Apple today sent out notices for the upcoming (still fairly far away) World Wide Developers Conference. The event is set for June 6th to 11th, in Apple’s old haunt, the Moscone Center. The five day event will focus on software.
Says SVP Philip Schiller, “At this year’s conference we are going to unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS. If you are an iOS or Mac OS X software developer, this is the event that you do not want to miss.”
The event coincides with the expected summer release of OS X Lion. So, what about the rest of us non-developers? The timing seems right for an iPhone 5 announcement. Apple, naturally, isn’t talking. Probably time to camp out at your favorite Redwood City waterhole for answers.
The PlayStation Phone. We’ve had quite the intimate history with this gamepad-equipped slider, learning of its secretive existence way back in August and then handling a prototype unit in January, so you’ll forgive us for feeling sentimental and still entertaining our pet name for it. The Sony Ericsson marketing gurus renamed it the Xperia Play when it finally went official at MWC this year, but the PlayStation connection remains as strong as ever. Aside from the D-pad, iconic game keys, and two touchpads, this device comes with a little app named PlayStation Pocket, which will be serving up dollops of classic PlayStation One gaming to all those with a taste for it. Yes, the Sony influence is strong with this one, and the Android Market will be joining the fun with Xperia Play-optimized titles from third-party developers. So all we really need to know now is whether the Android smartphone underpinning this smash-bang fusion of old and new school entertainment happens to be any good. Shall we get Started?
The widely unpopular New York Times digital subscription service known as the paywall goes live worldwide at 2 p.m today, March 28th. To help easy people into the new subscription service, the Times is offering a discount for the first four weeks; you can get unlimited access for just $0.99.
After the first four weeks, it will go up to $15 for four weeks of access to NYTimes.com and a mobile phone app, $20 for access to NYTimes.com and its iPad app, and $35 for four weeks of access to all of the above. Those who subscribe to the print version of the Times will still be able to access digital content for free.
Those who don’t pay subscribe digitally, will be able to access front page content, home page, as well as all section fronts, blog fronts and classifieds, and 20 articles per month for free. Without paying, you can still access the Top News section on smartphone and tablet apps, and you can read Times’ articles through links from blogs, Facebook,Twitter, and search (limited to five a day), even if you have reached your monthly reading limit.
Since the service went live in Canada on March 17th, there has already been a four line of code hack to get around the paywall. The Times tried to get Twitter to shut down the @FreeNYTimes Twitter account, which will provide links to all New York Times articles, but only succeeded in getting the account to remove the Times‘ logo. It’s also been noted that you can simply clear your browser cache to get around the 20 article monthly limit.
Microsoft’s been toying around with hardware for so-called white space spectrum for some time now, and it’s now back with another fairly ambitious scheme. Dubbed “SpecNet,” the hardware in this case in actually a network of spectrum analyzers that would seek out and map where spectrum is available and where it’s not, and let unlicensed devices use it when it’s available. Of course, that’s still all a bit theoretical, and it does face a few significant hurdles. Those spectrum analyzers, for instance would cost between $10,000 and $40,000 apiece, and you’d obviously need a lot of them for a nationwide network, although Microsoft suggests that they could be set up on an ad hoc basis and assigned to different areas for a specific time period. Those interested in the finer technical details can dive into Microsoft’s full paper on the subject at the source link below.
Apple's Steve Jobs appears on stage in San Francisco to introduce the iPad 2. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Apple has traditionally debuted new iPhones at its annual software developers conference, but this year’s event in June will be 100 percent software news, according to a report.
Citing anonymous tipsters, well-sourced Apple blogger Jim Dalrymple claims there will be no iPad, iPhone or Mac hardware introduced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, which kicks off June 6 in San Francisco.
Apple’s press release announcing the event doesn’t give much hope for any hardware announcements.
“At this year’s conference we are going to unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “If you are an iOS or Mac OS X software developer, this is the event that you do not want to miss.”
