Starbucks Corp opened the first store in its new Evolution Fresh juice bar chain on Monday, its biggest move outside coffee aimed at boosting the company’s position in the $50 billion health food sector.
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Starbucks goes beyond coffee with first juice bar
It looks like Mozilla is ready to throw in the towel in its battle against the patent-laden H.264 video codec. Over the last week or so, the software foundation has struggled publicly with whether or not to support the MPEG-LA-owned format. Now several of Firefox’s biggest players have all come out in support of the move and all that’s left is to actually bake the appropriate code into the browser. Both chairman Mitchell Baker and CTO Brendan Eich embraced the decision this weekend, however begrudgingly, in blog posts. Both admit that success in the mobile space requires them to abandon the quest to make WebM the standard for streaming video in HTML5. Even with Google’s support, at least on the desktop, VP8 was never able to seriously threaten the entrenched and battery-friendly (not to mention, Apple and Microsoft backed) H.264. For more details check out the source links.
Mozilla caves, will support H.264 to avoid ‘irrelevance’ originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Mozilla caves, will support H.264 to avoid ‘irrelevance’
Microsoft and NetClean, a software company focused on tools for stopping the spread of child pornography online, have announced that they are partnering to give law enforcement agencies access to Microsoft’s PhotoDNA image-matching technology at no cost to help in the investigation of child sex abuse cases. The software can be used to comb through collections of digital images to identify copies of known child porn images, speeding up the forensics work of investigators.
Developed by Microsoft in cooperation with Dartmouth College, PhotoDNA uses an approach similar to facial recognition and other biometric systems to mathematically create a signature for a particular image. In an e-mail exchange with Ars Technica, a Microsoft spokesperson said that PhotoDNA uses a mathematical approach called robust hashing, “calculating a unique signature into a ‘hash’ that represents the essence of a particular photo.” The hash can’t be used to recreate the image or identify individuals within the photo—meaning that law enforcement and others investigating child pornography don’t have to retain copies of the offending images on their systems. But it can be used to match copies of images even if they have been resized or altered in other ways, the spokesperson said.
The technology is already in use by Microsoft and Facebook in cooperation with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Microsoft is offering the technology through NetClean’s free tool for law enforcement, NetClean Analyze, as well as through direct licensing of source code to agencies who want to integrate PhotoDNA into their own tools. Microsoft is also building the techology into the Child Exploitation Tracking System, software that the company originally developed in cooperation with Canadian law enforcement and is now managed and used by a consortium of US and international agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and FBI.
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Microsoft gives photo-matching tech to cops to fight child pornography
Apple’s third-generation iPad, colloquially referred to as the iPad 3, is already setting Apple sales records after its first weekend on the market. Apple announced on Monday afternoon that it has already sold 3 million devices since the iPad’s launch on March 16.
The iPad 3 includes a number of upgrades over the iPad 2, including a sharp “retina” display, an autofocus 5MP iSight camera, and 4G LTE networking options. The iPad 3 also has beefed up graphics capabilities and battery capacity, largely to power its 4x resolution increase.
Those features clearly caught the attention of both previous iPad users as well as new iPad users; one survey we saw suggested that half of those waiting in line to buy one last Friday were first-time iPad users. For comparison, the original iPad sold about 3 million units in its first full quarter of availability. And though the iPhone still outsells the iPad by a significant margin, the iPhone 4S sold 4 million units during its launch weekend.
AT&T also claimed that the new iPad set a new single day device activation record for the company. This record was most recently set by the iPhone 4S last October.
The launch of the iPad 3 is Apple’s most aggressive so far. Already available in the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Switzerland, UK, and the US Virgin Islands, it will be available in 24 more countries starting this Friday, March 23. Those countries include Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Macau, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden.
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Apple moves 3 million third-generation iPads over launch weekend
We knew good and well that Microsoft was aiming for a 2012 launch of its latest and greatest operating system, and if sources reporting to Bloomberg are accurate, it looks like we’ll have a date with Mrs. October. Purportedly, work will wrap on Win8 this summer, with PCs and tablets (!) to ship in October carrying the newfangled OS. We’re told that the initial rollout will include devices running Intel and ARM processors, and not surprisingly, this positions Microsoft to make a serious play for holiday dollars. Still wondering if it’s for you? Give the Consumer Preview a run, won’tcha?
