The OM-Copter gives wings to the Red Epic from omstudios on Vimeo.
We have not provided a photo hack in a long time so it was due. So lets combine that with one of our favorites — RC quadcopters.
As you can see by the video above, this is shall we say upscale. Eight motors, larger batteries and a payload, a Red Epic, that ain’t exactly cheap if it gets busted up. The combo seems to work quite well as the video shows.
More here
Enjoy….
…Or why Apple’s Xmas may not be so stellar. Their Foxconn suppliers factory that builds the i’S had a major fire yesterday. GizChina has the story here.
The timing could not be worse. The plant was probably at full ramp up to get as much product into the store shelves before the Thanksgiving Black Friday appeared. Lack of unit sales will chew into Apple for the 4th quarter.
HT: GizChina
Lets do the count of those devices that the original Star Trek suggest would exist some time in the future –
Cell Flip Phone == Trek Communicator
Voice Recognition == Desk Computer
PCMCIA/USB Memory == Recording Chips
Naval Laser == Battle Phaser
Medical Tricorder == Medical Equipment
Well you can one more to the list. We now have the Universal Translator by Vocre. Its built for the iPhone at the current time. You can bet they will port it to the Android as well. For the foreign borne traveler this will be a must have load on your smart phone.
And of the course the episode where the translators (the silver thing on their belts) appeared
Only things left are the transporter and warp drive. Both of which are near physical impossibilities with our current understanding of physics.
Folks the days of channel programming as a component of the entertainment complex is rapidly drawing to a end. You see I finally have a media box running XBMC operational. Not a real big shucks, for the geeky, but there is a considerable amount of configuration work that has to be done post install.
Some 600 channels delivered via the Internet. No channel provider need apply. All those channels are on-air programming. RTE1 & 2, BBC 1,2,3, SyFy, Several Russian channels as well which is delighting my wife.
But those are still channels Dog. Granted. But I can go over to YouTube and download free movies. Add them to my library. The same with several other feeds that can be found. Work is already afoot by the team to integrate XBMC with NetFlix. The short story of all this is, the free tech already exists to automate your viewing pleasure without spending a dime.
Like the networking and telephony fields, the intelligence is moving to the edge of the network for entertainment as well. Centralized channel deploys will be a thing of the past. A very smart movie studio is going to figure this out.
I could see a XBMC addon provided by the studio. You install it, enter your provided identity code and have access to that studios back list of movies for $5mo. $50/year to have access to the MGM or WB back list. I would go for it at that price. Don’t have to include DRM either. Codecs exist that lock the stream route so it can’t be copied without all the pain of true DRM.
You will excuse me, my wife wants me to turn up the volume.
Digital Publishing is taking the world by storm. Indie publishers are crawling out of the woodwork. Fact it looks like a veritable Oki Sooners YeHaw! to stake a claim. There will be some losers, both big publishers and indies alike as it plays out. But it sure looks healthy.
But there is a problem and it has nothing to do with the content providers generally. It has to do with ePub and its sister .mobi. But before we get to the smack-down lets run around the carousel and what they got right. –
Its a reasonable list. But the real world is going to cream ePub pretty severely. So the question is why? One simple answer –
The world does NOT want another etext standard!
ePub has been successful to date as there has not been a viable alternative and that the whole web world was in flux with the infighting for-against-around HTML5. Well that battle is about done. What is left is minor skirmishes about viable container formats for video. Even Adobe seems consigned to the outcome. Only Google battles it.
The second reason for survival has been the divergence in the devices themselves. Most of the primary eReaders have been pushed by publishers. Principally Amazon with Kindle and Barnes and Noble with Nook. They essentially being walled garden affairs. Amazon going to the point of having their own .mobi format for their devices. So long as there were no competing devices, all was well.
Well that will disappear this year. This Christmas I suspect will be the Year of the Tablet. The likes of the Xoom and Toshiba are selling quite well. Carriers are loving the data stream revenues all the way to the bank. Enough that they are subsidizing the purchase price with a contract. Mfrs out of China are cranking out more. The base line cost of a tablet will be in the $99 bracket at Christmas and with capabilities that the $399 models have today. If you are still with me at this point you smell the word I am going to use next is just around the next paragraph.
Convergence. Both in software and hardware. Fact the hardware side will be driven by the software only to be reflected back. You see, a great many of the current Mfrs are using some variant of WebKit. Its the preferred development engine to design browsers. And ironically several eReaders. Android has it, Kindle has it, Feel the Force Luke…. [snap] The point is, if I am a tablet hardware dude am I going to listen to BS that I have TWO layout engines in my converged design?! Perish the thought. The Suit is going to side with the hardware dude and tell the software dink to come up with some CSS code or other to use one layout engine for both the browser and the ePub reader. So the next generation of tablets come eReaders will be using a HTML5 aware layout engine. The base difference of many will be a link rel swap of what base CSS suite they are using for the display. All handled very nicely in a javascript call.
Once that happens its curtains for ePub the standard. Long live ePub the container! Which brings us to the end game. The whole .epub is nothing but a .zip file with a different name. It acts as the bucket for all the subcomponents contained within. Ironic when you think about it. .epub files being implemented like .mht files are today for containing full website volumes. Once the content providers see that they can access the full capability of the layout engine the restrictions will be ignored. That is where we are headed. In a converged future .epub will contain it all, text, sound, video using HTML5 wrappers with the necessary javascript, AV codecs and yes DRM. Which at that point is it an .epub file or an enhanced .mht file? Go further. Is .epub on steriods the perfect way to deliver a video game? Or a combined book + movie package?
You be the judge.
Two key senators want to know if the leader of the vast U.S. intelligence apparatus believes it’s legal for spooks to track where you go through your iPhone.In a letter that Sens. Mark Udall (D-Colorado) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) will send later on Thursday, obtained by Danger Room, the senators ask Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, “Do government agencies have the authority to collect the geolocation information of American citizens for intelligence purposes?”
Both senators are members of the panel overseeing the 16 intelligence agencies. In May, they sounded warnings that the Obama administration was secretly reinterpreting the Patriot Act to allow a broader amount of domestic surveillance than it had publicly disclosed.
“[R]ecent advances in geolocation technology have made it increasingly easy to secretly track the movements and whereabouts of individual Americans on an ongoing, 24/7 basis,” they write. “Law enforcement agencies have relied on a variety of different methods to conduct this sort of electronic surveillance, including the acquisition of cell phone mobility data from communications companies as well as the use of tracking devices covertly installed by the law enforcement agencies themselves.”
Well gee dude, you signed off on the Patriot Act what do you expect you Turkey. But of course they are tracking you. They are probably tracking your mistress too, if you have one. Get real.
Recent Comments