Month: December 2011

What Do I Do When Apple Removes an App I Bought from the App Store? [Ask Lifehacker]

Dear Lifehacker,
I bought an app in the iTunes App Store and the next day Apple pulled it. Now I can’t get updates and I’m worried my copy of the app is going to disappear. If it does, Apple doesn’t even offer refunds. What can I do? More »


Follow this link:
What Do I Do When Apple Removes an App I Bought from the App Store? [Ask Lifehacker]

Heads-Up: Lumus Shows Off 720p, See-Through Video Glasses

scaledwm-4595

We’ve all see video glasses before – those clunky, Geordi La Forge-looking things that promise to display a 10 foot screen in front of your face. The drawbacks, generally, are size and transparency. Lumus, however, has solved those problems and is working on bringing a pair of see-through, HD video glasses to market that look more Minority Report than 1990s Star Trek.

I talked to these guys in September 2010 and the technology has improved immensely since then. They’re basically offering a pair of light, wearable glasses that will show HD video in front of your eyes and even allow you to interact with the world via augmented reality.

Basically, Lumus has embedded a pair of light pumps into the earpieces that send and refract light down the lens. This moves the electronics away from the eyes, offering a lighter and more stream-lined experience. The lenses are completely transparent (and can be tuned for folks with vision problems) and when enabled the glasses display a crystal clear, 87-inch screen about ten feet away from you. The displays themselves are 1280 x 720 pixels and Lumus has created iPhone-compatible adapters that can display HD video right through the pumps and into the lenses.

The display is stunning. Because each eye display works independently, you can view 3D video in 720p (1080p is on its way) and the clarity is amazing. When you turn them off, the picture disappears completely, leaving perfectly clear lenses. Unlike the Moto ROKR MP3 sunglasses that they used to sell back in the day, the styling and size makes you look less like Dog the Bounty Hunter and more like a Bond villain.

Although these guys will be showing their gear at CES, they’re going the OEM route and are currently looking for partners to use the technology in AR displays, video games, and media players. There won’t be any Lumus-branded “They Live” style super glasses any time soon, although they do have some major players interested in the technology.

Generally, the future of this sort of display is a “Not If But When” problem. At some point wearable displays like this will replace hand-held screens. However, it will take a few years of trial and error to hit the right device at the right time. Lumus is hard at work at military and commercial systems for logistics and battlefield feedback but I’m most excited about the prospect of wearing these on a plane instead of staring at an iPad or laptop.






View post:
Heads-Up: Lumus Shows Off 720p, See-Through Video Glasses

The Power User’s Guides to Chrome and Firefox [Web Browser]

You spend hours in your browser every day. Hell, Google Chrome is even a full-fledged operating system. The more shortcuts you know, tricks you master, and tweaks you understand, the more quickly and efficiently you can use your browser—whether you’re checking Facebook, buying something on Amazon, or, you know, doing bona fide work. Whether you’re a Chrome lover or a Firefox fanatic, get to know the best features of your favorite browser with our power user’s guides for Firefox and Chrome. More »


View article:
The Power User’s Guides to Chrome and Firefox [Web Browser]

Who is a journalist?

Writer and comedian John Knefel reaches for his glasses as police pull him away during an Occupy Wall Street protest in New York City yesterday. This really great photo was taken by Jessica Lehrman in the lobby of Winter Garden, a building owned by Brookfield Property, the same company that owns Zuccotti Park. To get a different view on the same scene, check out a video that someone else was filming at the same time. You can see Knefel falling down around 6:30.

The photo and video bring up something interesting. Knefel is a writer and comedian, one of the many people documenting OWS from the inside while trying to navigate the very grey boundaries of journalist and participant in the age of Internet journalism. Personally, I think this conflict is pretty interesting. If I can get all “journalism ethics class” for a minute here, I think OWS is drawing attention to the already existing need for new definitions of who constitutes “media” and who doesn’t. Why is this more confusing than you might thing? Let me use Knefel as an example.

Knefel doesn’t work for a major media outlet. But he’s also not just some random bystander. He’s got a political podcast with new episodes three times a week. Do we only call someone a journalist if they have enough page views? Do they have to have a journalism degree? What’s the line?

Knefel is a biased source of information. But so are a lot of mainstream commentators. We’d call someone from Fox News a journalist. We’d call someone from Reason magazine a journalist. We’d call somebody from Mother Jones a journalist. Having a clear political angle to your coverage doesn’t make you not a journalist. Except when it does. So what are the actual criteria?

Knefel didn’t have a press pass. But, as Xeni has pointed out, the press pass system in New York is incredibly convoluted and contradictory. So what if you can’t get one? Does that mean you aren’t a journalist? This is particularly problematic given the fact that the rules seem to be set up to favor long-standing publications with lots of resources that mostly just cover New York City. How does that fit into a globalized world? Why punish media entrepreneurship?

