Category: Sign of the Apocalypse

When Geek on Stun did their snarky little piece about Microsoft’s XBox guru J Allard’s dramatic new look (with significant weight loss, a shaved head, and hipper threads), we thought: give the guy a break. He looks MUCH better, healthier. But then, when we started to see him on the OurColony 360 infomercial, on the vid of the Microsoft press conference at E3, and doing other press appearances. You can only hear so much talk about the “iconic gesture” of the console design (an “in-breath”), the “ring of light” (a.k.a. the power button), and all that other “360” market mumbo-jumbo before you start tasting your own spit up in your mouth, and Allard’s makeover really does smack of just another PR gimmick. The MS press conference video is laughable, with Allard in jeans, an expensive suit jacket, and a gray hoodie (if you’re going to play the style game, that look is SO two years ago!). For part of it, he sat on the floor, for chrisakes, behind a planted audience that was about 35% woman, and everyone was supposedly so moved by the reveal of the 360 that they crossed their arms spontaneously to make “X” signs. Woot!

All of these press events are heavy with hype (Nintendo proclaimed a revolution and did little more than hold up an ambiguous black box), but Microsoft had people snickering and sniffing the air, trying to figure out what direction the smell of bull pucky was coming from. Hey, man, it’s “360,” it’s coming at you from ALL directions!

The Mixed Reality Lab at the National University of Singapore has come up with a weird telepresence rig which allows you to touch chickens over the Internet. The user strokes a chicken (no jokes, please) doll in the lab and embedded touch sensors translate and send the touch location information over the Net to a live chicken wearing a “lightweight jacket” outfitted with small vibrating motors.

The researchers say the technology could be used for things like allowing kids with severe allegeries to pet animals at a distance. C’mon people, we know what this sort of technology is REALLY going to used for. [NOW it’s time for the chicken-choking jokes!]

[Via Wired News]

According to a piece in the Wall Street Journal, being reported on CNN’s website, the NTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) has 13 reports of engine shutdowns on Toyota Prius hybrids due to computer crashes while driving at highway speeds. Edmunds.com has had an equal number of complaints on its Prius forums. Toyota identified one software glitch last year and notified owners to come plug their cars in for a one-hour upgrade at the dealership. It was not made clear by Toyota whether these recent reports are related to that problem or a different one.

It’s one thing to have your Windows PC crash, or your TiVo-tuned TV, it’s another thing ENTIRELY to have your car “crash” when you’re barreling down I-95!

Is it me, or did Bill Gates just admit to system-level spyware?

“Gates said that Microsoft is expanding its Watson program that sends error reports that alert the company’s engineers to problems in the software.

‘We’re taking Watson to a whole new level,’ Gates said. ‘We’ll have the ability to record what’s going on.’ He said Watson would become similar to the black boxes in airplanes that record all flight data.”

And you thought spontaneous human combustion was funny. Okay not ha-ha funny, just bizarre, quizzacal. Now there’s the odd fate of the exploding toad to ponder. According to an AFP story, hundreds of toads in Hamburg, Germany have met a grizzly end by puffing up to three and a half times their normal size and then going kablooey. Biologists have no idea what’s going on. Theories range from a virus, to an unknown fungi that may have infected their pond, to crow attacks that literally scare them to death.

Scientists believe that a fireball generated inside of a particle accelerator in New York (the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) may actually be a black hole, or something like it. The researchers believe that the particles in the generated ball of plasma are disappearing into its core and reappearing as thermal radiation, just as matter is now thought to collapse into black holes and re-emerge as “Hawking” radiation.

Brief story here.

Sometimes mice don’t work; it just happens sometimes. What’s unusual is when the mouse doesn’t work because the ball is so completely coated with a uniform layer of sludge that it stops functioning. Here tiny spots of crap have been cleaned off so the actual mouse ball (gray & white) is visible. It’s sitting in the middle of a CD to steady it for the photo shoot…

According to a piece on CNet, Pizza Hut has partnered with Sony Online to offer real-world pies to players of EverCrack… er… EverQuest II. Type in /pizza while playing the freakishly addictive fantasy RPG and a Pizza Hut order window will pop up. Of course, you’ll still have to extricate your tremendous ass out of your groaning task chair to answer the front door, and sadly, you’ll have to pay with real-world money not in-game platinum pieces. As much as the thought of this horrifies us, we have to admit, it’s brilliant marketing and probably the shape (a very large, Michelin-man shape) of things to come.

Ellen Ullman, a software engineer, has a nice op ed piece in the New York Times about Microsoft’s development of the “Attentional User Interface,” software that thinks it knows when you’re free to be interrupted for reminders to perform various maintenance tasks (save, backup, clean your desktop, and other machine interrupts) and how the general trend towards blinking, winking, crawling, popping up, and chiming in, might not be good for those of us who like to attend on our own time, not the machines, and certainly not Microsoft’s. [Login requires annoying password]

[Thanks, Kate!]

Just a reminder that the EFF is running a list of “Endangered Gizmos,” technologies that are at risk (or have already become extinct), thanks to aggressive lobbying from the entertainment industry and clueless lawmakers looking to protect intellectual property (and trammeling technological innovation in the process). The EFF writes:

“…suppose none of us had ever been given the opportunity to use or own a TiVo — or, for that matter, an iPod? Suppose instead that Hollywood and the record companies hunted down, hobbled, or killed these innovative gizmos in infancy or adolescence, to ensure that they wouldn’t grow up to threaten the status quo?”

The Endangered Gizmos page tracks the fate of various technologies and tells you what you can do to help (which basically boils down to joining the EFF and clue-by-four-ing your Congresscritters).