Posts Tagged ‘digital’

I’ve been really, really excited about digital video distribution lately: first Netflix greenlights jms’s return to science fiction TV, and then Amazon announces their new pilots. Perhaps the decade long dearth of any good television is nearing its end! So, with that in mind, I finished up editing Slashdot for the day and sat down to watch some of these new pilots. Only to discover that Amazon has taken away my ability to watch entirely in the name of Digital Restrictions Management.

Read the article:
The Dark Side of Amazon’s New Pilots

The initial scans weren’t that promising — just an array of corridors and storage hangers, once busied with the citizenry but long since abandoned. It looked like the operation was going to be a bust after all, but then I noticed it: a blip. Nothing more than a shimmer, really; a tiny artifact in the digital latticework. You’re never going to cloak something from a phase scan completely. The trick’s in masking what traces you do leave behind, making them as innocuous as possible

Excerpt from:
90 Seconds on The Verge: Apple’s new iPhone, Amazon’s new hire, and Prince

Our long, slow slog towards ubiquitous mobile payments isn’t getting any shorter, and today comments from Visa show that it’s going to get more contentious before it gets better. Visa’s CEO Charlie Scharf said that “it is totally appropriate” to charge companies like PayPal and Google a fee when their digital wallets get used. Both PayPal and Google offer something called a “staged wallet,” which means that those companies act as a kind of intermediary between you and your credit card. That theoretically helps make your wallet easier to use — since it can contain multiple cards — but Visa and Mastercard really hate this approach because it means they can’t collect as much data about your purchasing habits. Scharf’s statement comes..

See original article:
The knives come out: Visa, Mastercard will charge PayPal and Google for their mobile wallets

Microtransactions have become an increasingly important part of the gaming landscape, and it looks like EA is embracing the concept with open arms. EuroGamer reports that Blake Jorgensen, the company’s CFO and executive vice-president, discussed the tiny transactions at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, & Telecom Conference yesterday — saying EA would be adopting them in all of its upcoming titles. “The next and much bigger piece is microtransactions within games,” he said when asked about the company’s digital revenues. “We’re building into all of our games the ability to pay for things along the way, either to get to a higher level, to buy a new character, to buy a truck, a gun, whatever it might be, and consumers are enjoying… Continue reading…

Read More:
EA will be building microtransactions into all of its upcoming games

If you’re looking to get free access to The New York Times beyond the ten article-per-month limit , you may want to head to a Starbucks. The two companies announced a new partnership today that will allow customers to access 15 articles per day over the free AT&T Wi-Fi offered at Starbucks locations. The free stories are provided from a special landing page, according to paidContent , which will offer a selection of stories from the Top News, Business, Technology, and Most E-mailed sections of the digital paper, as well as one additional section that will rotate each day of the week. It isn’t the first time Starbucks and The New York Times have partnered: locations across the country have long sold print editions of the paper alongside…

Read More:
Starbucks customers offered 15 free New York Times articles per day

There’s an entire industry of Bitcoin miners out there, people that set up specialized computer rigs to run 24 hours a day to mine the digital currency. Thanks to a 23-year-old kid from Brooklyn, this cottage industry is about to change. Yifu Guo, a digital media student on hiatus from NYU-Poly, has released the first batch of ASICs, which are chips custom-built to do one thing: mine Bitcoins. These ASICs are capable of mining Bitcoins at a far higher rate than is possible with common computer equipment — Guo’s design, called the Avalon V1 , can mine Bitcoins about 50 times faster than a high-end rig, and offers a much more attractive price-to-performance ratio. ASICs also consume much less power than GPU-based machines, but they don’t..

Visit site:
23-year-old releases new chips that ‘mine’ Bitcoins 50 times faster

Amazon hardly ever gives you numbers that don’t begin with dollar signs. It won’t tell reporters or investors how many Kindles it’s sold, or anything else that offers too much of an x-ray inside its business. “More/fewer Kindle Fires sold than Nexus 7s!” is a tempting trend story, but it’s not really a trend Amazon wants to highlight. It’s a little odd, then, that in its newest quarterly earnings report , Amazon is calling attention to the fact that its sales growth for physical books is flattening out. This isn’t just tossed-off; it’s direct from founder and CEO Jeff Bezos: “our physical book sales experienced the lowest December growth rate in our 17 years as a book seller, up just 5 percent.” This is Amazon’s original business, for..

Follow this link:
Amazon’s digital metamorphosis: ebooks up 70 percent, video spikes as print books flatten

An anonymous reader writes “Radical Islamist hackers have been harassing Egyptologist Kate Phizackerley’s online journal Egyptological and her blog KV64. Phizackerley and her team finally got tired of it and shut their online work down. As blogger Roger Pearse says, ‘A bunch of violent scumbags… who never have contributed in any way to the web, have successfully interfered with the scientific effort of the entire human race..

