Sharp has introduced a new laptop that features an LCD screen as the trackpad. The Sharp Mebius PC-NJ70A has an LCD built in to the trackpad. The screen can output 854×480 and the brightness automatically adjusts to ambient light. The trackpad also can be used as a secondary display for programs.
Surprisingly the PC-NJ70A is not a laptop, it is a netbook. Having a trackpad like this instantly distinguishes this netbook from the rest of the competition. Other features include a 10.1″ display screen, 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, 3 USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet, Bluetooth, WiFi and multicard reader. The netbook runs on Vista which may require some sort of RAM upgrade since 1GB is not enough.
Although a price has not be announced for the U.S. market yet, rumor has it that it will cost $800 in Japan.
California Governor Arnold Schwarznegger has been very critical of the Detroit-based automotive companies, but his opinion is beginning to change.
In September 2008, FORA.tv caught the Governor giving a speech discussing the Tesla opening a plant in California rather than New Mexico. Schwarznegger asked the audience think of how a company that never made a car before can make one that is completely electric and the car companies in Detroit couldn’t do it. “Arnold to Detroit: Get off your butt,” stated Schwarznegger in the video.
Yesterday Schwarznegger gave his thumbs up towards a 100 miles per gallon hybrid version of the Hummer yesterday when it was introduced in Detroit. The hybrid Hummer vehicle that was introduced at the Society of Automotive Engineers World Congress is called the Raser H3.
“There is nothing wrong with the Hummer; it’s great vehicle,” stated the Governor in an interview with The Detroit News. “We should change the technology within those vehicles.” Schwarznegger himself owns 12 vehicles.
General Motors worked with Raser to produce the vehicle even though the automotive company is considering dropping production on the Hummer line of automobiles. Schwarznegger will be one of the first ones to be given a Raser H3.
Microsoft Corporation and Mayo Clinic have partnered on a new website that focuses on storing personal medical and health information. The Mayo Clinic Health Manager website is powered by Microsoft HealthVault. By storing medical records on the Health Manager website, clients are able to transfer their data to new clinics or hospital specialists.
Some of the data that can be stored includes medical history, hospital visits, and heart rate monitors. Anyone is allowed to sign up for an account and not just Mayo patients. When signing up for the service, the website will ask several questions and make recommendations based on that information.
While many people advocate using services like these as it may be more secure than paper files and reduces medical errors, others have been against the service due to privacy. Deven McGraw, Director of the healthy privacy project of the Center for Democracy and Technology stated that Health Manager is not covered by national laws that specify that health care systems can access and share information without consent.
Two years ago The Richter Scales made a parody song of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire and called it Here Comes Another Bubble. Part of the song lyrics include, “Blog, blog, blog it all! Blog it if its big or small. Blog at the cineplex, etc.” That is exactly what people all over the world is doing and many are making a living out of it, including myself. Through Pulse2.com I am able to afford a salary that is comparable to what corporations were paying me in the past and it is able to pay for an office in a commercial area of Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’m not the only one that is able to pull this off.
The Wall Street Journal reports that there are as many people making a living as bloggers as there are lawyers in the country. There is about 20 million bloggers in the nation of which 1.7 million are profiting from the Internet trend. About 452,000 people in America are using blogging as their primary source of income.
Three out of every four bloggers are college educated and most of them are white males that report above average income levels. Bloggers who are able to do it for a living successfully are about 2% of bloggers overall. Blogs that are able to receive 100,000 unique visitors per month have a high chance of hitting $75,000 in monthly income through advertisements and paid blog posts.
Even though bloggers work very long hours and are constantly finding ways to distinguish themselves from the rest of the herd, most of them report that they are overwhelmingly happy.
What makes blogging such an attraction is the low cost to entry and no barriers to entry. To a certain extend, writing your opinion about anything you want is backed by the First Amendment’s freedom of speech and freedom of the press. So far blogs have been doing okay in surviving the recession, but it is rather ambiguous what will happen when professional bloggers lose work. Will they be covered by unemployment and whether they are covered as journalists under shield laws?
