Continue reading Adidas builds intelligent soccer cleats that can outwit even Joey Barton
Adidas builds intelligent soccer cleats that can outwit even Joey Barton originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Sep 2011 20:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Tag Heuer's high-end concept chronograph is so precise, blink and you'll miss it -- literally. The Mikrotimer Flying 1000's watch movement runs at 500Hz. Compare that to other high-end chronos plodding along at 5Hz, and you start to see the sort of power and precision Team Tag are working with -- this mesmerizing piece of wrist jewelry is capable of banging out 3.6 million beats per hour. Initially planned as a one-off, the concept watch will now go on sale for a lucky few timepiece obsessives. Be prepared to reach for your severely over-burdened money clip, though; the price is set at €65,000 ($88,580), with a limited run of ten arriving before the end of the year. Gawp in awe at the brief video after the break. You may have to sell the Batmobile.
Tag Heuer concept watch beats 3.6 million times per hour, $89,000 price tag gives heart palpitations originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Sep 2011 21:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
LG seeks ban on South Korean BMW and Audi sales, sticks out its LED lit tongue at Osram originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Sep 2011 22:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Continue reading Tiny 'jumping robots' have more in common with firecrackers than Johnny 5
Tiny 'jumping robots' have more in common with firecrackers than Johnny 5 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Sep 2011 01:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
The new Kindles — and their unusually low price points — will likely have an impact on both the ereader and tablet markets. Here’s a concise guide to the new products and what makes them different from their predecessors.
The $79 Kindle.
The Kindle Touch comes in two versions: $139 with 3G, and $99 without.
Amazon’s new tablet, Kindle Fire, is an affordable tablet that focuses on content. While it runs the Android operating system and some apps including email, its interface looks nothing like the collection of apps that line the home screens of other Android tablets and the iPad. Rather, it looks like a bookshelf. Users can line its shelves with books, periodicals, movies and music they purchase from Amazon. New owners will also have free access to the Amazon Prime unlimited movie and TV streaming service for 30 days after purchase.
The tablet has no camera, microphone or 3G capabilities, but at $199, it’s the most affordable tablet from a major player.Now Amazon has made Special Offers a default option for its new compact Kindle, Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire. To get a new generation Kindle or Kindle Touch that won’t display ads when idle costs an extra $30. A Kindle Fire without Special Offers costs an extra $40.
Most people do not think of software developers as being high on the “social” scale. In fact, the (misinformed) stereotype for a typical developer is that of the introverted geek. But in many ways, particularly with open source developers, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Contributing to open source software is a profoundly social activity. Some of open source’s main tenets are collaboration, transparency and meritocracy, which require developers to collaborate and share at a highly productive level. And with over 500,000 open source projects on the Internet, there’s a lot of collaboration going on. It’s clear that by participating in open source communities, developers are engaging in productive social behavior.
But even developers working on small projects are still working with other people. And virtually all new open source projects derive from those projects and the developers that preceded them, creating a vast body of work that accelerates innovation and fuels further collaboration.
Today’s open source developers are contributing to projects in very different ways than just a few years ago. What has changed?Two developments — search and social media — have changed the way coders work to create “social development,” a new style of software collaboration. Let’s look first at social media’s influence on it.
Social media’s impact has forced change (some good and some bad) in nearly every sector of the economy — including open source development. While communities such as Slashdot and Stack Overflow provided an early glimpse of social media’s impact on development in the FOSS community and encouraged developers to become more active within these and other communities, the effect took some time to achieve.Web search has also enhanced the importance of social media among open source developers, affecting this new style of development. My company recently commissioned a study with Forrester to investigate the social habits of developers. As shown above, contributors to open source projects turn to online search first for information about development technologies, followed by social sites like networks, forums and other online communities.
Developers also share search results via open source or project forums, communities and more general social media tools like Twitter.As a result, today’s “social developer,” even if not an employee of a large enterprise, is participating more than ever with enterprises – or more specifically, with developers in those enterprises who are increasingly involved with FOSS communities of various types.
Social development arms corporate developers with a new toolset for producing innovative and high quality software at enterprise scale faster than ever before. This style of development wasn’t possible just a few years ago before search, social media tools and online collaboration tools made it possible to create software using social development techniques. Nevertheless, the evolution has been crucial to the success of businesses and individual developers.Another pivotal change is the fact that enterprise IT organizations are now discovering the need to “go social” and join communities as a strategy for leveraging and using more open source software, especially mission-critical components. This significant trend reflects the reality that open source use is becoming a competitive requirement. Even within the firewall of an enterprise, the trend toward collaborative development to share best practices, facilitate code reuse, and enhance developer productivity is escalating rapidly.
Other environmental and technical changes have supported the emergence of social development. Communications between project committers — which until recently were conducted through IRC channels and wikis — have expanded with the increased number of social communities. And today more than ever, FOSS developers are actively seeking enterprise adoption of their code.Another change is the emergence of sites like Ohloh, a free community resource, which was specifically designed to support and encourage social development and to allow developers to give each other kudos (literally). The figure above also lists the contributors for a project called Restlet, a Java REST framework for web developers. Shown on the page are the developer profiles, kudos and code commitments to the project.
While social development isn’t a challenge for Gen Y developers, it still presents management challenges for enterprises, especially larger ones. Moving at web speed and using social tools still requires some adjustment. For example, new college hires expect to be community participants, yet large enterprises may not be comfortable with this level of transparency. Although open source projects are based on the notion of transparency, collaboration and meritocracy, some corporate policies may prohibit or limit this philosophy, just like some corporate cultures may resist the trend toward openness in development.Social interaction and social development offer tremendous new opportunities for developers and enterprises. The advent of social media tools has changed the nature of community participation as much as search. If you and your organization have not joined the growing number of “social developers,” now is the time to start.
Disclosure: Ohloh is owned by the author’s company.Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Goldmund
More About: features, open source, Social Media, software, Web Development
Adobe Systems has updated Lightroom and Photoshop to support a number of new small, higher-end cameras from Sony, Panasonic, Olympus, and Pentax.
The software packages handle the raw photos that higher-end cameras can produce, offering higher image quality and better flexibility at the expense of convenience. And as new cameras arrive, Adobe must build support for the new models proprietary formats.
Lightroom 3.5 of and version 6.5 of Photoshop's raw-image plug-in (available on Adobe's download site) now can support a host of new compact interchangeable-lens cameras (ILCs) that lack SLRs' bulk-inducing reflex mirror. In addition, it supports high-end medium-format cameras from Hasselblad, Phase One, and Phase One's Leaf subsidiary. The full list:
• Fuji FinePix F600EXR
Sony's NEX-5N is among the new cameras that Lightroom 3.5 supports.
• Hasselblad H4D-60
• Leaf Aptus II 12
• Leaf Aptus II 12R
• Nikon Coolpix P7100
• Olympus E-P3
• Olympus E-PL3
• Olympus E-PM1
• Panasonic DMC-FZ150
• Panasonic DMC-G3
• Panasonic DMC-GF3
• Pentax Q
• Pha... [Read more]
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