Read More:
Islamist Hackers Shut Down Egyptology Research Journal

Sony’s RX1 full-frame compact digital camera is a tremendous technical feat held back by two factors: a near-$3,000 price tag and its 35-millimeter fixed lens. But it seems the company is already working to solve that latter issue. Sony Alpha Rumors is reporting that a NEX-style interchangeable lens camera has already reached the ”final stage of development” in Sony’s labs and could see release within one year’s time. Citing its best sources, the site reveals that Sony’s secret project would be slightly larger in form than the NEX-7

See the article here:
Full-frame mirrorless camera from Sony reportedly in ‘final stage of development’

Welcome to The Verge: Weekender edition. Each weekend, we bring you important articles from the previous week’s original reports , features and reviews on The Verge . Think of it as a collection of a few of our favorite pieces from the week gone by, which you may have missed, or which you might want to read again. Continue reading…

Continue Reading:
The Weekender: Larping, new iMacs, and celebrity endorsements

Consumers must again endure a four-week delay before renting new Warner Brothers releases at their nearest Redbox location. The multi-year agreement announced today represents a reconciliation between the popular kiosk service and film studio after Redbox cut ties with Warner Bros. in January. At the time, Redbox took issue with Warner’s request to double the existing wait period to a staggering 56 days

View original post here:
New deal between Redbox, Warner Bros. reinstates 28-day waiting period on all rentals

Technology has a way of going in and out of popularity, and while the days of HotSyncing our Palm Pilots are over, email and the digital calendar have managed to ward off nearly any sign of obsolescence. The move from PDA to smartphone has actually demonstrated the opposite, taking our personal calendars and transforming them into real-time collaborative scheduling tools. However beneficial this added level of connectivity might be, the ubiquity of the digital calendar has created its own challenges. We have to juggle our own personal calendars, department calendars, and the shared calendars of friends and coworkers

Continue reading here:
How to: sync Google Calendar to iOS, Android, and Windows Phone

Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren has lent his support to a bill introduced in the US House of Representatives on Friday , as well as its companion legislation in the Senate, which aims to reduce the rate of royalties paid by internet radio stations. Put forward by Representatives Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and Jared Polis (D-Colo.), the Internet Radio Fairness Act proposes putting internet radio stations on the same royalty scale as satellite and cable services — its Senate equivalent was introduced by Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). Conventional terrestrial radio stations are not required to pay performance royalty fees at all Supporters of the bill claim that services such as Pandora currently pay more than 55 percent of their annual… Continue reading…

Taken from:
Pandora backs bill to cut internet radio royalty rates

A group from Microsoft’s C++ team is developing a note-taking app for Windows 8, currently known as Project Austin. Inspired by and using code from Microsoft’s fabled Courier , Austin aims to replace real notebooks while also demonstrating the capabilities of the operating system as well as C++, as told by project member Jorge Pereira . Like most journal or note-taking apps, users with a stylus (or a finger) can draw or write on paper with various backgrounds. Project Austin adds to the experience by also letting users add photos from the device’s hard drive, a camera, or from the cloud

Excerpt from:
Born from Courier code, Microsoft’s Project Austin is a digital journal for Windows 8

There’s an unending siege of fake name trends on Facebook. It has been cool at various times to insert an adjective for a middle name, abbreviate your initials, or remove vowels; legions of tween girls have changed their last names to “Bieber” to imply marriage to the pop star. In 2008, a journalist found more than 500 “Mike Hunts” and “Ben Dovers” each . But as the general population gets more comfortable with the internet, subversive users are turning to subtler tricks that are nearly impossible for Facebook to detect: using a middle name as a surname, borrowing a fictional character’s last name, inventing a real-sounding name, and other distortions that violate Facebook’s strict real-names policy . “The name you use should be your…

View the original here:
Facebook’s fake-name resistance grows as users skirt the rules

With blockbusters focusing on CG spectacle, and high-profile filmmakers rushing towards the latest digital innovations, one cinematic option often gets left behind: the grandeur of 70mm. Hollywood’s own high-resolution alternative to 35mm film, the format was used to shoot the likes of Lawrence of Arabia and 2001: A Space Odyssey . Now filmmakers Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson have created a new film shot entirely on the format: Samsara. A follow-up to 1992’s Baraka, the film eschews dialogue and traditional narrative techniques. Instead, it uses striking visuals and music to take viewers on an emotional exploration of the world around us — and of the oft-unseen cause and effect behind things we usually take for granted (see our..

