Today, Bill Gates revealed his latest creation - The Microsoft Surface. With its five special motion-detecting cameras, the Surface responds to the user’s touch, allowing someone to manipulate objects on screen with more freedom than ever before.
What makes this any different from a giant touchscreen? Well, not only can the Surface interact with humans, but it can work with other devices as well. Take a few pictures with a digital camera, and just place it onto the Surface. It’ll read the pictures from the camera, where it’ll load them on screen, allowing anyone to manipulate and edit the pictures with simple hand movements.
The Surface shows many promising applications. It can be used in restaurants, where diners can scroll through an electronic menu, dragging items they want into an ordering “pile” in the center of the screen. After the meal is finished, just throw your credit card onto the Surface and it’ll complete the transaction for you. They’ll be found in department stores, where the placement of an item onto the screen will cause data of the item to be displayed in an interactive menu. Look out for them in hotels and tourists attractions too, where they’ll be showing road directions, tourist hotspots, and more.
The Surface is planned to be available to various businesses by November of this year. If you’d like your hands on it, be ready to wait at least three years for a consumer version. At least this’ll give you plenty of time to save up the $5,000-$10,000 that you’ll have to pay.
Link: Microsoft Surface
The important stuff:
Apple launched its DRM-free music tracks from EMI’s digital catalog on its iTunes Plus site Wednesday, keeping its promise that it would offer the music files in the month of May.
The DRM-free songs, which feature high quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, are offered at $1.29 per song; iTunes will continue to offer its five million-plus songs in 128 kbps AAC encoding at 99 cents a song. Consumers can upgrade previously purchased EMI songs to iTunes Plus tracks for 30 cents a song and about $3 for an album.
Apple noted that iTunes Plus songs can be played on iPods, Mac and Windows computers, and widescreen TVs outfitted with Apple TV technology. The company said the songs can also be played on the Apple iPhone, which is scheduled to launch in late June.
This is great news for Itunes users like me who currently have to take “a long way around” to bypass DRM and play their files on other platforms. Sure its a bit more money, but I may end up buying a couple and see if its really worth it.
Thanks for reading!
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Just a bit old, but I think this still stands…
Toshiba Matsushita Display announced an amazing new LCD display that is only 2.9mm thick. Halve iPod Nano’s thickness and that is about how paper-thin this Poly-Si LCD is. The LCD is 12.1-inch and is capable of 1280×800 resolution and brightness of 300 cd/m2. Measuring 270.5 x 180.0 x 4.50 mm and weighing 183 gram, the LCD is about 32% lighter than currently breed of LCD.
According to the two Japanese electronics giant (Toshiba and Matsushita), the LCD is already in production, but there are no words on when we can expect to see them in the market. I reckon we’ll see them first on laptops and monitors.
Bigger Picture
Original Source
[digg=http://www.digg.com/tech_news/See_the_streets_with_google_maps]Google has improved their road directions service, Google Maps, with the addition of view of streets of some cities in the U.S. Along with this, several mini-applications can now be embedded into maps as well. Continue reading ‘See the streets, with Google Maps’
I am sure that many, if not most, psp users already know that the psp is not for just games. In fact, some do not use the psp for gaming at all. They might have originally bought the 280g portable platform with the intent of gaming on it, but some just use it to do what mp3 players like Apple’s Ipod cannot. For example, manga (Japanese comics), are becoming more and more popular outside of Japan, and especially in the United States. Using a program called PSPhoto,users can reformat image files to the correct resolution of their PSP, making it possible to read comics, or other literature on the device. Along with this, with the PSP’s larger display, watching videos is a lot better on it than watching it on any mp3 player which is sure to have a smaller one. If you do not already know, the psp already has an RSS feed reader, and an Internet Explorer. Using psp emulators and homebrew programs, users can download games Continue reading ‘PSP, use it for more than just games.’
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Yesterday, Google rolled out yet another reason to give its calendar a try–a version that squishes it down into a phone-friendly format. This is a complement to full-blown Google Calendar rather than a complete calendar app: Basically, you can see your schedule, move backwards and forwards one day at a time, and use a quick-scheduling feature to enter appointments in plain English (”staff meeting tomorrow at 3pm”). And that’s kind of the point–it’s not overloaded with clutter, and pops up quickly, so you can see what’s on your plate at a glance.
The bad…
There’d be significant downsides to this strategy Continue reading ‘Google Calendar Gets Mobile’
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Facebook.com announced Thursday that it now allows any software designer to access the company’s members to make it a software operating system for all sorts of Internet media. The college student social networking site, which opened up to users of all ages over the past year, said it has signed up 65 partners, including Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. to build Web applications within Facebook.
Continue reading ‘Facebook welcomes third-party companies to make software for it!’
[digg=http://digg.com/tech_news/Dell_to_sell_pre_installed_Linux_PCs]DELL said it would launch three computer systems, including one notebook, on that will ship with the open-source Linux operating system already installed.
They will come with Ubuntu 7.04 and will have a cheap starting price of just $599.
Continue reading ‘Dell to sell Linux PCs’
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Do you get frustrated while you wait around for your slow Windows XP computer to startup? Windows XP will automatically load and startup any program that is in the startup folder whether you intend to use it or not. This article will show you how to speed up the bootup process of your PC by removing the programs that bog it down.
What to do….
1. Close all currently open applications.
2. Click Start->Run, and enter msconfig. This will start the system configuration utility.
Continue reading ‘How to Make Windows XP Startup Faster & How to make applications start more quickly’
[digg=http://digg.com/software/GETTING_HIGH_off_of_SOUND_I_Doser_and_binaural_beat_frequencies]I found this online a while ago, and just thought that it was pretty interesting.
I-doser is a program which utilizes the technology of Binaural beats.
Binaural beats or binaural tones are auditory processing artifacts, that is apparent sounds, the perception of which arises in the brain independent of physical stimuli.
The brain produces a similar phenomenon internally, resulting in low-frequency pulsations in the loudness of a perceived sound when two tones at slightly different frequencies are presented separately, one to each of a subject’s ears, using stereo headphones. Continue reading ‘I-Doser & Binaural Beat Frequencies- Getting high off sound?’
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