Technology News

Tech Innovator in Japan Sets It's Sights on China

Source: Michael Ricci
June 1, 2010

A Japanese technology giant little known outside Asia is racing to capture the booming Chinese Internet market. And in the process, it hopes to become a global player straddling what is fast becoming the worlds most wired region.

We want to be No. 1 in Asia on the Internet, said Masayoshi Son, the chief of Softbank, who founded the company in 1981.

The company, Softbank, already trumps Google in Japan, where it has the countrys most popular search engine and ...

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Pakistani Court Orders Access to Facebook Restored

Source: Michael Ricci
June 1, 2010

A Pakistani court on Monday ordered the government to restore access to Facebook, nearly two weeks after it blocked the social networking Web site amid anger over a Facebook page that solicited images of the Prophet Muhammad. Images or drawings of the prophet are considered blasphemous by most Muslims. We cannot block access to information, said Justice Ejaz Ahmed Chaudhry, a High Court judge in the city of Lahore who had also issued the original ban. Still, in the ruling, ...

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Chinese Edge Toward Supercomputing Record

Source: Michael Ricci
June 1, 2010

A Chinese supercomputer has ranked as the worlds second fastest machine, surpassing European and Japanese systems and underscoring China's aggressive commitment to science and technology. The Dawning Nebulae, based at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, China, has achieved a sustained computing speed of 1.27 petaflops the equivalent of one thousand trillion mathematical operations per second in the twice annual ranking of the worlds fastest 500 hundred computer. The newest Top 500 ranking is scheduled to be made public on ...

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Skype over 3G Comes to the iPhone. It's Not All Good News

Source: All About Jazz
May 31, 2010

Skype on Saturday released an upgrade to its iPhone app that allows calls to be made and received under AT&Ts 3G network, but theres a catch they wont be free for very long.

Even for Skype-to-Skype calls or for people who have all-you-can-eat calling plans with the internet telephony company.

No specific pricing or even timeline was announced, but the release notes of version 2.0.0 say this feature will be free only until at least the end of August 2010, ...

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Suicides a PR Nightmare for Apple

Source: All About Jazz
May 29, 2010

How Chinese Suicides Could Hurt Apple: A giant manufacturer of iPhones and other popular electronics has a bad employee problem: they're killing themselves.

Western shoppers in general don't spend a lot of time thinking about the origins of their brand-name sneakers and electronic devices. But when a sweatshop controversy arises, it can mean trouble for companies like Nike and Gap.

So the spate of troubling suicides at Foxconn Technology Group, a major Chinese manufacturer of consumer electronics, presents a problem ...

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Skinbook: Facebook for 21st Century Nudists

Source: All About Jazz
May 29, 2010

The rules for Skinbook are clear: No pornographic images or headless torso shots. Don't leave sleazy comments under people's photos.

Boot out any “creeps and voyeurs," as site executives call them, who manage to make it past the vetting process for new members.

Skinbook.ning.com is a U.K.-based website that proudly touts itself as the Net's only genuine nudist social network. Skinbook capitalizes on users' familiarity with Facebook-style member profiles, messages, forums and groups. Except that, unlike on Facebook, everyone's naked. ...

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How Computers Know What We Want Before We Do

Source: All About Jazz
May 29, 2010

Here's an experiment: try thinking of a song not as a song but as a collection of distinct musical attributes. Maybe the song has political lyrics. That would be an attribute.

Maybe it has a police siren in it, or a prominent banjo part, or paired vocal harmony, or punk roots. Any one of those would be an attribute. A song can have as many as 400 attributes those are just a few of the ones filed under p. This ...

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The 2010 Airstream International RV: Nature, Meet Man-Made Wonder

Source: Michael Ricci
May 29, 2010

Like a lot of Angelenos, I like to ditch the city every once in a while and experience nature. Briefly. My last escape involved 1,000 or so Cub Scouts, a battered, borrowed tent and two days of port-a-potties and pump-station water. This time around I was looking to rough it, but rough it “lite," during a weekend getaway with my best friend and our two young children. Enter the 2010 Airstream International, whose manufacturer, like many RV companies this year, ...

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