Hasta La Gadget!

ICANN decided late last year that URLs would finally be allowed with non-Latin characters, but it wasn’t until this week that the first one was set free onto the world wide web. The new hot place to visit is http://موقع.وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر/, and while you’ll need to know a bit of Arabic to actually pronounce it, you don’t have to have any foreign language skills to click the link and see what happens. As of now, the site loads as http://xn--4gbrim.xn—-rmckbbajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/ in pretty much every browser we’ve tried here in the US, but all of the site content seems to populate just fine. Remember that URL gold rush from last century? Round two is officially on.

First non-Latin domain name goes live, trips out browsers originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 10 May 2010 05:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink neverknowtech  |  A site we can’t pronounce  | Email this | Comments

You have more of your memories stored online than all of your ancestors ever left behind. The future of memory is already here.

When I take picture of a really delicious chocolate bread pudding that I’m about to eat, I might upload it to share with tens, or thousands, of people. That photo, the memory of that pudding, exists in my brain, on my phone, on my computer (and its backup), on servers owned by Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Tumblr and Apple. And inside of the minds of everybody cursing me for showing them that, until they forget. We don’t just have more (and more vivid) digital scraps of memory, they’re scattered all over the world like nuclear fallout, where they’re able to experienced by more people than ever. I didn’t go to your party, but I saw 156 pictures of it on Facebook.

The first hard disk drive for personal computers was the ST-506, by Seagate. A 5.25-inch disk, it held 5 megabytes of data and cost $1500 in 1980. Today, a 2-terabyte 3.5-inch Seagate Barracuda hard drive costs $180. That’s roughly 400,000x the storage for 1/8th the price. Although the brain and drives store data totally differently, some experts say the human brain holds between 10 and 100 terabytes. Think about it: We’re now using the same unit of measurement to talk about how much data a hard drive can store that we use for our brains.

The quantity and the quality of data, our digital memories, is exploding: A RAW photo from a Canon 5D Mark II digital SLR consumes roughly 20 megabytes, or 4x the data that the original Seagate drive could hold. It’s nearly 7x the size of the 2.7-megapixel photos taken by Nikon’s D1—introduced in 1999, it was the first digital camera that really started replacing film cameras at newspapers. Cellphones shoot photos 4x that large, and record high definition video now. Wilson has 40,000 photos, divided evenly between his cats and his child, in his iPhoto library. Giz’s Adam Frucci has 120 gigabytes of music, half of which you’ve never heard of, on his computer. And the memories we record today, using millions of pixels, billions of bits, will seem just as grainy as the black-and-white photos our grandparents took when they were my age, compared to what’s next.

My leaky brain will probably forget all about seeing your girlfriend spewing all over your sofa, watching a stray roman candle fireball shoot past my friend’s head after ricocheting off a log, and my yummy chocolate bread pudding, until I see them again, years later, the bits perfectly intact. Well, if they survive, anyway, and my computer’s still able to decode the format they’re stored in, rendering them into pictures and videos. A dead format, a defunct service, takes any memories it encodes with it. And if it’s still around, it’ll just be one drop in a pool of a million. Oh, and what happens to all of that when I die and my brain becomes worm poop?

We live in a world where a memory, encoded in bits, flowing in a million directions, can live forever. Maybe that means we’ll live forever. That’s what we want to consider this week. Also, in a sea of 1,000,000 other photos, how am I going to find my chocolate bread pudding again?

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

We’ve now pretty much reached saturation point with OnLive demos, so it’s good to finally see an independent set of eyes poring over the service and giving us the lowdown on the actual user experience. Whether you call it on demand, streamed, or cloud gaming, the concept is remarkably simple — OnLive pumps games via a web browser onto your machine and gives you the full gaming experience without the need for all that pretty, but expensive hardware. PC Perspective‘s Ryan Shrout “found” a login to the Beta program and has put together a very thorough comparison between OnLive and playing the games locally on the same computer. His conclusion is that latency issues at present make an FPS like Unreal Tournament unplayable, but slower input games like Burnout Paradise or Mass Effect give pleasingly close renditions of the real thing. We encourage you to hit the source link to see side-by-side video comparisons and more in-depth analysis.

OnLive Beta gets a preview, lukewarm approval originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  PC Perspective  | Email this | Comments

We’ve heard (ever-so-briefly) about ENUM before, which is generally described as an IETF-sanctioned standard for converting traditional phone numbers into IP addresses. But for the most part, even techies would say that they aren’t exactly up to speed on what the protocol offers and / or promises. ArsTechnica has spent a good while underneath the mire, and it has arisen with an in-depth article that spells out how the standard can neatly collate a variety of contact options (email address, mobile number, home line, Facebook account, ICQ name, etc.) into a single address that’s recognizable by the internet that we so dearly love. In fact, user ENUM even has the capability to rank contact options by priority, so you could hit someone up via the mobile first and their Twitter account second should they not answer. The issue, however, is that the ‘”ENUM standard (RFC 3761) demands that ENUM is a public service and that the control of the telephone number lies in the hands of the end-user,” and it doesn’t take an economist to understand why ISPs and carriers wouldn’t be fond of this. Indeed, just nine nations have an ENUM registry in production, and the future isn’t looking too bright for the rest of us. Don’t fret, though — chances are Google will have this whole “multiple contact” thing ironed out before the next decade rolls around.

ENUM: it’s the new telephone number, but it’s going nowhere fast originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Slashdot  |  ArsTechnica  | Email this | Comments

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 may call itself the only console to stream Netflix, but all that could be changing — and soon. As Netflix continues to pull in new subscribers (and cash flow) like it’s no big deal, the company is apparently looking to spread its wings even further by integrating its wildly popular Watch Instantly feature into “a device already owned by a large number of consumers.” Naturally, the most fitting candidates for that would be Sony’s PlayStation 3 or Nintendo’s Wii, though the company has yet to come forward with anything concrete. Just so know you, Netflix credits the Xbox 360’s streaming integration as the main reason some 2.4 million customers have signed up since late 2008, so it’s more than apparent that it loves the game console. Any bets for when this will go down, or are you just plugging your ears in order to avoid potential disappointment?

[Via Joystiq]

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Netflix hints at Watch Instantly integration on ‘already-popular device’ originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 24 Oct 2009 17:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments