Das is CNN, but for some reason most of my text seems to have disappeared. Ah well, let’s try again. So here we go then, what is capital football made up of? I don’t think so, this has little to do with football. Anyway, I hope this looks good. Let’s find out.

In this Oct. 28, 2009 photo, Sony Corporation Chief Executive Officer and President Howard Stringer, center, smiles with Japanese guests at Japan premiere of “Michael Jackson’s This is it” in Tokyo, Japan. Michael Jackson videos or the next Spider-Man movie won’t be among the titles that Sony Corp. releases in 3-D as it gears up to boost TV sales with that technology, Stringer said Thursday, Dec. 3, 2009. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi)

Or, Heathens All

Rev. Joshua Leavitt,

Dear Sir, – I noticed in a recent number of the ‘Emancipator,’ a proposition to furnish gratuitously for a year, that paper to such clergymen as lectured and took up collections among their people, in the course of the year, for the Anti-Slavery Society.

My course of procedure, although it does not conform strictly to the letter of the proposition, yet, in fact, secures to the cause a greater amount of attention and effort, in my view, than would a solitary lecture in the course of the year.

At my monthly concert of prayer for the conversion of the world, which I hold on the Sabbath evening previous to the first Monday in each month, a distinct portion of time is allotted to the cause of the oppressed slave. I portion out to brethren distinct missionary grounds, with the understanding that each is to prepare himself with the latest information relative to his own station. One has, for instance, China; another Ceylon; another the Seamen’s cause; another that of American slavery: which last cause being in two zealous friends of the slave, has, I think according to their ability, due justice to it. Our custom is, that each cause shall be followed by addresses at the throne of grace in their behalf.

As to contributions, the frequent visits of your agents and those of the State Society does not suffer what he ave to give to remain long idle in our purses.

My object in this communication is two-fold, –1st. That of communicating my plans, believing, as I do, that there are many brethren who might introduce it with profit to their people, and with little or no opposition. I think it profitable, as it brings the subject up for serious meditation more than it would be in any other way, unless a distinct concert is held for the slave. And further, the subject is brought before the minds of many that would not attend an anti-slavery concert or a regularly announced anti-slavery lecture.

If you agree with me in sentiment, you may be able to concoct a brief paragraph on the subject that will, I think, be useful. Or you can use such portions of this letter as you please, if you will leave blank my name and the date.

My second object in this communication is, to request that if my measures come up to the spirit of your proposition, in your view, you will please forward to me the Emancipator.

Yours, &c.,

~”Another Response from a Minister,” The Emancipator and Free American (New York), 8 August 1839, p. 58

Once you get past the overcrowded syntax here, this is a fascinating letter. While I’ve certainly heard of church groups convening to hear a lecture on slavery, or about happenings in the mission fields, it never occurred to me that the two would be grouped together in this way. Never mind how Chautauqua this is. Can you imagine hearing a sermon, and then getting a regular news round-up like this?

The list of topics that the good reverend assigns his parishioners – China, Ceylon, Seamen’s Bethels, American slavery – is a great reminder of the wonderful scope of Jacksonian evangelicals’ interests. A bit less happily, it reaffirms who’s at the edges of their world: people far away, people from home but of a radically different occupational class, and people who are property.

And, while I don’t think this is sufficient cause to give interest in missionary endeavors the same weight as the anti-slavery movement (I don’t think it would be wrong to say that missionary news reached a wider audience in anti-slavery newspapers like the Emancipator, rather than in missionary-only magazines like the Missionary Herald), it’s certainly a good indicator of the frame, or frames, within which such news was received. I do wonder if slavery is the controlling metaphor here, or if it’s something bigger about Christian civilization and the perfecting of society.

Thoughts, as always, welcome.

