Subzero Blue

Humanlike Female Robot

Japanese scientists have unveiled the most human-looking robot yet devised – a “female” android called Repliee Q1.

She has flexible silicone for skin rather than hard plastic, and a number of sensors and motors to allow her to turn and react in a human-like manner.

She can flutter her eyelids and move her hands like a human. She even appears to breathe.

Repliee Q1 is not like any robot you will have seen before, at least outside of science-fiction movies.

She is designed to look human and although she can only sit at present, she has 31 actuators in her upper body, powered by a nearby air compressor, programmed to allow her to move like a human.

Now this is cool, yet a bit freaky. I mean it’s cool to see how science and robotics have advanced but a bit freaky when you think that soon we could be living those scary science-fiction movies we see in cinema.

[Source: BBC News]
[Via: Sabbah]

Windows Vista

The next version of Windows, code-named “Longhorn”, finally has an official name: Windows Vista.

The advertising tagline for Vista is “Clear, Confident, Connected:
Bringing clarity to your world,” according to a video of the
announcement posted by Microsoft.

The company also said Friday that the first beta release of Vista, for developers and IT pros, is slated for release by Aug. 3.
A second, broader test release aimed at consumers will likely debut
ahead of Vista’s final release in the second half of next year.

Among the key features of Vista are a new searching mechanism,
supposedly better security, lots of new laptop features, parental
controls and better home networking. There will also be visual changes,
thanks to Avalon, ranging from shiny translucent windows to icons that
are tiny representations of a document itself.

What do I think?
Well, I’m pretty neutral to it. I don’t like it and I don’t dislike it.
In the Tunisian accent, “Vista” means jacket; So let’s just hope this
long-awaited multiply-delayed version of Windows lives up to its name
and covers Microsoft’s asses and delivers all they’ve been promising
and more.

[More: CNet News, CNN Money]

MP3’s Tenth Anniversary

Today, the name

Skycar

Moller International has developed the first and only feasible, personally affordable, personal vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) vehicle the world has ever seen, the M400 Skycar.

From your garage to your destination, the M400 Skycar can cruise comfortably at 350+ MPH and achieve up to 28 miles per gallon. No traffic, no red lights, no speeding tickets. Just quiet direct transportation from point A to point B in a fraction of the time. Three dimensional mobility in place of two dimensional immobility.

You can view flight test videos here.

Now that’s cool…
Although it raises a lot of security and noise pollution concerns, it still is very cool…

Flickr To Offer Print Service

Finally…

Flickr, the online photo service owned by Yahoo, is gearing up to launch a new print-on-demand service.

Flickr will partner with Qoop to offer a service that lets users select photos and formats to be printed into bound books.

Those who want to publish books can sell their books on their own Web sites or through online ads, including a link that takes the buyer to Qoop for payment processing, ordering and fulfillment.

[Source: internetnews]

This is great news. I’ve been wanting to be able to sell some of my photos online for some time now, and I hoped Flickr would do something like this.

Anyway, It’d be good if the end user could also have the choice of choosing which photos he wants to print and buy, with the original photographer getting a cut of the payment.

Yahoo Interested In Skype?

Yahoo Inc. is looking to boost its business in what they believe is the Internet’s next big growth area — voice communications.

Yahoo already has deals with several landline and wireless telephone companies, including SBC Communications, Verizon Communications Inc. and Sprint Corp., for a variety of Web-based services.

For what the future could hold, Yahoo points to its deal with Britain’s BT Group Plc, which sells the BT Communicator — a version of Yahoo’s Messenger that can not only handle voice calls between computers but make and receive telephone calls.

Anyway, some rumours are surfacing about talks between Yahoo and Skype, close enough that maybe even an acquisition is being cooked. Something like this would complicate Yahoo

Apple Overstocked on iPods

Sources report that Apple Inc. is overstocked on most of its iPod models.

In fact, for the first time in over a year, there is enough stock of all of Apple’s major products — both Mac and iPod — that even the company’s often-neglected value added retailers can get most products on demand. The only exceptions appear to be the new iMac G5 and the Special Edition U-2 iPod, both of which appear to be lingering just below a supply and demand balance.

I think this is very stupid of Apple.
They create good products, market them well, but suck in selling and distributing them.

For example, I’ve been wanting to get an iPod for some time now, not the iPod mini, not the iPod shuffle, I wanted a 20GB iPod, but they’re nowhere to be found neither in Tunisia nor in Jordan.
All I can find are 4GB iPod minis at very high prices.

I ended up buying another 20GB MP3 player, that I’m really happy with. That’s one customer lost for Apple. And I know a lot of people who are just like me, and I’m sure there are even more that I don’t know.

This doesn’t just happen in the Middle East, even in other places like Asia and Europe and even online, distribution just isn’t handled well enough.

People can’t buy your products if you’re sitting on a pile of them and not making them available for them at good local prices.

Red Hat Lets Fedora Loose?

Fedora is loose or is it?

Red Hat is changing course again with its free Fedora version of Linux, announcing Friday that it will turn over copyrights and development work to an outside entity called the Fedora Foundation.

Red Hat once had just one version of Linux, but beginning in 2002 it split the product into the commercially supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the free and fast-moving Fedora. But the company struggled to meet the original Fedora goal of attracting widespread outside involvement.

A vibrant Fedora project is important to Red Hat, and not just as a way to build improvements fed into RHEL. It also stands to boost Red Hat’s image as a company that cooperates with others in open-source programming, fill the pipeline of new RHEL customers, and keep Red Hat at the center of open-source operating system work in the face of rivals such as Gentoo and OpenSolaris.

[Source: ZDNet]

The way I see it is that RedHat’s plan to stop support for the free version of linux, yet get developers to add features to it for free so that it can use them in the paid Enterprise version didn’t work, and so now they want to mask their involvement with Fedora in an attempt to fool developers into getting involved.

I thought the move they took by discontinuing support for the free version of Redhat Linux was dumb and hurt linux, and all this stuff they’re trying with Fedora is just stupid and meaningless.

.XXX Addresses For Porn Sites

Pornographers and their customers soon will have a virtual red light district reserved just for them.

ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) approved a plan yesterday to create “.xxx” domain names.

ICANN said it’s working with the ICM Registry to finalize remaining details, meaning the porn-friendly set of .xxx domains should be available by the end of the year.

ICM contends the “xxx” Web addresses, which it plans to sell for $60 a year, will protect children from online smut if adult sites voluntarily adopt the suffix so filtering software used by families can more effectively block access to those sites.

[More: CNet News, CNN]

Blogger Spell Checking Scandal

Isn’t it weird that Blogger‘s spell checking tool doesn’t recognize the words “blog”, “blogger”, “blogging” and thinks they’re wrong and should be corrected?!

You’d think a blogging service as important as Google’s Blogger, that has played such a major role in spreading blogging across the world, would at least add those words to it’s dictionary.

Shame on you guys, shame on you!
lol…