Archive for January, 2009
IMAGINE a technology that lets you pay for products just by waving your cellphone over a reader.
The technology exists, and, in fact, people in Japan have been using it for the last five years to pay for everything from train tickets to groceries to candy in vending machines. And in small-scale trials around the world, including in Atlanta, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area, nearly everyone has liked using this form of payment.
For a phone, the technology to store account information securely is advanced enough so that several different virtual cards can be placed inside the phone; users can select an account by using the screen.
Account information can be embedded in the telephone or on a SIM card or microSD card, but no call over a network is needed to send the data. Proximity is the key: for the payment to work, the phone needs to be within a few centimeters of the reader.
A wave of a cellphone replaces the swipe of a credit card in a pilot program involving MasterCard PayPass, right. At left, a phone is used to pay for items at a Tokyo candy stand. Account information can be embedded in the phone.
The idea of equipping a cellphone with virtual credit cards worries some people; phones, after all, are easily lost or stolen. But Simon Pugh, group head of the mobile payments group at MasterCard Worldwide, said that if the phone were lost, the consumer could call the bank — using another phone, of course — to disable the account. He also said that consumers could choose to protect the payment part of their phone with an access code, but he added that the payment would also be secure even without such measures.
The risk of account fraud from mobile payments is “small,” according to Kevin Fu, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who in 2006 uncovered several security holes in credit cards that are waved rather than swiped. Credit-card companies say that these problems have been fixed.
Mr. Fu is more concerned about privacy. He says that it may be possible to get personal information, like a person’s name, from credit-card account data on a mobile phone. Nonetheless, he predicts that with time, “these N.F.C. phones will become one of the best ways to do mobile payments.”
Number Ten: Dual Screens for Laptops
Lenovo’s introduction of the ThinkPad W700 is hopefully the beginning of a trend. Its secondary screen is great for artists, CAD designers or anyone else who just can’t get enough desktop real estate. See also: Voodoo’s Firefly concept, whose 4.3-inch screen is great for checking e-mail while waiting to respawn in Counter-Strike.
Number Nine: 3G to 4G
As the third generation of wireless communications becomes ubiquitous this year, it’s time to think about moving on. In Baltimore, where Sprint is rolling out a 3G/4G modem for mobile broadband, average download rates range from 2 Mbps to 4 Mbps, compared to 3G speeds of 600 Kbps to 1.4 Mbps. Hopefully we’ll see more cell phone companies offer similar dual solutions while the next generation takes over.
Number Eight: Designer Netbooks
We thought we’d seen everything with the crystal-studded Nintendo DS, but then HP introduced the “China Chic” HP Mini 100, a sultry red number designed by Vivienne Tam. And why not? These little laptops fit into pocketbooks anyway. Look for more designers to cash in as the netbook becomes a fad.
Number Seven: USB 3.0
The new “SuperSpeed” USB technology won’t hit until 2010, but its effects should be felt early in the form of Firewire’s ultimate demise. The latest MacBooks have already taken the bold step of removing Firewire in favor of USB 2.0, perhaps an indication that other computer makers will follow. If that’s what must be done to make room for 5 Gbps of data transfer, so be it.
Number Six: Touch Screens
As touchable displays take over cell phones, the door is open for greater interest in tablet PCs as well. Asus introduced the T91 at CES this year. HP and Fujitsu released touch screen laptops towards the end of last year. With Windows 7 offering more touch screen features than ever, this could finally be the tablet’s time to go mainstream.
Number Five: Cloud Computing
It’s hard to pin down how Cloud computing will change in 2009 — especially because its core principal says you can’t tell what’s going on behind the scenes — but there’s at least a proliferation of online apps like Google’s ever-expanding suite, and the corporate world is apparently keen on the idea as well. Look for more news on this during the International Cloud Computing Conference and Expo in late March.
Number Four: 3D Visual Interfaces
An Apple patent for a three-dimensional desktop was revealed in December, but BumpTop and Project Looking Glass have similar ideas in the works. With new advances in 3D imaging this year, perhaps a true virtual office space is in reach at last.
Number Three: Smaller, Slimmer All-in-Ones
All-in-One PCs positively blew up at CES this year, with Dell, Sony, Gateway and Lenovo all vying to be America’s next top model. Really, they’re all coming out winners for having so many options to choose from. Our favorite, though, didn’t come from any of these PC-making heavyweights. We liked Shuttle’s X50 because it comes with a handle.