Sudah cukup lama AMD tidak dapat bersaing dengan Intel.Namun sekarang produsen chip terbesar kedua ini meluncurkan prosesor Quad Core Phenom II X4. menurut sebuah sumber yang belum dapat dikonfirmasi, chip 45 nm yang dikenal sebagai “deneb” ini ditawarkan dengan clock 2,8 GHz (untuk seri 920) dan 3 GHz untuk seri 940. Menurut AMD Phenom II bakal lebih cepat 20 persen dibanding pendahulunya. Hasil ini paling tidak ditunjukkan oleh pengujian awal dengan cinebench 2003, phenom II X4 940 bekerja 12 persen lebih sepat dibandingkan Phenom X4 9950-BE dengan clock sebesar 2,6 GHz. Hasil yang sama juga diberikan oleh PCMark05. di sini nilainya meningkat dari 7.597 poin pada Phenom menjadi 9.055 poin pada Phenom II. Varian 940 pada clock yang lebih tinggi. Pun memberikan hasil yang patut diharapkan pada kedua benchmark ini. Dibandingkan dengan Intel core i7, kinerja prosesor baru AMD ini dapat bersaing. Core i7 940 dengan clock yang lebih rendah sedikit kalah pada PCMark05 (8.362 poin) sementara dengan Cinebench, core jelas lebih unggul.

Platform baru untuk Phenom II

Dengan Phenom II AMD bakal menawarkan sebuah platform komputer yang baru, selain CPU baru “Dragon” ini juga dilengkapi dengan chipset AMD 700 dan graphics card Radeon seri 400 platform tersebut untuk pertama kalinya memberikan dukungan terhadap RAM DDR3 dan socket AM3.

Phenom II X4 940 kompatibel dengan solet AM2+ yang lama paling tidak dengan melakukan update BIOS yang sesuai. Varian Phenom II yang bakal direncanakan pada bulan Februari, seperti Tripple-Core Phenom II X3, masih menerapkan motherboard berbasis AM3.*

Microsoft telah merilis sebuah versi Beta dari Service Pack 2 untuk Vista versi ini tidak hanya tersedia bagi pengembang, melainkan juga untuk pengguna biasa yang ingin mengujinya terlebih dahulu. Namun perlu diperhatikan agar software ini tidak digunakan untuk pekerjaan atau tugas sehari hari.

Service Pack ini berisi semua update yang telah dirilis sejak sistem operasi ini diperkenalkan hampir dua tahun yang lalu. Untuk instalasi Microsoft juga menyediakan sebuah software clean up. Software ini akan menghapus semua file yang tidak diperlukan lagi selama proses instalasi berlangsung.

Sevice Pack 2 menawarkan beberapa pembaruan. Windows connect client misalnya. Dalam versi baru, jaringan nirkabel lebih mudah untuk dikonfigurasi. Masalah kecepatan WLAN setelah standby mode bahkan sudah diatasi dalam SP2. tadinya kecepatan WLAN menurun drastis setelah komputer kembali aktif dari standby mode. Windows search 4.0 pun sudah diitegrasikan sehingga mencari dan menamoilkan e-mail, musik, atau foto dapat dilakukan dengan mudah. Selain itu dukungan standart Bluetooth 2.1 sudah tersedia dengan spesifikasi baru. Perangkat yang menggunakan standar ini dapat digunakan pada Vista tanpa ada hambatan. Sejauh memiliki perangkat yang sesuai, penggunapun dapat membakar media Blue-ray. Kini sistem file exFAT juga mendukung UTC Time Stamp(coordinated world time). Jadi data misalnya pada USB Flashdisk dapat disinkronkan dalam beberapa zona waktu. Selama ini terkadang muncul masalah dalam kasus tersebut.
Selain itu, gadget RSS di Widows Sidebar pun sudah disempurnakan dalam Service Pack 2. Feature ini memerlukan resource sistem yang lebih sedikit dan bereaksi lebih cepat dari pada sebelumnya. Kini Vista juga dapat mendeteksi prosesor 64 bit dari VIA. Untuk versi 32 bit berukuran sebesar 302 MB, sedangkan versi 64 bit memiliki ukuran yang lebih besar dengan 508 MB. Menurut Microsoft, versi final akan dirilis pada pertengahan pertama tahun 2009 ini.* www.microsoft.com/chip

The NYT opened up access to its entire archive via an API, a programming interface. It lets developers use NYT news and stuff in their own applications.

