20,000 songs? Not nearly enough. $24.99 a year? Way too spendy. Unlimited and $20 a year? That’s a little better, at least, and that’s what Amazon just moved to. Taking a step up from its previous $20 for 20GB plan, the former bookseller is now letting new subscribers get any amount of storage they want for that price — unlimited for .mp3 and .m4a files, anyway. Naturally this means any songs purchased through Amazon MP3 will also be stored for to an infinite extent, not counting against your all-important quota. This is a “limited time” kind of deal, so if you’ve been on the fence now’s the time to click that cart, but there’s another new feature that isn’t going away: Cloud Player for Web on iPad. This lets you play your cloud tunes through Safari and that, combined with the whole unlimited storage thing, should ease any nagging feelings of regret you’ve been suffering since budgetary pressures talked you into the 16GB model.

Continue reading Amazon Cloud Player hits iPad, adds unlimited storage, scoffs at constrained competition

Amazon Cloud Player hits iPad, adds unlimited storage, scoffs at constrained competition originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Jul 2011 19:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft took the beta label off of Office 365 last week, and many consider the cloud-based productivity suite a potshot at Google and Google Apps. Office 365 may offer cloud-based document, storage, and collaboration services that look like Google Apps, but the user experience and price tag are very different. Here’s a look at the major differences between them. More

The United States Treasury didn’t print any $10 bills last year. Shocking, but true. It’s because we use less and less cash every year. Which doesn’t mean we’re going to be a cashless society anytime soon. That’s great. More

Mmechanic sez, “Andrew Marantz wondered how BPOs [ed: Business Process Outsourcing, AKA call centers] train Indians who have never even known a Westerner to sound and act like one. Since the call centers wouldn’t let a journalist in to their culture-training sessions, Marantz decided to become a trainee himself. The resulting article from Mother Jones magazine is alternatively funny, sad, and thought-provoking.”

During our second day of culture training, Lekha dissected the Australian psyche. It took about 20 minutes.

“Just stating facts, guys,” Lekha began, as we scribbled notes, “Australia is known as the dumbest continent. Literally, college was unknown there until recently. So speak slowly.” Next to me, a young man in a turban wrote No college in his notebook.

“Technologically speaking, they’re somewhat backward, as well. The average person’s mobile would be no better than, say, a Nokia 3110 classic.” This drew scoffs from around the room.

“Australians drink constantly,” Lekha continued. “If you call on a Friday night, they’ll be smashed–every time. Oh, and don’t attempt to make small talk with them about their pets, okay? They can be quite touchy about animals.”

“What kind of people are there in Australia?” a trainee asked. “What are their traits?”

“Well, for one thing,” Lekha said, “let’s admit: They are quite racist. They do not like Indians. Their preferred term for us is–please don’t mind, ladies–‘brown bastards.’ So if you hear that kind of language, you can just hang up the call.”

My Summer at an Indian Call Center

(Thanks, Mmechanic!)

Read more here:
Life in an Indian call center

We’ve come to love the fantastic and sublime images of space taken from such satellites as the Hubble, but the truth is that the technology that created those images is incredibly out of date. And while you can’t argue with the results, it has gotten to the point where the sensitivity, angle of view, and data collection rate just need to be moved up to 21st-century standards. The European Space Agency (ESA) is happy to bring space into the gigapixel era, and they’re packing a monster camera array onto their Gaia astrometry platform.

The mission of Gaia is accurate mapping of the entire Milky Way galaxy, and they plan to chart the positions of a billion stars about seventy times each over the next five years. The result will be (they hope) a more accurate and precise three-dimensional map of the galaxy. They’ll also pick up innumerable minor bodies (i.e. asteroid, planets, and so on) and will collect a ton of other useful miscellaneous space data.

The camera itself is actually over a hundred individual sensors put into an array — which makes sense, as a single gigapixel sensor would likely be far too small and pixel-dense to be of any use in this situation. The 102 sensors are 4.7×6.0cm each, and arranged in a large 1.0×0.5m field, and four more are used for quality checks.

The precision of the camera is pretty insane. It can resolve items of magnitude 15, which is 4000 times dimmer than what can be seen with the naked eye, down to 24 microarcseconds. To give you an idea of how powerful that is, if the Gaia array was on Earth, it could measure the thumbnails of a person standing on the moon. It will produce a huge amount of data, but its transmitter will be able to maintain a multi-megabit connection to its base station here on the ground even at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers.

There’s a ton (or tonne, I suppose) more information at the ESA’s Gaia site, and some other links at Network World.

Read this article:
Europe Launching Gigapixel Probe To Map Milky Way

Sure, we’ve seen plenty of cool billboard features over the years, from facial recognition to interactive Pong games, but few have managed the dual feat of promoting a popular soft drink and making the world a slightly greener place. All of that fuzzy area you see surrounding the silhouette of the Coke bottle in the above 60 by 60 foot billboard is made up of a number of Fukien tea plants, each of which can soak up around 13 pounds of carbon dioxide per year, for a combined total of 46,800 pounds. The plants are housed in pots made from recycled Coke bottles and are watered via a drip irrigation system. The billboard is the product of a partnership between Coca-Cola Philippines and the World Wildlife Fund. No word on when it might be greening up more skylines around the world. Press release below.

