Penguin's iPad Demonstration Asks: Are Kids Destined to Grow Up With Tablets?

In all our excitement over the iPad's possibilities for text, multimedia, and gaming, there's been hardly any consideration of the lucrative children's market. But the iPad is perfect for kids in a lot of ways--its larger screen is much easier for kids to manipulate than an iPhone or other smartphone, and the full-color screen and fast processor allow for bright, colorful apps with motion, which ebook readers like the Kindle can't handle. The iPad can act as a picture book, coloring book, audiobook, TV, educational game player, and visual toy--and Penguin's not going to let that potential pass them by.
Penguin's demonstration shows the company is dedicated to exploring this category; it opens the video with children's apps, and then spends more than a third of the video showing them. The children's apps are the most eye-catching part of the demonstration...

Source: FastCompany

...quite clearly, this will morph into something like the device in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer...

Google opens Google Apps Marketplace
Google launched on Tuesday evening Google Apps Marketplace, providing a venue for third-party, cloud-based applications to supplement Google's own online applications.

The program enables integrations with such applications as Google Gmail, Documents, Sites and Calendar. All told, the effort begins with 50 vendors participating, including Atlassian, NetSuite, Skytap and Zoho.

"Tonight, what we're doing is we're announcing a business-to-business marketplace for Google Apps users, where the idea is that we want to help users get more applications for Google Apps from third-party developers," said Chris Vander Mey, Google senior product manager, in an interview on Tuesday afternoon. Among the applications is a small business payroll system from Intuit, called Intuit Online Payroll, and Box.net's self-named content management system.

Users can link to an application via the UI in Google applications, offering benefits like single sign-on and sharing of data between Google Apps and third-party applications. Centralized administration also is featured.

"As you purchase applications, they're automatically integrated into your domain," Vander Mey said. Applications can be installed within a domain via a four-click process. Google Apps Marketplace could be compared to the Apple App Store for iPhone applications or the Salesforce.com Force.com cloud application platform, said Vander Mey.

At Box.net, an official cited integration benefits of Google Apps marketplace.

"Basically, we're now pretty deeply integrated with Google Apps," said Jennifer Grant, vice president of marketing at Box.net. Users can access Box.net directly from applications such as Gmail, she said...

Source: InfoWorld

...outstanding. Death to Microsoft Office, which is nothing other than an extortionate scam perpetrated against the planet Earth...

One of the world's 'best robots ever' lost off Chile
He was one of the first successful, unmanned, free-swimming ocean robots. But now, the 15-year-old autonomous benthic explorer – beloved ABE to those that designed, built and operated him at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution – is gone, lost off the coast of Chile in the early hours of last Friday.

On its 222nd dive, researchers on the vessel Melville lost all contact with the autonomous vehicle. Best guess what happened? A catastrophic implosion of one of the glass spheres used to keep ABE buoyant. If that happened, the pressure at 1.86 miles down - two tons per square inch - would have caused all of ABE's other spheres to implode, leaving it unable to surface and destined to remain forever at sea.

ABE was brought out of retirement (its replacement, Sentry, was on another expedition) for the trip to the Chile Triple Junction, the only place on Earth where a mid-ocean ridge is being pushed beneath a continent in a deep ocean trench. On ABE's first dive, it detected evidence of hydrothermal vents and was journeying to it again on its second dive.

The loss had nothing to do with earthquake activity off Chile, researchers said.

ABE, launched in 1995, ushered in a new era of deep sea vehicles that could operate without a tether to the surface, according to researchers. It "revolutionized deep-sea exploration by expanding scientists' abilities to reach into the deep," said Chris German, National Deep-Submergence facility chief scientist and a co-chief scientist for the Chile Triple Junction expedition.

ABE could stay under water for up to a day and ventured into some of the remote and risky places on earth, making detailed maps of mid-ocean ridges and was the first autonomous vehicle to locate hydrothermal vents.

So beloved was ABE, the editors of Wired magazine in 2006 called it one of their 50 best robots ever, a mix of real and fictional robots...

Source: Boston Globe

...goodbye, Faithful Servant...

Amazon S3 Now Hosts 100 Billion Objects
Amazon Web Services has quietly passed an interesting benchmark: the company's S3 storage service now hosts more than 100 billion objects. This factoid was noted this morning at Data Center World, when keynote speaker Brian Lillie of Equinix said that Amazon now is hosting 102 billion objects in S3 (Simple Storage Service).

Over the past year, the number of objects stored on S3 has grown from 54 billion to 100 billion, according to Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, who mentioned this startling growth curve in his recent presentation at the Cebit computer trade show in Germany.

It's a fuzzy milestone, to be sure, as we don't know how much infrastructure is required to store those 100 billion objects, or how much revenue Amazon is generating from them. But in an industry where we're used to big numbers, 100 billion is an eye-popping total. By any measure, that's a huge storage cloud, and likely a sign of things to come...

Source: Data Center Knowledge

...word to you wise parental units, point your spawn in the right directions...

BusinessWeek Prepares for Round Two of Layoffs
The other shoe is about to drop at BusinessWeek -- or Bloomberg BusinessWeek, as it's been officially known since the financial news giant bought it last October.

Shortly after taking over the 80-year-old magazine, Bloomberg pruned its staff by a reported 30%. Sharp as those cuts were, the new owners made it known that there would be another round of downsizing sometime before the magazine moved from its home in the McGraw-Hill building to its new offices in at Bloomberg headquarters in May.

According to sources, that round will commence on Thursday. One insider characterized it as a realignment intended to pave the way for a sweeping redesign of the magazine, which will debut April 23...

Source: DailyFinance

...ah, that's a shame...

