The guys at 9to5Mac have put together a profile you can install on your iPhone using a corporate development kit that gives you an alphanumeric passcode lock—versus the standard 4-digit PIN-style lock.
The settings profile's easily removed if you don't like it, but make sure you don't lock yourself out of your phone by forgetting the passcode. Also, it's entirely at your own risk, you know, in case it does blow up your phone forever. [9to5Mac]
Investigators at the NSA have tracked the huge online attacks that Google used as their reason for leaving the Chinese market to two universities, one with ties to the Chinese military.
If supported by further investigation, the findings raise as many questions as they answer, including the possibility that some of the attacks came from China but not necessarily from the Chinese government, or even from Chinese sources.
Tracing the attacks further back, to an elite Chinese university and a vocational school, is a breakthrough in a difficult task. Evidence acquired by a United States military contractor that faced the same attacks as Google has even led investigators to suspect a link to a specific computer science class, taught by a Ukrainian professor at the vocational school.
So this could mean a couple of things. The Chinese government could be using this school as a front for its attacks. Or it could be the work of "patriotic hackers" in the school, one of the best computer programs in the world. Or the schools could have been used as a proxy by another country looking to put the blame on China.
But one thing is sure: the attacks took place through a newly-discovered Internet Explorer vulnerability.
Executives at Google have said little about the intrusions and would not comment for this article. But the company has contacted computer security specialists to confirm what has been reported by other targeted companies: access to the companies' servers was gained by exploiting a previously unknown flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser.
Forensic analysis is yielding new details of how the intruders took advantage of the flaw to gain access to internal corporate servers. They did this by using a clever technique - called man-in-the-mailbox - to exploit the natural trust shared by people who work together in organizations.
After taking over one computer, intruders insert into an e-mail conversation a message containing a digital attachment carrying malware that is highly likely to be opened by the second victim. The attached malware makes it possible for the intruders to take over the target computer.
This is why you should not be running IE 6.0, you lazy companies. [NY Times]
WISE image of Comet Siding Spring. Click for a larger version. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
The WISE spacecraft has released the first of a group of handpicked images it has taken since it really got going in mid-January.
The particular image I have here is of Comet Siding Spring or more formally C/2007 Q3 was discovered in 2007 by observers at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.
The color might not be what you would normally expect, but this is actually very familiar to devotees of infrared images. The best way to explain it is to let NASA do it for me from the press release.
In this view, longer wavelengths of infrared light are red and shorter wavelengths are blue. The comet appears red because it is more than ten times colder than the surrounding stars, for example, the bright blue star in the foreground. Colder objects give off more of their light at longer wavelengths. An ice cube, for example, pours out a larger fraction of its light at longer infrared wavelengths than a cup of hot tea emits.
In this image, 3.4-micron light is colored blue; 4.6-micron light is green; 12-micron light is orange; and 22-micron light is red. It was taken on Jan. 10, 2010.
This particular comet is heading away from us at the moment after coming about 1.2 AU from Earth (1 AU = the average Sun to Earth distance), The tail of the comet is estimated at 10 million miles long.
There are other images available which you can see here.
I’ve already been asked why NASA isn’t releasing the images very quickly. I think probably the reason is out of necessity. If NASA were to release every image, for one thing they would be spending all their time doing it and for another you’d be pretty disappointed with most of them because they just wouldn’t show very much. I think the spacecraft can take an image about every 11 seconds and it will do this for six months and then start all over again. So to get any images for now is quite good and you can see why they have to pick and choose.
Stay tuned because this mission is going to get very exciting. If you want to see the image above in its original context and with the full caption click here.
A top-drawer political thriller that is timely, sophisticated, and well-acted.
Does anyone know where I can find a N/C thermal switch that will open between 800°F - 1000°F?
My application is this: (Country: US, Mid-Central)
I have a control (PCB) that turns On/Off outputs to either an AC electric heater or a LP gas burner to heat a small boiler tube (approxi
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After more than six years of exploring the Red Planet, the Mars rover Spirit will rove no more. The robotic adventurer is mired in a sand bed, and NASA has officially given up on trying to extricate it.
While it will continue to operate as a “stationary research platform” for the time being, there’s no denying that the rover’s swashbuckling days are over. No longer will Spirit spot an interesting landmark in the distance and gamely trek towards it, with the possibility of a fresh scientific discovery around every corner and under every rock. This photo gallery is a well-deserved eulogy for Spirit, in which we’ll survey its travels and achievements.
In 2003, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory launched Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, on a three-month mission to investigate Martian terrain and atmosphere on opposite sides of the planet. The solar-powered rovers surpassed NASA’s wildest dreams, extending their missions by nearly 25 times their anticipated lengths.
