Stop watching movies and TV shows according to Hollywood’s schedule! With video-on-demand, you can watch TV whenever you want, wherever you want, and you don’t even have to remember to program a box to record it. Here’s MaximumPC’s take on the major online VOD services available today. More
Researchers have figured out a way to make diamond aerogel. The aerogel is only 40 times as dense as air. Someday, it make coat the windows, the TV, and the inside of a person’s body. More
Microsoft will buy Skype for $8.5bn in cash, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Skype will become a new business division within Microsoft, and Skype Chief Executive Tony Bates will assume the title of president of the Microsoft Skype Division, reporting directly to Mr. Ballmer.
Buying Skype–a service that links users via Internet-based telephony and video–gives Microsoft a recognized brand name on the Internet at a time when it is struggling to get more traction in the consumer market.
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Microsoft to buy Skype for $8.5bn
The next time you’re low on toilet cleaner, just drop two Alka Seltzer tablets in the bowl and come back a few minutes later with the toilet brush to finish the job. More
What’s shaping up to be an epic week in tech news may be about to become even more exciting for T-Mobile fans. Internal employee docs are giving out some serious vibes that the company is ready to push out three important features to many of its phones as early as tomorrow. The first one to put a smile on your face is unlimited WiFi calling, which should be available as a free add-on to the Even More, Even More Plus, and 4G Do More plans. We’re glad to see the service come back as a freebie, much better than the $9.99 per month asking price when it was hotspot@home. As if that isn’t good enough by itself, the other services getting prepped for tomorrow’s lineup include Name ID — a caller ID service that shows the name, number, city, and state of anyone not listed in your contacts — and Voicemail-to-Text, a new enhancement to the existing Visual Voicemail service that transcribes the full message into text form on select devices. Keep in mind that while these docs certainly do look official, it’s all mere speculation until we hear actual word from T-Mobile about these new programs. With that said, we’ve got screenshots above and below, so feel free to glean as many details as possible from them.
T-Mobile leak divulges return of unlimited WiFi calls, may add Name ID and Voicemail-to-Text originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 May 2011 09:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Graphene, is there anything it can’t do? Researchers are already trying to put it in processors, fuel cells, and batteries — now your internet connection might get ten-times faster thanks to the silicon successor. Researchers at UC Berkeley have created tiny, one-atom-thick modulators that could switch the data-carrying light on and off in a fiber-optic connection much faster than current technology. In addition to running at a higher frequency (the team believes it will scale up to 500GHz — modern modulators run at about 1GHz) the smaller, 25-micron size means thinner cables could be used, reducing capacitance and further boosting speeds. Labs have already crossed the 100 terabit threshold and graphene could push that even higher, yet we’re still stuck staring at a buffering screen every time we try to Netflix Degrassi.
Continue reading Graphene-powered web could download 3-D movies in seconds, give MPAA nightmares
Graphene-powered web could download 3-D movies in seconds, give MPAA nightmares originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 May 2011 05:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Image via Wikipedia
The official scrabble list of words has undergone another update to reflect the changing nature of language. The big news is that there are two new words using the letter Q that do not require U.
QIN (n): A Chinese zither, with strings stretched across a flat box. Scrabble score: 12
and
FIQH (n): An expansion of Islamic sharia law, based directly on the Koran and Sunnah. Scrabble score: 19
So, word up folks. Print this out and be prepared. There are other words also added to the list including Wagyu (a Japanese Beef) and Webzine (which should make us all happy).
(via The Scotsman)
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Important Scrabble News: Two New Q (without U) Words
In the midst of a blog post welcoming us to “the future of video” head of YouTube Salar Kamangar confirms that starting today it will add around 3,000 new movie titles for rental in the US, along with reviews and behind the scenes extras. More details are promised to come in another post later today, but right now the video page appears to have the same list of flicks we’ve seen before so the question of which studios will bite is still up in the air. The rest of the post also mentions the YouTube Next program to push new original content on the site with “much more to come” — consider the week of Google I/O underway.
Update:Additional details have been posted on the YouTube Blog and are also after the break — NBC Universal, Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. are the new studios YouTube is partnering with to add the 3,000 new and catalog releases, doubling the amount previously available. The pricing is $2.99/$3.99 for movies viewable via PC or Google TV (no other device support is mentioned) and the FAQ notes that YouTube supports resolutions up to 4K but “most” of the new additions are sadly in SD, a choice which is apparently up to its partners.
Update 2: The YouTube Movies page is updated now, as seen above. There’s plenty of well known movies to be seen now replacing the catalog of older and indie movies that filled the page before. Rotten Tomatoes ratings integration is also front and center, while the Extras are on each movies individual page, but really just show a list of related videos on YouTube, while there doesn’t appear to be a way to tell if a movies is one of the few in HD before you pay.
YouTube adds 3,000 movies for rental from Universal, Sony, Warner Bros. (Update: they’re live) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 May 2011 15:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Heat sinks may not ordinarily be the most exciting sort of component — but the world’s thinnest air-cooled heat sink? That’s… something. According to the folks at Novel Concepts, their new credit card-sized, 0.75mm thick ThinSink has now laid claim to that title, and it may soon lead to thinner tablets, laptops and monitors. What’s more, despite its small size, the company claims that the ThinSink still has a cooling efficiency “25 times greater than today’s best microprocessor heat sinks,” and it consumes just 0.031 watts of electricity when equipped with a fan spinning at 6,000 RPM. Those interested in an evaluation unit will have to fork over a hefty $750, but the company promises it will be cheaper in larger quantities, and notes that it could also easily be stamped or molded from metal or plastic, as it only consists of two thin flat parts in addition to the motor.
Continue reading Novel Concepts’ ThinSink claims title of world’s thinnest air-cooled heat sink
Novel Concepts’ ThinSink claims title of world’s thinnest air-cooled heat sink originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 May 2011 18:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
One of the main limitations on touchscreen interfaces these days is that all you can do is poke at them. We do all kinds of things with our hands, but when it comes to screens, we just poke at them all day. UIs are doing all right, since our phone OSes still mimic mouse-based desktop OSes to some extent, but Microsoft is looking to ways to integrate more natural hand gestures incorporating more than just a “click” derived from a fingertip.
Hrvoje Benko, a researcher at Microsoft, is working on methods of recognizing shapes formed by hands and equating those with spatially-consistent gestures. Putting the side of your hand down like a wall forms a straight line that could be used for a boundary, cropping, or “pushing” objects. Forming an O with your hand could automatically call up the magnification loupe, and so on.
It’s a very natural extension of how you interact with a surface, since really, that’s how you interact with most surfaces. Right now “Rock and Rails” only includes support for three gestures: a fist, which holds things down, a straight hand, which sets a line to which UI elements can move perpendicular, and a “curved rail,” which sets a pivot point. I’m sure you can imagine a few more, but at the same time, limiting the “vocabulary” of a UI is part of making it usable. Nobody wants to remember a dozen different gestures.
Speaking of surfaces, the video shows the tech being demonstrated on a Surface, which uses a different detection method than your average smartphone or tablet — it can detect shapes far more easily. And the new Surface units, as we learned at CES, have thousands of pixel-sized cameras that can even detect patterns and text. So don’t expect this kind of special recognition to come to iPads any time soon, although it would be similarly unwise to underestimate developers who might want to make it happen.
The whole paper is being published later, so unfortunately this video is pretty much all there is right now, but if you head over to Hrvoje’s page, you can keep track of this and his other projects.
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Microsoft Research Looking Into Better, Whole-Hand Touchscreen Gestures