Number Two: Intel Core i7
With Alienware, Dell and Gateway getting in on Intel’s latest processor, it’s clear this is the must-have for PC gamers. Gizmodo does an admirable job of explaining the nitty gritty of the i7’s might, but the processor reduces bottlenecks, enables the use of more RAM and divides up tasks more efficiently — just what you need when getting your frag on.
Number One: Solid State Drives
Later this year, Asus and Toshiba will both offer laptops with solid state drives. These read faster, are more reliable and use less power than hard disc drives, so it’s obviously something that should be implemented in more portable PCs over time. Solid state’s higher cost will prevent it from becoming the majority by year-end, but this is only their first year of availability. Once it’s accessible for all, HDD will be officially on notice.
Thanks to Jared Newman for the original posting on GearCrave.
Verizon Wireless today introduced its long-awaited home phone with advanced Internet connectivity. The touchscreen-enabled Verizon Hub is a VoIP phone that works with your broadband Internet connection. Though Verizon would undoubtedly prefer you use their Verizon FiOS with the Verizon Hub, the phone will work with any broadband Internet service, including other DSL providers and cable modems. Beyond unlimited voice calling and all the calling features you’d expect from an advanced home phone, the Verizon Hub also have plenty of Web option available as widget-like apps on the phone’s touch screen. In fact, rounding up the features, it was hard not to think of this device as a multimedia feature phone made larger for the kitchen counter.
Learn more about the Verizon Hub at infoSync.
The aptly named Transition takes a stab at bridging the gap between automobiles and airplanes. Some people call it a flying car. The company designing and selling the vehicle prefers the term “roadable aircraft.”
Either way, it boils down to this: You sit down behind the steering wheel, drive to the runway, unfold two wings and take off. You can fly 500 miles on a tank of gas — regular unleaded —and when you land, you simply fold up the wings and drive where you want to go. At the end of the day, you fly back, drive home and park inside your garage.
The Transition aircraft, shown in this illustration with its wings partially unfolded, can shift from road-worthiness to airworthiness. The vehicle carries a price tag of $194,000.
Double click below to watch a video. This video is over 10MB, if it doesn’t load in a timely fashion you can also watch it here.
Read the entire article on MSNBC or visit Terrafugia to learn more about the Transition.
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,Saimir Strati shows the portrait of Leonardo Da Vinci he created with industrial nails at the International Centre of Culture in Tirana September 4, 2006. Strati, 40, was recognised by Guinness World Record officials for having created the world’s largest nail mosaic with about 500,000 industrial nails.
A new ticketing scheme from French railway company SNCF takes an existing idea, makes it better, and then sidesteps a big privacy issue — all in one go.
The system is called Weneo ID Smart, and is currently undergoing a 1,000 person trial. At its heart is a user-rechargeable RFID ticket, but the innovation comes from the enclosure: a USB stick. Users connect the stick to their PC and are automatically taken to the SNCF payment page where they can top up their balance. This seems like a smart idea, and because you use the USB drive to connect, it would be possible to build in some nice security features for the online transaction.
Inevitably, the card contains a mountain of user information. From the RFID Journal:
Data on the card will include the cardholder’s name and personalized information—whether that person is a student or senior citizen, for instance, or the amount of money the cardholder has available for purchases or transit tickets.
But it’s not all bad. It appears that the USB part is kept separate from the RFID part: the only information available to the RFID scanner is a unique ID number. Presumably this is still tied to the user’s account info back at the mothership, but it minimises the risk of having your information stolen by hackers out in the field.
For e-cash to really work, companies need to stop getting greedy about the wealth of marketing information provided from tracking people’s purchases. E-cash needs to be truly anonymous. The card should be loaded with funds from the user’s computer, but the actual card itself should contain absolutely no identifying information. Otherwise, it will never be as anonymous as real, dirty cash.
Originally posted on WIRED.
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,GParted is an industrial-strength package for creating, destroying, resizing, moving, checking and copying partitions, and the file systems on them. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganizing disk usage, copying data residing on hard disks and mirroring one partition with another.
Download your free copy of GParted from sourceforge.
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,A student who lost his left hand in an accident three years ago has been fitted with the world’s most sophisticated prosthetic limb.
Evan Reynolds, 19, took only minutes to learn how to manipulate the i-LIMB, which is operated by tiny sensors resting against his arm muscles.