Since landing on Mars in January 2004, Spirit has snapped more than 127,000 pictures. The robot probed beneath the worn surface of Mars, analyzing the microstructure of rocks and soil with a sophisticated array of instruments: spectrometers, microscopic imagers, and other tools. Spirit has also gathered strong evidence that water once flowed on the Martian surface, which could have created a hospitable environment for microbial life.
Spirit and its twin rover (which is still traveling on) will be replaced by more advanced machines that will roll onto the Martian soil in the coming decades. But Spirit will be remembered long after its operating system flickers off for good. Like a robotic Neil Armstrong, the rover has earned its place in the space explorers’ hall of heroes.
All text by Aline Reynolds. Image: NASA/JPL/Cornell
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"Inspired by NASA's Constellation Program, iRover is a fun way to tour the Lunar surface and see some of the elements that make up NASA's Lunar architecture.
Description: Drive your Lunar Electric Rover (LER) over the Lunar surface to conduct missions. Rescue stranded crew members, transport crewmembers, and launch and recover other Landers. Avoid being caught on the surface unprotected during Solar Particle Events (SPEs)."
Buy it at the iTunes Apps store
Hello engineers, I would like to build a cars with runs with 23cc fuel engine, and control by Remote control at RC frequencies. kindly give me sources, guidelines. i have seen many Ready made cars but i need to design my own RC car. help me please guys...
Thinksound's Rain and slightly bassier Thunder earphones are made out of wood. That's their thing, but it's not the best thing about them. The best thing about them is that they're damn nice earbuds, for a reasonable price.
Though their MSRPs are significantly higher, at $100 and $75, respectively, you can find the Rains for $60 on Amazon, and the Thunders for about $45. In these photos, the Rains have the darker finish and black tips, while the Thunders have a cherry finish and white tips.
To be honest, the only apparent difference between these two earbuds, aside from their slightly different shapes, is sound balance: The Rains are tuned for all-around listening, and the Thunders for heavier bass.
The first thing you'll notice about the Thinksounds is that, yes, they are made out of wood, and yes, that makes them beautiful. There's nothing about the design or shape that's particularly striking—if these were molded from shiny plastic, they could even look tacky—but the finish, either in Black Chocolate or Red Cherry stain, looks and feels great. A headphone body is one of the only reasonable applications for wood in the gadget world, and to both your eyes and your fingers, the Thinksound are a treat. But who cares what they think; what about your ear holes?
Not knowing that they used to be made from the living flesh of a tree, the Rains have a rich sound, if not a spectacular one. The low end is healthy to the point that I'd hesitate to recommend the even bassier Thunders, and the midrange is well represented and clear even at high volumes. The highest notes, which are crucial to conveying strong presence in music, can sound a bit soft at times, but unless you've just been listening to a set of high-end Etymotics, you're not likely to notice. Which brings me to the core issue here: wood. How about that wood!
I could hazard a guess that wood is the reason the Thinksounds' sound soft at the high end, or that all the way down the equalizer, they sound warm, a favorite, and largely meaningless, word among audiophiles. I can credit wood with the near-total lack of cable noise (when the cord is jostled), and blame it for the earphones' sound isolation, which is only OK. I can posit that funneling sound from the 9mm (and in the case of the Thunder, 10mm) drivers through wood instead of plastic would cause sound to reverberate differently. I could buy into Thinksound's claims that building headphones out of renewable natural materials is better for the environment than building them out of something else.
But since I can't actually test a plastic or metal version of the Rain or Thunder, and since I have absolutely no background in ecology or material science, I won't. I'll just say that, for the price, the Thinksound Rains hold their own against any other earphone, up to an including the Shure SE115s, and that for any price, you're not going to find a set of earphones more attractive, or immediately distinctive.
So: should you wood? Sure you should. [Thinksound]
They're even prettier in real life than they look above
Balanced, clean, powerful sound, especially for the (street) price.
They're good for the environment, despite the fact that they're explicitly made from something that used to be alive, and now isn't. This is a plus if you want it to be, and causes no compromise.
The Thunders are a bit too bassy, so unless you like your music thumpier than most, stick with the slightly more expensive Rains.
Looks like our hunches about what's inside the next MacBook Pros are panning out: AppleInsider hears that Apple's got new MacBook Pros running that can switch between integrated and discrete graphics automagically, which exactly describes Nvidia's Optimus dual graphics tech.
If you remember, the unibody MacBooks from Oct. 2008 were the first to use Nvidia's GeForce 9400M, a combination chipset/integrated GPU that ridiculously outperformed Intel's own integrated graphics, and the Pro models at the time could switch between power-saving integrated and beefier discrete graphics, though it requires a logout.
