31 Jul 14:46

Peaches Sold as Sexy Butts in China

Peaches have long been compared to backsides. Because, well, peaches look like tushes! And now, thanks to some fruit venders in China, they really look like butts. Sexy butts.

These peaches are apparently being sold to capitalize on the the upcoming romantic Qixi Festival. They're a novelty present! And should be taken as such. But, they aren't cheap: A box of nine panty fruit is 498 yuan or US$80.

The peaches are getting mainstream coverage in China. Online, some people have been delighted by the peaches, while as Sina explains, some think they are rather vulgar! They look kind of cheeky to me.

[Photo: 农业博士]

China News reports that these unusual peaches are called "Ripe Fruit" (蜜桃成熟時), a name evoking obvious sexual connotations. The panty peaches were first developed by a fruit vender in Nanjing, with each pair of underwear slipped on each sexy butt by hand. As SDChina reports, the peaches are from Yangshan, in Wuxi, an area that's also famous for its lingerie and garment industry.

[Photo: FenyiZX]

And how do these peaches taste? Well, The Wall Street Journal once called Wuxi peaches "the juiciest, most delicious peaches on earth," so they're probably pretty good!

[Photo: Mancy]

Other fruit venders in Shanghai and elsewhere have also apparently started selling sexy peaches. SDChina adds that this Nanjing fruit vender claims to have applied for a panty peach patent a month ago and is filing for infringement with the intellectual property bureau. Peach panty patents, who knew?

[Photo: Sjzhchb]

水果店老板推"内裤蜜桃"热传无节操营销引争议(图) [China News]

小伙发明"穿内裤的水蜜桃" 网友大呼无节操(图) [SDChina]

Top photo: Eastday

To contact the author of this post, write to bashcraftATkotaku.com or find him on Twitter @Brian_Ashcraft.

Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.

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31 Jul 14:02

The Best Free Android Apps in Amazon's New Two-Day Giveaway

The Amazon Appstore already gives away one free app each day, but today it's decided give away 30 apps, worth a combined total of $100, for free to anyone with an Android phone. Here are the pick of the bunch that you should download first.

The second of such app giveaways this summer, the deal is only on today and tomorrow, so you should grab them while you can. There are some great deals here: get Instapaper for free, or save a massive $30 on the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. You can check all the apps on offer out here, but we've listed the best ones below.

Head to the bottom of the page if you need to know how to get the Amazon Appstore on your phone (remember, this isn't Fire specific—anyone using Android can take advantage).

If you don't own a Kindle Fire, you'll need to install the Amazon Appstore for Android on your phone before you can take advantage. Fortunately it's pretty easy sailing. Go to Settings and navigate to Unknown sources option (which is under Applications or Security, depending on your device). If Unknown sources is unchecked, tap the checkbox and hit OK.

Then, head to this link to get the app. When the app's downloaded, open your notifications and then tap the file called AmazonApps-release.apk. Tap install, then tap open and you're done. Phew! Now go get some free stuff. [Amazon]

27 Jul 12:27

Bloomberg Hires a Founder of The Verge to Lead Online Initiatives - NYTimes.com

by Khalid

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/25/business/media/josh-topolsky-of-the-verge-is-joining-bloomberg.html

Bloomberg Hires a Founder of The Verge to Lead Online Initiatives

By RAVI SOMAIYA

July 24, 2014

Josh Topolsky, the co-founder of the technology website The Verge, will join Bloomberg as the editor of a series of online ventures it is introducing as part of a revamped journalism strategy.

Mr. Topolsky will start Aug. 4, and will report to Josh Tyrangiel, the editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, and Justin Smith, the chief executive of the Bloomberg media group and the architect of a plan to reposition the company as a multimedia destination.

"I think Josh is an amazing entrepreneur," Mr. Smith said. "He has been more successful than anyone in building new digitally centered brands."

Mr. Topolsky, who was the editor in chief of the technology site Engadget until 2011, helped to found The Verge, and was one of the creators of its parent company, Vox Media. He will develop and run Bloomberg's new ventures, which will cover specific topic areas like politics and luxury.

With Bloomberg's resources, Joshua Topolsky said, the job is "an opportunity to build a 21st-century media company."

