Omniglot is an intimidatingly complete site devoted to cataloging every writing system that ever existed. As JoshP says, “If you ever need to transliterate Punic… this is the place.”
Omniglot – the guide to languages, alphabets and other writing systems
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Every writing system, ever, pretty much
There’s a problem with the idea of an iTV, rumors of which have been sloshing about for a long time, but with greater intensity since Steve Jobs’ biography hinted at one. Unlike an Apple TV, an iPhone, an iPad, or other devices, an Apple TV wouldn’t be tied to a Mac, and it wouldn’t take advantage of iTunes the way those devices do. It’ll be related, of course, but it doesn’t promote the “hub” idea that drives iPhone owners to buy Macs, Mac owners to buy iPhones, and all the other crossover purchases that interweave the Apple ecosystem.
Instead, it would be an Apple-designed window into content that Apple has very little control over. And while you can bring a new idea to the TV space, as set-top boxes and Google TV have, you can’t make the TV space play nice. Google learned that the hard way. And it looks like Apple may be facing a similar challenge.
USA Today has a story on the so-called iTV, with a few juicy nuggets hidden amongst a bedding of fluff. They say that Jonathan Ive has a big, beautiful 50-inch television in his studio. And several sources describe difficulties on Apple’s part securing the content that would be necessary to make their device worthwhile. After all, people using a next-generation content consumption device don’t want to be told that Fox shows are available but not Universal ones. We’re supposed to be leaving all that 20th-century dross behind.
The thing is that guys meeting with Apple over show licenses aren’t stupid. They’ve seen what Apple has done to the music industry over ten years, and they have no intention of entering the lion’s mouth, as their friends at the labels did. In the early 2000s, of course, the labels had no idea that Apple was a lion, and really, neither did Apple. But things are different now, and the guys at Warner and HBO and Turner and so on are happy to make a power play. After all, until someone revolutionizes the channel by which people at large get their TV shows, they’re still king. And Apple can’t revolutionize without their express permission.
That’s not to say they don’t recognize an opportunity. They smell money, but they’re not willing to bite until they can be sure they aren’t falling into a trap. Some of them went along with Google for a lark, but as we saw, they didn’t like the way Google did business (they tend to want to give things away). Apple may be happy to charge, but they also tend to take quite a bit of the sale, and it’s likely that the content producers aren’t willing to let their prize possession, new TV shows, be used as a money-printing machine by Apple. And Apple doesn’t want to leave anything to the discretion of the content producers, who could deep-six the iTV at the drop of a hat and get into bed with Google purely out of spite. And believe me, the TV industry isn’t short on spite.
Difficulties, however, are not failures. They are made to be overcome, and Apple, if it indeed has its sights set on the living room and the burgeoning net-broadcast TV sector (for which people can be made to pay handsomely), will do what it needs to in order to seal the deal. Time, in the end, is on their side: they are sitting on enough money to choke the entirety of the TV business, and they know that their device will be a moneymaker for all involved (not the users, naturally). “Softly, softly, catchy monkey” is their motto. Google’s was a bit more “Leeroy Jenkins”.
Note that there is plenty of time for this to pan out, and the devices we’ll be seeing at CES next week will have a long, full life (which is to say, about six months) before we start seeing the inevitable reports from Digitimes of Apple ordering five million 50-inch LCD panels.
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Apple Reportedly Butting Heads With Content Producers Over iTV
bs0d3 writes “Kopimism is now an official religion in Sweden. Kopimi beliefs originated with the Swedish group called Piratbyran who believed that everything should be shared freely online without restrictions from copyright. Leader Isak Gerson, has recently had some disagreements with the Swedish Pirate Party where many people disagree with all religions.” Here’s the official website for the “Missionary Church of Kopimism.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
When things aren’t working the way you want them to, or you feel you’re surrounded by problems, it can be tempting to look outward and try to change the things that you feel are causing issues. Chances are the issues you’re facing aren’t so cut and dry. The solution to the problem might just be your attitude. That’s what pastor and educator Charles R. Swindoll believes: More »
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"Life is 10% of What Happens to Me and 90% of How I React to It" [Quotables]
diegocg writes “Linux 3.2 has been released. New features include support for Ext4 block size bigger than 4KB and up to 1MB, btrfs has added faster scrubbing, automatic backup of critical metadata and tools for manual inspection; the process scheduler has added support to set upper limits of CPU time; the desktop responsiveness in presence of heavy writes has been improved, TCP has been updated to include an algorithm which speeds up the recovery of connection after lost packets; the profiling tool ‘perf top’ has added support for live inspection of tasks and libraries. The Device Mapper has added support for ‘thin provisioning’ of storage, and a support for a new architecture has been added: Hexagon DSP processor from Qualcomm. New drivers and small improvements and fixes are also available in this release. Here’s the full list of changes.”