Why does this matter? Their archives are newspapers biggest assets (yes, more than their journalists. Sorry). Especially the big, old, authoritative ones. This article explains some of the importance of the development. Or try this. Monetising the archive will be a critical opportunity and challenge for the largest media groups, one that will stretch their business, technology and editorial departments. This side of the business – use of archive, syndication etc – is hard to grasp but critical to the future of the industry.

The newspaper of the future: all news, no paper. Steve Outing of Editor and Publisher writes on what it looks like, and how it works. It is a well thought-through piece, really focussing on some of the transitions of staffing and operations. It also provides a good and heart-felt aspiration for the exercise. “The great hope will be that these digital-only newspaper descendents will learn and grow, and once again provide more jobs for journalists. At least while we wait for that, the communities they serve will continue to have a watchdog with a louder bark than community bloggers and local TV and radio news outlets. It’s the cities and towns that completely lose their newspaper and Web site that I really worry about.” Add to the growing list of good visualisations of the online-only paper. There will be some: the Christian Science Monitor goes online only in April.

Does this make economic sense? Newsosaur, Alan Mutter, thinks not. The comments on this are also interesting. I much prefer this debate (and indeed most of them) when they have some numbers and business logic.  ”Because newspapers on average derive approximately 90% of their sales from print advertising, the only ink-on-paper newspapers that can afford to attempt digital-only publishing are the ones that are irreversibly losing money… But those web-only franchises would produce far less cash than their print predecessors, reducing the value of those businesses by several magnitudes. “

Another thing the thesis doesn’t really address: why bother? Why would we assemble all these people in a city-focussed entity – the Blowville Times or the Suckville Gazette – if it were online? Why would the people at the (presumably revenue-generating) site that covers local business want to cross-subsidise the investigators, or those that cover City Hall? Where will it get its foreign news from – will it even try? 

There is a multitude of new visualisation technologies for the web, many of them affecting how we do or can perceive news. Anyone who has worked on a news desk will instantly get this one – News Map - and how it can be useful (and its limitations, and what one might do to change it for a professional news editor). Great piece of work.

I found this via a site called 10,000 words that is worth a trawl through if you are interested. I will from time to time revisit this subject. The story of how journalism hits technology and vice versa is partly about new interfaces, but to my mind there have been surprisingly few durable changes here: much about the web and new media is very conventional.

Konsep Memristor sebenarnya sudah ditemukan 37 tahun yang lalu. Namun baru sekarang empat peneliti dari Hewlett Packards Lab For Quantum Technology di California mengembangkan elemen unik ini. Teori mengenai Memristor ini dipublikasikan pada september 1971 oleh Leon Chua dari University Berkeley California. Memristor merupakan sebuah hambatan listrik yang menyimpan informasi seperti dalam ingatan manusia.
Komponen baru ini akan mengubah dunia IT secara drastis. Dengan Memristor, sistem komputer dapat mengingat semua informasi dengan konsumsi daya yang sangat kecil dibanding perangkat daya yang ada saat ini, dan dapat dihidupkan atau dimatikan sperti sebuah sakelarlampu. Kepala Lab for Quantum Technology HP Stan Williams yang telah membuat 60 paten AS dan lebih dari 300 karya ilmiah, merasa sangat optimis menemukan sesuatu yang baru dan begitu fundamentaldalam bidang yang berkembang pesat sperti teknik elektro merupakan hal yang luar biasa. Memristor menjadi bukti adanya elemen dasar keempat dari sirkuit listrik, selain dari Resistor,Induktor, dan Kapasitor.

