CrunchGear |  |
- Daily Crunch: Cloudy 3D Edition
- 10 Things That Simply Need To Be In iOS 5
- Alleged Spy Pics Surface Of Kyocera “Katsura” Tablet
- A Micro SD Reader And Camera In One? The Fuuvi Pick Is A Miracle!
- SpaceX: Something Big Is Coming
- Apple Patents 3D Camera System, Vows To Be Better Than The 3DS
- Tesla To Join The Ranks Of The Big Three?
- Amazon’s Cloud Player Tests The Limits Of The Record Labels’ Patience
- Nasa To Show Their Next Launch In HD
- Ex-Microsoft Games Chief Apologizes For ‘Consolization’ Of Gaming
- The Tupperware Turret: The Cake Container Is A Lie
- Hercules Announces The Ultra-mini eCAFE Just In Time For The Next Netbook Revolution
- Sony’s XDR-S16DBP Radio Can Sit On My Desk Anytime
- NEC Medias: World’s Slimmest Smartphone Tops Japanese Cell Phone Sales Charts
- Pitch-Black Dungeon Hits World of Warcraft, Blizzard Brings Kinect To StarCraft 2
- DIY Cloud: Two Hard Drives That Let You Access Files Anywhere
- Even An Asus Netbook Can Run Crysis 2
- Glee, Sons Of Anarchy And More Hitting Netflix Watch Instantly Today
- Report: ‘Peak Bandwidth’ Threatens Global Economy Unless Decisive Action Taken
- A Spot Communicator Model Recalled, Found Not To Work Below 40 Degrees
| Daily Crunch: Cloudy 3D Edition Posted: 02 Apr 2011 12:00 AM PDT |
| 10 Things That Simply Need To Be In iOS 5 Posted: 01 Apr 2011 05:11 PM PDT
WWDC. It’s like Christmas for OS X and iOS developers. Each year, they flock to San Francisco’s Moscone Center, anxiously awaiting the pair of gifts that Apple annually bestows: the new iPhone, and a bundle of new features on which they’ll build their next big thing. If whispers and hearsay hold true, this year’s WWDC will only feature the latter; the iPhone 5, says the rumor mill, won’t be showing its face until Fall. Instead, this show is purportedly going to be all about iOS and OS X. While Apple doesn’t come right out and say it, it’s pretty safe to assume that by “iOS” they mean “iOS 5″. Given that we’re writing about iOS on a regular basis and talking about it with readers and friends even more, we’ve got a pretty finely-tuned wishlist for iOS 5. We also happen to know that a heaping handful of Apple folk read TechCrunch regularly — and with the feature lock stage of iOS 5′s development cycle (wherein they absolutely refuse to add anything new and just focus on what they’ve already started) presumably riiiight around the corner, we figured there was no better time than now to put it out there. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>
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| Alleged Spy Pics Surface Of Kyocera “Katsura” Tablet Posted: 01 Apr 2011 03:48 PM PDT
“Katsura” is the Japanese word for a kind of tree, though the buds on the back appear to be of the unrelated Cercis genus. The decoration and name are the kind of consistent branding that suggest to me this isn’t fake, but beyond that there’s little we can tell. Kyocera is making a tablet… and if it’s as weird as the Echo, it’ll at least stand out from the crowd. Head over to Android Community for the rest of the shots. Keep the date in mind, though.
