Friday, March 19, 2010

All URL Shorteners Are Not Equal; Pick a Speedy and Reliable One [URL Hacking]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5496415/all-url-shorteners-are-not-equal-pick-a-speedy-and-reliable-one

URL shorteners are great for minimizing URLs in a Twitter message or keeping links clean in an email, but as convenient as they are they do introduce an extra point of failure. WatchMouse, a monitoring organization, highlights the best.

A Dutch web-monitoring company, WatchMouse, monitored popular URL shortening services for a period of one month and then analyzed the results. They found a significant amount of variance in the quality of services with 100% uptime and low latency on one end and shaky uptime and long latency on the other.

Shortening service Snurl, for example, had the lowest uptime of any of the services. Only Goo.gl and Twt.tl had 100% uptime. Latency was an issue for many of the shorteners but none quite as bad as Facebook's shortener Fb.me—nearly ten times as slow as the fastest shortener, Goo.gl.

At the moment Google's URL shortener is clearly dominating the market with perfect up time and extreme responsiveness—learn how you can use Goo.gl without a Google account or Google Toolbar here—but since it may not always be so WatchMouse set up a publicly accessible monitoring page to track URL shortening services. You can read the article at the link below or jump to the current monitoring stats here.

URL Shorteners Make the Web Substantially Slower; Facebooks' fb.me is Slowest [WatchMouse via Mashable]

All Giz Wants: A Google Set Top Box That Doesn't Suck [Google]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5496708/all-giz-wants-a-google-set-top-box-that-doesnt-suck

Google's upcoming set top box has great pedigree: It's Android-based OS, Sony and Intel are building the guts and design and Logitech doing what Logitech does best (input devices). So please, please, please don't screw this up.

Right now we know very little. We know it's Android-based and will have the Chrome web browser. We don't whether it's going to be the full Chrome browser, the Webkit-based mobile browser on Android or some hybrid of the two. Roku's CEO understandably tried to pump up the potential price of a Google TV, saying that it would cost $200+ if it were entirely browser-based, like ChromeOS, compared to the $80 of his own machine. But hey, couldn't this thing cost less with Intel and Sony's scale of manufacture, and ads subsiding the entire thing?

So we're left filling in the holes ourselves. Here's what we want.

The Googly features

For it to be a Google set top box as people imagine it, it really needs to have access to Google's resources. That's the reason why a heavy gmail and gcal users would get an Android phone versus any other phone.

• Really good YouTube support: Many devices support YouTube, like TiVo or Boxee or the PS3 (via the browser), but none are really as good as watching something on your computer, believe it or not. It's mostly down to the input device. If Logitech can make a remote/keyboard that has all the correct buttons and shortcuts for YouTube, this'll be a winner. And of course, you'd be able to buy/rent Youtube hosted hollywood movies through the device.
• Gmail, Gchat (including voice and video, so this requires USB webcam support), Gmaps, Gdocs, Picasa, GReader and all the other supported apps on Android. This theoretically shouldn't be a problem, since there will be some sort of Chrome browser on board. It's just a matter of making a comfortable 10 foot interface (and keyboard, if you're going to be typing) so it's not just WebTV 2010. This is a worrying point, since Google's always done data driven design analysis, which has turned out useful, but not very slick, interfaces.

• Android apps: Google has limited access to their Android Marketplace for devices that run Android (tablets, the Nook) but aren't actually Android phones. Lessen the restriction so we can get some of the 30,000 Android apps onto the platform and this'll be THE set top box.

General media set top box features

Having YouTube and a browser on your set top box is fine, but set top boxes are for TVs, aren't they? And what you really want to do on your TV is watch video, which is why Google needs to step beyond just hooking up their own products to the box and expand into other video delivery.

• Hulu, plus support for various segmented online streaming video, like cbs.com, abc.com and Daily Show/Colbert Report websites. This shouldn't be a problem provided Google also has Flash support on their set top box Chrome browser, but you never know these days
• Netflix Watch Now!
• Local streaming: Google may want everything streamed from the ~~web~~ cloud, but not everyone has the pipes to support full quality video. So local network streaming, yes please
• Good codec support: A corollary of local streaming, but in order to watch all the proper codecs, containers and so forth (DivX, XviD, h.264, MKV, etc) you'll have to support them. This isn't a problem anymore, since just about all the network streamers are hopping on board with the latest file types
• Media Center Extender: Being able to act as an extender to Microsoft's Windows Media Center—which lets you have access to cable TV, but without having have a fat box next to the TV with CableCARD support—would bridge internet video well with traditional broadcast video. It also means paying Microsoft money to license the tech, if Microsoft will even allow Google the privilege. But having all those features PLUS what amounts to a TiVo experience in one box would make this a must buy, assuming the price was low enough.