We live in an age where publishing is easy and the tools to do it are available to a much wider swatch of people. But our standards and rules for who gets protection as a member of the press are based on a paradigm where publishing wasn’t easy and only a limited number of people could do it. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that not everybody who uses the Internet is a journalist, because being a journalist comes with responsibilities not just protections. I’m pretty sure my Dad doesn’t want to hold his Facebook to the same standard that I use when writing here.

I don’t know the answer to these questions. But I know we need to have this conversation. Occupy Wall Street just shows us what can happen when we keep applying old rules to a new world.


More here:
Who is a journalist?

Cambridge digital library posts scan of Newton’s Trinity College notebook, claims copyright over scans

Robbo sez, “The Cambridge Digital Library has posted Sir Issac Newton’s notebook which he used as an undergraduate at Trinity College in the 1660’s. It can be viewed, page by page, in its entirety and is a fantastic glimpse into the scribbling and doodling thought processes of the man.”

Sadly, these images are licensed under CC noncommercial, which means that Cambridge is asserting a copyright over these ancient manuscripts. UK law does make some provision for asserting a copyright in photos of public domain works, though to do so certainly runs contrary to the ethic of scholarship that the Cambridge name evokes.

However, readers in the USA should know that these images are not in copyright there, and they could be downloaded and reused in any way, in keeping with the principle of a robust public domain.

Given that I live in the UK, I have not included any images from the manuscript here.

The argument for asserting copyrights in public domain works is that the public interest is best served by taking public money to acquire and maintain national cultural treasures, then selling access to them, and using the money to reduce the amount that the public pays for future operations.

I understand and reject that argument. A real public domain in national treasures allows for a much broader range of uses and reproductions than the limited, noncommercial, no-derivatives license permits, and these uses would benefit our public life.

I applaud the Cambridge Library’s initiative in making its works available to the public, and in adopting CC licenses, but I wish they would adopt a programme of making Britain’s ancient treasures truly free.

Update: I’ve been giving this more thought; here’s something I just posted to the comments:

The problem with this framing is that it assumes that increasing commercial exploitation of the public domain by cultural institutions will fill the void left by contracting public spending, but the reverse is true.

When public institutions reduce their public service in order to supplement their income, they are (obviously) delivering less public value than they would if they made the public’s treasures free.

The public, then, sees less reason to fund these institutions (because there are fewer ways in which the public receives benefit from them), which means they are more vulnerable to future cuts.

So each round of budget cuts results in a new impetus to privatise the collection. Each privatisation of the collection results in more vulnerability to budget cuts.

And this logic isn’t limited to times of austerity. The drive to fence off digitised versions of the public domain dates to the 90s and the neoliberal period when Labour (in the UK) encouraged cultural institutions to claim copyright in the verbatim copies of their public domain works.

This is “now more than ever” thinking: in good times, we must shut down the public domain and charge for its use. In bad times, we must do the same.

Meanwhile, the evidence runs contrary to this agenda. In the US, public data is public — no copyright can be asserted in government documents, and in the US, both the public and business enjoy unfettered access to same. The result is that all the sectors that depend on public data (such as maps) in the US dwarf their UK equivalents, and return more in tax revenue (and jobs, and public benefit) than their UK counterparts, which can only kick off if they can afford to pay to access and use the data.

If public data is to have a future, it has to make the case to the public that it deserves to be funded. It cannot do that by reducing the utility of public data to the public.

Trinity College Notebook by Isaac Newton

(Thanks, Robbo!)


Read More:
Cambridge digital library posts scan of Newton’s Trinity College notebook, claims copyright over scans

Hitachi outs a pair of 4TB HDDs for your storing pleasure

We here at Engadget believe that, while keeping data in the cloud is certainly convenient, one can never have too much local storage space. Hitachi shares our enthusiasm for commodious HDDs, and has rolled out a pair of 4TB drives to keep all your movies, music, and photos close to home. For those wanting to up the ante in their desktop machine, the Deskstar 5K4000 should do the trick with a SATA 6Gb/s connection and 32MB buffer. Its stablemate, the Touro Desk External Drive, brings the same HDD in an onyx enclosure and connects to your computer via USB 3.0 — plus you get 3GB of cloud storage free from Hitachi. (Who says you can’t eat your cake and have it too?) The 5K4000 is available now for a penny under $400, while the Touro will cost $420 once it hits the market in January.

Continue reading Hitachi outs a pair of 4TB HDDs for your storing pleasure

Hitachi outs a pair of 4TB HDDs for your storing pleasure originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Dec 2011 02:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | sourceHitachi (1), (2) | Email this | Comments

Continue Reading:
Hitachi outs a pair of 4TB HDDs for your storing pleasure