Archive for: June 8, 2009

Like so many others I've been following the tragedy of Air France Flight 447. As we mourn the death of those on board the process of learning from this event begins. Obviously if there was something preventable that led to the crash we need to change it.

An Airbus spokesman was widely quoted Friday making reference to speed indications and pitot tubes. Part of what he said struck me as strange. Here's CNN's version.

Airbus confirmed on Friday that in the wake of the crash it sent a Telex to operators of all Airbus models reminding them what to do when speed indicators give conflicting readings.

A Telex? Really? There must be a mistake.

A Telex was (is?) a message sent between two dumb terminals using a switched network--not unlike the standard "dial-up" telephone network. It allowed companies flexibility to send text messages from their own facilities to any other Telex equipped spot without heading to a company like Western Union and sending a telegram. This was a big deal... in 1965.

From Wikipedia: At the rate of 45.45 (±0.5%) baud -- considered speedy at the time -- up to 25 telex channels could share a single long-distance telephone channel by using voice frequency telegraphy multiplexing, making telex the least expensive method of reliable long-distance communication.

The fact CNN and other news agencies chose to capitalize "Telex" means they're using it as a proper noun--implying its classic meaning. It seems a strange comms choice for a high tech company and its high end customers. Maybe the spokesman is confused or the word has been unofficially adopted and modified over time? I'll keep checking.

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We knew that Opera Mobile 9.7 beta was on its way (in fact, we expected it in May,) but the build released to Windows Mobile consumers on Monday morning isn’t exactly what we had anticipated given certain hints in the business build that support for Flash video was … Originally posted at The Download Blog

View post:
Opera Mobile 9.7 beta: Not what we expected

By Andrew Liszewski What better way is there to keep the kids occupied on a warm Summer day than with a healthy dose of sibling rivalry? But what parent wants to spend the afternoon playing official timekeeper while their kids swim laps in the pool? Enter the Swimways ESPN Swimming Challenge which not only comes with an ESPN decal on the side, but a couple of mountable touch pads that can be used by two swimmers to start and stop the timers on the waterproof (hopefully) clock. There’s also a set of LED displays that show the current time, winning time and number of laps if you’re just in it for the exercise. $43.95 at SwimOutlet.com . [ Swimways ESPN Swimming Challenge ] VIA [ 7Gadgets ]

Read the original here:
Swimways ESPN Swimming Challenge

The Palm Pre’s sharp edge can be used to cut cheese. It’s not in the instruction manual, but who reads it anyway? Of course the cheese cutting technique will be available as well for the GSM / UMTS version. Post from: Cellphone9

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Palm Pre Hidden Feature: Cheese Cutter

A new service from 83 Degrees called Super Chirp launches this evening that lets Twitter users get paid for their content stream. This is a theme we’ve touched on in the past. There is a huge market for celebrity fan pages that Super Chirp will play right into. In fact, 83 Degrees CEO Narendra Rocherolle wrote a guest post here last year called A Missed Opportunity - Britney On Twitter where he talks about the idea. Twitter is mobile and it’s real time, two huge advantages over normal fan sites. And it’s constantly refreshed with new content. Britney Spears has 1.7 million Twitter followers. How many of them would be willing to pay $1, or $10, per month to see a premium stream of her content? Here’s how Super Chirp works. Unlike Twitpub , where publishers have to create a new Twitter account, Super Chirp works through direct messages (Twitter’s private message system). That means publishers can leverage their existing Twitter accounts to promote the paid streams. Users subscribe to the content on the Super Chirp site, pay via Paypal, and then get the messages via DM. They can also visit Super Chirp to see all those paid messages, and sort them by publisher. This is a natural product for celebrities to embrace. But it’s also interesting for charities - loyal supporters can donate to the charity and get a stream of news relevant to that charity, or whatever. Some news outlets may try to charge for streams as well. I could imagine that at least some of our followers on our main Twitter account would pay to get additional information if it had enough value. Any publisher that wants to sign up can as long as they have a Twitter account. The publisher sets the price, between $0.99 ...