Slaven Vlasic / Getty Images

"The potential is massive," Mr. Topolsky said of his decision to take the job. "They have the resources and the technology. It's an opportunity to build a 21st-century media company to scale."

Mr. Topolsky will be replaced at The Verge by Nilay Patel, its former managing editor, now the acting managing editor of Vox.com. Dieter Bohn will become executive editor of the technology site.

In joining Bloomberg, which had been viewed as a lucrative but not necessarily cutting-edge destination for reporters and editors, Mr. Topolsky is bucking the trend of young, web-native journalists leaving established media brands for smaller, more nimble start-ups. Those include Ezra Klein, formerly of The Washington Post, who moved to Vox Media.

"They're very different companies," Mr. Topolsky said, "with very different challenges and goals." He added, "Right now all I see is this huge potential and huge resources to build unbelievably strong brands."

Bloomberg, which relies on its financial information terminals for a large percentage of its annual revenue, has recently hired other prominent journalists. In May, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, political reporters known for detailed, gossip-filled books like "Game Change" and "Double Down," joined to start a new site that will focus on American politics and policy.

Though there will most likely be further big-name hires in the future, Mr. Smith said that Bloomberg would now focus on "doing tons of things in the trenches," including building new video and web products.

27 Jul 03:05

Every American Killed by Lightning So Far in 2014 Has Been Male

A fisherman knee-deep in a lake, a man lying against a tree, a roofer working atop a car dealership—these are just some of those who were killed by lightning in 2014, a year that so far has seen a 100 percent-male ratio for fatal U.S. strikes.

Seven American men have died from lightning since January. Add to that grim tally the nine consecutive male fatalities last fall, and you have the longest lightning-on-dude killing streak since at least 2006. It's a statistical fluke strong enough to get the #YesAllMen crowd crying misandry at Mother Nature.

But this all-XY zapfest is a testament to the sad fact that when it comes to men and fusillades of sky electricity, some things never change. Men are disproportionately represented in the history of lightning deaths. Since 2006, they've comprised 81 percent of such tragedies, as the National Weather Service shows in this graphic for the ongoing Lightning Safety Awareness Week:

Why is that? Commenters on the weather agency's Facebook page are full of theories. One woman believes it's because "[m]ore men work outside." Another guesses: "It's b/c they're out in lightening storms holding what essentially equates to lightening rods. Such as guns, fishing poles and other metal sports equipment. So basically it's b/c men are stupid."

And here are thoughts from the male commenters: "More men get hit cause more men play golf and refuse to leave the course lol." And, "Hate to admit it but women are smart enough to go inside. We men love to get up personal with storms." And in a similar vein, "When there's a thunderstorm, I want to look at it. And watch it progress...especially because we don't have that many here in SoCal. It's just a natural pull towards it, or any other notable weather event."

Last summer, NOAA scientist John Jensenius Jr. penned a study about this meteorological gender disparity. In looking at fatal strikes since 2006, he found that 64 percent occurred while the victims were engaged in recreational activities such as camping, fishing, soccer, and golf. (Fishing topped the list with 26 deaths, followed by camping and boating.) One might wonder, as the Weather Channel did, if these leisure-time diversions are enjoyed by "mostly male participants."

These are Jensenius' suppositions from the study:

Based on the statistics for gender, the vast majority of lightning victims are male. Possible explanations for this finding are that males are unaware of all the dangers associated with lightning, are more likely to be in vulnerable situations, are unwilling to be inconvenienced by the threat of lightning, are in situations that make it difficult to get to a safe place in a timely manner, don't react quickly to the lightning threat, or any combination of these explanations. In short, because of their behavior, males are at a higher risk of being struck and, consequently, are struck and killed by lightning more often than females.

So who were the men unlucky enough to meet this year with a 300 million-volt bolt from the blue? Here's the brief list, in chronological order from May to June (more details are available at the NWS):

• A 60-year-old found slumped near a lightning-hit tree in his backyard in Nacogdoches, Texas. "A witness reported hearing a loud boom that shook the house," writes KTRE-TV.

• A 40-year-old construction worker who had gone to check on his car in Seminole, Florida. "It was raining," said his boss. "He went to close his windows, and 15 minutes later he didn't come back."

• A 71-year-old fishing in a lake when storms moved through Plant City, Florida. Reports ABC News: "Deputies said while waiting to remove the body, an alligator went toward it and forced a deputy to shoot. The alligator was hit and swam away underwater."

