Are you a university professor having trouble keeping track of which students are attending your classes and which ones are blowing them off? Well, Japan's Aoyama Gakuin University has a plan for you, using one of the most desired electronic devices around to sucker, I mean, give students an incentive to attend.
In addition to its back-to-school promotion , Apple on Wednesday quietly tweaked the specs on its entry-level white $999 MacBook.
THE world economic crisis may have forced Apple to slow down the global rollout of its retail stores, but in Australia – which hasn’t been hit as hard as other countries – the stores are coming thick and fast.
Hard on the heels of Apple Store openings at Robina (Gold Coast) and Doncaster (Melbourne), Brisbane has been revealed as next in line for the Apple retail experience. A job listing on Apple’s website, as reported by Australian web forum MacTalk, reveals that the next location will be in the northern suburb of Chermside, probably at the sprawling Westfield shopping centre that is now one of the biggest in Australia.
Apple raised eyebrows recently when it opened on the Gold Coast before Brisbane. International retail chief Steve Cano said it was more about finding the right store in the right mall, rather than the right city.
The recently extended Chermside complex obviously has aroused Apple’s interest, in the same way the refurbished Robina and Doncaster shopping centres did.
The Chermside store would be the sixth Apple-owned and operated retail store in Australia, with others including Chatswood (Sydney), Chadstone (Melbourne) and the three-level glass-fronted flagship store in Sydney’s CBD.
Cano said the emphasis was on service rather than sales, and free troubleshooting and tuition was available to users, no matter where they bought their Apple product.
Apple Australia spokeswoman Fiona Martin said the company had nothing to announce regarding a Chermside store. Apple is notoriously secretive about its plans.
However, recent store locations such as Robina and Doncaster were first revealed by job listings on Apple’s site.
It usually takes several months for the store fit-out and the training of successful job applicants. If the Robina and Doncaster stores are any indication, Apple does not formally announce them until a few days before they open.
It will not be the first time an Apple store has opened at the Chermside shopping centre. In late 2000, ill-fated Apple reseller chain Buzzle opened a store in the centre, but it only lasted a few months.
IF you just can’t get enough of Twitter on the web, in the news, on your phone, on Rove and on Oprah and in the conversations you have at the water cooler, then you’re in luck.
Soon, according to reports, you’ll be able to watch a whole show dedicated to it as well.
The Associated Press today reported the website had teamed up with a production company to “bring the immediacy of Twitter to the TV screen”.
The show would apparently be unscripted and would pit contestants against each other to track down celebrities. Presumably, the task will be something a bit harder than finding them and clicking “Follow”.
News of the show led to the usual outrage on Twitter, where thousands of users added their thoughts under the #notwittertv tag — the more hysterical of them claiming that the site was now officially “dead”.*
Mashable tried to calm things down by reporting there was no official Twitter TV show, but instead made it worse:
“Biz Stone has confirmed that Twitter has signed a contract with production company Reveille and Brillstein for a TV show, but emphasises that this is not an ‘official’ Twitter show — it’s a non-exclusive contract and multiple companies are currently working on TV projects related to Twitter.” (my emphasis)
Does this mean we could see not only a new show, but a whole new genre of Twitter television? A primetime showdown between Twitter Idol and Australia’s Got Twitter? Lord help us.
* Twitter, if you are to believe its users, has died and continued to exist so many times it makes cats look weak.
He was wearing them to protect his eyes when he reached the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in 1997.
With frogs and other amphibians already dying in large numbers, a group of teenagers is joining other amateur scientists nationwide to gather information on the problem. They're doing so even as new research shows climate change is likely to worsen the threat. This ScienCentral News video explains.
NETBOOK schmetbook! If you’re in the market for a cheap, underpowered laptop, neither word is in Apple’s vocabulary. Move along, there’s nothing to see here.
If, however, you’re looking for a desktop replacement, read on: Apple’s new flagship 17in MacBook Pro could be the best on the market.
Apple has repeatedly expressed indifference towards the netbook market that now accounts for up to 20 per cent of laptop sales. And the 17in MacBook Pro is the Anti-Netbook incarnate. It’s big, powerful and expensive, yet somehow still sleek and relatively light.
Like the MacBook Air, the 17in MacBook Pro now has a built-in battery; a controversial move, despite the claimed eight hours of battery life that in the real world probably is closer to six. If you think this means the new Pro Mac is as thin as Air, you’d be disappointed. It’s the standard MacBook Pro thickness of one inch (2.5cm), which is nonetheless impressive for a machine of this power. With its 17in screen, it’s nowhere near as portable as the rest of the MacBook range, but as a desktop replacement it would probably spend most of its time on the desk anyway. On the occasions you do need to take it with you, it’s sleeker and lighter (3kg) than most of the 17in notebooks out there.
