Dec 19

RIAA Jerks To Stop Suing Individuals For Online Piracy

Posted in: Music, Today's Chili, top

Whether you’re a pratin’ granny, single mom or a full-on haxxor, you no longer have to dread waking up to an RIAA summons. They still might rat you out to your ISP, though.

Alas, it took the RIAA five years and 35,000 cases to realize that suing individual for illegal downloads was not an effective deterrent. Not only was it an abject PR failure, not even the RIAA has ever pretended that it was making a difference.

That’s not to say the RIAA is not entirely out of the anti-pirate game, of course. Now, they will focus on notifying your ISP of your malfeasances, should their wide net of semi-legal piracy detection agents sniff out your IP seeding 808s and Heartbreak to 12 year old girls. The RIAA will email your ISP (if it is one of the “major” providers that has an agreement), who will then either forward the email on or send their own warning. If you don’t comply to that and subsequent warnings, your service may be canned. [WSJ]

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Dec 19

Apple buys a little Imagination — 3.6 percent to be exact

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Apple buys a little Imagination -- 3.6 percent to be exact

It’s been a busy couple of months for the mobile PowerVR gurus at Imagination Technologies. First the company got picked to handle the polygon-shuffling duties in Sony’s PSP2 (which may or may not be actually happening), and has now received a $5 million cash infusion from Apple — in exchange for a measly 3.6 percent of its soul. What does it all mean? As much as we’d love to fling out crazy speculation about an Apple / Sony hybrid iPSP or hardware support for a mobile 3D operating system, we’re putting our money on the most sensible explanation: a next-gen iPhone with even more emphasis on games. Place your bets now, folks.

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Apple buys a little Imagination — 3.6 percent to be exact originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dec 19

Universal Announce Massive Profits From YouTube Deal

Posted in: Music, Online, Today's Chili

pspan class=”mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image” style=”display: inline;”img alt=”YouTubeUniversal.jpg” src=”http://uk.gizmodo.com/YouTubeUniversal.jpg” width=”395″ height=”375″ class=”mt-image-none” style=”” //span/p pLast month we looked at the possibility of YouTube streaming a href=”http://uk.gizmodo.com/2008/11/10/youtube_edging_closer_to_strea.html”full length movies/abr / from the industry’s major players, with the sticking point being how to best handle advertising to make the move profitable./p pA recent announcement from Universal might stir up more interest in the movie business, since it is apparently seeing ‘tens of millions of dollars’ worth of profit from a syndication deal that has both parties splitting ad revenue. /p pbr / /pimg width=’1′ height=’1′ src=’http://feeds.uk.gizmodo.com/c/552/f/9581/s/29cb43d/mf.gif’ border=’0’/div class=’mf-viral’table border=’0’trtd valign=’middle’a href=”http://res.feedsportal.com/viral/sendemail2.html?title=Universal Announce Massive Profits From YouTube Deallink=http://uk.gizmodo.com/2008/12/19/universal_announces_massive_pr.html” target=”_blank”img src=”http://rss.feedsportal.com/images/emailthis2.gif” border=”0″ //a/tdtd valign=’middle’a href=”http://res.feedsportal.com/viral/bookmark.cfm?title=Universal Announce Massive Profits From YouTube Deallink=http://uk.gizmodo.com/2008/12/19/universal_announces_massive_pr.html” target=”_blank”img src=”http://rss.feedsportal.com/images/bookmark.gif” border=”0″ //a/td/tr/table/div

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Dec 19

ESlick E-Book Reader Cheapest, Ugliest Yet

Posted in: Today's Chili

Eslick

E-books are expensive, especially when you consider their single purpose design. The Kindle comes in around the same price as some full-featured netbooks (although it has a way better battery life).

But there is a new player in the e-book game, and – while it isn’t cheap – it’s certainly getting closer to the magic sub-$100 mark.

The eSlick is from Foxit, a company well known by many Windows users for it’s small, lightweight and fast PDF reader, called Foxit Reader. Foxit’s eSlick will cost $230 (rising to $260 after the initial promotion) and seems to get the basics right: It has a screen similar to that of the Kindle (6-inch, 600-by-800-pixels) and with it the monster battery life of e-ink displays (Foxit claims 8,000 page turns). The reader also comes with an MP3 player, 128MB internal memory and a 2GB SD card in the box.