Continue reading Coca-Cola’s green billboard consumes carbon dioxide like so much sugary soda

Coca-Cola’s green billboard consumes carbon dioxide like so much sugary soda originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Jul 2011 13:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that Facebook had surpassed 750 million monthly active users today at a product launch in Palo Alto.

He said the company had declined to announce it earlier because it’s become focused on other metrics, including how actively users are sharing information.

“Hopefully, we’ll get to a billion at some point,” he said. “I think people generally think that’s going to happen at some point.”

The announcement suggest that Facebook’s growth, at least in terms of raw monthly actives, is continuing at a linear, not exponential, pace. The company has been growing at just under 50 million monthly actives every two months since late 2009. It last said it was at 500 million monthly actives a year ago.

Zuckerberg said he believes social networking is moving into a different era — one that is more predicated on the strength of connections rather than the quantity of users or ubiquity of the technology.

“Social networking is at an inflection point,” he said. “Mostly it was about connecting people and there was still this question about

It ain’t the first time Mark Zuckerberg has taken the stage to announce… something, but today’s shindig is resulting in “something” that’s a bit more exciting for the average user. As rumored, the world’s most notable VoIP service is set to become exceedingly integrated with the world’s most notable social network. Skype has just thrown up a teaser page for v5.3 for Windows (and v5.5 Beta), noting that Skype and Facebook will aim to provide “the best of both worlds.”

Zuck is primarily announcing three main things today: group chat, a new way to chat (“an easier way to find someone who is online”) and Skype-enabled video chat. Oh, and the tiny, tiny fact that there’s now 750 million Facebook members. What’s notable is just how easy it is to fire up a group chat (or send transcripts to group members who miss out) and get a video call going using your existing Skype contact list. A single click is all it takes, and we’re told that it’ll be rolled out to everyone “over the next few weeks” in 70 different languages. The new chat design will be scalable based on your browser size, and the company made a point to mention that it’ll be listening closely to user input in order to iterate as it moves forward.

Tony Bates stepped up to the plate, and noted that over 300 million videocall minutes a month are going through Skype, and at peak times, over half of its traffic is video. He also noted that the technology behind it was “tough” to construct, but somehow it managed to hammer this whole thing out in around six months via joint development. There’s also talk about future “paid products” in due time, and it’s strikingly clear that this partnership isn’t going to fade anytime soon. If you’re looking to take a dive yourself, hit up the source links below for the Windows applications, and wear that F5 button out over at Facebook’s homepage if you’re more of the “in-browser” type.

Oh, and if you’re curious about mobile — video chat isn’t active on that front yet, and Mark’s not spilling any details on “when.” To quote him on a question of time tables: “We’ll see.”

Update: Those on the web can get started right now. Of note, this forces open the familiar chat bar, so it doesn’t much look like you can hide from “those people” while attempting to find folks on Skype.

Skype comes to Facebook, and Facebook comes to Skype (update: available now!) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Jul 2011 13:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve come to love the fantastic and sublime images of space taken from such satellites as the Hubble, but the truth is that the technology that created those images is incredibly out of date. And while you can’t argue with the results, it has gotten to the point where the sensitivity, angle of view, and data collection rate just need to be moved up to 21st-century standards. The European Space Agency (ESA) is happy to bring space into the gigapixel era, and they’re packing a monster camera array onto their Gaia astrometry platform.

The mission of Gaia is accurate mapping of the entire Milky Way galaxy, and they plan to chart the positions of a billion stars about seventy times each over the next five years. The result will be (they hope) a more accurate and precise three-dimensional map of the galaxy. They’ll also pick up innumerable minor bodies (i.e. asteroid, planets, and so on) and will collect a ton of other useful miscellaneous space data.

The camera itself is actually over a hundred individual sensors put into an array — which makes sense, as a single gigapixel sensor would likely be far too small and pixel-dense to be of any use in this situation. The 102 sensors are 4.7×6.0cm each, and arranged in a large 1.0×0.5m field, and four more are used for quality checks.

The precision of the camera is pretty insane. It can resolve items of magnitude 15, which is 4000 times dimmer than what can be seen with the naked eye, down to 24 microarcseconds. To give you an idea of how powerful that is, if the Gaia array was on Earth, it could measure the thumbnails of a person standing on the moon. It will produce a huge amount of data, but its transmitter will be able to maintain a multi-megabit connection to its base station here on the ground even at a distance of 1.5 kilometers.

There’s a ton (or tonne, I suppose) more information at the ESA’s Gaia site, and some other links at Network World.

See more here:
Europe Launches Gigapixel Probe To Map Milky Way

Facebook has scheduled a Wednesday news conference to announce the launch of what it termed “something awesome.”

Originally posted here:
Facebook adds Skype video chat feature