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| A Micro SD Reader And Camera In One? The Fuuvi Pick Is A Miracle! Posted: 01 Apr 2011 02:38 PM PDT
[via Geeky Gadgets]
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| SpaceX: Something Big Is Coming Posted: 01 Apr 2011 01:35 PM PDT SpaceX just announced a press conference for next Tuesday in Washington, DC and released the embedded video as a teaser. Think it’s going to be a rocket announcement? Yeah, that’s probably a good guess and it might have something to do with the company’s massive Falcon Heavy rocket. Anyone wanna go to the Moon? Watch the press conference next week live right here. (We’ll remind you)
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| Apple Patents 3D Camera System, Vows To Be Better Than The 3DS Posted: 01 Apr 2011 01:17 PM PDT
Even though we thought the 3D display for iPhone 5 rumor was preposterous, it doesn’t mean Apple isn’t considering 3D in the future. According to a new patent, the company is working on a 3D camera for a device similar to the iPhone. Could Apple do 3D better than everyone else? The patent says how Apple would do 3D in a different way than tradition methods, which involve extensive software to “stitch” two photos together. Instead, Apple’s way would involve a “paradigm shift from the known software-based approaches.” The new method would utilize hardware for a “deterministic calculation for stereo disparity compensation.” Essentially, the two images will be rendered into 3D from hardware based on data from separate luma, chroma and distance sensors. With a one-time system calibration the Apple device would be able to take both photos a videos. Pretty neat stuff, if it ever happens. But as we’ve seen before, Apple sometimes patents things for the hell of it.
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| Tesla To Join The Ranks Of The Big Three? Posted: 01 Apr 2011 12:30 PM PDT
Being called “America’s fourth automaker” is good for stock prices. That’s what Tesla was recently labeled in a report from Morgan Stanley and it caused their stock to shoot up nearly 20% to close at $27.75. It also doesn’t hurt that they’re projected to hit $70 by the end of the year. Morgan Stanley sites increasing fuel costs and major government backing as reasons that Tesla could break into the top US automaker bracket normally reserved for Ford, GM, and Chrysler. Many are still skeptical of EVs because they aren’t yet cost effective over gasoline and a large-scale charging infrastructure hasn’t been set up. “As long as we’re still in a world where we don’t have a vastly expanded infrastructure, in a world where gasoline is still cheap enough, the mainstream is not going to embrace them. Consumer behavior is affected first and foremost by price.” said Ed Kim, director of industry analysis with AutoPacific. If gas prices continue to rise, it’s likely that Tesla’s stock will continue along with it. [via The Huffington Post]
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| Amazon’s Cloud Player Tests The Limits Of The Record Labels’ Patience Posted: 01 Apr 2011 12:00 PM PDT
Amazon may have introduced its digital locker music service, the Cloud Player, before similar services from rivals Google and Apple (that are widely believed to be launching this year), but that doesn't mean it will be an easy existence. Not long after the company published a note on its Web site inviting users to give Cloud Player a try did one of the major record labels offer a warning. "We are disappointed that the locker service that Amazon is proposing is unlicensed by Sony Music," a Sony spokesman said. Is Amazon on a collision course with the music industry, and if it is, could that be a good thing for consumers? The Amazon Cloud Player gives users the ability to listen to their music collection from anywhere they have an Internet connection, either via a Web app that's compatible with all major browsers or an Android app. (The service is officially incompatible with iOS devices such as the iPhone, but users have nonetheless reported partial success using Mobile Safari.) Users upload their music files, either in MP3 or AAC format, to their online account (or "locker"), and can thenceforth access these files with the Cloud Player. It's your music anywhere and everywhere you happen to be. Amazon gives everyone with an Amazon account—and who doesn’t have one of those?