Apple will likely give details on the next-gen Mac operating system, OS X Lion, and the next version of its mobile OS, iOS 5.
New cloud-based features will likely be included in iOS 5 (think online storage, or a “music locker” service). It may not be released until fall, according to a TechCrunch report. That means an iPhone 5 would probably release in the fall timeframe with the launch of iOS 5.
You probably point and laugh at your friends when they have big, bulky 3D glasses perched on their noses in theaters. That kind of tomfoolery just won’t do amongst the military brass, who frown at the slightest hint of snickering in the operations room. This new 3D system, called the Urban Photonic Sandtable Display (UPSD), should help. It’s a DARPA project, a fully holographic table (no glasses required) that can be scaled up to six feet diagonally and allows visual depth of up to 12-inches. The technology comes courtesy of Zebra Imaging, which earlier wowed us with some insane 3D printouts, and the data will come from LIDAR systems like this ROAMS bot. No word on when the system will be deployed to the field, but it should allow grizzled commanders and uppity businessmen to find unobtanium deposits, even if they happen to be located right under a big ‘ol tree.
You’ve read our Nintendo 3DS review, where we found it to be a generally fun but still somewhat flawed handheld gaming experience. Now it’s been released to the world, and to the willing hands of Triforce Johnson, and we’re left wondering what all of you think. We’re also hearing scattered word of a supposed “Black Screen of Death,” where the system indicates “An error has occurred” while playing a variety of games and has to be rebooted. We saw no such glitches in our testing, but what about you?
So far Canadian Netflix users have had to deal with a far more limited streaming library than their US cousins, exacerbated by the lack of a DVD / Blu-ray library to fall back on, but that’s about to change. Netflix has struck a deal in Canada with Paramount for premium pay TV window access covering “exclusive subscription television rights to all first-run films.” Currently in the US Netflix’s deal with Epix gives it access to many of the same movies (Iron Man 2 — already available since the 25th in Canada, while not currently ready for streaming in the US — Titanic, Zoolander, The Last Airbender) eventually, but that’s clearly not exclusive. While it’s previously cut deals with smaller distributors like Relativity Media and Nu Image/Millennium Films for pay TV window access, the combo of exclusive and a major studio like Paramount makes Netflix a pay TV channel competitor in a whole new way. This backs up its earlier move in that direction by signing up for a new original show to debut on the service in 2012 and potentially adds a new edge to rumored negotiations for the Miramax back catalog, press release follows after the break.
This beautiful, swooping bird is actually a robot. It’s called the SmartBird, and it is made by Festo.
The wonders of this robot bird are manifold, not least the bird’s outward design, which looks like a King of the Rocketmen-era spacecraft.
The bird weighs just 450g, or around one pound, and has an ingenious drive mechanism. Inside, a motor controls the up/down movement of the wings by spinning two wheels inside the torso. These are connected, like the wheels on a steam-train, by rods that produce the periodic up-down movement. The complex rod design uses levers to make the wing tips flap faster.
The second part uses “torsional motors” to adjust the angle of the wings. On the up-stroke, the front edge of the wing points up. This reverses as the wing pushes down, forcing the bird forward.
Steering is done by moving the tail, and the eery, is-that-thing-alive? effect is achieved by moving the head from side to side, as if it can see you.
The light weight and sophisticated, yet simple design let the bird almost glide, and it can even take off and land unassisted. You can control it with a Zigbee radio, or you can just let it glide through the skies alone.
But the most striking thing is just how much like a real bird this SmartBird moves. Until you get a closeup of its cyberman-like exterior, it could easily pass for the real thing. The military surely has its eye on this, although adding much in the way of a payload may mess up the power-to-weight balance. But imagine a flock of these all gliding quietly and gracefully towards you, you unsuspecting dolt, and then raining down fire and death from above.
I would be fine. Ever since a dream I had as a child, I have never, ever trusted evil seagulls. I actually plan to catch a few of these SmartBirds and make a real-life Angry Birds right up on my roof terrace.
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