Microsoft aiming for October 2012 release of Windows 8, tablets and PCs on deck originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Microsoft aiming for October 2012 release of Windows 8, tablets and PCs on deck
Golan sez, “The Free Universal Construction Kit is a collection of adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability between ten popular children’s construction toys. By allowing any piece to join to any other, the Kit encourages totally new forms of intercourse between otherwise closed systems—enabling the creation of previously impossible designs, and ultimately, more creative opportunities for kids. As with other grassroots interoperability remedies, the Free Universal Construction Kit implements proprietary protocols in order to provide a public service unmet, or unmeetable, by corporate interests.”
F.A.T. Lab and Sy-Lab are pleased to present the Free Universal Construction Kit: a matrix of nearly 80 adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability between ten* popular children’s construction toys. By allowing any piece to join to any other, the Kit encourages totally new forms of intercourse between otherwise closed systems—enabling radically hybrid constructive play, the creation of previously impossible designs, and ultimately, more creative opportunities for kids. As with other grassroots interoperability remedies, the Free Universal Construction Kit implements proprietary protocols in order to provide a public service unmet—or unmeetable—by corporate interests.
The Free Universal Construction Kit offers adapters between Lego, Duplo, Fischertechnik, Gears! Gears! Gears!, K’Nex, Krinkles (Bristle Blocks), Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Zome, and Zoob. Our adapters can be downloaded from Thingiverse.com and other sharing sites as a set of 3D models in .STL format, suitable for reproduction by personal manufacturing devices like the Makerbot (an inexpensive, open-source 3D printer).
OK, that’s pretty badass right there.
The Free Universal Construction Kit
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3D-printed adapter bricks allow interconnection between ten kids’ construction toys
When Apple dropped the second developer preview of Mountain Lion on Friday it didn’t see fit to include release notes, instead leaving it to us and the rest of the blogosphere to dig up the new features ourselves. The big ones are clearly Twitter alerts in the Notification Center and the introduction of tab syncing in Safari through iCloud. The latter of which should sooth iPhone fans that were jealous of Chrome for Android. Smaller enhancements were also turned on, including warnings when a program asks to access your contacts and location-based alarms in the Reminders app — which can be shared with your iOS-based mobile device as well. We’ll keep looking for more, but let us know you discover any new features in the comments.
Mountain Lion Developer Preview 2’s new features detailed originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Mountain Lion Developer Preview 2’s new features detailed
wiredmikey writes “Earlier this month, researchers from Kaspersky Lab reached out to the security and programming community in an effort to help solve a mystery related to ‘Duqu,’ the Trojan often referred to as ‘Son of Stuxnet’, which surfaced in October 2010. The mystery rested in a section of code written an unknown programming language and used in the Duqu Framework, a portion of the Payload DLL used by the Trojan to interact with Command & Control (C&C) servers after the malware infected system. Less than two weeks later, Kaspersky Lab experts now say with a high degree of certainty that the Duqu framework was written using a custom object-oriented extension to C, generally called ‘OO C’ and compiled with Microsoft Visual Studio Compiler 2008 (MSVC 2008) with special options for optimizing code size and inline expansion.”
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Rick Prelinger sez,
I’m delighted to let everyone know about our newest Internet Archive collection which, for want of a cooler title, we’re calling 35mm Stock Footage. Digitized from 35mm original negatives and release prints dating back to the first decade of the 20th century, these unedited sequences were shot for feature films but never used. Studio librarians saved them for use in future productions, and now you can download and use them yourself in a variety of formats, including 720p HD, absolutely free. As far as I know, this is Internet Archive’s first all-HD collection.
In the first wave of materials: a trip across the George Washington Bridge in the late 1940s, a snake slithering on rainy ground, aerials of Hollywood studios, 1940s Southern California hotrodders, stunt flying, miniature airplanes crashing, the Staten Island Ferry in the 1930s, and much more. Much of the footage is “process plates” — film shot for the rear-projection screens you see out of car, taxi and train windows in old movies.
We’ve also digitized HD versions of newsreels and short subjects from the 1920s and 1930s, and there are even French “primitive-era” silent films dating back as far as 1905. Please get lost in this collection, make your own movies with it (please upload them to Internet Archive if you can!), and keep watching for more.
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Trove of free, public domain HD video
Thinkcloud writes “The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 3.5.1. Some of the core fixes include: don’t crash for empty input data in charts, UI fix on PDF export dialog, don’t copy page styles into temporary clipboard doc, and use the correct db range for the copy. ‘Another milestone for the LibreOffice project was hit this past month as well. “The number of TDF hackers has overtaken the threshold of 400 code developers, with a large majority of independent volunteers and several companies paying full time hackers.” Although some are paid developers, no company employs more than 7% of developers, keeping the project independent and self-governing.'”
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LibreOffice 3.5.1 Released With Fixes