There are a variety of small and portable scanners available for those who need on-the-spot scanning abilities. One of the latest to come up is Apparent's Doxie Go, a compact, battery-powered mobile scanner.
Sunday, December 9, 2012
Lawyer sues Microsoft over Surface tablet storage
A California lawyer is suing Microsoft, claiming the Surface tablet he bought doesn't have all the storage space the company advertised. He discovered that a significant portion of the 32 GB storage space was being used by the operating system and pre-installed apps such as Word and Excel. Only 16 GB was available for him to use.
Surviving the Mobile Cliff
Continued hyper-growth in the mobile landscape is not a foregone conclusion, and factors that could lead to the "Mobile Cliff" are strengthening.
Apple and Google Joining Forces On Kodak Patents Bid
TrueSatan writes "Bloomberg reports that Apple and Google have partnered to make a bid of more than $500 million for the Kodak patent portfolio. The bid relates to Kodak's 1,100 imaging patents. 'Kodak obtained commitments for $830 million exit financing last month, contingent on its sale of the digital imaging patents for at least $500 million.' This is likely to be an opening bid, with the final figure being far larger. By comparison, a group including Apple, Microsoft, and RIM bought Nortel's 6000+ patents for $4.5 billion last year. 'Google lost the auction for those patents after making an initial offer of $900 million.'" 
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Windows Store has enough apps to prevent Windows RT flop, say analysts
The apps available for Microsoft's new Windows operating systems are good enough to entice early buyers of tablets and other touch devices, analysts said.
Hackers hit UN conference debating future internet governance
A suspected hacking attack has hit the Dubai UN meeting to discuss telecoms regulations that could alter the way the internet is governed
Citrix buys corporate MDM tool company Zenprise
Citrix has bought mobile device management (MDM) company Zenprise for an undisclosed sum to boost its corporate mobile tools portfolio
The past, present, and future of bionic eyes
Next-generation bionic eyes are practically here today. Imagine a blind person’s real-world conundrum trying to shop for one — they could schedule surgery for Nano Retina’s implant today and see their daughter’s wedding in 576-pixel clarity, but it would cost them their life’s savings. The Nano Retina 5000-pixel device could be ready tomorrow, or in another six months… and would be much more affordable. When the procedure involves assimilation of an electrode pincushion into the ganglionic tentacles of your retina, hardware upgrades are not as simple as popping in more RAM. What kind of decision matrix could be offered under such critical circumstances?
Cochlear implants, used to restore hearing, work phenomenally well when properly tuned and fitted. Most are refinements of the basic piece of hardware one might have sitting on their bookshelf — the graphic equalizer. The implant processes a single audio stream into bins of various sizes according to frequency, and then applies current to the corresponding frequency location in the cochlea, typically with a 16-spot linear electrode. The main function of these devices is to capture speech formants — the peaks in the frequency spectrum of the voice. The toughest challenge for the cochlear implant is to provide sound localization and source separation in noisy environments like a cocktail party.
Vision implants are much more complex. As any practiced photographer knows, the eye is more than a camera. The optic nerve does not feed the brain pixels. If you imagine your camera responding to auto-selected targets several times a second, gathering the full spectrum of light through its entire range of settings at each pause, and compressing the data onto a bandwidth- and energy-limited channel ideally matched to its receiver, you have some idea of what the retina accomplishes routinely.
The reason cochlear implants work so well is that the brain is just that good at making sense out of virtually any kind of signal it is given. If presented only with noise, or with nothing at all, the brain will eventually begin to manufacture hallucinations. If the implant signal contains even some distorted fragment of the original signal, it can be made to work convincingly. This is also the reason why retina implants can work without incorporating any knowledge of what the retina actually does in the healthy state.
These days researchers are trying to do a little better than the grainy images provided through our current implants. Signal processing techniques were developed in the Cold War era to track and target incoming missiles by extracting signals from noisy radar data. These same techniques are now used to convert the activity of groups of neurons in the motor cortex into a set of commands for moving a cursor, prosthetic device, or de-enervated limb in brain machine interfaces (BCIs). These methods and derivations of them can also be applied to incoming sensory data and can approximate what the retina actually does, without doing it in the same way.
Unfortunately, videos and TED talks are not the places where this kind of knowledge is typically transmitted in much depth. For that, one needs to look back to the work of the founding father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, and his eminently practical inspiration, Vito Volterra. After suggesting that helium be used instead of hydrogen in airships, to great success, Volterra shifted gears and came up with some methods to characterize complex systems. Wiener simplified Volterra’s equations and they are now widely used today in statistical techniques like linear regression analysis, and analysis of spike trains from neurons.