Nvidia got cockblocked from making chipsets for Intel's latest-gen chips (read: Core i3, Core i5, Core i7), ruling out using Nvidia's better integrated graphics; Nvidia canned their chipset business entirely. So! Nvidia's Optimus tech works with Intel's crappier integrated graphics that are built onto the same die as the newer Core processors, but even more seamlessly than before—the computer automatically switches between Intel's power-sipping integrated and Nvidia's monster discrete graphics, depending on what you're doing. No logouts required.
In the demo we saw on a Windows machine, the automatic part of the tech has some drawbacks—namely, it's entirely dependent on software to tell your computer which graphics card to run. But Apple's obviously worked pretty closely with Nvidia on graphics before, so it seems logical they're doing so here, too. Though I don't expect we'll know until the new MacBooks finally arrive, whenever that happens (hopefully, soon). [AppleInsider]
Ok ok ok, rewind a few weeks. Before WinPho 7 trundled into the daylight, the strongest evidence we had for a new product from Microsoft actually centered around something else: The long-rumored, utterly mysterious Project Pink. So, err, what happened?
With Windows Phone 7 Series as the star of the show, Mobile World Congress came and went without a single mention of Pink. Which is strange! Because leading up to the conference, most of the material, non-rumor evidence we had about Microsoft's mobile plans centered around that very product, whatever it is. We had Twitter chatter from within Microsoft, from a client called "Danger." We had FCC filings, the most tantalizing pieces of which are being withheld until just days after the CTIA conference in late March. We had recent reports that the Pink phones would have Nvidia's Tegra, and run a Silverlight-based interface over a Windows CE6 base. And of course, we had the original Pink leak.
So, with Windows Phone 7 unveiled and described, where does that leave us? It leaves us with outstanding documentation, unexplained, not-insubstantial leaks, and perhaps most revealingly, the same "Danger"-sourced Twitter traffic from within Microsoft. See above, captured today.
Despite Windows Phone 7's emphasis on social networking integration, it debuted with a glaringly obvious lack of Twitter support. In other words, all these tweets from inside Microsoft? They're not coming from Windows Phone 7. Add to that the "Danger" branding (the Pink Project was rumored to be a followup to Danger's Sidekick as far back as September, and you start to get the sense the Windows Phone 7 is only half the story. Pink is probably still coming, and probably not running Windows Phone 7, leaving one massive question: What the hell does it run? And will it be the only one?
It's an exciting question, if just for how completely and utterly unanswered it is. So whatever you do, don't take your eyes off Microsoft—I don't think they're done yet. [Twitter]
Shelby: Government spending 'out of control', Birmingham Business Journal
"Alabama's senior senator said the Obama administration is on pace to turn a $10 trillion deficit into $20 trillion during a speech before the Trussville Area Chamber of Commerce. Shelby, R-Tuscaloosa, reminded the audience he led the charge against federal bank and automaker bailouts. Shelby warned federal entitlements and deficit spending will ultimately hurt the nation's economy. During the question and answer portion of the speech, the four-term senator said he will fight to keep funding for NASA's Constellation program that the Obama administration has cut in its proposed 2011 budget. Huntsville is home to the project that Shelby helped save $600 million for last year."
Shelby Was For The Private Sector Before He Was Against It, Previous Post
Now that I probably have the international shipping mostly worked out. Now for another problem.
Most of Europe of course runs 220v and 50 cy for their household power.
Now so I'll need to install in my clock,
a 1 rpm mo
The celebrant wore a black turtleneck and read vows from an iPod. The ring was brought in on a first-generation iPhone. And the bride and groom both said iDo. What more could you hope for from an Apple store wedding?
Josh and Ting first met at an Apple store, and could think of no place better to affirm their eternal devotion than between rows of MacBook. Apple didn't sanction the event, which took place at the flagship Fifth Avenue location in New York, so they took the good ol' fashioned flash mob route. As Josh said to Entertainment Weekly:
"I used to joke that the Apple Store is my church because I am not religious, and I loved everything Apple... Ting then came up with the idea of having the wedding there."
Let's hope their love has a better warranty than my iPhone. [EW via Cult of Mac]
I want to congratulate Dr Peter Hulick M.D. Medical Geneticist/Internist.
The afternoon program will additionally showcase:
· Four “prototypes of the future” sessions highlighting the next generation of personalized genomic products, services and activities and moderated by the executive editor of WIRED and author, Thomas "The Death Stare" Goetz.
· The public debut of the BioWeatherMap initiative, a collaboration between scientists and the public using next-generation sequencing platforms to address the fundamental question: “How diverse is the microbial life around us and how can we use that information to our advantage?”