Elemen baru ini menghasilkan sebuah komponen yang benar benar baru. Misalnya sebuah super memory yang beberapa tahun kedepan dapat menggantikan fungsi DRAM sebagai memori kerja atau Flash Hardisk. Sebuah Memristor memory menawarkan kecepatan yang tinggi untuk sebuah RAM yang modern dengan satuan waktu sepermiliar detik. Tidak seperti memory yang lainnya, Memristor tidak memerlukan konsumsi arus untuk menyimpan konten. Tidak diperlukan lagi pemindahan konten pada saat booting atau saat menulis dokumen antara hardisk yang lambat dan RAM. Semuanya masih tersimpan dalam Memristor memory.Windows dapat langsung digunakan setelah aliran listrik diaktifkan kembali. Bila listrik mati mendadak, data tidak hilang.
Perangkat mobile seperti ponsel atau notebook juga sangat diuntungkan. Bila tidak digunakan perangkat akan dimatikan. Setelah diaktifkan perangkat langsung bisa digunakan. Tidak ada lagi hardisk magnet yang menjadi pemakan arus.para peneliti nantinya ingin mewujudkan sebuah prosesor berkinerja tinggi dengan dengan sistem berbasis seperti otak manusia. Sebelumnya, produsen hanya berusaha menambah jumlah transistor pada CPU. Sekarang kita dapat menggunakan Hybird Circuit dengan Memristor. Keberagaman fungsionalitasnya dapat bertambah, jelas Williams. Namun kita masih perlu menunggu beberapa tahun sampai teknologi ini dapat diproduksi secara massal. Para peneliti harus membuat modelnya dan kemudian produsen chip mengaplikasikannya pada desain baru.* sumber : Chip/www.hp.com

Here at Cardiff University School of Journalism, we have been told for weeks by speakers including Matthew Yeomans, Andy Williams and Anthony Mayfield about how the internet and new technology will change the face of society by bringing the powers of publishing to the masses.

People can publish what they want, when they want, and make it available for all to see. People can likewise read what they want, when they want. No longer do people have to rely on a rich few to publish their take on today’s news, and they can get there news from literally anywhere. The oligopolies of old have been blown apart and anybody can come in and seize a sizable chunk of this new market.

Matthew Yeomans told us in his lecture how:

• the record industry has been hit by online services like iTunes, where people can buy whatever single they want to buy from a band’s album, rather than relying on what the record company chooses to sell as a single in shops;
• the advertising industry has been hit by Sky Plus, where people can wind on adverts they don’t want to see; and
• professional journalists have been hit by the rise of ‘citizen journalists’ with mobile phone cameras and an internet connection.

Andy Williams told us how CNN’s iReport now allows anyone and everybody who has news to tell to upload their video news story directly to their website, which could then be broadcast by CNN.

Anthony Mayfield said that with the rise of blogs, forums and mass publishing techniques, we were in the middle of a ‘technological revolution’ comparable to that of the printing press. Never before the rise of the World Wide Web, which was created in 1989 by English scientist Tim Berners-Lee, did we have access to so much information literally at the click of a mouse.

However, as I highlighted in my last blog, the downside of this rise in the availability of information is the ‘fast food’-esque culture of absorbing facts that has arguably come with it. Nicholas Carr argues that the internet, in particular Google, through its nature of regular linking and providing lots of distractions, has made people digest information in a rather ‘artificial’ way, whizzing through texts to find quick answers, rather than thoroughly absorbing and understanding texts and what they tell us about the world – a more productive way of thinking that was encouraged by the printing press revolution, but not this one.

But the common man, coming home from an exhausting day behind a till, does not want to spend hours reading Nietzche – he wants the information in a ‘lite’ format that he can easily understand. And the internet gives him exactly that. The internet is not a replacement for long texts, as Carr presumes; it is just an additional resource.

*

What caught my interest this week is that comics are doing exactly the same thing. David McNeill writes: ‘Japan’s prolific comic culture has distilled complex issues into pocket-sized, graphic books that can be read in the office or in transit.’ Japan went into recession this week for the first time since 2001, and McNeill writes: ‘A string of publications have found success capitalising on Japan’s growing inequalities and economic insecurity.’

