Category: Computers, Science & Technology

Cross-Posted from the Hand Held Hack: Wow! How cool is this? Hold this device up to view a person using sign language, and get a vocalized version of the “translation!”

Prototype Device Translates Sign Language

“ScienceDaily (June 1, 2012) — Too often, communication barriers exist between those who can hear and those who cannot. Sign language has helped bridge such gaps, but many people are still not fluent in its motions and hand shapes.

Thanks to a group of University of Houston students, the hearing impaired may soon have an easier time communicating with those who do not understand sign language. During the past semester, students in UH’s engineering technology and industrial design programs teamed up to develop the concept and prototype for MyVoice, a device that reads sign language and translates its motions into audible words. Recently, MyVoice earned first place among student projects at the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) — Gulf Southwest Annual Conference.

The development of MyVoice was through a collaborative senior capstone project for engineering technology students (Anthony Tran, Jeffrey Seto, Omar Gonzalez and Alan Tran) and industrial design students (Rick Salinas, Sergio Aleman and Ya-Han Chen). Overseeing the student teams were Farrokh Attarzadeh, associate professor of engineering technology, and EunSook Kwon, director of UH’s industrial design program.

MyVoice’s concept focuses on a handheld tool with a built-in microphone, speaker, soundboard, video camera and monitor. It would be placed on a hard surface where it reads a user’s sign language movements. Once MyVoice processes the motions, it then translates sign language into space through an electronic voice. Likewise, it would capture a person’s voice and can translate words into sign language, which is projected on its monitor.”

Cool looking new computers from Discount HDTV company Vizio. They look VERY cool! High tech goodness!

Vizio’s Beautiful Sci-Fi Computer Fleet Lands Now for Cheapish (Updated: Hands On)

“It takes a lot to make us genuinely excited about a laptop, or even worse, another desktop PC. But cheap TV king Vizio’s done just that. We loved them at CES, and now the all-in-one and superskinny laptop line’s official.

The 24 and 27 inch all-in-one PCs, which borrow enough of Apple’s picture frame design without looking like just another imitator. In fact, it looks pretty stellar, the result of two years of design. The gleaming aluminum neck, the entirety of the guts packed into the tiny base, the Magic Trackpad knockoff—the thing’s form is terrific.

And for a highly reasonable $900 and $1100, respectively, you’ll get a damn good thin rig: Ivy Bridge CPUs, Nvidia’s latest Kepler graphics, USB 3.0, 1920 x 1080 displays, and a maximum terabyte hard drive plus a 32 GB SSD. On the software side, you’ll appreciate an installation of Windows 7 with zero bloatware—no awful photo editors and video players you’d drink blood over actually using. You’ll get none of that here—nothing installed at all—which is an enormous relief.

The entire thing doubles as a 1080p TV, with two HDMI inputs—hey now, nice for a dorm or bedroom!”

Official version 4.0 of Skype for Linux is available NOW!

From the Skype for Linux Blog:

“First off, we’d like to thank our Skype for Linux users for your patience awaiting Skype 4.0 for Linux, codenamed ‘Four Rooms for Improvement,’ which is now available. With this release, we have finally filled the gap with our other desktop clients and we are now making many of the latest Skype features, as well as a lot of UI improvements, available to our penguin lovers.

You will find four major changes in this release:

• We have a new Conversations View where users can easily track all of their chats in a unified window. Those users who prefer the old view can disable this in the Chat options;
• We have a brand new Call View;
• Call quality has never been better thanks to several investments we made in improving audio quality; and
• We’ve worked on improving video call quality and have also extended support for more cameras.

Of course, we have loads of other small improvements and fixes. As you can imagine, the list is so long it would take too much time to write it all, but some are worthy of mention:

• improved chat synchronization
• new presence and emoticon icons
• the ability to store and view phone numbers in a Skype contact’s profile
• much lower chance Skype for Linux will crash or freeze
• chat history loading is now much faster
• support for two new languages: Czech (flag:cz) and Norwegian (flag:no)

Note, the very first time you start Skype for Linux 4.0 might take a few minutes (depending on how lengthy your chat history is). Please do not close Skype during this time. Subsequent starts will load much more quickly.”

Yammer will get a reported 1.2 Billion dollars in it’s sale to M$. Insiders suspect Microsoft is trying to shore up its Office product to update it to use social components. Yammer is sort of a “Facebook for Business.” I have an account there and watch discussions between fellow virtualization geeks. In the last nine months, Microsoft revenue from their Office product division is 17.7 Billion.

According to the web site “The Wrap,” Microsoft has a surprise in store for Apple! A tablet to rival the iPad. Can they pull it off?