• A 44-year-old struck while riding his motorcycle in Cimarron, New Mexico. He veered off the road and crashed.

• A 55-year-old roofer working at an auto dealership in Pompono Beach, Florida. "Out of nowhere, a single strike hit," the dealer's spokesman told a newspaper. "The skies at the time were clear."

• A 71-year-old picking blueberries at a farm in Milton, Florida. "There were a cluster of thunderstorms over the area at the time, but they weren't anything we would consider unusual," a meteorologist said.

• A 32-year-old found under a tree in a park in Pittsfield, Michigan. The man who noticed him said he "was in a resting position, as anyone would rest under a tree on a sunny day."

Going back to the nine fatalities toward the end of 2013, the victims were engaged in these activities: hanging tobacco in a barn (two men), doing something vehicle-related under a tree (three men), power-washing underneath a tractor trailer, playing in a back yard, working on a billboard, and finally, fishing in a canoe.

About 300 people in the U.S. are struck by lightning each year, leading to an average of 30 fatalities. The good news is that thanks to a growing awareness of the dangers of thunderstorms, this death toll is a shadow of what it was in the 20th century. An incredible 131 people died from lightning in 1969, but since the late '60s lightning-related deaths have decreased by 78.6 percent among men and 70.6 percent among females, according to the CDC.

Top image: Ana de Sousa/Shutterstock.com

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27 Jul 03:05

English, loanword champion of the world!

There’s nothing like visiting Finland to make an English-speaker appreciate the value of words borrowed from other languages. Finnish, as I learned during a trip earlier this month, is an agglutinative language, in which parts of words stay distinct instead of fusing together. This makes for very long words, like “kahdenneksikymmenenneksiyhdeksänneksi” (one way to say “29,” according to my guidebook), and considerable bewilderment for a visitor. To me, it might as well have been Klingon, only with more umlauts. Every now and then, though, a light would shine through the darkness: I’d catch something like “hot jooga” or “muffensi” or “grill maisteri,” and sigh with relief.

It’s a common experience for English speakers abroad: suddenly recognizing a familiar word in a newspaper, or on a billboard, or in a fragment of conversation. Since World War II, English has become by far the leading exporter of “loanwords,” as they’re known, including nearly universal terms like “OK,” “Internet,” and “hamburger.” The extent to which a language loans words is a measure of its prestige, said Martin Haspelmath, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute. English, clearly, is now on top.

Continue reading below

But that imbalance can build resentment. In France, the secretary of the Academie Française called last December for a “reconquest of the French language” from loanwords; in China, government-friendly papers printed screeds this spring against “Wi-Fi,” “VIP,” and “e-mail.” Even as many governments work to protect languages from the spread of English, however, speakers in those countries go blithely off to “hot jooga,” meaning that official policy and the daily reality of English may be very different things.

Linguistic loans can appear in a number of forms: Some float on the surface of a language, while others are more integrated. Because English and Japanese have very different sound systems, for instance, Japan often adapts words in ways that make them nearly unrecognizable to English-speakers. Über-Japanese media franchise Pokémon actually takes its name from English (“pocket monster”). Japan’s “puroresu” is another abbreviated compound, from “professional wrestling”; similarly, the extra syllables required to pronounce English consonants have given rise to “purasuchikku” (“plastic”) and “furai” (“fry”). Then there are loans where a word stays intact but the meaning shifts. A “smoking” is French for a tuxedo, and a “dressman” is a German male model. Chinese people say they want to “high” when they want to have a (non-drug-related) good time.

Loanwords are fun to track, from the perspective of the loaner. But if you’re the borrower, there can be a feeling of defeat, that you’ve relinquished your own way of saying things. This has fed linguistic purism: attempts to cleanse languages of foreign influences, or resist them in the first place.

Sometimes purism peaks after a war or in a post-colonial situation. South Korea tried to de-Japanify its language after World War II; the Indian and Pakistani governments tried to separate Hindi and Urdu after their partition. A purist approach can also be a smaller language’s way of resisting outside influence. In Iceland, the Icelandic Language Institute preserves the country’s Viking-era language by cobbling together new terms from indigenous roots. Some Native American groups do the same to resist English.