What it doesn’t have is the Kindle’s wireless capabilities. To get books onto the device you’ll have to dock it, iPod style, via a USB port. The reader only works with pdf and plain text (txt) files, although it does come with PDF conversion software. PDF is certainly not the best format for e-books, designed as it is for print, not screens. The biggest omission is ePub, which allows text to be formatted properly for e-readers and also supports DRM (bad for us, but essential for getting some publishers on board).

Foxit does plan to add some form of wireless to the device in a future iteration, and it needs it. The Kindle’s killer app is its instant shopping, available everywhere, and anyone hoping to gain some of its market share needs to do the same. We see the Kindle as the iPod of e-books: where the iPod has the iTunes Store, the Kindle has Amazon.

The eSlick does manage to match the Kindle in one key area: it’s fugly. It’ll be available in three colors (or shades — black, gray and white) but that won’t stop it looking like a cheap, oversized Zune.

Product page [Foxit via PC World]

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Dec 19

First Turn-By-Turn Navigation App Comes to Android, Hates America [Android Apps]

Posted in: Today's Chili

AndNav2 is Android’s first
turn-by-turn navigation app, marking one of the first instances where Android’s wide-open apps policy has put it at an advantage over the iPhone. At least, in Europe. UPDATED 10:38 EST

Since the software is based on the OpenStreetMap mapping data, the app will be more useful in some areas than others, as the map information is, at least in part, crowdsourced like Wikipedia. The app itself, though, is polished. The search and directions functions will be familiar to anyone who has used a satnav unit (or even Google Maps) before, and the turn-by-turn functionality seems solid.

The main issue with AndNav2 is availability, as their site lists versions for Germany, France, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Austria and Ireland, but not the US. This could be an exclusion based on insufficient mapping data for the country, but in any case there’s no reason that you couldn’t install the British version and at least try it. The alpha release of AndNav2 is available here.

UPDATE: Nicolas Gramlich, the man behind AndNav, got in touch to let us know why there’s no US version: logistics. Opening the app to running routes through North America would require a much larger server than the one they’re using right now, for which the developers are trying to secure donations (you know, from you). And honestly, the app is free, so settle down, quit yer whinin’, etc. [AndNav via MobilitySite]






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Dec 19

Christmas Tree Powered By Bikes, Supposedly [Holiday Magic]

Posted in: Today's Chili

In Barcelona, anyone passing by is invited to lend some stationary bike exertion to a cause—lighting a tree to create a true Christmas miracle. It’s a neat idea, if you believe it.

Wired does not.

Like the Wizard of Oz, the workings are hidden behind a curtain. One thing we do know — there is either cheating or batteries involved. I’ve walked by a few times to see nobody on the bikes, but the lights still blazing.

Perhaps the tree is powered by Christmas spirit? [Wired]






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Dec 19

Sensor-laden footballs / gloves could run referees right out of work

Posted in: Today's Chili

Dr. Priya Narasimhan, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, doesn’t intend to put a single NFL referee out of work, but there’s no doubt that the technology she’s tinkering with could indeed have that effect. The prof and her students are developing sensor-laden footballs and gloves, both of which could eventually tell in real-time whether a ball bounced off the ground before being caught or whether a player actually had possession of a ball whilst being piled upon after a fumble. Currently, she’s had zero luck persuading a college or professional team to help her experiment further, and we can sort of see why. We mean, it’s nice to get every call right in theory, but what fun would sport be without the all-important “Ref, you suck!” chant?

[Thanks, Freddy]

Sensor-laden footballs / gloves could run referees right out of work originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Dec 2008 08:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dec 19

Apple RAW Updates Adds New Canon Cameras

Posted in: Today's Chili

Rawagain

Our older British readers will remember Mastermind, the impossibly hard quiz show which could, after a gruelling series of intellectual battles, net the winner a vase or other pointless item. They will also remember the catchphrase of the presenter, the icy Magnús Magnússon: "I’ve started so I’ll finish".