—5GB of free storage, with premium options available for more storage space. (Not that hard drive space is expensive these days. Scroll to the bottom of your Gmail inbox and you'll see that Google already gives you more than 7GB to play with by default.) The idea of streaming music isn’t new. Services like Spotify in Europe and Rdio in the U.S. have long given users the ability to stream music using a variety of desktop and mobile applications. The key difference between these services and the Amazon Cloud Player is that Amazon’s allows you to upload your own music to its servers ("the cloud"), and then access those as you see fit. If you have an old Rolling Stones CD ripped to your hard drive you can’t upload those files to Spotify’s cloud, but you can upload them to Amazon’s. The record labels, which have hardly been friendly to the digitization of music since the days of Napster, don’t necessarily approve of this feature, saying that Amazon doesn’t have the proper licensing agreements in place to offer that kind of capability. Sony Music has been the most vocal opponent thus far. It told Reuters that it didn’t think its licensing agreement with Amazon would permit streaming music. (The record labels differentiate between giving users the ability to download a song once versus being able to call upon that same song as you see fit. Think you own a song when you download it from iTunes? Think again, as you’ve only purchased a license to download the file once. Ownership of digital music is a thing of fiction.) More ominously for Amazon, it also said that it was "keeping its legal options open." But what type of problems could Amazon run into? Julie Samuels, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that Amazon may model its defense on how Cablevision successful argued for its remote storage digital video recorder, or RS-DVR, in 2006TKTK. Users would use the RS-DVR as they would a traditional DVR—pause live TV, rewind, re-watch recorded content, etc.—except all of this content was stored on Cablevision’s own servers. Cablevision argued that despite the fact that the hard drive in the DVR was located somewhere else, its functionality was identical to that of a traditional DVR. Amazon could argue the same thing, that all its doing is putting somewhere else the users’ hard drive that otherwise would be sitting on their desk. Perhaps to avoid all of that, Amazon is now said to be "aggressively" courting the record labels to ensure that the service doesn’t land the company in a federal court. Amazon’s not the only company that’s offering such a service. MP3Tunes.com also offers a digital locker, and an assortment of desktop and mobile applications to access that locker. It just so happens that EMI, one of the big four record labels (and founding member of the Recording Industry Association of America), has been fighting the service in court since 2007. But if Amazon is able to convince a judge that what it’s doing is just that, merely giving users access to a hard drive that just so happens to be available somewhere else. Unless the record labels are prepared to argue that it’s illegal to set up a Web server (thisismymusiccollection.com) and access its files, in which case the nation’s copyright laws are truly uselessly antiquated.
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| Nasa To Show Their Next Launch In HD Posted: 01 Apr 2011 11:30 AM PDT
Nasa is planning to stream their next launch in HD. This will be the first time Nasa will show a launch in HD on their online HDTV channel. The ISS crew will fly out to the ISS in the Soyuz spacecraft from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Make sure you’re around for the launch on April 4th at 5:18 pm EST. You can watch the events leading up to the launch, along with the launch, here. Press Release HOUSTON, April 1, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — For the first time, NASA Television will provide high definition footage of the pre-launch events and liftoff of an International Space Station crew aboard a Soyuz spacecraft. NASA astronaut and Expedition 27 Flight Engineer Ron Garan and Russian cosmonauts Alexander Samokutyaev and Andrey Borisenko will launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 4 at 5:18 p.m. CDT (6:18 a.m. Baikonur time on April 5). The HD video from Baikonur will air on NASA TV’s HD channel and standard definition channels. The schedule includes (all times Central): Friday, April 1 Saturday, April 2 Sunday, April 3 Monday, April 4 In continental North America, Alaska and Hawaii, NASA TV’s high definition and standard definition channels are MPEG-2 digital C-band signals carried by QPSK/DVB-S modulation on satellite AMC-3, transponder 15C, at 87 degrees west longitude. Downlink frequency is 4000 MHz, horizontal polarization, with a data rate of 38.86 Mhz, symbol rate of 28.1115 Ms/s, and 3/4 FEC. A Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) compliant Integrated Receiver Decoder (IRD) is needed for reception. For NASA TV downlink information, schedules and links to streaming video, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv For more information about the International Space Station and the Expedition 27 crew, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/station
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| Ex-Microsoft Games Chief Apologizes For ‘Consolization’ Of Gaming Posted: 01 Apr 2011 11:00 AM PDT