Chinese is an imperial language that has always loaned more than it borrowed. In the Max Planck Institute’s World Loanword Database, Mandarin Chinese has the lowest percentage of borrowings of all 41 languages studied, only 2 percent. (English, with one of the highest, has 42 percent.) In part because of the difficulty of translating alphabet-based languages into Chinese characters, it’s common to see what are called “calques”—nonphonetic literal translations like “re gou” for “hot dog” or “zhi zhu ren” for “Spiderman.” Despite (or because of) the vast appetite among the Chinese for learning English as a foreign language, Chinese ministers have recently cracked down on loanwords. And yet Chinese people still say “baibai” and “sorry”; “e-mail” is just a lot easier than “dianzi youjian,” the official substitute.

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When languages are full of borrowed words, it’s often not by choice. Romany has many loans because of a history of extreme marginalization. Japan has a long tradition of cultural borrowing; it was also occupied for years after World War II. Vietnam, following centuries of successive occupations, has a high rate of Chinese and French loans presaging more recent English ones like “canguru,” according to the Max Planck research. Other languages are more deliberately open: According to research by Anne-Line Graedler, an English professor at Norway’s Hedmark University College, the Danes are the most welcoming Scandinavian country to loans.

Most languages fall somewhere in between the extremes. Many European countries went through a period of linguistic nationalism in the 19th century and continue to regulate loans today. The Language Council of Norway, for example, has created official “Norwegian” spellings for English loanwords since 1996—although some, like “pøbb” (pub), were apparently rejected by the Norwegian people. Finland, fairly open to loans, has the Kielitoimisto, the Finnish Language Office, which helps create neologisms like “pehmelö” (“smoothie”) and advises on how to adapt foreign words into Finnish. Smaller European languages like Czech, Slovenian, and Croatian (with its “džez,” or jazz, and “hardver”), have traditionally been more resistant than larger ones.

It’s not hard to see why governments would seek to defend their languages. But some linguists think a staunch anti-English stance may be counterproductive. Truly endangered languages tend to be encroached on mostly by their dominant geographic neighbors, says Selma Sonntag, a political scientist at Humboldt State University who studies language purist movements: “The threat isn’t from English, it’s from whatever the official language is within their area.” Linguist David Crystal, author of “English as a Global Language,” has written about how Welsh-language purism may be furthering an elitism that prevents younger speakers from adopting the tongue. And it’s worth noting that English owes much of its vitality to its long history of borrowing from French, Latin, Arabic, and pretty much any other language it met. “Loanwords...do alter [a language’s] character—but is this a bad thing?” Crystal told me. “Imagine English without French or Latin loanwords. No Shakespeare, for a start.”

When England became an empire, English began borrowing less and became the prolific word lender it is today, Haspelmath told me. If we start borrowing again—the way Arabic stopped exporting words to the rest of the world once its empire crumbled and started borrowing more from French and English—we’ll know we’ve seen the apex of our cultural influence. Until then, at least we’ll be able to find a hot yoga class just about anywhere in the world.

07 Apr 00:58

Not dead yet: Dutch, British governments pay to keep Windows XP alive

by Sean Gallagher

Windows XP is supposed to be dead next week. But the Dutch and British governments have both inked deals with Microsoft to continue to keep it on life support, at least for them—under Microsoft’s Custom Support program.

On Wednesday, ComputerWeekly reported that the UK government agreed to pay Microsoft £5.548 million (approximately $9.1 million) for continued support of Windows XP, Office 2003, and Exchange 2003 for all British public sector customers. On Friday, the Dutch government cut its own “multi-million Euro” deal with Microsoft for custom XP support of over 30,000 computers still running the Windows XP operating system.

Those deals may be just a drop in the bucket in comparison to what the US government may have to pay for support of the hundreds of thousands of systems still running Windows XP and other end-of-life software. Despite years of foreknowledge of the end of support for the operating system, there are still a large number of systems running Windows XP within government, including computers on sensitive networks and embedded systems. Many hospitals in the US still use Windows XP on workstations and healthcare devices because software developers have not had their products certified by regulators for use with later versions of Windows.

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

03 Apr 19:33

Uncharted creative director to lead new EA Star Wars game

by Sam Machkovech

We can only hope Hennig's contributions to her new Star Wars video game are more elegant than our hastily made Boba Drake.