The extra screen real estate of the 17in MacBook Pro, coupled with Apple’s industry-leading Final Cut Pro video-editing application, has made the machine a favourite tool for filmmakers, particularly documentary makers who can now take a fully fledged editing studio into the field (though the built-in battery means they now must ensure a power point is always within reach).
The standard configuration is an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz processor, 4GB RAM, 320GB hard drive and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M + 9600M GT with 512MB of video RAM.
Now that the Mac uses Intel processors, and many of Apple’s internal notebook components are identical to those of other PC brands, it’s become fashionable to say that you’re paying a premium for the Apple logo. But the MacBook range boasts a unique combination of hardware features: rigid Unibody enclosure, LED backlit screen, light-sensing backlit keyboard, Multi-Touch trackpad, iSight webcam, MagSafe power connector and all-aluminium and glass construction.
Then, of course, there’s the software value-add: the user-friendly but powerful OS X operating system and the ability to run leading-edge Mac-only software such as iLife, iWork, Aperture, Logic Pro and the aforementioned Final Cut Pro. If you have to, you can run Windows on it as well, in dual-boot and/or virtualisation.
The price, which starts at $A4499, is steep, to be sure. But this is Apple’s top-of-the-line, full-featured notebook that would give a lot of desktop machines a run for their money. And when compared with a similarly equipped PC notebook, its pricing is quite reasonable.
The 2009 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Engineering is presented to Richard Robbins for his imagination and skill in developing a hard-rock tunnel boring machine and its associated systems, resulting in a safe, economical, and efficient method for constructing tunnels. This ScienCentral Video Profile explains.
A NEW site that aims to catalogue “as much of the world’s knowledge as possible” and use it to answer every question imaginable has the tech industry buzzing.
Developed by British physicist Stephen Wolfram, the Wolfram Alpha “knowledge engine” was this week opened to the public — and much fanfare.
The idea is that if Google sorts through all the pages on the web and tells you which one to read, Wolfram Alpha reads them itself and then tells you the answer.
In Wolfram’s words:
“We’re trying to take… all the data and methods and models and algorithms that have been accumulated in our civilisation and make them immediately computable so that anyone anywhere can just go to the web and use all that knowledge to compute answers to their specific questions.”
However Wolfram Alpha’s usefulness depends entirely on what you ask it.
Things it can tell you include the time the sun rose on the day you were born, the amount of energy required to melt 50g of gold and how long it would take a journalist to write 3000 words in shorthand.
But ask it a more human question and things get tricky. Take this example from radio producer Ryan Egan posted on Twitter today:
@rynobi: i asked Wolfram Alpha what the best Pavement record was and it had no idea what i was talking about! #smartcomputerindierockfail
For the record, the answer is Wowee Zowee.
More reading:
“It is beginning to get at the sort of role that science fiction writers have always envisioned for computers, i.e. HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Wolfram Alpha’s ‘intelligence’ is still severely limited.” — Mike Harvey at The Times
“I’ve been putting Wolfram Alpha through the paces for the past few days and I come away impressed, but not super-impressed. It is obviously at a very early stage of development (hence the ‘alpha’ in the name) and it does show a lot of promise.” — Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch
It's commencement time, and psychology researchers say those valedictory speeches about how success isn't measured in riches are much more than mere platitudes.This ScienCentral News video explains.
WHAT started out as a seemingly harmless game on Twitter set off security agencies and led to warnings of a massive identity theft scam.
Anxiety over the #twitterpornnames hashtag game, in which users made their own “porn name” out of details like the name of their first pet, culminated in a warning in the US Department of Homeland Security daily report of infrastructure threats.
British Twitter user Dave Lambs (@pembsdave) started the game on May 12 with the post:
@pembsdave: OK new tag â€" #TwitterPornNames â€" Made up of 1) Your 1st pets name, 2) your 1st headteachers surname.
The game took off, with hundreds of users taking part and “#twitterpornnames” becoming the top-trending hashtag on the site.
But it soon became a veritable game of Chinese whispers as variations of the trend â€" with users posting their first pet’s name, their first teacher’s name, mother’s maiden name and street name â€" started to creep in.
Hysteria and paranoia ensued as security agencies began to suspect the trend was a massive phishing expedition, with hackers ready with rod and reels in tow to collect details that could be used in identity theft.