Microsoft Manufacturing Tablet to Rival Apple iPad, Says Insider (Exclusive)

“Microsoft is set to unveil a tablet next week that will mark its entry into rival Apple’s territory with its own branded product, TheWrap has learned.

The company has scheduled a secretive event for Monday at 3:30 p.m. June 18 in Los Angeles, where it will make a ‘major’ announcement whose nature has not been disclosed. Even the venue has not yet been announced.

But an individual with knowledge of the company said that Microsoft would introduce a Microsoft-manufactured tablet at the event, marking a foray into a new hardware category that would put the company in direct competition with giant rival Apple.”

Indeed! I love my notebook running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS… I use it as my primary system!

As I predicted in the last netcast, M$ backed off. I knew they would. It was a “trial balloon” to see what the industry would say.

IE 10’s ‘Do-Not-Track’ Default Dies Quick Death

“Well, that didn’t take long.

The latest proposed draft of the Do Not Track specification published Wednesday requires that users must choose to turn on the anti-behavioral tracking feature in their browsers and software.

That means that Microsoft IE 10, which the company announced last week will have Do Not Track turned on by default, won’t be compliant with the official spec. Which means that tech and ad companies who say they comply with Do Not Track could simply ignore the flag set by IE 10 and track those who use that browser. Which means Microsoft has no choice but to change the setting.

Microsoft’s surprise announcement last Thursday was interpreted by many as a way to gouge Google, which runs an ad system based on tracking cookies. But it also enraged many online ad companies and industry groups, who saw the move as overly aggressive and a threat to their business model.”

LinkedIn has been comfirmed, and security experts believe that the dating site, eHarmony may be involved in the password dump as well. An unknown hacker posted the cryptographic hashes for the passwords, and has asked for help in decrypting them. He said in his post, “These are the ones I can’t crack.”

Someone with the username “dwdm” posted the information and in less than two hours, 76% of the posted list was hacked.

If you have an account on LinkedIn… change it now. I changed mine! I don’t have (or need, since I am happily married!) an account on eHarmony, but if you have one, change that one as well!

Ta-da! IPv6 is here!

IPv6 Day: Only the Biggest Change to the Internet Since Its Inception

It’s only the most significant architectural development in the history of the Internet, and presto, it transpired last night at 00:01 GMT. Did you notice?

I’m betting not, and that you probably didn’t even know it was happening, which is precisely how things were supposed to go down. Don’t worry, you’re fine, you don’t need to do anything, and as far as most of the Internet is concerned, turning on IPv6 — of tectonic caliber at the architectural level, minus the earthquakes — won’t impact how you interact with the Internet any time soon. But it will eventually. And it was necessary, to prevent the Internet from running out of real estate.

Thus ‘IPv6 Day,’ which is what participants have dubbed June 6, 2012, the day some of the world’s biggest Internet service providers like AT&T, Cisco, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and TIME’s own parent company, Time Warner, enable IPv6 permanently on their hardware. It’s the followup to World IPv6 Day, which occurred a year ago on June 8, 2011, when providers turned on IPv6 for a single day in a kind of symbolic ‘time to pay attention to this’ act.”

With IPv6, everything can have a unique address. In comparison to IPv4’s 4.3 billion IP addresses, IPv6 can assign about 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses. Or to be exact:
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 IP addresses.

Iconic science fiction author, Ray Bradbury, is dead at the age of 91. He was born the same year as my father. I read his work as a kid. Wow.

Ray Bradbury Dead at 91

(CBS/AP) Ray Bradbury, the writer best known for his dystopian novel “Fahrenheit 451,” died Tuesday night in Los Angeles. He was 91.

Reached at Bradbury’s home, his daughter, Alexandra Bradbury, says her father died Tuesday night in Southern California. She did not have additional details.

Bradbury had a lengthy career of writing everything from science-fiction and mystery to humor. He transformed his childhood dreams and Cold War fears into telepathic Martians, lovesick sea monsters, and a high-tech, book-burning future in “Fahrenheit 451.”

He also scripted the 1956 film version of ‘Moby Dick’ and wrote for ‘The Twilight Zone.’

Bradbury’s series of stories in ‘The Martian Chronicles’ was a Cold War morality tale in which events on another planet served as a commentary on life on this planet. It has been published in more than 30 languages.

‘If I had to make any statement, it would be how much I love and miss him, and I look forward to hearing everyone’s memories about him, Danny Karapetian, Bradbury’s grandson, told science website io9. ‘He influenced so many artists, writers, teachers, scientists, and it’s always really touching and comforting to hear their stories.'”