This is how I feel keeping up with the RAW compatibility updates for Adobe Camera RAW, Lightroom and Apple’s OS X. We covered it once, now we have to continue. Today we bring glad tidings of an update from Apple, which will allow the Finder, iPhoto and Aperture to recognize some new cameras. These are:

Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Canon PowerShot G10
Pentax K2000/K-m
Leaf AFi-II 6
Leaf AFi-II 7
Leaf Aptus-II 6
Leaf Aptus-II 7
Leica M8.2

There are also some "stability" fixes in there. The update is tiny, at just 4.4MB, but it does require a restart. Get it now, while it’s hot, in your Software Update.

Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update 2.4 [Apple]





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Dec 19

Student’s tech promises 12x the battery life in your iPhone, BlackBerry

Posted in: Today's Chili
Feeling the hurt of endlessly dying batteries on your BlackBerry (or iPhone, if that’s what you’re into)? Atif Shamim, a PhD student at Canada’s Carleton University might have the medicine for that pain of yours. He’s cleverly hacked such devices, removing all the wires that connect the electrical circuits to the antenna, and developed a module for the connection to operate wirelessly. The result, he estimates, is that his modified devices use almost 12 times less power than they normally do — which of course means longer battery life. A paper about the device has won an award at the European Wireless Technology Conference, and Shamin has filed for a patent in both the US and Canada. There’s no indication of when we might start to see tech like this on actual commercial devices, but we’re pretty sure plenty of companies are going to want to get a hold of this technology like, yesterday.

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Student’s tech promises 12x the battery life in your iPhone, BlackBerry originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Dec 2008 08:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dec 19

VIDEO: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Posted in: Movies, Online, Today's Chili

pobject width=”425″ height=”344″param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/HlC0XQ6VXNQcolor1=0xb1b1b1color2=0xcfcfcfhl=enfeature=player_embeddedfs=1″/paramparam name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”/paramembed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/HlC0XQ6VXNQcolor1=0xb1b1b1color2=0xcfcfcfhl=enfeature=player_embeddedfs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″/embed/object/p pWolverine has always been one of the most loved comic book characters, not least because he’s a wise-cracking ball of anger and retribution. /p pDespite the third X-Men Lite movie, Hugh Jackman – who has done a remarkable job of transferring Wolverine from the comics to the big screen – will be back next year in his own flick: X-Men Origins: Wolverine. /p pFollowing his life up to, and after, he gets painfully spliced with that adamantium skeleton and pig-stickers – and before his life with Ironside and others at the mansion – this one is shaping up to be the ‘superhero’ movie that everyone has been waiting for. Alongside a href=”http://uk.gizmodo.com/2008/11/14/video_new_watchmen_trailer_roc.html”Watchmen/a, that is./p pJust check out the trailer above and tell us you don’t think this movie will kick some serious box-office butt come May 1st.-Martin Lynch/p pa href=”http://technorati.com/tag/movies” rel=”tag”movies/a a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/x-men” rel=”tag”x-men/a a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/wolverine” rel=”tag”wolverine/a /pimg width=’1′ height=’1′ src=’http://feeds.uk.gizmodo.com/c/552/f/9581/s/29cb444/mf.gif’ border=’0’/div class=’mf-viral’table border=’0’trtd valign=’middle’a href=”http://res.feedsportal.com/viral/sendemail2.html?title=VIDEO: X-Men Origins: Wolverinelink=http://uk.gizmodo.com/2008/12/19/video_xmen_origins_wolverine.html” target=”_blank”img src=”http://rss.feedsportal.com/images/emailthis2.gif” border=”0″ //a/tdtd valign=’middle’a href=”http://res.feedsportal.com/viral/bookmark.cfm?title=VIDEO: X-Men Origins: Wolverinelink=http://uk.gizmodo.com/2008/12/19/video_xmen_origins_wolverine.html” target=”_blank”img src=”http://rss.feedsportal.com/images/bookmark.gif” border=”0″ //a/td/tr/table/div

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