Regardless the numbers are extremely staggering. The kind of money that can be made by just typing words on a computer and publishing it on an independent website is staggering. It will be amazing to see where blogging technology takes us from here.
Chuck Rosenberg, Andy Hertzfeld, and Michael Cohen have discussed the new features that are coming out of Google Labs this week. Google Labs is a place where Google employees can design, research, and brainstorm ideas for the company to launch as part of the 20% free time at the company. Out of Google Labs, ideas such as Google Maps, iGoogle, and Google News has been introduced. The two newest services to arrive in Google Labs are Similar Images and Google News Timeline.
Similar Images is a feature where Google Images uses a visual similarity engine to find images that are related to each other. The reasoning behind creating this feature is to solve the problem of finding the right image if you can’t describe it in words.
Google News Timeline chronologically organizes results on Google News. Users can navigate the news by using the time scale on days, weeks, years, months, years, or decades.
In order to keep up with all of the ideas that Google engineers are coming up with, the company launched Googlelabs.com. The new website also centralizes all of the Labs information that relate to GMail, Google News, Google Office, Google Code, etc.
Fourty seven year old Susan Boyle shocked the judges and the audience on Britain’s Got Talent by her voice when singing I Dreamed A Dream from Les Misérables. According to video metrics company Visible Measures, the video has been watched over 100 million times. These video views include placements, original performances, fan responses, interviews, etc.
This video was just as much as a shock as 6 year old Connie Talbot singing Somewhere Over The Rainbow on the same show. That video has also generated millions of views on YouTube and other websites.
When I was about 5 years old, the original Nintendo Game Boy console was introduced to the video game market. Anyone that owned one back then must have been addicted to games such as Tetris, The Simpsons: Bart vs. The Juggernauts, and NBA All-Star Challenge.
The original Game Boy retailed for $94 at the launch. During the Christmas season of the handheld console’s launch, about 1 million units were sold. To date, about 118.7 million original Game Boys have been sold which does not include the Game Boy Advance.
The original Nintendo Game Boy revolutionized the handheld console market as a whole. After the Game Boy was introduced many competitors launched shortly after. Competitors included the Sega Game Gear, the TurboExpress, and the Atari Lynx.
The Game Boy was created by Gunpei Yokoi and Nintendo’s Research and Development 1. The Game Boy was Nintendo’s second handheld console after they made the Game & Watch series of products. Nintendo took the Game & Watch model, combined it with the NES console and came up with the idea for the Game Boy.
The specs of the original Game Boy are below:
-8 bit Sharp LR35902 core at 4.19 MHz
-8kB of internal S-RAM
-256-byte bootstrap ROM
-2 Square Waves of sound with 1 programmable 32-sample 4-bit PCM Wave, 1 White noise, and one audio input from the cartridge. The Game Boy had one speaker, but headphones helped provide stereo sound
-160×144 pixel Reflective LCD
-4 shades of “gray” (with range from green to very green)
-2 Game Boy devices could be linked together using built-in serial ports
-4 AA batteries could provide up to 35 hours of life)
-Dimensions 90 mm (W) x 148 mm (H) x 32mm (D)
Last week I wrote about Park Dae-sung, a blogger that falsely reported that the country of South Korean banned banks from purchasing U.S. currency. Today the court granted him freedom as part of the decision that was set for today. Park Dae-sung also known by his online alias Minerva was arrested in January and it was heavily debated how much freedom of expression should be tolerated online. Dae-sung could have been prisoned for 5 years. Dae-sung is an unemployed 31 year old that predicted the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the crashing of the South Korean currency, and the effect of the American subprime mortgage crisis in South Korea.
Minerva sometimes took his written attacks too far. He heavily criticized the government’s actions in responding to the financial crisis and often times was mistaken in the facts. After that the government blamed him for undermining financial markets. As part of Dae-sung’s release, the judge stated that there was no evidence that he “had the intention to undermine public interest.” Dae-sung may not have actually known that the facts he was writing were false.
Dae-sung’s prosecutors were looking for at least an 18 month sentence. In court, Dae-sung stated “South Korea may be the only country in the world where a man is tried because he criticized the government’s foreign currency policies.”
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