With his new hand he can now pick up a paper cup filled with water, peel a carrot or walk down the street eating chips, all activities he could only dream about before.
PHOTOS: Click here to see the i-LIMB.
The $15,000 i-LIMB was developed by the Scottish company Touch Bionics and Reynolds is only the second person in the U.K. to be fitted with one. Unlike previous prosthetics, the hand can tell how tightly it is gripping, allowing the user a large degree of control.
Reynolds, a sports biology student at University of the West of England, was in a friend’s car hanging his hand out of the window when it was taken off by a wooden gate post. His life was saved by his quick-thinking friends who applied a tourniquet and stopped him bleeding to death but the accident wrecked his dreams of joining the British Army.
The i-LIMB was introduced in 2007 and has won awards for its innovative technology. About 450 people, most in the United States, have been fitted with the prosthetic hand so far. Reynolds said it has given him a new lease on life.
Read the entire article on FOXNews.
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,Shimano, a company that’s been at the forefront of the cycling-component industry for decades, has got a new product. It’s an electronic shifting system that forgoes mechanical cable for electronic impulses and servomotors. Based on our test ride of the system, here’s how it works, and what you can expect when it hits the market in the next month.
Shifting controls are on the levers like mechanical Dura-Ace, but they are just switches. It takes much less pressure to activate a shift than on standard systems, but it still takes a little effort to give the rider some feedback.
The wiring harness contains a small control box that provides battery-status indicators, as well as a way to adjust the system when you’re out on the road. This can correct for problems in alignment that might arise after a crash.
The battery pack mounts on the down tube, tucked under the water-bottle cages. Shimano claims battery life of more than a thousand miles per charge, and the battery can do more than 300 charge cycles. It’s surprisingly light and small, given the size of the motors it has to power. The complete electronic system is about 70 grams heavier than the mechanical version of Dura-Ace.
The powerful servomotor on the front derailleur provides superquick and crisp shifts. Front shifting is the clear killer app on the electronic group, really an astonishing improvement on the usual performance.
Rear shifting is also actuated by a servo in the derailleur. Overall the shifting is much faster than the mechanical version, as the impulses can be sent to the derailleurs much faster than the cable can be pulled in the standard setup.
We’ve been able to drop the world of 32bit for a while now, with 64bit processors and support for them being prevalent in all popular, modern operating systems. However, where Mac OS X and Linux seem to make the move to 64bit rather effortlessly, Windows has more problems. Even though 32bit applications should run fine on 64bit Windows, some don’t; and to make matters worse, drivers need to be 64bit, as there’s no support for 32bit drivers in 64bit versions of Windows. Still, Gizmodo claims that with Windows 7, the time is right to take the plunge. But really, is it so? And why do Linux and Mac OS X seem to handle the transition so much easier?
The biggest problem with 64bit Windows is that kernel-mode drivers need to be 64bit as well. While newer hardware usually has 64bit drivers, hardware that is slightly older usually does not, and this is where the problems start: your favourite piece of hardware simply won’t work. User-mode drivers can be 32bit, by the way.
Mac OS X circumvents this issue by running the kernel in 32bit, allowing 32bit drivers to run without any problems (the kernel in Snow Leopard is supposed to be 64bit). The userland applications run in 64bit, however, so users still get many of all the benefits. The Linux situation is different; here, the advantage of portability and open source come into play: drivers are simply recompiled to support 64bit.
The second problem is 32bit applications. While 64bit Windows is perfectly capable of running 32bit applications, you might still encounter problems, which can be quite annoying. Especially if you rely on certain applications, its 64bit support is something you should take into account.
Mac OS X has all of its important frameworks in 64bit (Cocoa, Quartz, OpenGL, X11), and thanks to the concept of fat binaries, you really needn’t worry about what version you download. In the Linux world the transition to 64bit once again benefits from the open nature of the operating system and its tools. While open source may have its downsides, there is no denying that in this case, its strength is pretty obvious.
According to Gizmodo, the time is right to move to 64bit with Windows 7. I personally faced this choice with my new computer, but I decided to stick to 32bit for now when it comes to Windows because I’m not that much of a performance junkie (I don’t think Miranda really benefits from 64bit), and I didn’t want to be bothered with its potential problems.
So my question to you is: have you ever faced this choice? What were your arguments to go one way or the other? What are your experiences running 64bit Windows or any other 64bit operating system? What major applications or hardware parts failed for you?
Original posting by Thom Holwerda on OSNews.
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