Guys Upstairs - Tech

For most users, they have several user names and password for the many different websites they visit.  This has become very tedious and annoying.  One great solution to this problem is OpenID.  It is a shared identity service allowing users to log on using using a single digital identity for many different web sites.  This means one user name and password for many different sites.  OpenID lets users control the amount of personal information they are willing to provide.  If you are thinking, “Sounds good.  Where can I get one?”

The answers is you probably already have one.  OpenID is increasingly gaining adoption among large sites, with organizations like AOL, BBC, IBM, Microsoft, MySpace, Orange, VeriSign, Yandex and Yahoo! acting as providers.  Now, with Google entering the picture, very few people are left without one.

However, if you do not have an account with any of these providers listed above, you can create an account and have a OpenID.

[PCWorld]

The Metal Gear Solid 4 “Gun Metal Gray” Playstation 3 was previously only available through the Konami website at a premium of $600. Last week it was reported that the bundle could be pre-ordered through Amazon for $450. The price has now been dropped to a mere $400. The bundle contains the 40GB version and will be released on November 4th.

I personally like the gun metal color more than the traditional Sony “Piano Black,” but nothing can compare to the MGS4 PS3 mod by the guys over at Morpheon Mods. The unit is even signed by Hideo Kojima himself when the world tour stopped in NYC. The front of the PS3 is a giant black laser etching of Solid Snake while the other side is decorated with the Fox Hound logo. The entire thing is covered in digital camouflage and has a laser cut Metal Gear Solid 4 marquee. It’s also lit up with 15 white micro LEDs. Best of all, this was created using an original 60GB PS3 so it’s got full backwards compatibility. It sold for $17,100 on eBay with 15% of the proceeds going to Child’s Play Charity.

[Joystiq]

Kodak has been a pioneer in the OLED field, and has just announced another breakthrough. The new material will enable full color displays that are more energy efficient and longer lifespans. Dubbed Kodak OLED Material EK-GD403, it uses green dopant technology to control the color output and increase efficiency.

When EK-GD403 is combined with other Kodak OLED materials, it can produce low-voltage green OLEDs with high efficiency and lifetime in excess of 65,000 hours. The luminance efficiency is 31 cd/A, and Kodak has been working to increase this number by over 50 percent every year.

Just two months ago, Kodak released the world’s first wireless picture frame using an OLED display. The display is even capable of automatically adjusting the brightness based on surrounding light. OLEDs are starting to become more widespread with advances such as flexible displays.

[Digital Trends]

ESA just announced today that the 2009 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E³) will be held June 2-4, 2009 at the Los Angeles Convention Center (LACC). It will be open to “international and U.S.-based media, analysts, retailers, developers and business partners,” meaning that it will be returning to the way it was pre-2007. The last two years have had significantly less attendance and the spectacle of the event was mostly absent.

While the event still will not be open to the public, the policies will remain as relaxed as it was before when you could gain entrance just by having a gaming blog. The event will be open to both ESA and non-ESA members (Activision-Blizzard, LucasArts, id) to exhibit their newest and upcoming releases. In response to concerns that the extravagance expected will lead back to the trimmed down E³ of the past two years, ESA president and CEO Mike Gallagher said that they will be keeping many of the improvements such as the suites format.

[Joystiq]

Google touted the Android would be the most open mobile platform and they are finally keeping their word. The Mountain View, California based company released the Android platform source code via the Android Open Source Project. Google’s adherence to open-source ideals has resulted in the release of the code a day before consumers can get their hands on the T-Mobile G1.

There is hope from Google that Android can develop a large community similar to Linux. They even cited Linux to alleviate concerns that making Android open source could lead to potential security risks. While Google will be concentrating on developing Android for mobile phones, they hope that people will also be able to apply it to other devices. The ultimate hope from the Android team is that it will be so widespread that it could affect the future of mobile devices and not just phones.

[Forbes]

Could this be the breakthrough in energy that we have been waiting for? Researchers at the S&P Energy Research Institute in Korea believe they have found a way to produce hydrogen without as much energy input. The current method of using electrolysis to split the gas from water molecules requires a lot of energy and is also not emissions-free. While the current method uses 4-4.5 kwh of energy for 1 cubic meter of hydrogen, the new method could produce the same amount using only 0.1 kwh. The high energy input has been a barrier to the widespread use of hydrogen, but the method developed by the Korean researchers would be 20-30 times cheaper to manufacture. Hydrogen can be considered a “permanent clean energy” because it is clean and can be manufactured from the plentiful amount of water on Earth.

[TechRadar]

GE has announced a new radio frequency identification (RFID) which can draw power wirelessly from an external reader. These RFIDs use traditional RFID tags with biological or chemically sensitive films, allowing many new potential applications. The new sensors could potentially be used to detect biological threats as well as check the freshness of foods in the grocery store. GE’s sensors are very small and will be able to be used in a wide variety of low cost uses. Passive RFIDs are nothing new, but the inclusion of the chemical and biological sensing ability allows for the possibility of RFIDs having a much greater prevalence in daily life.

[gizmag]

The Adobe Creative Suite is one of the most widely used software suites for design and development. Creative Suite 4 is Adobe’s most recent iteration of the series and it brings some radical changes. The largest change in CS4 is the move toward higher efficiency with many new features and changes to the workflow. There are also 13 releases today of each of the individual Adobe products (although this number includes Photoshop CS4 Extended).

Creative Suite now has even tighter integration of Adobe programs, enabling better design across different media. Photoshop CS4 also has content-aware scaling which can recompose (like taking out that annoying person who tried to sneak into the side of the group picture) an image as it is resized. Flash CS4 will also make animations easier by allowing tweens to be applied to objects instead of just keyframes.

The price starts at $1699 for the Web Premium and Production Premium editions, $1799 for the Design Premium, and $2499 for the Master Collection.

[PhotoshopNews]

Apple’s long awaited event at the Cupertino headquarters announced several updates to the MacBook line of notebooks. Many of the rumors were true, including the brick manufacturing process. The manufacturing process involves cutting down a solid block of aluminum and after 13 milling processes and other machininery it finally gets made into the base of the MacBook.

The MacBook as well as the MacBook Pro will feature a new glass trackpad which is 39% larger than previous ones and allows up to four finger gestures. Also updated is the display which is now LED backlit, and the graphics card - Nvidia GeForce 9400M and 9600M (with 512 MB RAM) on the MacBook Pro and 9400M on the MacBook.

Prices for the MacBook will start at $999 (2.1GHz, Intel GMA X3100 graphics), with the Nvidia graphics card available on the more expensive $1,299 and $1,599 models. The MacBook Pro will go for $1,999 for 15.4″ display, 2.4GHz, and 2GB 1066MHz DDR3 memory.

Check out the entire keynote here. It appears that Steve Jobs is trying to ease the world into the possibility of him leaving sometime in the future.

[Ars Technica]

The 18th Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence was held at the University of Reading in Berkshire, England. It pitted top artificial conversational entities (ACEs), also known as “Chatterbots,” from around the world to see whether they could fool humans into thinking they were talking to another human. Elbot, which won the $3000 top prize, was just shy of passing the Turing Test. The test is named after famous British mathematician Alan Turing, who said that a machine is “thinking” if it can be indistinguishable from a human. In order to pass the test, the robot needs to have 30% of the human subjects fooled.

While the ACEs were able to be picked out as being robots, the conversational abilities were rated to be 80 to 90%. Advances in artificial intelligence will completely change the way we interact with machines in the near future. A world such as the one in Isaac Asimov’s “Robot” series may not be as science fiction as we once believed.

[BBC News]