The GET Conference 2010 will take place on Tuesday, April 27, 2010 from 8:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m. at the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center in Cambridge, Mass. The event will be limited to 200 registrants. To register for the GET Conference 2010, visit http://www.getconference.eventbrite.com/.
Tommy Goetz hates me, but I still will go because, let's face it, who doesn't love the
"Howard Stern of Genomics"-Jeff Gulcher
The Sherpa Says: An army of geneticists amassing to deploy clinical useful tools in a virtual setting? Nawh.....
Every now and again I think I’ve pretty much seen it all when it comes to astronomical images, and I’m getting jaded.
And then I see a picture like this:
Yeah, I still get a thrill from seeing things like this! Click to massively embiggen.
The image shows what’s called the Hickson Compact Group 31, a small collection of galaxies. It’s a combination of images from Hubble (visible light, shown in red, green, and blue), Spitzer (infrared, shown as orange), and the Galaxy Explorer or GALEX (ultraviolet, seen here as purple).
If I saw this picture with no caption, I’d know I was seeing dwarf galaxies colliding; the shape and the glow from newly-forming stars is a dead giveaway. But I’d also guess that the galaxies were young; old galaxies tend not to have much gas in them, and there’s clearly plenty of that in those galaxies! But in fact the galaxies here are very old; there are globular clusters (spherical collections of perhaps a million stars each that tend to orbit outside of galaxies) in the group that can be dated to being 10 or so billion years old. That means these are old objects, reinvigorated by their collision.
In fact, star clusters inside the galaxies can be dated as well, and appear to be only a few million years old. Oddly, the gas content of the galaxies is very high, with about five times as much as the Milky Way has. That’s pretty weird; it should’ve been used up a long time ago. Apparently, these galaxies have lived very sedate lives until very recently. I’ll note that they are relatively close to us, about 166 million light years away. Usually, colliding dwarf galaxies like this are seen billions of light years away, so we really are seeing them as they appeared recently.
Apparently, the lower-case g-shaped object on the left is the result of two galaxies smashing into each other, and the longer galaxy above them is separate. The spiral to the right is part of this as well and may be involved in the gravitational dance; you can see a splotchy arm of material pointing right at it from the collision on the left. Typically in collisions the gravity of one galaxy draws matter out of the other, and that can collapse to form stars. The red glow is from gas excited by newly born stars, and the blue glow is from these stars themselves. The galaxies are pouring out ultraviolet light (the purple glow) which is another dead giveaway of vigorous star formation.
The background galaxies are gorgeous, too. There’s a phenomenal distant open spiral on the bottom, to the left of center, and what looks like yet another pair of interacting galaxies at the bottom left, obviously much farther away than the Hickson group. Take a minute to look around the high-res version to see what else you might find!
Yup. I guess you can teach old galaxies new tricks… and even sometimes jaded astronomers, too.
Granville T. Woods was an African-American inventor and engineer known as "The Black Edison". His inventions included overhead electrical lines for railways, a steam boiler furnace, the synchronous multiplex railway telegraph, and a communications technology called "telegraphony".
MediaMemo's Peter Kafka hears that Hulu and its three owners want to be on the iPad, but if it happens—which won't be soon—it'll mostly likely be as part of a paid subscription package to get Hulu everywhere.
Technical challenge of switching from Flash to an iPad-friendly format aside (which isn't a huge one), here's the bigger question: Would Apple allow it on the iPad as an app, since it would compete with iTunes? (Especially if Apple's pushing for their own TV subscription plan, why would they somebody else's TV subscription app on their device?) More likely, Hulu'd have to able to run completely in the browser, where there's not much Apple could do to block it. But that's ultimately trivial.
Still, the bigger hurdle is that Hulu hasn't quite decided how it's going to move to a paid service yet—they want to keep the main site free, Kafka hears, while charging for the extras, which will most likely come in the form of some package that lets you watch Hulu on multiple screens (computer, TV, mobile). Also, they need mobile rights to shows from content producers. Not work that can be done overnight, or at least in time for the March launch.
But if there's a video service out there people will pay for besides Netflix, it's Hulu. At least, if some of the restrictions on back episodes are lifted. I want the full run of Buffy at my fingertips, dammit. [MediaMemo]
From National Geographic News:
Comet Siding Spring and its ghostly tail streak across the sky in one of the first infrared pictures taken by NASA's new Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope, which were released February 17. The telescope, which launched in D
From Neatorama:
That's the provocative title of an article in this month's Archaeology magazine exploring the scientific, legal, and ethical considerations involved. Extensive information about the Neanderthal genetic code is available, and the technologic problems can apparently
