internet

The New York Times reported last week that led by robots, roaches abandon [their] instincts. Specifically, when left to their own devices, groups of cockroaches followed their instincts and natually preferred a darker hiding place to a lighter hiding place virtually all the time. And when a minority group of robotic cockroaches replaced some of the bugs in the cohort and followed natual cockroach rules, again virtually all cockroaches sought the darker hiding place. But when the robots were programmed to seek the lighter, rather than a darker hiding place, fully 60 percent of the wild cockroaches teamed with the robots rather than obeying their instincts, thus demonstrating that even cockroaches are susceptible to bug peer pressure.… Read more

MP3 players are great if you know what you like, own it, and want to listen to it exclusively. But what happens when you're sick of your music collection? Or when you're simply feeling lazy and want somebody else to do the programming for you?

Slacker has the answer: portable Internet radio. The company's been demonstrating its devices since the South by Southwest music conference in March, but it looks like the company's finally taking pre-orders.

You can get the basic idea just by visiting the Slacker home page, which has an embedded version of the … Read more

Updated Again:Nokia has released a legitimate upgrade for the N800 tablets. N800 owners no longer need to follow these instructions to update their OS. Instead, go visit the official Nokia website for info.

Updated: This post was edited for clarity, and to provide an alternative method for generating a N810 serial number (see below).

Details of a major operating-system upgrade for Nokia's Linux-based N800 Internet Tablet device was leaked Wednesday afternoon. Fans of the N800 (and soon-to-be-released N810) have been waiting eagerly for the last few weeks for any word of a final release date.

While the N800 … Read more

Lovers of streaming Internet radio should check out Nexus Radio, an all-in-one app users can rely on to discover interesting stations from around the world. Better than that, Nexus Radio has some built-in tools for saving clips as MP3s, building playlists, and editing clips (warning: this is cursory, but serviceable feature.) Nexus Radio also plays fetch--create a filter and it will capture songs or artists according to your keyword choice. That spells "free music discovery" to me. Get a peek at Nexus Radio in the First Look video below. Click here for the whole First Look video collection. … Read more

A new social-networking DIY Internet radio site called Jango went into public beta on Monday.

Jango, which Webware reviewed while it was still in private testing, offers many of the common features other leading music sites offer, but embeds the controls right within the main play bar.

The site concentrates on improving the usability and interface for DIY music sites that can sometime be daunting. Things like weighting the worth of a song, scrolling your own and others' playlists, finding band information, and managing music is all one click, mouse movement, or thumbnail away from the main play bar.

What … Read more

The "click to activate" step for using certain interactive Web pages with embedded controls will no longer be required when viewing them with Internet Explorer, Microsoft announced Monday.

Microsoft had kept a "click to activate" requirement for interactive Web pages that embedded controls via HTML, in order to avoid patent infringement.

Microsoft has now licensed the technology from Eolas that allows that interaction to happen automatically. Eolas had been engaged in a long-running patent dispute with Microsoft that resulted in a settlement in August.

The result of that agreement is that IE users will no longer … Read more

I suppose "resurrected" is a bit harsh, since ActiveGrid never really died. More than anything else, ActiveGrid had a hard time explaining just what it was meant to do/be. I'm not very technical, so maybe it was just me, but I heard it explained as an application server and various other things. The true meaning never settled as an easy-to-explain elevator pitch for me.

Now ActiveGrid is back, but this time it's called WaveMaker and its mission is much clearer: help migrate noncompliant client/server applications to the Web. It also has a new CEO/management team, new technology, and a new market: Fortune 2000 developers.

This seems intuitively to be a Very Good Thing (applications are no longer resisting the Web's gravitational pull, and gravity always wins), but it becomes even more so when one considers some blog commentary from WaveMaker CEO Chris Keene:… Read more

The CNN article about the Aqua Dots product recall says:

U.S. safety officials have recalled about 4.2 million Chinese-made Aqua Dots bead toys that contain a chemical that has caused some children to vomit and become comatose after swallowing them.

We immediately did our own product recall, removing the unsafe toy from our house last night after our daughter went to bed. But how did this product get into our house in the first place?… Read more

As I have spent the past few years analyzing the differences between the Boomers and Gen X, a yawning chasm has developed between Gen X and the teens and twentysomethings behind us. Years from now I still think we'll be mulling over the cultural divide between people who came of age using MySpace and Facebook, and those who didn't.

While we geezers (aka parents in their thirties and forties) mull over the technological and privacy implications of social networking, the generation behind us is adopting it as a given, and pushing the frontiers of sharing.

Case in point: a start-up called Shoeboxed was launched last July by a group of Duke University undergrads and recent grads. At first glance, I could wrap my mind around Shoeboxed's main concept. The service allows you to input all your receipts in order to keep track of them in one place. Got it.

But then they added a strange social-networking spin. Users are encouraged to "flaunt" their purchases by sharing them publicly. And then other users are encouraged to "let out your inner Mean Girl and go nuts with our stereotyping feature. Using the mouse is almost as easy as real-life stereotyping!"

Because we all know that what the world needs is more stereotyping! The Shoeboxed labels include "ghetto fabulous, attention whore, trust fund baby, teenage mother, playa, playa-hater, white trash, techy geek dork"....you get the idea. The prominent butt shot of the "ghetto fabulous" icon stands out as being particularly gratuitous.… Read more