A soon-to-be wed Israeli couple is asking Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg to attend their wedding. Zuckerberg, after all, (much unbeknownst to him) was their matchmaker. “Nimrod and I are getting married,” Shikma Sharon begins in a video plea to the billionaire, “and it’s all because of you.
You see, Sharon and Nimrod Fridberg met on Facebook, reason the couple, so Zuckerberg was their cupid of sorts. “Our friends, family, even my own mom learned about the marriage proposal through Facebook,” explains Sharon.
But Sharon and Fridberg don’t just want Zuckerberg to be an audience member. They’re asking the young executive to take part in the ritual. “It’s a great mitzvah [good deed] to invite the matchmaker to be one of the people [who holds] the Chuppah [wedding canopy],” says Sharon in the video. “I promise you, you’ll have fun.”
Oh, and just in case the billionaire in running low on funds, “If money is an issue, we will be happy to pay for your ticket. After all, you are the guest of honor.”
CEO, COO, CIO, CFO — all TLAs that most folks would be proud to see blooming on their business cards. Get ready for a new one. It’s CDO, Chief Digital Officer, a position recently created in New York City and now occupied by one Rachel Sterne. She’s something of a social media maven and is the founder of GroundReport, an aggregator of user-created news stories. She’ll now be tasked with improving the city’s ability to leverage social networks and the internet as a whole to communicate with its residents. We’re not sure if this will actually entail the digitization of Rachel herself, but we’re wondering if maybe that’s already been taken care of. See for yourself after the break.
This article was written on August 27, 2007 by CyberNet.
Acer, the Taiwan based computer company, has announced that they are buying Gateway! The acquisition of Gateway for $710 million will make Acer the 3rd largest PC company in the World, overtaking China’s Lenovo. Gateway, which is probably known best for their infamous cow spotted boxes, and Gateway Country retail stores (which failed), is expected to help Acer’s presence in the United States. The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by December.
Gateway’s chief executive, Ed Coleman says:
“Joining with Acer will enable us to bring even more value to the consumer segments we serve and capitalize on Acer’s highly regarded supply chain operations and global reach.”
I remember back in the mid to late 90’s when Gateway was actually a pretty popular brand and their Holstein cow mascot was recognized by just about anyone. Things started to get rough for them after the dot-com bust which is when they tried a variety of things to help increase sales like selling plasma TVs and digital cameras. Then in 2004, they acquired e-Machines which they hoped would help them in the retail aspect of business.
This acquisition sounds like a win-win situation for both sides if you ask me. Acer wants a bigger presence in the U.S. market, and Gateway was really in need of something like this to help get them out of the slump that they’ve been in for many years. Hopefully this also means that the infamous Gateway cow spots will be ditched for a new look that will appeal to more than just those from Iowa where Gateway was actually founded (ahh, now the Cow Spotted boxes make sense!).
I’m not sure I’m ready to use my iPad like some sort of techno-kangaroo, but that doesn’t mean others aren’t. New bags from Assero Industries fill that niche.
Wondering where your HP Slate has been all these weeks since you ordered it? Well, at least one of those precious Windows 7 tablets has taken a little detour from its supposedly enterprise-centric destiny to make a cameo appearance… as a dashboard infotainment system. HP, in its inimitable wisdom, has decided to grace the opening of its Vancouver store last month with a customized GMC Yukon Denali truck, which is where we find the company’s Slate casually showing off its Acrobat Reader and other big boy OS advantages. We wouldn’t really say embedding the Slate into your dash is the worst idea in the world, though the rest of the characterful customizations to this Denali just might be.
Ricoh’s new CX5 compact is virtually identical to the CX4 it replaces. There is one new feature, though, that alone makes the camera worth mentioning: “hybrid” autofocus.
First, the things that have stayed the same. The CX5 keeps the 10MP backlit sensor, the 28-300mm (35mm equivalent) sensor, the 3-inch, 920,000-dot screen and of course the same slim body.
Hybrid AF works by adding in a distance sensor to the AF mix. This assists the contrast-detection AF found in all compacts and — according to Ricoh — shrinks the minimum focus time down to 0.2 sec, whether you’re shooting zoomed out, or all the way in to 300mm. That’s pretty fast.
Back when film compacts first gained AF, they all worked this way, as there was no sensor with which to detect contrast. An infra-red beam was shot out at the subject and its return time was measured to determine distance. Think sonar, only with light. This, as you can imagine, was less than completely accurate – it could be fooled by including the sun in the frame, or by shooting through glass. It could, however, focus in the dark.
The CX5 has another “feature”: Super-resolution. This is software-based image processing that claims to enable “amazing photographs with high resolution” but which is little more than smart sharpening. Seeing as you can only shoot JPEG and not RAW files, this may actually prove useful.
Price and availability are yet to be announced, but as a guide, the street-price of the CX4 is around $300.
Samsung has sought to take market share from all manner of iProducts over the years, and it seems the company is now shooting to steal Apple’s MacBook thunder in 2011. Sammy sold ten million laptops in 2010 — only 150,000 less than Jobs & Co. through the first nine months of the year — and purportedly plans to move between sixteen and seventeen million portable machines in 2011. That is a massive increase in sales, but if the Korean company’s 9 Series is an indication of what’s to come, we can’t say it’s a completely unrealistic goal. Whether they move more product than Apple is still to be determined, but given its record Q4 earnings, there’s no indication that the Cupertino crowd will be slowing down any time soon. Game on, fellas.
Robots that look like oversized hockey pucks, dune buggies or refrigerators may be practical for cleaning floors, exploring Mars or dispensing beer, but it’s the walking robots that capture our imagination.
The trick is making them use their legs to walk efficiently, not like stiff-legged metal monsters out of a 1950s B movie.
A new computer simulation by a Vermont researcher shows how robots might learn to walk better by starting on their bellies, the same way animals evolved.
The robots started with snakelike bodies. His simulation applied different movement algorithms to the robots’ segmented spines. If the algorithms were successful at moving the robots closer to a target, they’d be used in the next iteration. If not, they’d be thrown away.
In each iteration, successful algorithms would be tested alongside slightly modified versions. After many iterations, the robots had evolved effective movement patterns and were able to slither rapidly towards the goal.
Then Bongard added legs.
As the legs slowly grew, the simulation evolved from slithering to walking. What’s more, it learned how to walk much more quickly than simulations that had legs from the very start.
“You can think of the changing bodies of these robots as training wheels,” says Bongard, who teaches an evolutionary robotics course at University of Vermont, where he is an assistant professor. The slowly-growing legs allowed the algorithms, or “controllers” in robotics parlance, to deal with one problem at a time: first wiggling, then balance.
The result is a much more natural gait, too.
“The walking controllers are a little different than what we’ve seen before,” says Bongard. “The quadruped uses its spine a lot more, to sort of throw its legs forward. That’s much more natural, the way that four-legged animals like dogs walk.”
It’s difficult to make robots change their bodies or grow legs in the physical world, but Bongard built a proof of concept using Lego Mindstorms.
This robot (shown above) has a simple jointed spine and four legs. At first, an added brace keeps the legs splayed out to the sides, like a lizard’s, then gradually pulls them together, eventually allowing the robot to stand up on its legs.
The prototype shows that a similar evolutionary process could be used to develop effective walking gaits in real robots, Bongard says.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