Next page: The future of high-res bionic eyes
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Microsoft patches Surface in Windows RT’s first Patch Tuesday
Although it hasn’t even been out for a month, Microsoft has already rolled out the first update for its Surface RT product. The update was introduced alongside bug fixes for other Microsoft products, like Windows 8, as part of the company’s Patch Tuesday bonanza. The firmware update includes seven patches for Windows RT, including two [...]
Analysts dissect Microsoft's Windows 8 pitch
Microsoft's big launch today for Windows 8 and its sibling, Windows RT, in New York City was either the best Windows launch in nearly 20 years or 'bupkis.'
Ticking Arctic Carbon Bomb May Be Bigger Than Expected
sciencehabit writes "Scientists are expressing fresh concerns about the carbon locked in the Arctic's vast expanse of frozen soil. New field studies quantify the amount of soil carbon at 1.9 trillion metric tons, suggesting that previous estimates underestimated the climate risk if this carbon is liberated. Meanwhile, a new analysis of laboratory experiments that simulate carbon release by thawed soil is bolstering worries that continued carbon emissions could unleash a massive Arctic carbon wallop." 
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Magid: Microsoft's future looks grim
I'm not ready to write an obituary for Microsoft, but from what I've seen lately, things don't look promising.
Yes, you can update your Mac's hard drive firmware in OS X
Some third-party drives in use by your Mac may need a firmware update. With modern Macs, we can create an ISO update disc on that installs the new firmware.
UK government jobs website exploited by hackers
Hackers have been able to exploit security flaws in a new government jobs website to steal personal information about job applicants
How to create a mind, or die trying
I was clutching at the face of a rock but it would not hold. Gravel gave way. I grasped for a shrub, but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss.
Thus spoke amateur rock climber Heinz Pagels, the real-life inspiration for mathematician Ian Malcolm in Michael Critchon’s Jurassic Park novels, about a recurring nightmare he had been having. If continuity of consciousness could some day be guaranteed through software or hardware backups of the mind, risky sport, like climbing, might become a lot more popular. Mind uploads and copies, conscious machine intelligences and connectomes are the kinds of things that keep a man like Ray Kurzweil up at night.
With the publication of his 2005 book, “The Singularity is Near,” Kurzweil single-handedly mainstreamed the concept of a technological singularity. Presumably, when the singularity is reached, machine intelligence will have attained human-level equivalence and therefore be capable of consciousness. The future fate of humanity would at this point become unpredictable, then unknowable. Kurzweil’s estimation for the singularity to begin in less than 30 years has raised eyebrows — and controversy. With his newly released book “How to Create a Mind,” Kurzweil seeks to better ground his former work, and in the process takes stock the current state-of-art in brain mapping, machine intelligence, and how we came to be where we are today.
Among its many gems, Kurzweil’s new release looks to define ways in which the human brain will overcome its limitations by either merging with, or being downloaded to, the hardware of our machines. The most palatable option would be to expand the natural architecture of the brain, augmenting it by sharing resource with the the cloud of the future through appropriate interface. The more daring option would be for future minds to abandon flesh and blood hardware, resolving instead to neuromorphic hardware or to software running on more traditional computing elements.
In an incident disturbingly similar to his dream, Pagels fell to his death in 1988 while climbing Pyramid Peak in Colorado. Perhaps even more poignant, his last published work, “Complexity as Thermodynamic Depth,” serves as the first clear articulation as to why a human consciousness will never be “dragged and dropped” in the manner of copying a piece of software and uploading it to a machine. Like his Jurassic Park counterpart, Pagels strove to understand what makes complex systems so complex. He formalized the notion that copies that are easy to create are not very “deep,” as brains are systems that are neither completely ordered nor completely random.
Consider, for example, a box containing two hard drives, each with Windows 8 installed. One might then ask how much more complex is this box, then a box containing just a single Windows 8 hard drive? If complexity is defined as thermodynamic depth — essentially a measure of how hard it is to put something together from elementary pieces — then the answer would be not that much. On the other hand, a box containing both Jayne and Joan Boyd, the original Doublemint Twins of Wrigley’s fame, would have roughly double the thermodynamic depth of a box containing just Joan.
Next page: The ever-changing nature of the brain…
Return Policy Cheat Sheet
Sometimes you get a gadget or notebook home, try it, and find that it doesn’t live up to your expectations. The next step is to return that device, and start over. But, unlike returning a shirt to a department store, there are important rules for returning electronics. Here’s what you need to know before you head [...]
