Poetro's blog

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Dog Saves Man

Vancouver, BC - "Man's Best friend" has never rung truer. A dog saved a drowning man yesterday, by pulling him to shore at Second Beach.

Tags: rescue | man | Dog | Life

Dog Saves Man

Vancouver, BC - "Man's Best friend" has never rung truer. A dog saved a drowning man yesterday, by pulling him to shore at Second Beach.

Tags: man | rescue | Dog | Life

Monday, January 07, 2008

Majesco building Our House - Wii News at GameSpot

Having conquered the food service industry with Cooking Mama, Majesco is now setting its sights on do-it-yourself home improvement. Today, the publisher announced it would be bringing construction sim Our House exclusively to the Nintendo Wii this holiday season.
Catering to aspiring architects and interior designers, Our House lets players build and decorate their dream homes using the Wii's motion-sensing technology. After laying blueprints and purchasing raw materials, players don their tool belts to custom build their unique homes, one nail, paint swash, and tile at a time. In a bid to keep up with the Joneses, Our House accommodates four-player build-offs for multiplayer gaming, and players will also be able to show off their creations to friends online.

Source: gamespot.com

Wikia Search Engine Goes Live Today

It has been a long time, since the Wikia project and the company behind the thing has started, but finally we can see some results.

Search Wikia, the widely awaited search engine from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, is slated to make its official debut on Monday, with the bet that an open-source, community-driven effort can disrupt and reshape this Google-dominated market.

However, people who give the search engine a test drive on Monday shouldn't expect a Google killer, because they will be looking at a project that is at a very early stage and will need participation from volunteers to grow and be refined, Wales said.

In that sense, Search Wikia is expected to develop in a similar fashion to Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia written and edited by a community of volunteer collaborators who have expanded it and improved it organically over the years.

Source: pcworld.com via pgaliba

With Wikia Search, Wales is betting on a very different approach: transparency.

He said: "The proof will be in the pudding? I just believe that transparency is an important political issue on the web. One of the things I make an analogy to is openness in a free society, openness in a court system. I love Google, I trust Google but I still think that there's a problem with secrecy in that you never know who you really can trust."

So the way Wikia Search works is to be determined by the community of users, "Wherever there is an editorial decision we want to push that out into the community", said Mr Wales.

The new system will also allow users to rate search results according to their usefulness.

Source: news.bbc.co.uk via pgaliba

Jimmy Wales Gives Talk on Free Culture, Transparency, and Search

One Laptop Per Child Versus Intel--Who Speaks for India and China?

Money talks?

At the Consumer Electronic Show this week, the One Laptop Per Child foundation was supposed to make two announcements—the number of computers it sold under the Give One, Get One holiday program and a new olpc machine made jointly with Intel. But now Intel has pulled out or been pushed out of the project with olpc, depending on who you believe. It’s a mess and a mess of huge dimensions that encompasses a conversation of profit vs. nonprofit, nationalism vs. colonialism, technology vs. pedagogy, rote vs. experiential learning, Western design vs. Eastern design, good intentions vs. bad intentions. It doesn’t get bigger, or nastier.

Nicholas Negroponte, the ex-head of the MIT Media Lab and founder of the olpc project, frames the current mess in terms of profit vs. non-profit. He says Intel has been sabotaging olpc in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to sell its own low-cost ClassMate laptop to these markets. The olpc laptop uses an AMD chip, is Linux open source and therefor threatens Intel's commercial success in emerging markets, Negroponte argues.

Source: businessweek.com via pgaliba

After several years of publicly attacking the XO, Intel reversed itself over the summer and joined the organization’s board, agreeing to make an $18 million contribution and begin developing an Intel-based version of the computer.

Although Intel made an initial $6 million payment to One Laptop, the partnership was troubled from the outset as Intel sales representatives in the field competed actively against the $200 One Laptop machine by trying to sell a rival computer, a more costly Classmate PC.

The Classmate sells for about $350 with an installed version of Microsoft Office, and Intel is selling the machine through an array of sales organizations outside the United States.

Even after Intel joined the One Laptop board, in country after country, the two organizations competed to make government sales, Mr. Negroponte said yesterday in a telephone interview. The relationship first frayed seriously in October, he said, when an Intel salesman gave a Mongolian government official a side-by-side comparison of the Classmate PC and the XO.

Source: nytimes.com via pgaliba

Monday, December 17, 2007

Donec ante felis, scelerisque vel, luctus at, adipiscing quis, augue. Phasellus condimentum risus eget enim. Quisque in nunc. Sed arcu purus, pretium cursus, volutpat vel, semper at, libero. Sed bibendum scelerisque nulla. Integer augue felis, mattis vel, accumsan eget, imperdiet non, dui. Vestibulum tristique. Fusce velit nisi, placerat eu, mollis sed, dignissim eu, sem. Donec ultrices nulla vel nisi. Maecenas vulputate malesuada arcu. Vivamus cursus mi vitae nunc. Proin non quam.

Morbi et eros. Vestibulum quis urna. Pellentesque cursus feugiat lacus. In aliquam quam eget sapien. Sed imperdiet, sapien a convallis dignissim, dui nisl viverra erat, quis sollicitudin lectus nunc non nisi. Pellentesque nisi tellus, bibendum vel, tincidunt ac, accumsan ut, erat. Duis elit. Donec sit amet ante ut nunc lacinia lacinia. Nulla urna eros, consequat id, dapibus vel, ullamcorper eu, diam. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Etiam iaculis hendrerit magna. Curabitur dignissim, augue vitae dictum vestibulum, justo lorem suscipit nunc, et porttitor turpis diam non ligula.

Tags: Entertainment

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Christmas is coming

Boiiiiiiiing! Five New Frog Species Found :: MAXINE

New species of bat, frogs found in Congo forests

Youâ€™re Not Going to have to Just Fight Other Shoppers This Christmas Season

HUD Says No To Angels on Christmas Trees, Other 'Religious' Symbols

HUD Visited By the Ghost of Christmas Emails

Tags: Christmas | Entertainment

Monday, December 03, 2007

OpenSocial

The web is better when it's social

The web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. But with the trend towards more social applications also comes a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn.

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds.

Many sites, one API

Common APIs mean you have less to learn to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by Google in conjunction with members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the APIs and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

In order for developers to get started immediately, Orkut has opened a limited sandbox that you can use to start building apps using the OpenSocial APIs.

Server optional

OpenSocial is built upon Google Gadget technology, so you can build a great, viral social app with little to no serving costs. With the Google Gadget Editor and a simple key/value API, you can build a complete social app with no server at all. Of course, you can also host your application on your own servers if you prefer. In all cases, Google's gadget caching technology can ease your bandwidth demands should your app suddenly become a worldwide success.