Thursday, August 23, 2007

ImageTrail - google adwords inside search results

Looks kinda desperate for a viable revenue model

http://picturesandbox.com

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Interior Design: Light-Emitting Wallpaper Does Just What it Says

jonas_samson_led_wallpaper.jpgI can't tell you much about this wallpaper, except for that I think it rules the school. It's basically a two-dimensional light source that switches on and off. Please, someone put Jonas Samson's idea into practice, because I'd have no hesitation in putting this up in my bedroom. Just one question, though: does it come in a roll? [Design Scoops]

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Mempile's TeraDisc fits 1TB on a single optical disc


We've heard a lot of talk about the death of optical media, but for inexpensive high-capacity storage, it's pretty hard to beat -- which is why the TeraDisc, from Israel's Mempile, look like it has such promise. Eschewing the reflectivity principles in current optical media entirely, the TeraDisc system uses light-sensitive molecules called chromophores to create hologram-like matrices that can be used to store a full terabyte of data on a single disc using a red laser -- and Mempile says that an eventual transition to a blue laser system will enable storage capacities of up to 5TB. The company is hoping to get a prototype ready in 18 months, and plans to ship the first version a year after that, priced around $3,000 for the drive and $30-60 for a 600GB disc. No word on the price of those 1TB discs, but you can bet they won't be cheap.

Read - Mempile website
Read - In-depth article about TeraDisc at The Future of Things

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iPhone Safari does NOT support Flash (of ANY flavor)

Source: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/designingcontent.html

scroll down to near the bottom

Unsupported Technologies

You’ll want to avoid using Flash and Java for iPhone content. You’ll also want to avoid encouraging users from downloading the latest Flash to their iPhone, because neither Flash nor downloads are supported by Safari on iPhone.

Safari on iPhone does not support:

  • window.showModalDialog()
  • Mouse-over events
  • Hover styles
  • Tool tips
  • Java applets
  • Flash
  • Plug-in installation
  • Custom x.509 certificates
http://picturesandbox.com

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Rubik's Cube solvable in 26 moves or less

David Pescovitz: No matter how scrambled a Rubik's Cube may be, it can be solved in 26 moves or fewer -- by a supercomputer anyway. The previous record was 27 moves, but Northeastern University computer science grad student Daniel Kunkle and his advisor Gene Cooperman developed new algorithms to save a step in the process and optimize the problem for a supercomputer. Their next step is to bring the magic number down to 25, which is still 5 more than the minimum number of steps that most researchers believe is possible. From Science News:
After 63 hours of calculation, the supercomputer found that it took no more than 16 steps to turn any random configuration into a special configuration that can be solved using only half-turns. And since those special puzzles can be solved in no more than 13 steps, this approach showed that 29 steps were enough to solve any Rubik's Cube.

But this answer wasn't good enough to set a new record. Last year, Silviu Radu of the Lund Institute of Technology in Sweden showed that any Rubik's Cube can be solved in no more than 27 steps. Kunkle and Cooperman realized that to set a new record, they would need to eliminate three steps.

Their existing method had established that all but about 80 million sets of configurations could be solved in 26 steps or fewer. By searching through all possible moves starting from those relatively few configurations, they succeeded in finding a solution for each one that took 26 steps or fewer.
Link

Previously on BB:
• Video of tot solving Rubik's Cube Link
• Table shaped like huge Rubik's Cube Link
• Michel Gondry solves Rubik's Cube with feet Link

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