The New York Times Sunday edition team picks fights like no one else. The problem is they tend to pick the wrong fights. In December they wrote about Facebook revenue woes just, as it turned out, at the time that Facebook saw a huge spike in advertising dollars that will propel them to as much as $600 million in revenue this year. Then there was the Tesla article that prompted quite a response from CEO Elon Musk. That article was retitled and rewritten to correct errors and change the overall tone. I can’t help wondering if our occasional criticism of the NYTimes prompted their most recent attack, this time aimed squarely at us . Not only does writer Damon Darlin get a lot wrong, he just absolutely failed to write the real and far more interesting story that was staring him in the face. When Damon reached out to me by email to talk about the story, I wrote back something along the lines of “The Sunday New York Times scares the shit out of me” because of their reputation for twisting conversations to fit whatever story they’ve decided to write. But Damon persisted, saying “I want to call you about a column I am doing on different ways news organizations approach reporting rumors.” Seemed fair enough, I have lots of thoughts on that subject. We talked for 20-30 minutes by phone. About 30 seconds of dialog, remixed to change the meaning and context entirely, made it into the article as quotations. None of the rest of our talk seemed to influence his thesis, that blogs can’t be trusted, at all. Damon was laser focused in the article on a post we ran talking partially about Apple/Twitter acquisition rumors. Here’s that post: Twitter Mania: Google Got Shut Down. Apple ...

A couple of days ago we reported statistics from StatCounter suggesting the Bing , Microsoft’s new “decision” engine, had bypassed Yahoo as the number 2 search engine in the U.S. and the world. Well guess what? That same data suggests Bing reign as #2 was extremely short-lived: As in one day. Yes, the same data now suggests that just as quickly as Bing shot up, it’s now heading the opposite way. And in fact, it’s still falling. On June 4, Bing had over 15% of the U.S. search share market, according to the data. On the same day, Yahoo had just over 10%. The following day, Yahoo had almost 11% while Bing had fallen below 10%. And yesterday, Bing had fallen to 6.68% while Yahoo rose again to 11.33%. Meanwhile, the same data suggests that while Google took a big dip during Bing’s reign, it too has now started moving back upwards as Bing declines. Not that Google was in any real danger — on June 4 (the day of Bing’s #2 position), Google had fallen to 72% of searches in the U.S. Now it’s just about back up to 80%. Worldwide data shows the story to be basically the exact same. Bing was #2 for a day then Yahoo regained its place as Bing fell. Of course, it’s important to note that StatCounter is not the be-all end-all measurement tool for such numbers. It claims to track the browsing behavior of over 2 million users across 3 million sites. But the overall trend is undeniable — Bing shot to fame quickly, and once the initial hype wore off, it’s now falling back down. Microsoft needs to keep pushing those TV and web ads to keep its name in people’s minds. Otherwise, Bing runs the risk of having already ...

We’re on the verge of Apple’s WWDC keynote tomorrow morning in San Francisco. We’ll be there covering it live starting at 10 AM PST. After the usual months of speculation, there are two things Apple’s VP of marketing Phil Schiller is expected to focus on during the keynote: Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” and the iPhone platform. Obviously, the iPhone 3.0 software will be a big part of that, but most of those details were already given during Apple’s iPhone 3.0 SDK event a few months back. That’s why a new piece of iPhone hardware seems likely to take center stage tomorrow as well. Details of such a device (or devices) have been trickling out over the past few months. It now seems fairly likely that the device will look similar to the current iPhone 3G, perhaps with a different, more matte-finish back and a loss of the silver ring that goes around the screen now. It will likely feature a better camera — probably 3.2 megapixels (as opposed to the current version’s 2 megapixels) and could have autofocus. The device should also be able to record video. It’s also possible that it could have a front-facing camera, though that may be saved for a future version rather than this one. Speed will likely be a focus as the device should have a faster processor , more RAM and be able to handle faster 3G connection speeds. And that leads to two final rumors: The device’s name and battery life. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber made his predictions for the WWDC keynote this morning, talking about what he’s heard and what he’s unsure about. He has a great track record when it comes to such things, so when he says he’s heard a new possible name for the device, ...