technology – Alondo

Make Your Own Magazine (Well Sort Of)

Flipboard, the now infamous RSS and personal news aggregator has upgraded to version 2.0 of its software. Now, it is always a gamble when moving to version 2.0 of any software that has a strong following, especially considering that it might alienate the die hard or remove the features that users love the most. However, Flipboard looks to have gotten it right.

One of the complaints of many folks was the inability to share a craftily comprised collection of poignant or timely news sources. That concern has been taken care of via the ability of users to share their culled sources as a personal magazine. This means that if your have a group of horticulturists who have the same affinity for bug neutralizing fertilizers as you do, you could simply share out your news sources to those folks via the magazine feature.

Another feature that was added was the ability for individuals to quickly bookmark stories and sources that showed up in suggested feeds and news stories that originated through recommendations and suggestions via the Flipboard aggregator.

I know that I had quite a few uses for a feature like this when I would see interesting stories show up on the technology feed of Flipboard. I would have no way to add a new up-and-coming technology blog that wasn’t quite on my radar.

There are some other new features, like the ability to quickly add content to your Flipboard via the bookmarklet tool, integration with Etsy, a new content search, and some navigation logistics in the ribbon area.

The newest versions are out for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. There was no immediate indication of Android application changes or release dates.

Press 1 to Speak with a Representative about an Exciting New Opportunity…

We have all been there, picking up the phone after a long day of work, only to find that some swindler or politically-oriented campaign has decided to interrupt your evening with an attempt to get your time, money, or vote. It is the quintessential definition of annoying.

Like 220 million other Americans, you join the Do Not Call registry, but the slimy characters still seem to slip through. Their ability to circumvent the established safeguards can bring on stages of ire that can only be assuaged through anger management.
Continue reading “Press 1 to Speak with a Representative about an Exciting New Opportunity…”

Researchers Get Data to Approach the Speed of Light, but that Constant May Be a Princess in Another Castle

Austin xmas tree at capitol — Ryan Gallagher

In a story that will probably get latency junkies hurriedly excited, it was announced through a research paper that a fiber network was created that allowed for the transmission of data that traveled at 99.7% of the speed of light. The team of researchers at the University of Southampton in England did so by creating air-filled fiber optic cables. The data they sent through these cables did so at a mind-blowing bandwidth of 10 terabytes per second.

That’s almost fast enough to stop my Hulu playback on my Playstation 3 to stop stuttering when I watch episodes of Family Guy or The Office

In the ExtremeTech article, they mention the fact that “the speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters per second, or 186,282 miles per second”. However, that may not be true.

In an unrelated article that was published today, universities in both Germany and France have begun to question whether the speed of light is as constant as Einstein and pioneers before him thought it was. In the research by the two universities, a better understanding of vacuums indicate that some of the long-standing beliefs about their characteristics may be disputable. This is due to the presence and absence of particles on a quantum level.

Of course, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the original mechanisms and methods used to measure the speed of light in the first place