Electronic Arts has hired Amy Hennig, creative director and writer for the Uncharted video game franchise, as the new creative director for a forthcoming Star Wars gaming project.

A post by Steve Papoutsis, vice president of EA-owned subsidiary Visceral Games, celebrated Hennig's decades in the games industry, including long runs at companies like Crystal Dynamics and Naughty Dog. Papoutsis also revealed how EA swooped the design legend up. "I could sense that what really excited her about this opportunity (because let’s face it, we weren’t the only ones knocking at her door) was Star Wars," Papoutsis wrote. "Just thinking about the possibilities made both of us even more excited about having her join the team."

As Hennig stated on her Twitter page today, this is her second go-round at EA and her first in 23 years. She previously worked on EA games like Desert Strike and Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City. No details have emerged about potential Star Wars games from EA since a development deal was signed in May of last year, but considering the number of Harrison Ford similarities found in lead Uncharted character Nathan Drake, we can imagine the direction Hennig may take with her new project.

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03 Apr 19:21

Crowdfunding Is Not a Scam, It's Market Research - Bloomberg View

by Khalid

Crowdfunding Is Not a Scam, It's Market Research

7 Mar 28, 2014 12:05 PM ET

By Virginia Postrel

Crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo represent a classic entrepreneurial phenomenon: Once you roll out your great idea, customers use it in ways you didn't imagine, and you wind up in a different business than you expected.

Kickstarter's founders wanted to help artists raise money. Indiegogo co-founder Danae Ringelmann pictured aiding capital-strapped small-businesses owners like her parents. Neither intended their site to act as a test market. But, as the rags-to-riches story of virtual-reality firm Oculus shows, that's what they have become.

"It's a way to access capital, but what it's also become is a market-testing and validation platform," Ringelmann told the Dent the Future conference on Tuesday. "What we're doing is creating pre-markets for ideas," she said.

In theory, the sites operate a bit like a PBS pledge drive: Give us money for a good cause and we'll send you this nifty tote-bag. But the economics of running a campaign work best if whatever you're trying to do directly generates the premium. That way the same cash you use to complete your project gives you products or event tickets to hand out.

"If a project's goal is to produce a pure 'public good' -- like data, as it was in my case -- almost any exclusive, tangible reward offered to backers winds up simply adding costs, making it that much harder to raise the required funds," says Cosmo Wenman, who ran an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign to finance 3-D scans of classic sculptures. "The tote-bag is not free." (He instead received funding from Autodesk.)

As a result, the most successful crowdfunding projects aren't charities. They're ventures that produce something people wish they could buy.

That makes crowdfunding a great way to test the market. "You're going directly to your fans, your customers, the people who're going to be your customers," said Ringelmann. You're finding out whether anyone is willing to pay for your great new idea.

When more than 9,500 people gave $2.4 million -- nearly 10 times the original goal -- to back the Oculus Rift headset on Kickstarter, it was clear the market was hungry for the invention. Although smaller donors received T-shirts or posters, the vast majority contributed enough to get either a prototype or a developer kit.

Now that Facebook is buying Oculus for $2 billion, critics are reverting to the original assumption that crowdfunding is primarily about raising money. "Talking people out of $2.4 million in exchange for zero percent equity is a perfectly legal scam," wrote my colleague Barry Ritholtz.

But it's not a scam at all. It's market research. In effect, customers placed pre-orders and received early products; why are they griping that they don't own a part of the business?

The backlash is largely Kickstarter's fault. It may not be running a scam, but it definitely sends mixed messages. Unlike Indiegogo, which prides itself on operating a neutral platform giving anybody's idea a market test, Kickstarter hasn't embraced its de facto transformation. It strictly curates the campaigns it hosts and, although it makes its biggest profits on technology products, it still exudes an artistic sensibility that isn't entirely comfortable with disruptive technology or large enterprises. It still talks as though it's PBS. "Kickstarter is not a store," it declares.

Indiegogo, by contrast, proudly touts itself as testing platform. "We allow entrepreneurs to prove themselves in a merit-based way," by discovering whether a venture can in fact attract interest and money from potential customers, said Ringelmann. The site even allows campaigns to swap in new perks or change the required giving levels. "You can test your pricing. You can test your features," she said. That kind of blunt sales-oriented language would be unheard of on Kickstarter.

