Hasta La Gadget!

If you read tech news today, expect to see a story making the rounds concerning a “consumer poll” rating the iPad versus the Galaxy Tab. According to the report, an “overwhelming majority” of consumers prefer Apple’s tablet over its nearest Android competitor — a whopping 85 percent of those queried felt the iPad had a higher perceived value than the Tab. Sounds shocking, right? Except there’s one small problem. The “survey” (and really, you have to use the term loosely here) consisted of 65 people. Let’s just say that again: 65 respondents. That’s problem number one.

Problem number two is that the survey was conducted by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who is not only using a bizarre and somewhat useless metric like “perceived value” to judge these devices, but is also known for wildly miscalculating sales numbers and expectations for Apple products. In fact, Gene Munster should probably be close to the top of the most wanted list for irresponsible analysts. Some of his famous misses? Take the wildly speculative report that Apple would sell 5.6m iPads in 2010 (a baseless prediction which he quickly reassessed to more reasonable digits… the day after the device’s launch), or the prediction that Apple would build its own search engine (so far so good!), and of course, Gene’s news that Apple will have an HDTV on the market by 2011. Did we mention the $1,000 AAPL stock price call? No? Okay.

So this latest report, in which Gene apparently just polled the families living on his block, seems beyond disingenuous. The margin of error on a group of 65 people is so high that it makes the results of the iPad vs. Galaxy Tab study all but meaningless, and further demonstrates the insidious, dangerous power of some analysts and their fantasy football stock manipulations. The moral of the story? Next time you see the names Gene and Munster in the same sentence, don’t just take the news with a grain of salt — use the whole shaker.

55 people think the iPad is more valuable than the Galaxy Tab originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Dec 2010 10:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink AppleInsider  |  Piper Jaffray  | Email this | Comments

Remember the cloaking device effect used in the original Predator movie? The effect allowed the many-mouthed man-hunter from beyond the moon to cloak itself into its background. It was all the buzz of the late 1980s cinema. Now you can achieve basically that same effect with the Microsoft Kinect home gaming system.

This home-brewed digital invisibility cloak comes courtesy of Takayuki Fukatsu. According to his YouTube channel, he constructed the hack using openFrameworks, an open source C++ coding toolkit, however he holds back on the exact deets used to achieve the effect.

Making yourself invisible to the Xbox probably isn’t the most useful function in the world, but it is an impressive piece of techno-doodling. It’s also telling of how far we’ve come technologically that anyone can recreate an effect in their living room that was Hollywood state-of-the-art just 20 years ago. It’s also another example of Kinect-o-tinkering that tech-minded folk have found for Microsoft’s cool new toy.

via PopSci

The universe just got a lot more crowded. According to a new study, there may be three times as many stars in the universe as previously thought. How many? Three-hundred sextillion. How many is 300 sextillion? Behold:

300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

That is, as the Associated Press points out, three trillion times 100 billion.

That staggering new number comes from a new study published on Nature. The new study discovered that, unlike previously thought, most galaxies may be shaped like our own. One-third of the galaxies in the universe may actually be elliptical, not spiral, like the Milky Way.

Those elliptical galaxies, it turns out, contain 10 to 20 times more stars that previously thought. Those galaxies can contain as many as one- to 10 trillion stars.

The total number of stars is the universe is roughly equivalent to the number of human cells on earth–that’s 50 trillion cells times six billion people.

Speaking of earth, the lead astronomer in the findings, Pieter can Dokkum of Yale, suggested that, “There are possibly trillions of Earths orbiting these stars.” Way to make a guy feel insignificant, science.

Did NASA find alien life? Well, no, not exactly. Don’t pay any attention those blown out of proportion headlines. Not yet, at least. The space agency is holding a press conference today will, at the very least, explore the possibility,

NASA will hold a news conference at 11 a.m. PST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe.

What will they be discussing? The speculation at this point is just that–everything from evidence for life on Mars discovered by The Exploration Rover Spirit to the discovery of “a chemical model for life based on something other than oxygen and water,” according to the smart people that Yahoo spoke to.

A rather strange piece of news comes to us from Canon. If you have either the EOS 7D or 5D Mark II, you can send it off to Canon and get a brand new mode-dial. Why? Because this one locks in place, requiring you to push a central button to turn it.

Presumably Canon has received enough complaints from users that it deems this a worthwhile upgrade. I have used both cameras briefly and never thought that the mode-dial was particularly loose. Perhaps that’s something that worsens with time?

Even odder is that this upgrade will cost you $100, which seems steep for something that Canon seems to see as a fix for a design flaw. So if you’re the kind of person who can’t glance down to check what mode your camera is in, and if you don’t mind being without your SLR for what will presumably be a few weeks, then go ahead. Canon will be happy to have some of your money.

Slippery Knob upgrade page [Canon]

See Also:

• Canon Recalls Flagship Cameras for Lube Job
• Ghost in The Machine: Canon Investigates Phantom Images on EOS 7D …