So-called “secret” questions like “what was the name of your first pet?” and “what is your mother’s maiden name?” are often used by websites to let users recover their passwords if they have forgotten them.
Senior security advisor for Trend Micro Rik Ferguson said the information that people were posting was gold dust for hackers.
“Giving out things like your mother’s maiden name, name of your first pet, the street you grew up on is a very bad idea,” he said.
“Giving them out online in a public forum that is indexed by search engines is Even Badderer (sic).”
But Mr Lambs insisted his nostalgic schoolyard game was far from the hoax it was thought to be:
@pembsdave: Its very very funny â€" I’m seeing “experts” in security analysing #twitterpornnames and now realising they’re over reacting.
Just in case they got bored, Mr Lambs joked he had an even better game around the corner:
@pembsdave: I’m really upset no-one has picked up on my #TwitterRobotNames â€" PIN Number + Postcode + 3 digit security code from CC.
Depending on how you looked at it, it was either a small step, or a big leap for Twitter, as NASA astronaut Mike Massimino sent the first tweet from space.
FACEBOOK has started censoring private messages sent between users to block out internet nasties.
If links to certain websites are detected in a private message, the user is shown a warning:
“This message contains blocked content. Some content in this message has been reported as abusive by Facebook users.”
Their message is then scrapped.
It was first reported the block applied to The Pirate Bay, one of the world’s largest file-sharing websites that recently came out on the wrong side of a legal battle with music and movie industry groups.
Links to The Pirate Bay’s homepage were reportedly accepted, but links to specific pages within the site were blocked.
When we tested it today, that was still happening. However links to other file-sharing sites were fine:
The Pirate Bay â€" BLOCKED
Mininova â€" OK
Demonoid â€" OK
BTJunkie â€" OK
Links to at least one major pornography site were also blocked.
Wired reported that the censorship may place Facebook in breach of US wiretapping laws.
However Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly said the site had a legal right to censor messages, because users had agreed not to send “spammy, illegal, threatening or harassing” content in accepting the site’s terms of use.
Check TorrentFreak and Wired for more info.
Have you noticed links to any other sites being blocked?
George Whitesides wins the inaugural Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences. This comes on the heels of Whitesides being awarded a Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry just a few weeks ago. (video profile)
PLE products are renowned for keeping it simple, but with the hit App Store for iPhone and iPod touch offering nearly 40,000 mobile applicationsand recently chalking up a billion downloadsthings can get a little overwhelming.
Now FileMaker says it can help simplify things a little with the iPhone/iPod touch version of its personal database software for Mac, Bento.
“It’s one app for $A5.99, and has 95 per cent of the functionality of the Mac version which sells for $A79,” FileMaker Asia-Pacific general manager Steve McManus says.
“And it does what a whole bunch of $1 and $2 apps do.”
Bento helps you create lists and databases on the fly, or sync them with the Mac version. Its interface has been optimised for OS X iPhone for a simple, seamless experience.
As on the Mac, iPhone and iPod touch users might find themselves using Bento to access their Address Book, iCal calendars and to-do lists, as Bento folds them all conveniently into the one app, in a similar fashion to Microsoft Outlook.
Other uses are limited only by the user’s imagination. Aside from the conventional management of contacts, customers, projects and inventory, Bento could be used to, say, store recipes, keep track of a collection or even compare properties while house-hunting.
Media files up to 10MB can be attached to entries for added effect, while Google Map links can be embedded to help identify and locate people and projects. Integration with Apple Mail or MS Outlook keeps all your contacts, calendars and correspondence together.
Bento also makes your database files visually appealing, with 30 professional-looking templates and CoverFlow view for flicking through your files in a similar way to iTunes and the Mac Finder.
FileMaker is offering Bento for iPhone and iPod touch at the attractive price of $A5.99 (or $NZ6.49), which as McManus says is extraordinary value considering it offers most of the functionality of the $A79 Mac version.
While this might make the iPhone/iPod touch version seem like a replacement for the desktop version, FileMaker Asia-Pacific software engineer Erick Olazabal points out that the desktop version is still far more convenient for extended periods of data entry, and general ease of use, and can do things the portable version can’t yet do, including creating calculation fields (though, once created, they can be edited on the iPhone/iPod touch).
As it has no real peer on Windows, Bento could be the latest app to tempt iPhone-toting PC users to switch to Mac, to enjoy the added benefits of the desktop version.
Amazon.com has scheduled a press conference for Wednesday, and the last such press conference they held unveiled the Kindle 2. This time, it appears to be a larger-format reader, one tilted toward reading newspapers and magazines rather than books.