Crowdfunding has enormous potential to expand entrepreneurial opportunity and reduce business risks. "We've actually gotten thank you notes," said Ringelmann, "from people who were highly unsuccessful in raising money that said, 'In three weeks I discovered that I had an idea that nobody wanted. You just saved me two years of my life.'"

But these benefits depend on recognizing this new institution for what it is: a way of taking pre-orders, not a charity pledge drive.

To contact the writer of this article: Virginia Postrel at vp@vpostrel.com.

To contact the editor responsible for this article: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net.

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06 Sep 22:28

Here’s why you should care about rising Chinese smartphone firm Xiaomi

by Kaylene Hong

Apple and Samsung are household names all over the world for their smartphones, and it may be difficult to imagine that another smartphone firm — let alone a Chinese one — could possibly be muttered in the same breath. But have you heard of Xiaomi? Indeed, can you even pronounce its name properly (it’s Shiao-Me)?

If celebrities can cross the boundaries of countries easily to attract fans from all over the world, red-hot Chinese smartphone firm Xiaomi, which displayed its celebrity-like appeal yesterday at its launch event, will soon show that it can take its influence overseas. The only step left for it is to launch its products internationally.

Xiaomi commands loyalty from its fans

Xiaomi showed media from all over the world yesterday exactly how popular it is in the world’s largest smartphone market — its launch event for the Mi-3 Android phone and a 3D smart TV was overwhelmingly packed with people, so much so that the security guards had to come out in full force to prevent more people from heading into the conference hall.

Many of those who turned up yesterday were Xiaomi fans in their mid-20s, who (presumably) took the day off work or school to come and support the company.

Those who were locked out were obviously not happy. I even witnessed a scuffle when someone tried to break through the barrier to try to get in, and at least five security guards laid hands upon him to push him back. There was plenty of shouting, angry words and unhappiness in general. Even journalists did not have priority — many also got locked out of the event that they went down especially to cover.

Despite being invited, many journos & I got locked out of @XiaomiChina event for lack of space. Thx @SirSteven for picking up the slack.

— Paul Bischoff (@pabischoff) September 5, 2013

Crowd at #XiaomiChina shows company buzz. But need to learn crowd control, no media seats, Hugo Barra left briefly cause of media scrum.

— Paul Mozur (@paulmozur) September 5, 2013

Crowd control and event organizing skills: zero. Loyalty of fans: 100.

To inspire this massive amount of loyalty is something that many international tech companies would probably kill for. It seems like in general, only celebrities or cults have this power — and Xiaomi has now taken on a celebrity role in the Chinese tech sector, despite just being founded three years ago and releasing its first device as recently as 2011.

On its Facebook page, Xiaomi says it has over 3.5 million users and 2.7 million fans currently: amazing growth for such a young tech company. Its revenue for the first half of 2013 reached $2.15 billion after it sold 7.03 million devices — just shy of the 7.19 million units it sold during the whole of 2012.

Xiaomi was born to be global

The various reasons for Xiaomi’s success in China is likely something that can be replicated overseas. Xiaomi is a company that was born to be global from the start despite starting in China: it is made up of employees from various international tech companies — among them Microsoft and Google.

Its overseas ambitions have been cemented by recently nabbing Hugo Barra, previously Google VP for Android.

Barra took to the stage at Xiaomi’s event yesterday to say he has been following Xiaomi from the start and that the work the company has done with its highly-customizable Android-based MIUI firmware has been impressive:

I am incredibly proud of the amazing work you guys have done with MIUI. Xiaomi is a huge Android supporter and is a very important part of the Android ecosystem here in China. Now I believe the entire world is ready to learn from Xiaomi.

Lei says that Barra, who is moving to Beijing, can help Xiaomi make MIUI better and accelerate the company’s global ambitions.

Basically there are three things at play here for Xiaomi: low prices, high-end smartphones and user feedback (which in turn leads to flexibility). Applying Xiaomi’s various tactics overseas would definitely work well, especially in emerging economies — indeed it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to think of Xiaomi as Apple for less-developed countries.

Low prices, high-end smartphones

The obvious reason for Xiaomi’s appeal is that its smartphones pack a lot of punch for the price point that they sell at — simply because the company adopts a different model from traditional smartphone companies. Unlike Apple, for example, which makes money from margins on selling its phones, Xiaomi’s revenue stream comes from its software — the highly-customizable MIUI firmware that is based on Android.