Image courtesy of filmonic.com

For years, the Western comic industry has been trying to prove to the public that comics are not just for kids and geeks. Alan Moore has dealt with issues including rape (in Watchmen, which is in the process of being adapted into a movie), and Victorian drug abuse (in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) in realistic detail, while Frank Miller has painted harrowing modern cityscapes in comics like Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Sin City, not unlike those painted by Marx, Dickens and other Victorian writers.

The same real life topics of depravity, inequality, death, love and survival are examined in comics as they would be on any other platforms – be it film, novels or politics. But they are looked at with far less words and a more simple sentance structure, with the added componant of fantastic artwork.

Fans are still commonly dismissed as geeks, as were avid internet users only a few years ago.

I would like to, half-seriously, suggest that comic book and internet geeks could be the ‘middle-class intelligentsia’ spoken of by Marx in Capital that will lead the workers out of their oppression as the economy crumbles and into a communist paradise where everybody is equal.

…when you piss off a group of hackers. I nearly went onto another Paramore tangent with the title, but I think it still fits.

“Two days after someone broke into the email account of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, unknown intruders have hacked the website of conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly and posted personal details of more than 200 of its subscribers.

The breach into BillOreilly.com came as retaliation for remarks O’Reilly made on FoxNews condemning the attack on Palin’s Yahoo email account, according to Wikileaks, a site that makes it easy for whistleblowers, hackers and anyone else to leak documents.

As proof, Wikileaks posted a screenshot of the BillOreilly.com administrative interface that showed the names, email addresses, passwords, and home town of 20 subscribers of the website. In all, information belonging to 205 subscribers was intercepted, according to Eric Marston, CTO of Nox Solutions, the company that maintained the O’Reilly website.

The hack came in response to comments O’Reilly made on Fox News about the posting of contents of Palin’s email account, including pictures of her daughter and her contact list.

“I’m not going to mention the website that posted this, but it’s one of those despicable, slimy, scummy websites,” O’Reilly said, according to this snippet from YouTube. “Everybody knows where this stuff is, OK, and they know the people who run the website, so why can’t they go there tonight to the guy’s house who runs it, put him in cuffs and take him down and book him?”

It’s evident from the remark that no one bothered to tell O’Reilly that Wikileaks, the first site to publish the Palin email, is a multi-national, bulletproof organization that has successfully withstood serious take-down efforts before. He’s not the first conservative to have his lack of tech credentials in doubt. In July, Republican presidential candidate John McCain confessed he was still “learning to get online” and “becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need.”

The hackers were able to access the unsecured list by trying a large number of variations of the website’s administrative URL. He said all affected members have received an email and a phone call informing them of the breach and urging them to change their password anywhere they may have used it. No credit card information was stolen, and the site has since been completely locked down, Marston said.

BillOreilly.com charges $4.95 for monthly premium membership. The O’Reilly Store sells hats, mugs, T-shirts and other assorted schwag.

While the information exposed on Wikileaks may seem minimal, it has the potential to imperil the BillOreilly.com subscribers listed in ways they may not have anticipated. A case in point is Carolyn Carpenter, 68, of Henderson, Nevada. The list showed she used a six-letter word from the English language to access her account. Early Friday evening, when told she should change all accounts that used the password, she replied: “Oh damn, I use it all over the place.”

If there has ever been a case of Karma, then it’s here. When Bill O’Reilly starts shouting about something he knows nothing about, this is what happens. The hackers who broke into Palin’s account were not being malicious or trying to embarrass anyone, but merely to prove whether or not Palin was using a private email account to conduct government business. But rather than look at the facts surrounding the hack, ultra-conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly just went for the jugular and verbally attacked not only the hackers themselves, but even the sites publishing the material on the Internet.

