The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘using-the-same’

It’s no secret that the D3s is an excellent camera. But I would have thought NASA would choose something a little more specialized for, you know, space .

Read more:
NASA goes Nikon for ISS, loves the D3s

For those of you who have graduated from college in the past decade, you may want to relive the glory days of playing Super Smash Bros. until 4AM, except this time you’ll just skip an entire day of work instead of a morning class or two.

Originally posted here: 
Super Smash Bros. hits Wii Virtual Console

Wow, we just burned through 14 bags over the last seven days. We looked at dual-purpose bags , weather-proof backpacks , camera satchels , and even went hands-on with a bag worthy of Batman. Hopefully you were introduced to a few new options.

Here is the original: 
Bag Week Review Round-up

We’re stretching for stories today, believe me. Hence: it’s about time we update the way we conduct the U.S.

More: 
Someone at the Census thinks we should, you know, use technology to improve the Census

As the world watches the violence and post-election protests escalate in Iran, startling images from the streets of Tehran are disseminating through various social media. Many of them are tagged #iranelection, a hashtag which started on Twitter but is spreading to Flickr and elsewhere.

Since it is difficult to find photos in the sea of Tweets using the same #iranelection tag I’ve been using Twicsy, an image search engine for photos posted to Twitter which we wrote about yesterday. If you search “iranelection” or “tehran iran”, dozens of images from the protests will pop up.

Fair warning: these images are raw and unfiltered, and some of them are quite gruesome, showing people getting shot and lying in pools of blood. The most tragic one shows what is described as a woman protester bleeding to death after being shot today. This same incident was caught on someone’s video or cell phone video camera and uploaded to YouTube. (I hesitate to link to this because it is so hard to watch, but you can find it by searching for “An innocent girl was shot by Iran riot police” on YouTube).

There’s been plenty of debate about how big a role Twitter is playing in events in Iran. At the very least, it is being used as a channel to distribute information and images to the rest of the world. It is not always clear where these images come from or who took them. Some of the images are credited to professional news agencies such as the AP, Getty, Reuters, and Arabic news organizations and are being spread around by bloggers both inside and outside Iran. Others look like they were taken in haste or on a cell phone. (For other images from Iran taken by citizen photojournalists, check out Demotix/iranelection).

Below are a few images circulating on Twitter. The first one was uploaded on June 14, 2009 and has no attribution (if anyone knows the photographer, please tell me in comments):

This one was also uploaded on June 14, and is also uncredited:

This one was taken by Farhad Rajabali of news.gooya.com:

So was this one (Farhad Rajabali/news.gooya.com):

Beyond Twitter, you can find a slide show of Iran protest images on the New York Times. And on Flickr, Faramarz Hashemi has collected the set of #iranelection photos embedded below (some of them overlap with the ones on Twitter).

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Final Fantasy XIII is our white whale. We’ll follow it and follow it until it drives us crazy. Today’s news: the Xbox 360 version of the game has only been in development for two months .

Read the original post: 
The Xbox 360 version of Final Fantasy XIII has only been in development for two months

Facebook developers are dying for a unified payment platform, and all signs are pointing to one coming soon. In the latest news, the site has just released a draft of its proposed new Payments Terms, which will dictate how transactions will be conducted going forward. While the updated terms are in line with Facebook’s recent trend towards using simplified language in its legal documents, the company’s blog post also notes that the new terms will “give us the flexibility to try new features”. This isn’t particularly surprising - there have recently been reports of Facebook planning to begin testing payments some time soon, after months of delays.

Facebook is using the same community commenting process it used during its site-wide Terms of Service fiasco before it officially rolls out the new terms, giving users three days to voice their thoughts on the site’s Governance site.

You can read through the proposed list of rules here (there’s also a FAQ). Most of them are pretty straightforward - Facebook basically says that it licenses all of your virtual goods and credits to you (you don’t own them), and it can do whatever it wants as far as changing the price of credits. It’s also not responsible for anything you buy (aside from ensuring that your Facebook Gifts are delivered), and there are no refunds (though the company says that it may intervene in disputes betwen users concerning payments, but that it is under no obligation to do so). Some of the language refers to transactions between users and third parties, which is indicative of the upcoming payment system.

There are a few interesting tidbits worth looking through. My favorite is this one, which seems to indicate that Facebook can randomly disperse virtual gifts to friends if you fail to use your credits in three years (which could have some potentially hilarious consequences, depending on who receives those virtual bikinis and cans of Coors Light):

3.6 If you leave a balance of credits unused for three years, we may redeem those credits by sending virtual gifts to your Facebook friends or donating the credits to a nonprofit organization of our choice (and charging standard redemption fees for those transactions).

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Listen up, 2.5mm-to-3.5mm headset adapters. You too, crappy shape changers required by an absurd chunk of the worthwhile phones out there: We’re through. Game over. Just like voicemail and hand shakes, we’re officially declaring war on any middleman component required to pump audio from a cell phone, along with the phones that require them.

There was a time when this sort of thing was acceptable. It was only a few years ago. Most phones were hitting the shelves with but a few hundred megabytes of storage space, while standalone audio players touted capacities that all but the most dedicated downloaders had a hard time filling. Then came microSD and its high capacity variant, allowing users to pack up to 16 gigs of data (soon to be 32 gigabytes and, with the eventual evolution of SDXC, up to 2 terabytes) onto a card roughly the size of your thumbnail. Then came the iPhone which, whether the decriers like it or not, made much of the general populace give a damn about what their cell phones could do. With 3G networks up across the country and 4G networks beginning to roll out, audio streaming and on-the-go music downloads are becoming commonplace.

Phone manufacturers can no longer afford to implement media playback as an afterthought - but if they insist on requiring headset adapters, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Read the rest of this post >>

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

For sure, Twitter Trends give visitors a great general overview of what the app’s user base of millions are talking about the most at any given time, giving some insight in what’s happening around the world.

It’s an awesome way for people to discover what’s going on, and more users will see the benefit of keeping track of trending topics now that the company has decided to integrate the top 10 trends in the right sidebar of the web version for everyone.

At times the keywords for the trending topics, often determined by many users using the same hashtag for something can be quite self-explanatory, e.g. today’s ‘Swine Flu’ and ‘#swineflu’. More often that not, however, you have no idea why a certain keyword is currently a trend, and figuring out what all the fuzz is about can be quite a pain. Enter What The Trend, which attempts to offer short blurbs about trending topics with a short explanation on why it’s in the top 10 list.

For example, I had no clue why ‘Jonas’ was in the top trends list, until I clicked through to this user-editable explanation blurb and learned that it’s a new show in Disney Channel. In addition, What The Trend shows me the latest tweets about the topic, and also attempts to fetch related pictures from Flickr as well as news through Google News.

You can directly tweet that there’s a trend explanation to your own Twitter account, with bonus points for another service boasting its very own URL shortening service (wttrend.com). The service has its own Twitter account which it regularly updates with new trends + explanations and also offers RSS feeds and its own API.

I can actually see myself going this website once and a while to get a feel of what’s trending on Twitter, although I wish I wouldn’t need to and Twitter would incorporate this into the web version itself. Until that happens, and I doubt it ever will, What The Trend provides the perfect alternative.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

“Do you know how big we are? Do you know what CNN is?!” Them fightin’ words — from longtime CNN host Larry King to Ashton Kutcher.

See the original post: 
Twitter Fight! Larry King To Kutcher: CNN Will Bury You