Its third-generation smartphone launched yesterday, the Mi-3, has been touted as the fastest smartphone in the world.

The phone is powered by dual processors that are top-notch in the tech world now — there is a TD-SCDMA (China’s 3G service) version powered by a 1.8 GHz Nvidia Tegra 4 processor and another China Unicom/operator version running on different networks that is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 800.

Despite its slim frame, with its thickness coming in at only 8.1mm, the Mi-3 packs a 3050 mAh battery that should give it plenty of juice. Its camera feature is also pretty impressive, coming in at 13 megapixels with dual LED flash lights.

And how much does the Mi-3 cost? A mere CNY1,999 ($327). Comparatively, the Samsung Galaxy S4 is retailing for CNY5,199 ($850).

With yesterday’s event, Xiaomi also crossed over to the smart TV sector, launching an Android-powered 47-inch 3D smart TV coming in at only CNY2,999 ($490) that supports wireless streaming of TV shows and Android games.

User feedback is part of Xiaomi’s manufacturing process

However, there is one other very huge reason that Xiaomi has inspired so many fans that people don’t tend to zoom in on: the way it includes users in its whole ecosystem — from the software to the hardware. Basically, Xiaomi users all have a say in the final products that the company launches.

Compared with the closed ecosystems in use within many tech companies, Xiaomi’s open system has drawn a lot of users who have had enough of being unhappy with certain features in their smartphones but no power to be heard.

Overseas users would likely be attracted to Xiaomi’s system for the exact same reasons that Chinese users are enamored with.

Xiaomi’s commitment to its users can especially be seen in its MIUI software, which is now in Version 5, and which Barra praised. The Android customization software is highly flexible and incorporates user feedback to release weekly updates.

Hiring a man central to the Android ecosystem hints at Xiaomi’s ambition to grow its own Android customization software system into a global force — perhaps to even take on Android itself?

Tying up with social networking sites ups Xiaomi’s cool factor

With the low price points of Xiaomi products, people can afford to buy them off-contract and unsubsidized. This means that Xiaomi gets to sell its phones directly — via its own website and via social networking sites such as Sina Weibo and Tencent QQ. Tapping on the reach of these sites and aligning its image with them makes Xiaomi a hip, cool company that understands what the younger generation wants.

Speaking with a few local Chinese yesterday, someone pointed out to me that Xiaomi basically appeals to those who follow trends easily — the younger generation who also have less disposable income. Simply put: Xiaomi understands the power of influence. Just like a celebrity, Xiaomi knows how to make use of the power it has, and it is little wonder that the company has managed to climb so fast in such a short amount of time.

Xiaomi will soon hit the world

This is why the world should watch out for Xiaomi — this company understands what makes its customers tick and caters to its users at all points of the smartphone manufacturing process.

It probably means less control over its product — and some would say users don’t always know best — but it is interestingly a concept that smartphone companies haven’t really put into motion yet (despite all the vows about listening to customers and having customer service centers).

It also does not hurt that basically Xiaomi phones represent exceptional value for money. With the combination of these killer factors, it may not be long before Xiaomi hits the international world as a force to be reckoned with.

Headline image via Xiaomi

View attached file (xiaomi2-520x245.png, image/png)

06 Sep 22:27

Why Chemical Weapons Deserve Their Big No-No Place

by jessamyn

CMA reaches 45% destruction milestone by U.S. Army Materiel Command (cc by)

Punkey explains why chemical weapons actually are worse than nuclear or biological weapons.

[T]he big reason for it being on the No-No List is that chemical weapons are essentially useless against a real military force, and are only really good at killing and terrorizing civilians. Unlike white phosphorus, chemical weapons do absolutely no damage to structures or materiel, they only kill people. Even the most lethal nerve agents are stopped by standard-issue chemical protection ...which is great if you have those things, and most modern militaries do.... Chemical weapons are spectacularly effective against people that aren't prepared and can't easily leave the target area - which pretty much only describes civilians.