As with the Palin hack, this hack wasn’t done for malicious reasons. No credit card details were stolen, and no harm was done to the website itself. The hackers have targetted Bill O’Reilly just to prove a point. He deserved it in my book, and while I do not condone or encourage any illegal activities, he’ll think twice next time about mouthing off about something he knows nothing about.

Full Article/Source: BBC News

Google is launching an open source web browser to compete with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The browser is designed to be fast, and to cope with the next generation of web applications that rely on graphics and multimedia.

Called Chrome, it will launch as a beta for Windows machines in 100 countries, with Mac and Linux versions to come.

“We realised… we needed to completely rethink the browser,” said Google’s Sundar Pichai in a blog post.

The new browser will help Google take advantage of developments it is pushing online in rich web applications that are challenging traditional desktop programs.

“It’s certainly the biggest news in the browser space since Firefox started to dent Internet Explorer’s lead and many people see this as a re-ignition of the browser wars.” – Darren Waters

Google has a suite of web apps, such as Documents, Picasa and Maps which offer functionality that is beginning to replace offline software.

“What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build,” Mr Pichai, VP Product Management, wrote.

In theory, this could work very well. Google has given us the definitive search engine, Google Earth, and Gmail.  The Google messenger and free web applications have been less successful, but they’re free so come on!

For me, The Google Browser would need to be seriously good. I mean, seriously good. Using FF3 with my mods and settings the way I like it is ideal- very secure and very fast. And Free. I see no reason to leave Firefox unless Google come up with some amazing feature, which I can’t even imagine.

Google has an uphill battle on it’s hands, and I’m not sure how far it will go.

Google Chrome

Download the Beta Here

Digital Rebel 2

I will be finding a good free gallery software for the website soon and ill have a whole bunch of photos shortly.

Just taking some time to let people know there is an amazing way that you can contribute to finding the cure for protein related disease - “when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.”

“You can help by simply running a piece of software.

Folding@home is a distributed computing project — people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.” 

ITS REALLY SIMPLE PEOPLE

Simply visit http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download and follow the downloads that are recommended and run it in the background. All it does is use SPARE  aka EXTRA CPU power that your not using anyways. This software is going to do scientific calculations and send them to the university. They have made great strides to finding out why and how proteins miss-fold and soon enough there will be cures for these diseases BUT its not going to happen unless YOU make it. 

Check it out and make sure to right click and check out the configures tab so you can setup a name and pick a team (i’m on team 32) – points are awarded for helping the project and some teams have prizes and fun stuff. 

http://folding.stanford.edu/ !

Alright my phone came in Monday but I haven’t been able to put it down (and i’ve been working a lot) so I hav’ent had the time to write a proper review but expect it shortly!

Well like most say if you don’t know what the iPhone is by now…you might as well just stay under that rock you’ve been under because the new iPhone is here and in my opinion its nothing too fancy. 

New Features: 

• 3G communications (2 or 3 times faster then EDGE for web surfing) 
• GPS
• New design
• Version 2 Firmware (which can be downloaded onto old iPhones soon enough

Now unless you live in a major city that has decent 3G support, I don’t see this phone being worth UPgrading to. If you don’t have one on your ATT plan then its worth it because of the low price its being introduced with. 

Up in Canada Rogers is taking charge of the iPhone and the rates are…well just like every other data package with Rogers – CRAZY. Heres a quick rip off the Rogers site. 

iPhone 3G Voice & Data Packages

iPhone packages include all the voice minutes and data you’ll need to fully benefit from the breakthrough device.

YES that is 115$ for 2GB of storage. Now I know most people will never use that much but if you compare these plans to ATT for the same thing check the following out for a quick comparison…

Most people would loose it but for us Canadians (eh) this isn’t anything new. Rogers data packages have always been outrageous. 

anyhow my (old) iPhone will be in tomorrow so expect a (old) review on it because I’m ”upgrading” from a Windows Mobile 6 device! (yes very interesting….)

http://tik-sma-dki.org/webtik/?pilih=news&aksi=lihat&id=40