Oprah to Tweet on Friday’s Show

By Sterling “Chip” Camden
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

What’s the big news that Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, hinted at earlier today?  Oprah Winfrey will tweet for the first time on tomorrow’s Oprah show, which will feature famed tweeter Ashton Kutcher.  Her account is already active, and as of this writing she has 32,607 followers – increasing at the rate of about 15 with every browser refresh.

We can confidently project that after tomorrow’s show airs:

  • That number will skyrocket
  • So will the number of Twitter users (especially in a certain demographic)
  • So will the number of people following Ashton Kutcher – he’ll probably bounce right over the million follower mark.
  • So will the number of times Twitter goes down.

Regardless of what you may think of Oprah, she has an amazing power to lead her followers (pun intended) en masse into any activity that she promotes on her show.  Unless she has something negative to say about Twitter, this may be the moment when Twitter becomes a household word for more than just the social-media-savvy Internet population.  Provided, of course, that Twitter avoids turning off too many of these new users with its legendary failures, signaled by the arrival of the Fail Whale.  There’s even a Fail Whale Fan Club, “Celebrating Twitter and our favorite error page cetacean.”

As Veronica Sopher said:

Forget the whale.  it’s shark jumping time.

Is this Twitter’s big intro?  Or will it be all over once the fat lady tweets?



Mirror’s Edge Recreation (May Cause Super-Cool Motion Sickness)

By Casey Lynn
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Mirror’s Edge, the EA game that sold over a million copies in just a few months, features a first person perspective that makes it pretty stylistically distinctive, and lots of running/jumping/sliding that gives it a kind of frantic feel. This video recreates that style/feel in real life, with the creator holding the camera in one hand as he runs around all over the place.

Somehow it’s a little more dizzying in the flesh than in pixels… if you felt a little queasy when watching The Blair Witch Project you might want to give this one a pass.

Spam wastes the power of 2.4 million homes

The energy wasted by spam e-mails could power 2.4 million homes a year according to security firm McAfee. But its report offers little advice as to how to avoid this problem.

The firm’s report, produced with the help of environmental consultants ICF International, concludes that spam is responsible for the waste of 33 billion kilowatt hours of energy each year. It also produces 17 million tons of CO2, the same amount produced each year by three million cars.

However, it appears the actual production and sending of the spams make up just seven per cent or so of the energy costs (though it’s not as if spammers are likely to be carbon offsetting anyway). Instead, most of the energy is used in filtering out the unwanted messages.

Around 16% of the energy costs come from automated filtering. The rest comes from recipients, with 27% coming from having to retrieve legitimate messages from a spam folder, and just over 50% coming from reading through spams which have evaded the filters and landed in the inbox.

According to the study, this means that the energy used in automated filtering actually pays for itself in environmental terms by saving on energy wasted by recipients. Of course, more effective filtering would cut down energy costs ever further.

It’s worth noting that there’s a major caveat to the figures. It appears the energy costs at the user end were estimated by taking the time it takes for people to sift through e-mails and working how much power their computers used during this time.

The drawback with that method is that is assumes the computer would otherwise be switched off or in hibernation mode. But in reality, it’s almost certain that people who didn’t have to sort through spam would simply spend the time working on their computers instead.



Illusion Labs brings multi-touch gaming to the big screen

In the following video, Swedish gaming company Illusion Labs shows a few of their games running on a large multi-touch display. The games run on any multi-touch hardware, including mobile devices, multi-touch laptops and large window displays.

[Via Newlaunches]

Fun with Nitroglycerin and Nitrogen Triiodide

Warning: Do NOT attempt to do any of these experiments at home. Doing so could result in serious injuries or even worse. You’ve been warned!

Nitroglycerin is moderately easy to detonate, and a hammer is more than enough. Nitrogen triiodide will detonate if it is breathed on. It is an explosive with no use other than a novelty.