Microsoft Surface goes on sale to cheering crowds
About 100 people waited outside Boston's Microsoft Store Friday to buy the company's new Surface tablet, which runs a new version of Windows.
Speeding up Chrome on Macs
Chrome is one of the fastest Web browsers around, but on Mac OS X it can get really, really slow. Here are two ways to restore its speed.
Windows 8 to Boost Sophisticated Business Use of Tablets and Smartphones
Enterprises are beginning to leverage mobility to transform their business processes rather than simply providing always-on access to email and calendaring. Healthcare, financial services and retail are at the forefront of using mobile to transform their businesses, and Windows 8 may accelerate the process.
iOS 5: What We Wanted vs. What We Got
Only two of our nine iOS 5 wishes were granted. To be fair, we got our number one wish (wireless syncing)—and a whole lot more. Here are the details. 
Friday, December 7, 2012
Get Organized: Budgeting for the Holidays
Traveling, hosting parties, shopping for gifts—there's a lot to be done in the lead-up to the holidays. These online tools and apps can help you create a budget and stick to it. 
GameSpy's New Owners Begin Disabling Multiplayer Without Warning
New submitter OldTimeRadio writes "Over the last month, both game publishers and gaming communities alike were surprised to find their GameSpy multiplayer support suddenly disabled by GLU Mobile, who purchased GameSpy from IGN this August. Many games, including Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2, Microsoft Flight Simulator X, Swat 4, Sniper Elite, Hidden and Dangerous 2, Wings of War, Star Wars: Battlefront are no longer able to find (and in some cases even host) multiplayer games. While games like Neverwinter Nights are still able to directly connect to servers if players know the IP address, less-fortunate gamers expressed outrage on GLU Mobile's 'Powered by GameSpy' Facebook page. In an open letter to their Sniper Elite gaming community today, UK game developer Rebellion explained it was helpless to change the situation: 'A few weeks ago, the online multiplayer servers for Sniper Elite were suddenly switched off by Glu, the third-party service we had been paying to maintain them. This decision by Glu was not taken in consultation with us and was beyond our control. We have been talking to them since to try and get the servers turned back on. We have been informed that in order to do so would cost us tens of thousands of pounds a year — far in excess of how much we were paying previously. We also do not have the option to take the multiplayer to a different provider. Because the game relies on Glu and Gamespy's middleware, the entire multiplayer aspect of the game would have to be redeveloped by us, again, at the cost of many tens of thousands of pounds."" 
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Pay Now, Save Later: T-Mobile to Ditch Phone Subsidies in 2013
Next year will bring an end to T-Mobile’s iPhone drought, but that’s not the only major hardware change coming to the magenta-loving carrier in 2013. While T-Mobile may be the last major U.S. cellular provider to receive Apple’s vaunted handset, it will be the first to ditch subsidized phone pricing. That’s right, starting next year [...]
10 Gifts for the Geek Who Has Everything
You wouldn’t buy a new toilet snake for your buddy the plumber, because he already has a top-of-the-line model. And if he wants a new one, he should pick it out himself. So why on earth would you buy a laptop, tablet or smart phone for the tech geeks on your list when we either [...]
David Cameron confirms £50m for Tech City regeneration in Old Street
Prime Minister David Cameron announces a regeneration project for Old Street's Tech City area to build facilities for start-ups in Shoreditch
Maker of Hackable Hotel Locks Finally Agrees To Pay For Bug Fix
Sparrowvsrevolution writes "Slashdot readers are no doubt familiar by now with the case of Onity, the company whose locks are found on 4 million hotel room doors worldwide and, as came to light over the summer, can be opened in seconds with a $50 Arduino device. Since that hacking technique was unveiled by Mozilla developer Cody Brocious at Black Hat, Onity first downplayed its security flaws and then tried to force its hotel customers to pay the cost of the necessary circuit board replacements to fix the bug. But now, after at least one series of burglaries exploiting the bug hit a series of hotel rooms in Texas, Onity has finally agreed to shoulder the cost of replacing the hardware itself--at least for its locks in major chain hotels in the U.S. installed after 2005. Score one point for full disclosure." 
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Speeding up Chrome on Macs
Chrome is one of the fastest Web browsers around, but on Mac OS X it can get really, really slow. Here are two ways to restore its speed.
Microsoft: 40 million Windows 8 licenses sold
Microsoft has sold 40 million licenses of the Windows 8 OS since its launch a month ago.
In search of the sub-$300 Windows RT tablet
Where are the sub-$300 Windows RT tablets? That's a question that might not be answered until Friday, when tablet makers finally put them on sale.
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