Robbie Bach, the former president of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices division, has apologized to PC gamers for the "consolization" of their hobby. "Am I happy to have been a part of the destruction of PC gaming? No, of course not. But I am proud of the fact that I’ve helped convince a generation of gamers that it’s cool to pay $10 for a pair of virtual sunglasses and that playing online should be considered a premium feature. Look, guys, no one’s stopping your from installing Doom II and playing through that again, right? I mean, what’s the difference between that and Black Ops, really?" Bach, who served as the division’s president from its formation, in 2005, until last fall, made the comments yesterday at the annual Dream-Crushers & Fancy Hats convention, held in Schenectady, NY. The keynote speaker, he made the comments while wearing a beanie bearing the slogan "DLC MADE ME RICH." "PC gamers have to understand one thing: they’re irrelevant jerks, and the whole world will be much better off if they would go away forever. Nobody in the gaming industry cares how much memory they have or how many slots their GPU occupies. Overclock your CPU? Why don’t you fill a cup of water and see if it gives a damn because I can guarantee nobody at Activision or EA gives a toss. Do you think we’re able to buy pet tigers making sure textures look good at your stupidly high resolutions? We’ve convinced gamers that sub-720p resolutions blown up to fill 60-inch TVs represents the absolute pinnacle in visual fidelity. Besides, people want to be able to hit the A button and see something awesome happen, not fiddle around with .ini files making sure their FOV—whatever that is—looks good on their monitor. People want to use their mouse to like things on Facebook, not accurately aim their weapon in the 38th shooter they’ve played this year." PC gamers have long complained that the continued existence of consoles like the Xbox 360 and PS3 has all but ruined their lives. Half-baked DLC, terrible graphics, linear level design, and copycat gameplay have destroyed PC gaming, they argue. "I bought Crysis 2 because it’s Crytek, and Crytek usually knows how to take advantage of my PC’s hardware," one anonymous PC gamer told CrunchGear. "And what do they churn out, this Direct X 9 trash? I wish I was never born. Why don’t I just take my PC, drive it to the tallest bridge in town, throw it off, watch it fall, then have Superman catch it mid-air, fly even higher in the air, and then drop it again and watch it smash into a million little pieces. At least then I won’t have to deal with Games For Windows Live ever again when I want to play F1 2010," he said. "PC gamers should shut up," said one console gamer who’s probably too dumb to know he’s being trolled. "Like, nobody cares what they think anymore. They’re worse than WWE fans who get mad when they hear the words sports entertainment. Get over yourselves, marks."
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| The Tupperware Turret: The Cake Container Is A Lie Posted: 01 Apr 2011 10:50 AM PDT I realize this is a bad day to show off something amazingly cool, but this turret is worth the abuse. Basically it’s a Tupperware cake container with an airgun inside. It uses a small microcontroller and an IR sensor to accept commands and it can swivel and tilt up and down to take on attackers from all sides. A press of the green button fires and a press of the red button stops the gun.
There are full instructions on the Project Page so you and your loved ones can prepare your own special experiments at home using common household materials.
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| Hercules Announces The Ultra-mini eCAFE Just In Time For The Next Netbook Revolution Posted: 01 Apr 2011 10:26 AM PDT
It looks like a little Chrome OS notebook for real haxors. I’d totally get one.
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| Sony’s XDR-S16DBP Radio Can Sit On My Desk Anytime Posted: 01 Apr 2011 10:21 AM PDT
Sony’s first jump into the DAB radio pool involves this gorgeous tabletop model. The XDR-S16DBP features a monochrome 16×2 LCD, headphone jack, dual 0.8W speakers and of course the goods needed to pull in the digital radio signals floating over most of Europe. £79 (around $127) will put this retro set in your life. Available now in Euroland.
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| NEC Medias: World’s Slimmest Smartphone Tops Japanese Cell Phone Sales Charts Posted: 01 Apr 2011 09:09 AM PDT  The NEC Medias is not only "the world's slimmest smartphone", it's also selling really well. The handset, which we have shown you last month, was the best-selling cell phone in Japan between March 14 and March 20, according to market research firm Gfk Japan [JP]. Read the rest on MobileCrunch.
