Cisco, NASA Plan ‘Planetary Skin’ For Monitoring Earth Climate
Slatterz writes “Cisco has inked a deal with NASA to build a new global system for tracking climate change. Dubbed ‘Planetary Skin,’ the network platform will connect a number of sensor and recording units throughout the planet in an effort to gather data for monitoring and tracking changes to the global climate. The company plans to begin building the system next year with a program called ‘Rainforest Skin’ which will track both climate change and deforestation in rainforest environments. Eventually, the company plans to take the system throughout the planet and create a global network of data-collecting systems for the project. A podcast and a video explain the project in further detail.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Film Piracy, Organized Crime and Terrorism
flip-flop writes “The RAND Corporation has just released a lengthy report titled “Film Piracy, Organized Crime, and Terrorism” which attempts to link all three. The authors suggest that organized crime might be financing itself in part through movie piracy (PDF) — and in three out of 14 of their international case studies, they claim that profits from piracy end up with suspected terrorist organizations. But now for the interesting part! Quote from the preface: ‘The study was made possible by a grant from the Motion Picture Association (MPA).’ Ah, what a surprise…” The RAND Corporation has made a video summary of the report as well. TorrentFreak has an article disputing some of the report’s claims, focusing criticism on RAND’s interchangeable use of the terms “piracy” and “counterfeiting” — the report deals with the physical distribution of DVDs, making only brief mention of digital downloads. The MPAA and others have barked up this tree before.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple’s iPhone Developer Crisis
David Gerard writes “iPhone development sounds closed-shop but simple — apply to be a developer, put application on the App Store, you and Apple make money. Except Apple can’t keep up with the request load — whereas getting a developer contract used to take a couple of days, it’s now taking months. Some early developers’ contracts are expiring with no notice of renewal options. And Apple has no idea what’s going on or the state of things. If you want to maintain a completely closed system, it helps if you can actually keep up with it.” Reader h11:6 points out news of a recent study which suggests that “Android’s open source nature will give it a boost over Apple’s iPhone,” and thus take the lead in sales as soon as three years from now. It will be interesting to see how they deal with the flood of proposed apps as their popularity rises.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I’m sorry but Dreamweaver is dying
The real problem for Dreamweaver and for its users is that the nature of the web is changing dramatically. Dynamically-generated web applications, from Amazon right down to the humble blog, all offer much more – in-built commenting, voting, RSS feeds, etc – than the best sites built on static HTML can ever hope to provide.
I’m sorry but Dreamweaver is dying
The real problem for Dreamweaver and for its users is that the nature of the web is changing dramatically. Dynamically-generated web applications, from Amazon right down to the humble blog, all offer much more – in-built commenting, voting, RSS feeds, etc – than the best sites built on static HTML can ever hope to provide.
Twitterfall: a Google for the Twitterverse
Twitterfall: a Google for the Twitterverse
Welcome to the Hive Mind; Learn How to Search Twitter
I set out to learn more about the search feature, which is what so many are saying will be where Twitter makes its money, and found all of my advanced theorizing led me to a pretty basic page that held … If you go to http://search.twitter.com/advanced you can literally see all of the different ways you can search
Welcome to the Hive Mind; Learn How to Search Twitter
I set out to learn more about the search feature, which is what so many are saying will be where Twitter makes its money, and found all of my advanced theorizing led me to a pretty basic page that held … If you go to http://search.twitter.com/advanced you can literally see all of the different ways you can search