Read more here:
Film without words: the 70mm story of life, death, and rebirth in ‘Samsara’

User interface design has been increasingly focused on gestures — from Apple’s use of pinch-to-zoom to the Charms bar in Windows 8 — because they’re (usually) a natural and easy-to-grasp way of navigating in the digital world. There’s certainly lots of interest in these sorts of gestures, but an essay by Dan Hill on City of Sound takes a closer look at the sometimes humorous, often bizarre postures that we perform in the absence of well thought out design. The gestures highlighted in the essay — shaking a mouse awake or walking around looking for a strong Wi-Fi link — offer an intriguing look at where human nature meets technology. “A user approaches a sleeping computer and attempts to rattle it into life by hammering the… Continue reading…

Read More:
Filling in the gaps: the odd ‘digital rituals’ we perform to make technology serve us

Back in February we took a look at Sigma’s DP2 Merrill — a compact shooter with the company’s characteristic 15.3-megapixel APS-C-sized Foveon X3 sensor parked behind a fixed 45-millimeter equivalent f/2.8 lens. Now, six weeks after the DP2 was released to consumers, Sigma is announcing the release of its fraternal twin, the DP1 Merrill . Announced at the same time, the only difference from its partner is a shorter 28-millimeter equivalent lens with the same maximum aperture of f/2.8. Sigma says the camera will be available in mid-September for $999 — a tough sell with the excellent Sony RX100 at $649.99, but we’re sure it will appeal to a certain crowd. Continue reading…

More:
Sigma’s DP1 Merrill compact available mid-September for $999

As the jury slogs through the twenty-page final verdict form in the Apple vs. Samsung trial , it has given its decision on one of the more critical aspects of the case: whether Samsung infringed on Apple’s design patents for the look and feel of its devices. The jury needed to decide the issue on four different design patent as they apply to over over a dozen different Samsung devices, and furthermore had to also distinguish between three different corporate entities.

Continued here:
Samsung infringed on Apple design patents, jury rules

We all know the feeling. You’re sleepless in the sad hours of the night or stumbling around early on a hazy weekend morning in need of something to read, and that pile of unread books just isn’t cutting it. Why not take a break from the fire hose of Twitter and RSS and check out our weekly roundup of essential writing from around the web about technology, culture, media, and the future? Sure, it’s one more thing you can feel guilty about sitting in your Instapaper queue, but it’s better than pulling in vain on your Twitter list again. On Medium Twitter alums Biz Stone and Evan Williams this week launched the new Medium publishing platform in private beta as part of their Obvious corporation.

Visit site:
The best tech writing of the week, August 19

Music legend Prince’s hostility towards the internet and consumer technology as a whole has been well documented. “The internet’s completely over,” he once told the UK’s Daily Mirror . “All these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.” In addition to withholding his latest releases from iTunes, he’s mounted an obsessive campaign to keep his music off YouTube. With the number of takedown requests hitting video sites daily, such behavior isn’t unique to Prince

Read this article:
Roots drummer Questlove uses Instagram to vent about Prince’s digital ignorance

It was more than two decades ago that the first web page launched, and if you’re curious what the web looked like back in 1991, CERN has preserved that original site for your perusing pleasure. Created by Tim Berners-Lee on a NeXT computer, the site was a place to find information about the new and exciting World Wide Web — “a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents,” as it was described. The preserved version has been around for some time, but isn’t an exact replica, however. CERN says that it’s a copy from 1992, and that “changes were made daily to the information available on the page as the WWW project developed.” Sadly no screenshots exist of the..

Continue reading here:
Visit the very first web page from more than 20 years ago

Geometry of Love is a web-based game set to the tune of Lady by the Chromatics and produced by Kill Screen . The objective of the game is simple — avoid the shapes that appear in time with the thumping rhythmics of the song. As the music is queued, a floating wire-frame woman (that we assume represents your digital self ) floats onto the screen followed by shimmering stars, light rays, and other geometric shapes. Geometry of Love is part of a joint advertising campaign between Pitchfork and Intel highlighting the chipmaker’s Ultrabook laptops

Taken from:
Play this: feel the ‘Geometry of Love’ with trippy 80s visuals and music from the Chromatics

The 2012 Summer Olympics have finally kicked off, and while NBC has been boasting about the digital options it’s offering US sports fans, the broadcaster offered no live streaming of the opening ceremonies, instead funneling viewers towards its tape-delayed primetime broadcast this evening. NBC has now defended the decision to the Los Angeles Times , telling the paper in an emailed statement that the ceremonies “are complex entertainment spectacles that do not translate well online because they require context, which our award-winning production team will provide for the large prime-time audiences that gather together to watch them.” However, in the same statement NBC also touts that it is streaming every event from all 32 sports — a… Continue reading…

View article:
NBC insults viewer intelligence, says Olympic Opening Ceremony is too ‘complex’ for online audience

Boost Mobile announced today that it will be the first US retailer to offer the low-end, waterproof Kyocera Hydro . The Hydro has a 3.5-inch display, runs Android 4.0 on a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, and sports a 3.2-megapixel camera. While none of these specs particularly stand out, the phone’s shining feature is its IPX5 and IPX7 waterproof rating. These ratings mean that the Hydro can withstand sprayed water and being submerged in one meter (just over three feet) of water for up to thirty minutes provided the charging port is closed

Read More:
Waterproof Kyocera Hydro launches August 3rd on Boost Mobile