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| Pitch-Black Dungeon Hits World of Warcraft, Blizzard Brings Kinect To StarCraft 2 Posted: 01 Apr 2011 09:00 AM PDT
Who will survive the Tomb of Immortal Darkness? It’s a new five-man dungeon coming to World of Warcraft that’s "deep beneath the crumbling tombstones of Duskwood’s Raven Hill Cemetery." (Incidentally, Duskwood is my favorite old world area. Oh, the memories.) The dungeon uses Deep Dark technology to give players the ultimate challenge: navigating an instance in total darkness. Is your toon gear’d enough to take on Omgsogoth, the Dark Lord of Twilight? Clearly this is a silly April Fools gag (I hope that doesn’t spoil anything for you), and it’s just one of a few Blizzard has going on. Another worth mentioning here: Kinect functionality in StarCraft 2! /dance
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| DIY Cloud: Two Hard Drives That Let You Access Files Anywhere Posted: 01 Apr 2011 09:00 AM PDT
It has long been a dream of mine to connect a hard drive at home to the Internet. This dream, of late, has been deferred by the rise of cloud services like SugarSync and Dropbox but two hard drive manufacturers, Buffalo and Iomega, have come out with compelling devices that seem to finally allow home and home office users to get the benefits of cloud hosting with the safety of complete control over your data. The two devices, the Buffalo CloudStor and the Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive, come in multiple sizes and sit on your network. They are, for the most part, plug and play except for a quick port change for the Iomega drive. I’ve put them both together as their feature sets are similar in process but intrinsically different in performance.
Buffalo CloudStor(1TB, $149, 2TB $209) With this hard drive, Buffalo has eschewed homegrown technology completely and has embedded a full Pogoplug install inside the case. Pogoplug, as you’ll recall, is a dead simple file sharing box that lets you connect any external drive and share the content immediately, either with a secure login or with the world. This image [available until my ISP pulls my plug], for example, is stored on my local network and I’ve shared it publicly with you all using the Pogoplug interface. This is an amazingly useful feature and because it is a public share you can pull it at any time.
I’m impressed that Buffalo simply ignored the traditional route of buying or white labeling an unknown sharing system and went with an established player in the cloud market. The drive works amazingly well when you need to upload and share certain pieces of data in very specific contexts and is excellent for folks who are always on the go and want a ready store of information to be available from their home office.
The drive has a BitTorrent client built-in and supports Time Machine backups as well as an “active directory” system that will synchronize with any folder on any PC, allowing you to create a cloud-based backup of your data. In all, it’s an interesting and very usable device. Cons The Cloudstor is outward facing. Its designed to allow you to access things through almost any firewall. As such, it’s not such a great internal server although I found that it had fewer hangs and failures than the Iomega drive.  Iomega Home Media Network HD(1TB $169, 2TB $229) The Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive is aimed a bit more at network-based VPN and file sharing. The drive itself supports remote access from anywhere in the world and acts as an iTunes server, DLNA and UPnP server, and a print server. It supports 64- and 128-bit encryption and you can “share” your drive with others using a unique key system that allows you to invite outsiders to access your data. The drive also includes TimeMachine backups and standard disk duplication for centralized back-up. Pros Cons I had some issues using the drive as a home UPNP share and for a brief period I couldn’t access it at all, even on my home computers, because the shares were freezing and failing to connect. My concern is that Iomega’s system is a bit too complex for its own good. It avoids the web almost entirely and instead depends on a PC-based sharing interface. However, rather than confuse and intimidate I found that the drive sharing system worked well enough for those with a little bit of net savvy. Bottom LineOn the whole I preferred Buffalo’s solution over Iomega’s although Iomega support a more media-centric workflow and as such made it easier to grab videos outside of a browser and on media sharing devices. However, if Buffalo opens the drive’s firmware to the open source Pogoplug solutions, I think it could be a winner. The sheer fact that both of these offer over a terabyte of storage on a seamless cloud is impressive in itself. Manufacturers have been trying to achieve this for years and the last good implementation I saw was in Netgear’s Stora line. I think these two drives have their plusses and minuses and I’m pleased to finally be able to say that each and every one of us can, in a way host our own cloud servers at home.       
