “physical control” over the code nor “deprived… Continue reading…

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Code isn’t physical property under the definition of National Stolen Property Act, US court rules

Includes newly-discovered stable transuranics Ytterby, Actinny and Rubiddy. [Matt Gallant via Gizmodo]

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Watch an adorable 3 year-old kid sing the periodic table

Photographer Nina Katchadourian says that in 2010 she was in an airplane bathroom when she “spontaneously put a tissue paper toilet cover seat cover over my head and took a picture in the mirror.” This led to a photo series called “Seat Assignment: Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style.” (Thanks, David Steinberg!)

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Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style

joemite writes “On early Wednesday, Nokia said it had found a software bug in the new Lumia 900 smartphone, its big hope to take on Apple’s iPhone, and was effectively giving the model away until it is fixed. It is offering anyone who has bought a Lumia 900 phone, or who buys one by April 21, a $100 US credit to their AT&T bill. The operator sells the phone for $99.99 with a two-year contract. Both Microsoft and Nokia still have big hopes for this phone. The bug apparently causes a random data connection drop

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Nokia 900 Being Given Away Due To Software Glitch

Humankind has battled viruses virtually from the beginning. Take just one example: Variola major , the smallpox virus. Its telltale pocks mark the mummified body of Pharaoh Ramses V, dead now over 3,000 years.

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Killing sickness: is DRACO a doomsday device for viruses?

It’s been a long and winding road for the tongue-twisting Asus Eee Pad MeMo ME171, and though we did get a first-hand look back at CES it’s finally available to call your own. The team over at Netbook News decided to take the 7″, 1280 x 800 display totin’, 1.2GHz Snapdragon powered slab and give a good benchmarking — which always piques our interest. Nenamark and Nenamark 2 landed at 34.5- and 24-fps respectively. Quadrant, on the other hand, came in around the 1,800 mark, about the same as the Transformer TF101.

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Asus Eee Pad MeMo benchmarks come out fighting, other slates take note (video)

Charles Manson has again been denied parole. Manson, 77, will be eligible again in 2027. The above video is from a 1987 interview. “Charles Manson shows no signs of rehabilitation, parole board says” (LA Times)

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Manson to stay in prison

This is a follow-on to an editorial that I wrote last year, The universal status indicator . @verge. @zpower.

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How Twitter accidentally fostered the universal presence

Western Digital is whipping the sheets clear from a new, 7mm tall 2.5-inch mobile HDD that’ll sit nicely inside your Ultrabook or other skinny device. The single-platter Scorpio Blue comes in 320 and 500GB varieties and will even sit nearly in 9.5mm slots (just, you know, bring along some blu-tack to pad the void around the drive bay). The units boast of super-low power management, quiet operation (with WD’s WhisperDrive tech) and capable of taking a shock of 400Gs. It’s available from today via selected retailers, the 320GB edition costing $80 and the 500GB version $100.

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Western Digital ships 7mm HDD for Ultrabooks, losing down pavement cracks

Neatorama is offering two signed copies of my new book, Before the Lights Go Out, as part of a contest drawing. To enter: Go read the interview Neatorama did with me about energy, infrastructure, and my writing process. Then answer a couple of quick questions in the comments.

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Win a signed copy of Before the Lights Go Out

In the new issue of Smithsonian, Matt Groening reveals that the Simpsons’ home of Springfield was named for the town in Oregon: OK, why do the Simpsons live in a town called Springfield? Isn’t that a little generic? Springfield was named after Springfield, Oregon. The only reason is that when I was a kid, the

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The Simpsons’ Springfield named for Springfield, Oregon

As designer Pippin Barr will readily admit, his games tend to be based more on concepts than on “fun” in any traditional sense — just try beating the final round of Epic Sax Game . With Pongs , however, Barr has taken a surprising turn into the realm of enjoyment. Some of these 36 variations on the classic table tennis adaptation riff on other games like B.U.T.T.O.N . and Snake , while others add simple but satisfying mechanics like a ball that splits in two or a net that must be knocked apart before you can hit the ball to your opponent. Pongs was inspired by Barr’s experience with Painstation , a shock-administering variation on what Barr calls “the most abstract, most ‘pure’ videogame out there.” Changing tiny rules in such a…

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Pippin Barr gives us 36 ‘Pong’ variations with lasers, Tetris blocks, and more

Japan is often on the cutting edge of technology, but one of the things it apparently does not have is a collection of large solar power plants. Kyocera , better known state side for its interesting cell phone designs , is looking to change that by teaming up with IHI and Mizuho Corporate Bank on a large facility in Kagoshima City. The 314 acre sun farm will collect solar rays on 290,000 Kyocera-built panels capable of generating 70 megawatts of electricity, increasing the country’s sun-powered production by almost 40-percent and keeping roughly 22,000 homes thoroughly juiced.

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Kyocera joins forces with IHI and Mizuho on 70-megawatt solar plant

“I’m 7 foot. For Halloween I went as a normal guy on stilts.” (imgur)

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Tall guy’s costume: short guy on stilts