Photographer William Carrick and his partner John MacGregor traveled throughout Russia between 1857 and 1878 taking portraits of Russians of all stations and occupations. These pictures form an ethnographic overview of Russia in the 19th century, and are a historical treasure. This picture shows a young vendor with his hand-carved wooden abacuses for sale. See a varied collection of Carrick’s photographs at Environmental Graffiti. Link
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Incredible Photos of Russian Peasants
Mac: The Mac Blu-ray Player from Macgo will read a Blu-ray disc from an attached drive and play it in Mac OS X. It works and it’s the only option currently for Blu-ray playback on the Mac, but there are tradeoffs for the convenience. More
The long-awaited debut of PCI Express 3.0 is finally here, and it’s come aboard MSI’s Z68A-GD80 (G3) motherboard. Rocking Intel’s latest design standard, this board’s packing two PCIe 3.0 — one x16 and one x8 — and three PCIe 2.0 slots, two USB 3.0 ports, and four DIMM slots. What’s more, the board offers Click BIOS II, for a consistent interface whether you’re tweaking at boot time or boosting clock speeds in Windows, and Virtu’s switchable graphics. Unfortunately, for you mother lovers, there’s still no word on pricing or availability for the Z68A-GD80 (G3). Full PR after the break.
Continue reading MSI unveils Z68A-GD80 (G3) PCI Express 3.0 motherboard
MSI unveils Z68A-GD80 (G3) PCI Express 3.0 motherboard originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Jul 2011 04:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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.
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.
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!)
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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.
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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.
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