Mile-High Mega Kites Could Pull Giant, Floating Power Plants

Take a huge oceanic catamaran, stick a hydroelectric turbine underneath it, and hitch it to a 6.5 million-square-foot parafoil flying nearly a mile in the air. That's a Korean research team's new proposal for generating gigawatts of clean energy.

As the parafoil pulls the boat, seawater would be forced through the turbine, which generates electricity. The 800 megawatts of electricity produced would separate seawater into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis, and the hydrogen would then be stored on-board the ships.

"The calculation shows that, with a large such ship, a gigawatt order electrical power may be harvested by this system," wrote Park Chul of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute and Kim Jongchul of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, in the journal Energy in March.

"If such ships are deployed at 20-km (12.4-mile) intervals over two temperate zones, one in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the Northern Hemisphere and the other everywhere in the Southern Hemisphere, the total power produced will be many times that needed by the world," they wrote...

Source: Wired News

...just fabulous...

Lindsay Lohan wants $100M over E-Trade ad
The world revolves around Lindsay.

Lindsay Lohan is suing the financial company E-Trade, insisting that a boyfriend-stealing, "milkaholic" baby in its latest commercial -- who happens to be named Lindsay -- was modeled after her. And she wants $100 million for her pain and suffering, The Post has learned.

The actress filed a lawsuit yesterday in Nassau County Supreme Court over the commercial that debuted during the Super Bowl this year.

The ad -- part of a series starring babies who play the stock market -- features a boy apologizing to his girlfriend via video chat for not calling her the night before.

"And that milkaholic Lindsay wasn't over?" the baby girl asks him suspiciously.
"Lindsay?" the boy replies, just before a baby girl sticks her head into the frame and slurs, "Milk-a-what?"

Lohan's lawyer, Stephanie Ovadia, said the actress has the same single-name recognition as Oprah or Madonna.

"Many celebrities are known by one name only, and E-Trade is using that knowledge to profit," Ovadia said.

"They used the name Lindsay," Ovadia said. "They're using her name as a parody of her life. Why didn't they use the name Susan? This is a subliminal message. Everybody's talking about it and saying it's Lindsay Lohan."

Ovadia wants an injunction to force the spot off the air, and the Lindsay camp wants every last copy of the commercial.

Chris Brown, a spokesman for Grey Group, which produced the spot, is throwing cold milk on the controversy, saying it "just used a popular baby name that happened to be the name of someone on the account team."...

Source: NY Post

...I don't even know what a Lindsay Lohan is. But I do know this; "All lawyers suck. They say they don't, but they do." ^®...

Cisco Introduces a 322 Tbit/sec. Router
Today Cisco Systems introduced its next-generation Internet core router, the CRS-3, with about three times the capacity of its current platform. 'The Internet will scale faster than any of us anticipate,' Cisco's John Chambers said while announcing the product. At full scale, the CRS-3 has a capacity of 322Tbit/sec., roughly three times that of the CRS-1, introduced in 2004. It also has more than 12 times the capacity of its nearest competitor, Chambers said.

The CRS-3 will help the Internet evolve from a messaging to an entertainment and media platform, with video emerging as the 'killer app,' Chambers said. Using a CRS-3, every person in China, which has a population just over 1.3 billion, could participate in a video phone call at the same time. (Or you could pump nearly one Library of Congress per second through the device, or give everyone in San Fransisco a 1Gbps internet connection.) AT&T said it has been using the CRS-3 to test 100Gbit/sec. data links in tests on a commercial fiber route in Florida and Louisiana.

Source: Slashdot

...smokin'...

Doctors Skirt FDA To Heal Patients With Stem Cells
For many years countless individuals in the US have had to watch with envy as dogs and horses with joint and bone injuries have been cured with stem cell procedures that the FDA has refused to approve for humans. Now, in an exciting development, Regenerative Sciences Inc. in Colorado has found a way to skirt the FDA and provide these same stem cell treatments to humans. The results have been stunning, allowing many patients to walk or run who have not been able to do so for years. There's no surgery required, just a needle to extract and then re-inject the cells where they are needed. There has always been a lot of hype around stem cells, but this is the real deal. Real humans are getting real treatment that works, and we should all hope that more companies will begin offering this procedure in other states soon...

Source: Slashdot

...I do cherish and defend their right to reject all medical treatment, especially if done before they breed...

Wine may help women keep weight in check
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Light to moderate alcohol consumption, especially red wine, is not only good for a woman's heart, it's also good for her waistline, according to a study reported Monday.


The study started out with nearly 20,000 trim middle-aged and older women. Over time, women who drank alcohol in moderation put on less weight and were less apt to become overweight compared to non-drinkers. This was true even after taking into account various lifestyle and dietary factors that might influence a woman's weight.

Red wine seemed best at keeping weight in check, but white wine, beer and spirits also had some benefit.

"Our study results showed that middle-aged and older women who have normal body weight initially and consume light-to-moderate amount of alcohol could maintain their drinking habits without gaining more weight compared with similar women who did not drink any alcohol," Dr. Lu Wang from the division of preventive medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, noted in an email to Reuters Health.

Many prior studies have suggested that moderate drinking -- usually defined as a drink or two a day -- can be a healthy habit, particularly with regard to heart health, while heavy drinking can harm health...

...Over an average of about 13 years, the women generally gained weight. However, the teetotalers gained the most weight, with weight gain decreasing with increasing amount of alcohol consumed.

Women who did not drink gained an average of 3.63 kilograms (8 pounds) compared with 1.55 kilograms (3.4 pounds) for those who consumed 30 grams of alcohol or more each day.

During the 13 years the initially normal-weight women were followed, 41 percent became overweight or obese. Women who drank 15 to less than 30 grams per day had the lowest risk of becoming overweight or obese, which was 30 percent less than that of non-drinkers...

Source: Reuters

...there goes the budget...