An awesome new viral video from the folks at Evian featuring a bunch of roller-skating babies grooving their stuff to the sound of an old school tape player.
This thing is sure to go viral in no time, because as everyone knows, anything that has to do with a dancing baby on the Intertubes will automatically generate millions of views. Good job Evian!
Microsoft has begun to add some messages from Twitter to results from the Bing search engine. It comes as Microsoft celebrates a clear – though minute – growth in Bing’s usage.
While Twitter’s audience is still relatively small in comparison to the web as a whole, it’s become a useful way to find information which wouldn’t necessarily appear on web pages. For example, one airline looks for references to itself in Twitter posts to keep on top of possible customer service problems before people get to the point of making formal complaints. It’s also a handy tool for “Is it just me?” situations such as when there are problems with a service such as Gmail.
Until now, the major search engines have struggled to cover Twitter because the service is constantly updated. This means firms such as Google face a dilemma because by the time their systems could properly index and filter messages from the site, they’d be comparatively out of date.
At the moment the only way to search through posts is through Twitter itself or through dedicated search tools, which take advantage of the fact Twitter makes its system relatively freely accessible to outside developers. Most of these are simple searches which simply match the query term with little regard to context or importance.
That’s about to change with Microsoft announcing it will allow real-time searching of some Twitter posts. For now it will only cover tweets by a few thousand leading users, chosen by a combination of how often they post messages and how many people regularly read their tweets. That limit is probably a way of reducing the amount of data which must be indexed, giving a balance between timeliness and quality of results.
The announcement follows news that after a full month of operation, Bing is clearly growing in popularity. Weekly figures from traffic analysts Statcounter show that after a fall in usage in the second week (once fewer people were trying it as a novelty), Bing’s audience began rising towards the end of the month.
Across the entirety of June, Bing had a US market share of 8.23 per cent. That’s up from 7.86 per cent in May, a combined total of the MSN and Live Search tools. And while Google probably won’t be losing any sleep, Bing has won over some new customers: Google’s figures dropped from 79.07 per cent in May to 78.48 per cent in June.
The news isn’t so good for Microsoft across the rest of the world: Bing’s global share in the same report was just 3.36. That may be because people see Google as doing a better job of customizing its services for local markets, while some of Bing’s headline features don’t yet work in all countries.
Since the last time I posted browser benchmarks, Google Chrome jumped to version 2, Safari released version 4, Internet Explorer 8 was released, and just yesterday Firefox version 3.5 hit the intertubes. Furthermore, the Dromaeo JavaScript benchmarks have been refined and expanded since then, so it’s high time we update the numbers.
I ran Dromaeo’s recommended test suite on Google Chrome 2.0.172.33, Mozilla Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.18783, Apple Safari 4.0 (530.17), and Opera 9.64. The test machine is an Intel Centrino Duo running Windows Vista with no other applications running and as many services stopped as possible.
Internet Explorer could not run all of the tests due to JavaScript errors, but I was able to get 42 of the 49 tests to run by hacking dromaeo’s HTTP parameters.
First, some graphical representations of the results. Since these numbers express average runs per second, bigger bars are better:
By Casey Lynn
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
Some of the gadget blogs were reporting on the “game doctor” before it was released in June, but now that the mainstream media has picked up the story, you can be sure that more moms will be hearing about this device and thinking, “Oh, that’s brilliant!”
This isn’t the first video game timer out there (and of course there’s even one built into the Xbox 360), but it seems to be getting a lot of attention. The 79-year-old retired businessman who invented it “figures there’s large, pent-up demand for his inexpensive and easy-to-use device.”
So what does the GameDr do besides having a confusing and rather silly name? It’s just a clamp-on lock for the power cord to a game console, equipped with at timer. It’s locked with a four-digit combination, and without that combination, the power shuts off when time is up. To its credit, it at least give a 10-minute and 1-minute beeping warning so that the kids in theory have a chance to save their game before the system goes black.
Wired Gadgets, who gave the device Gadget Lab “Fail” award, pointed out that even if the device is “tamper proof” as advertised (i.e., you’d have to break it to get the cord out without the combination), you could just buy a new cord for $20 bucks. After all, for most game systems, you could easily just replace the locked-up cord with another one and put it back when you’re done, and assuming that mom’s not around (which I guess she wouldn’t be, because why else would she need a timer as opposed to just telling the kid to stop playing games?), she’d never know. I foresee secret stashes of power cords underneath mattresses along with dirty magazines.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with wanting to make sure that a kid isn’t playing video games when they should be doing their homework, sleeping, eating, etc. After all, we don’t want kids collapsing from exhaustion. But it seems to me that a parent who cares enough to want to encourage healthy moderation wouldn’t need a device like this to do it. I suppose the exception might be for a teenage latchkey kid, though if you’re loosening the leash enough to let a kid stay home by himself, the GameDr could be a little insulting. It seems more likely to me that the GameDr will be popular among those who aren’t so much concerned about moderation, as control. “Sorry, your half hour a day of video game time is up! Don’t look at me, the game doctor says so. Now go update your color-coded wheel-of-chores.”
Of course, as noted above, for kids unlucky enough to have a visit from the GameDr, the smart ones shouldn’t have much trouble getting around it. As Wired also pointed out, if your mom set the thing up, then you could probably just try your siblings’ birthdays and be able to crack the code pretty quickly.
Though I have to say, I’m still dubious of that big smile on the kid’s face on the packaging.
Created for Nike by visual effects studio Big Lazy Robot, this promotional clip features a hoodie-wearing robot doing some free-running over the rooftops of what looks like a major metropolis. The final result looks quite incredible to say the least. Video after the jump.
There are lots of interesting ways geeks can express their love to one another. A few months ago, we featured Signs, a short movie about love and communication in the office world, and today, for all the hopeless geek romantics among you, we’d like to present Post-it Love, another cute office romance story.
It’s official folks, Firefox 3.5 final has just been released today! Not only does the new version have a smaller memory footprint and better memory management, but it’s also twice as fast as the previous one. So what are you waiting for? Each second you spend reading this is a second of future productivity lost!
Produced by Mathieu Gérard as his master thesis graduation film, Steel Life is all about beautiful music and stunning 3D imagery.
Steel Life is an experimental student short film based on aesthetics of visual effects. It was produced at university Paris 8 for my master thesis graduation in Arts et Technologie de l’image. My goal was to achieve an onirical and aesthetic treatment of visual effects through CG art.
No, no, don’t worry folks, we’re not talking about the actual end of the world here, but of 2012, the upcoming movie from director Roland Emmerich, the same guy who produced Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow.
What? No LHC destroying Earth in this trailer? Clearly, I find Mr. Emmerich’s lack of vision disturbing!
If the internet was a 50s Broadway musical, it would feature eHarmony, Pandora, Evite, Twitter, and anything else that rhymes well enough for a song. OK, to really enjoy this, you have to be old enough to be familiar with West Side Story AND young enough to know your way around the internet. You know, people like me.
[via Neatorama]