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Linux 3.2 Has Been Released
Macoto Murayama’s exquisite “Inorganic Herbarium” diagrams will be on display at Frantic Gallery’s booth in the Art Stage Singapore Art Fair next weekend, January 12-15. I first posted about his work back in 2009 and its evolution is nothing short of breathtaking.
This time we present exclusively large scale Botanical Diagrams by Murayama with a vast explanatory material on both botanical and technical context of his digital flowers. We will also show how the artist creates his works, beginning from vivisection of a real flower, photography, sketches and then software for 3-Dimensional drawings. For the first time, the original flowers used for the Botanical Diagrams will also be shown inside transparent vessels filled with formaldehyde.
Macoto Murayama: Botanical Diagrams
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Macoto Murayama’s incredible digital flower diagrams
MrSeb writes with this excerpt from an Extreme Tech article about the latest FreeDOS release and a bit of project history: “Some 17 years after its first release in 1994, and more than five years since 1.0, FreeDOS 1.1 is now available to download. The history of FreeDOS stems back to the summer of 1994 when Microsoft announced that MS-DOS as a separate product would no longer be supported. It would live on as part of Windows 95, 98, and (ugh!) Me, but for Jim Hall that wasn’t enough, and so public domain (PD) DOS was born. … Despite what you might think, FreeDOS isn’t an ‘old’ OS; it’s actually quite usable. FreeDOS supports FAT32, UDMA for hard drives and DVD drives, and it even has antivirus and BitTorrent clients.”
The official release announcement has more details on the improvements, and the FreeDOS website has the release for download.
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FreeDOS 1.1 Released
WiFi hacking has long been a favorite pastime of hackers, penetration testers, and people too cheap to pay for their own Internet connection. And there are plenty of targets out there for would-be hackers and war drivers to go after—just launch a WiFi scanner app in any residential neighborhood or office complex, and you’re bound to find an access point that’s either wide open or protected by weak encryption. Fortunately (or unfortunately, if you’re the one looking for free WiFi), those more blatant security holes are going away through attrition as people upgrade to newer routers or network administrators hunt down vulnerabilities and stomp them out. But as one door closes, another opens.
Last week, security researchers revealed a vulnerability in WiFi Protected Setup, an optional device configuration protocol for wireless access points. WPS lets users enter a personal identification number that is hard-coded into the access point in order to quickly connect a computer or other wireless device to the network. The structure of the WPS PIN number and a flaw in the protocol’s response to invalid requests make attacking WPS relatively simple compared to cracking a WiFi Protected Access (WPA or WPA2) password. On December 28, Craig Heffner of Tactical Network Solutions released an open-source version of an attack tool, named Reaver, that exploits the vulnerability.
To find out just how big the hole was, I downloaded and compiled Reaver for a bit of New Years geek fun. As it turns out, it’s a pretty big one—even with WPS allegedly turned off on a target router, I was able to get it to cough up the SSID and password. The only way to block the attack was to turn on Media Access Control (MAC) address filtering to block unwanted hardware.
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Hands-on: hacking WiFi Protected Setup with Reaver
The future of transportation is here, folks. We’ve spent some time with the Ford Focus Electric and have seen all the bits that make it go, but we didn’t know who’d be the first to receive one. Turns out Google got an early Christmas present, and received its Focus Electric, the first production unit, just before the holidays. That means that the gang at Big G is already enjoying the 84mph top speed and fast charging secret sauce that lets the Ford fully charge on a 240-volt outlet in just over three hours — or roughly half the time it takes a Leaf to top off its batteries. Wonder whether the EV from Dearborn is destined to join Google’s Street View fleet, its cadre of self-driving cars, or replace some of those multi-colored company bikes strewn about Mountain View?
Continue reading First Ford Focus Electric rolls off the production line into Google’s open arms
First Ford Focus Electric rolls off the production line into Google’s open arms originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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First Ford Focus Electric rolls off the production line into Google’s open arms
Update: Comet has issued the following response to Microsoft’s statement which we’ve got for you in full, after the break.
Microsoft: UK Retailer ‘sold 94,000 counterfeit copies of Windows’ (Update: Comet responds) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 Jan 2012 06:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Microsoft: UK Retailer ‘sold 94,000 counterfeit copies of Windows’ (Update: Comet responds)