The other, weirder, component to this rumor is that Sony wants to embed this Android set top box tech in its TVs and "appliances", which is vague and broad. TVs are obvious, since the easy way of making your TV brand more worthwhile is shoving software components that let it do much more than just be a TV. The appliances bit might be something as simple as a small LCD-based kitchen computer, or a set top box of their own, or even putting this inside their PS3. All our wishlist items stand for Sony's version too, except it also comes with an item about Sony not proprietarying it to death.

Making Water Run Uphill, With Lasers [Water]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5496727/making-water-run-uphill-with-lasers

Making Water Run Uphill, With Lasers Researchers at the University of Rochester have discovered how to make liquid overcome gravity and flow upward along a silicon surface. The essential ingredient, as always: lasers.

The scientists achieved the curious movement by using short laser blasts to carve imperceptible patterns into the silicon sheet. That alone prompts the water molecules to climb upward, without any additional aid:

Unlike a straw, though, there is no outside pressure pushing the liquid up; it rises on its own accord. By creating nanometer-scale structures in silicon, Guo greatly increases the attraction that water molecules feel toward it. The attraction, or hydrophile, of the silicon becomes so great, in fact, that it overcomes the strong bond that water molecules feel for other water molecules.

Thus, instead of sticking to each other, the water molecules climb over one another for a chance to be next to the silicon. (This might seem like getting energy for free, but even though the water rises, thus gaining potential energy, the chemical bonds holding the water to the silicon require a lower energy than the ones holding the water molecules to other water molecules.) The water rushes up the surface at speeds of 3.5 cm per second.

A fun party trick, but are there practical applications? Actually, yes! This could be the first step towards new heat regulation strategies for computers. Instead of fans, we may see liquid cooling systems thanks to silicon that can pump its own coolant. That method would be more energy efficient, cost effective, and most importantly a heckuva lot more lasery.

As has been pointed out in the comments, the image above is an optical illusion and here for illustrative purposes only. [University of Rochester via CrunchGear]

Invisibility Cloak Project Becomes More Realistic [Science]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5497136/invisibility-cloak-project-becomes-more-realistic

Invisibility Cloak Project Becomes More Realistic Invisibility cloak project is back on! It's from a different team of scientists that were using silver-plated nanoparticles in water though, with these latest Harry Potter enthusiasts using photonic metamaterials to change light rays.

The idea is to cloak an object and disguise it with the use of light rays, like a "carpet mirror", as described in the Science publication by Tolga Ergin, a scientist from the German Karlsruhe Institute of Technology working on the project.

Using polymer crystals with minuscule rods, Ergin found success with his "invisible cloak," making it invisible to light wavelengths:

"By changing the thickness of the rods, you can change the ratio of air to polymer.

Since the refractive index of air is about one and the refractive index of the polymer is about 1.52, in principle, we can get any refractive index between those two numbers"

Anyone looking at the object assumes the area is flat, and that there's nothing hidden there—and it could theoretically hide any object, even a house. There are obviously limitations involved with the science, not least the length of time it takes to create the 3D cloaking structure. [BBC]

Dell rolls out Vostro 230 Slim Tower, Mini Tower desktops

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/18/dell-rolls-out-vostro-230-slim-tower-mini-tower-desktops/

They may not be quite as sleek as their latest laptop counterpart, but Dell's two new Vostro 230 desktops are both at least fairly compact and, most importantly, cheap. Available in both Slim Tower or Mini Tower form factors, the desktops start at just $389 or $299, respectively, but can of course be upgraded significantly from there, including processors up to a 3.0GHz Core 2 Quad Q9650, a maximum 4GB of RAM, up to 2TB of storage (from two 1TB drives), and your choice of NVIDIA GeForce G310 or GeForce GT220 graphics (in addition to the standard integrated option). Hit up the link below to configure one for yourself.

Dell rolls out Vostro 230 Slim Tower, Mini Tower desktops originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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