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| Even An Asus Netbook Can Run Crysis 2 Posted: 01 Apr 2011 08:30 AM PDT Crytek went to great pains throughout the development of Crysis 2 to stress that it wasn’t going to be a repeat of the first game. You weren’t going to need a monstrous machine merely to get 20 frames per second. No, Crytek said, we’ve managed to get the game running on the Xbox 360! And if the 360 can run it, what can’t run it? Not the Asus Eee 1215B, that’s for sure. Netbook Spain recently reviewed the little Asus, and in order to demonstrate its capabilities (in no small part thanks to the presence of AMD Fusion), they tested it out with various games, one of which was the mighty Crysis 2. And how did the Asus do? Well, the game ran, which is crazy in its own right, and didn’t run too poorly, either. We’re talking an average of 12-15 frames per second (sounds like Perfect Dark on the N64!) at 800×480. Speaking of Crysis 2, so much for that Direct X 11 patch. Seems to me that if you were holding out till the patch before playing, well, you might want to reconsider. Crytek never did confirm the existence of a patch, mind, but how strange is it that I can play the first Crysis with DX10 and I can’t even do that much with the sequel. (Whether or not there’s a lick of difference between DX9 and DX10 is besides the point.) At least AMD is working on fixing some of the graphical glitches.
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| Glee, Sons Of Anarchy And More Hitting Netflix Watch Instantly Today Posted: 01 Apr 2011 07:53 AM PDT
The new deal brings the first season of Glee and the first two of Sons of Anarchy as soon as today. It’s a shame that the war between content distributors and rights holders leave consumers trapped in limbo. Apparently Netflix’s 20 million subs isn’t a big enough market for big media and so we all lose.
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| Report: ‘Peak Bandwidth’ Threatens Global Economy Unless Decisive Action Taken Posted: 01 Apr 2011 07:30 AM PDT
Sometimes humor is the best mechanism to explain an opaque topic. Public Knowledge, a group that concerns itself with defending consumer rights in "the emerging digital culture," has released a report today entitled "Peak Bandwidth." [Here's the PDF.] Keep in mind today’s date, is all I have to say. The report says that the "era of plentiful, low-cost bandwidth is approaching an end. The supply of bits, the raw material of our information economy, is rapidly dwindling… unless mitigation is orchestrated on a timely basis, the economic damage to the world economy will be dire and long-lasting." You hear that, we’re running out of bits! The bandwidth crisis—and why else would the likes of AT&T have to impose bandwidth caps if we’re not in the middle of a crisis?—has been caused by hogs like "young people" and "cord-cutters." These people have placed an "unbearable strain on our bandwidth supplies," and in effect have clogged the pipes to the point where we now have to ration bandwidth. Most ominously: "Once bandwidth is gone, it's gone. Used up bits are gone forever. They don't come back and can't be replaced." What to do about the coming crisis? Public Knowledge offers up a few ideas, including moving away from inefficient file formats like MP3 toward formats like MIDI, and replace too-big-for-their-own-good images with ASCII art. We could also move toward "renewable communications technologies" such as carrier pigeons and sneakernets. Walking down the hall and handing over a burned DVD is more much bandwidth-efficient than setting up an FTP server and having people download files over and over again, no? Now you see the light. Now you understand why it’s so hard to be an ISP in 2011: bandwidth hogs have used up the Internet’s bandwidth, so now it’s time to start rationing. Unless, of course, you’re OK with destroying the global economy and holding back innovation.
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| A Spot Communicator Model Recalled, Found Not To Work Below 40 Degrees Posted: 01 Apr 2011 07:07 AM PDT
Good thing the company is righting a wrong and compensating owners of the affected models. The recall focuses on the Spot Communicator DeLorme PN-60w bundle with serial number range of 0-2000000 and 0-2019999. Owners are requested to use this website to swap out their unit and in turn Spot will gift the user six months of free service. As GPSTracklog points out, hopefully this flaw wasn’t discovered during a real emergency.
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This isn’t an April Fool’s joke. I think. 
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