Matt's Favorites: Keeping Google Glass Clean, And Much More
So what's the latest and weirdest and most interesting in the ever-fascinatin' world of high technology? Well, pull up a few electrons and check out these gems...
* Of all the things you will watch on Google Glass anytime soon, you will not watch filthy pictures. Yeah, and here's some music to go with that.
* A U.S. government lawyer opened a civil trial by portraying Apple Inc. as a corporate bully that swaggered into the market for electronic books in 2010, forcing an end to price competition and costing consumers hundreds of millions of dollars.
* A Domino's publicity stunt in the United Kingdom shows what it would look like if pizzas were delivered by RC helicopters. Oh, if only.
* A stupid new proposed rule from the State Department could cripple space tourism. Guess I better hurry up and blow half our life savings on a half-hour suborbital flight if I'm gonna.
* Here's a neat article on why users may not be nearly as crazy about agile development techniques as developers.
* InfoWorld offers a serious proposal to fix Windows 8. We'll see.
* When you look at this picture, you are most likely looking at an actual picture of a planet orbiting a star that is not our Sun. This is something I never thought I would see, which is almost enough to make up for the complete lack of space tourism in this future.
* A small team of developers, including a complete novice, has figured out a new breed of software that lets you pool the processing power of potentially thousands of machines just by pointing them to a single website. They call this creation Smidge. It's a kind of ad hoc supercomputer built with JavaScript, the standard programming language of the web.
* Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Intel all came late to the mobile revolution. Why? Because they're companies where management is top-down and responsibility for innovation and change is concentrated among executives with strict bureaucratic control over workers. That's got to change, Gary Hamel, a consultant and management educator at the London School of Business, said at the CITE Conference and Exhibition in San Francisco this week. And he was not alone in his belief that the next revolution in corporate America won't be technological, it'll be social. Power to the peons! Not only should they be rewarded for being creative, they should be given the power to spend corporate money on research and development, he said. By doing that, companies will diversity their experimental capital.
* It appears that former Facebook president Sean Parker has inadvertently become an environmentalist to save his wedding. He has agreed to dole out $2.5 million in a settlement with the California Coastal Commission over the construction of an immense wedding venue in an ecologically sensitive area of state. That comes on top of the $10 million he spent on his lavish wedding this past weekend to singer-songwriter Alexandra Lenas. (Any bets as to the duration of this marriage?)
* A New Mexico city commission has agreed to allow a Canadian studio to search an old landfill where old, terrible Atari games are rumored to be buried. The Alamogordo Daily News reports that Alamogordo commissioners will allow Fuel Industries to search the landfill for games. It has offices in Ontario, Canada, and Los Angeles.
* An intriguing hint of a certain type of gamma-ray light at the center of the Milky Way might be a product of elusive dark matter -- or it might not be. For the past several years, scientists have debated whether the light is really there, and what it means. Now, researchers are petitioning the management team of NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, the observatory that saw the light, to change its observing strategy to determine once and for all whether the signal really exists.
* Twitter suffered its largest outage in some time Monday following an error in a "routine change" to the microblogging site. In a statement, the company said the site was not available from 1:08 p.m. to 1:33 p.m. PT. A mere 25 minutes. For the 200 million Twitter users, that was a while, at least since the days of the regular "fail whale." But now that Bloomberg terminals -- the computers that Wall Street analysts, financial types, and traders use -- have tweets flowing through them, there's a greater onus of responsibility for Twitter to maintain uptime. A single tweet can ding the stock markets.
* The high camp era of the 1960's Batman TV show, and video game-influenced "choose-your-own-adventure" stories, will come to DC Entertainment's digital comics this summer with new digital storytelling techniques to draw in readers.
* The solar-powered Solar Impulse is another leg closer to completing its mission across America. Flown by Solar Impulse co-founder and Chairman Bertrand Piccard, the plane landed smoothly at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport at 1:28 a.m. local time Tuesday. Taking to the skies on Monday morning from Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, Piccard -- and the plane -- stayed in the air for 21 hours and 21 minutes, marking his longest flight to date.