A few factoids –

Nitric acid, the acid shown in the beginning of the video, will cause very deep chemical burns that take weeks to heal after contact of just five seconds. It also fumes, and the vapor is very choking. The red gas in the flask is nitrogen dioxide, a very toxic gas that can produce, and be produced from, nitric acid. Sulfuric acid is also dangerous and very reactive to flesh, but is not close to the danger of nitric acid.

Microsoft agrees to free repairs on E74 Xbox bug

Microsoft has agreed to extended the warranty on the Xbox 360 to cover the ‘E74’ error.

This bug is different to the much-publicized ‘red ring of death’. It’s indicated by one quadrant of the power indicator glowing, and an on-screen message displaying the error code E74 and informing users to contact Xbox customer support. Once this happens, the machine is pretty much useless without repair, though there have been some claims of temporary solutions.

The exact cause of the problem is still uncertain. There doesn’t seem to be any pattern of manufacturing dates among the affected machines, making it unlikely it’s down to a rogue batch of components. The most popular theories are that it’s related to either the audio-video cable or to the scaler chip.

Originally Microsoft classified it as simply a ‘general hardware failure’ which was not covered by the product’s warranty. That left users having to pay for repairs unless they were prepared to take legal action under local consumer laws.

Microsoft says it is now satisfied the problem is related to the ‘red ring of death’ closely enough that it’s prepared to include it in the warranty program announced in 2007 to cover that fault. Users hit by the E74 error can now get a free repair or replacement for three years after purchase.

Those who’ve already paid Microsoft for an E74 repair will get a refund of those costs. These should be automatically paid in the next four to twelve weeks. Customers who haven’t had the money back by 1 July should visit www.xbox.com/support to lodge a formal claim, which must be received by November 1st.

Skydiving Simulator

I don’t exactly know how difficult moving around this skydiving simulator is, but it sure does look like a lot fun! I’ve seen simulators similar to this in the past, but the only thing they allowed was to hover in mid-air. Certainly nothing as cool as this thing!

[Via TechEblog]

Microsoft Laptop Hunters Ad Spoof: Homeless Frank

In the following Laptop Hunters ad spoof, homeless Frank has a budget of $1,000 to find his perfect laptop. Will he succeed in his quest? Check out the video to find out!

‘Facebook = low college grades’ study hardly an A+

A study by Ohio State University claims Facebook users spend less time studying and get lower grades than classmates who don’t use the site. But there are some serious flaws in the study’s logic.

A survey of 219 students found that 85% of undergraduates use Facebook. Those who do have grade-point averages between 3.0 and 3.5, while those who don’t have averages between 3.5 and 4.0. Facebook users averaged one to five hours a week of studying, while non-users averaged 11 to 15 hours. Students disagree with the conclusions, with 79% of Facebook users claiming the site didn’t affect academic performance.

The problem with studies such as this is that they assume a link between two facts: as the saying goes, correlation does not equal cessation. It’s entirely possible that the type of students who use Facebook are the type of people who are less likely to study in the first place and that Facebook is simply how they choose to fill the time that comes from not studying.

To be fair to the study author, Aryn Karpinski, she does state that “It cannot be stated (that) Facebook use causes a student to study less. I’m just saying that they’re related somehow, and we need to look into it further.”

The figures themselves are also pretty vague. The study report doesn’t give specific figures about the grades and simple says the students’ results “generally” fitted into the stated ranges. That makes it tough to tell exactly how significant the differences between Facebook users and non-users was.

It’s also worth nothing that 85% of the 102 undergraduate students were regular Facebook users. That means that the comparison for undergraduate students is the behavior of 87 people against that of just 15. That leaves a pretty significant margin of error.

The study didn’t break down the results for either study time or grades between undergraduates and graduates. That provides further room for misleading results as of the non-Facebook-users, barely a fifth were undergraduates. It’s not exactly a fair comparison to stack up undergraduate grades against those of graduates, or to compare the commitments to putting in the hours of studying.

About the only conclusion you can be reasonably confident about from this study is that people who study for longer generally get better grades. But that’s hardly news worth posting a status update about.