06 Sep 22:26

Yes, Internet: Your citizens still want their anonymity

by Casey Johnston

massdistraction

Big Internet companies have pushed for years toward identifying users as real people, but as it turns out, the large majority of us are uncomfortable with this practice. Fifty-nine percent of people recently surveyed by the Pew Research Center agreed that they should be able to use the Internet completely anonymously, and 86 percent have attempted to cover their Internet tracks, according to a study published Thursday.

The capability to remain anonymous on the Internet is, without question, ebbing. A decade ago, the average Internet presence was a letter-and-number-jumbled forum handle or screen name, with only signatures and the barest of profiles to represent your online distillation of yourself.

Now, it is de rigueur to thread all of your online presences together under your own real name (take Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn, for example). Furthermore, some big companies require it, not only for attribution and accountability reasons, but because the profit draw of Big Data has become too, uh, big to ignore. It’s far easier to market online ads to a unified user profile than to JasonBourneFan69.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

myszor4444 likes this

25 Aug 16:37

Web ad killer AdBlock launches crowdfunding initiative to finance… an Internet ad campaign

by Jon Russell

Khalid Shagari
They should've linked to a tutorial of how to exclude sites from AdBlock in their final note to justify publishing this article even more.

money cash investment 520x245 Web ad killer AdBlock launches crowdfunding initiative to finance... an Internet ad campaign

AdBlock, the company behind the AdBlock Chrome extension that block out Internet advertising, is going meta after it launched a crowdfunding initiative to raise a minimum of $25,000 for an advertising campaign of its own.

AdBlock has launched the Kickstarter/Indiegogo-style 30 day donation push to finance a promotional campaign that will use the very medium that it restricts: Web ads.

“We’re going to use ads to get rid of ads,” the campaign page explains. “We will use the money raised to make AdBlock banner ads and video commercials, and we will show these across the Internet to people who don’t have AdBlock.”

The donation page quietly went live this weekend — crossing $4,000 at the time of writing — but AdBlock says it will push a notice to users of its services this coming week to generate further interest.

It expects that alert to users to drive around 15 million visitors to the campaign page, which includes a variety of donation packages, priced upwards of $1. Like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, donors will only pay if the minimum target is reached.

There is an ambition to make its campaign more visible, and AdBlock says it will rent a billboard on Times Square if it can bring in $50,000 in donations. If the amount reaches $150,000, it wants a full page spread in the New York Times — while, at the crazy end of of crazy, it’s pledging a Super Bowl 2014 TV spot if it can pull in a highly unlikely $4.2 million.

AdBlock says it can make the Internet “a better place for everyone” if it cuts out “annoying” advertising. While that may appeal to some, many Internet sites — The Next Web included — rely on advertising to bring in revenue, which pays for staff to write content — so cutting out ads is very much detrimental to many content creators.

One argument to justify services like AdBlock is that that online media should develop better business models that are not reliant on ads. While that’s all well and good on paper, it remains to be seen how many Internet users will pay for anything — let alone news and content — which they are used to getting for free; while other monetization models are still to come to the fore.

Bearing those arguments in mind, it will be interesting to see how AdBlock’s campaign progresses.

(I’m quite aware of the irony that The Next Web, a site that includes ads, is effectively prompting the campaign by writing about it. But we consider our content to be of high enough quality, and the types of advertising that we serve to be more than bearable, that our readers aren’t compelled to ‘AdBlock’ us.)

UPDATE: A previous version of this post conflated the AdBlock and AdBlock Plus brands. The post has now been amended to remove this error. AdBlock Plus is a separate company to AdBlock.

Headline image via Thinkstock

View attached file (money-cash-investment-520x245.jpg, image/jpeg)

almajid likes this

09 Jul 22:26

Caught on video: Fake hit man and Muskegon's widow wannabe discuss husband's murder | MLive.com

by Khalid

Khalid Shagari
wow, very strange...Just see the videos

From Evernote:

Caught on video: Fake hit man and Muskegon's widow wannabe discuss husband's murder | MLive.com

Clipped from: http://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/index.ssf/2013/07/caught_on_video_muskegons_wido.html

Caught on video: Fake hit man and Muskegon's widow wannabe discuss husband's murder

Fake hit man, Julia Merfeld talk husband's murder (part 1) A fake hit man, actually a Michigan State police detective, and Julia Merfeld discuss plans to murder Merfeld's husband. Video was shot April 9, 2013. Footage courtesy of Muskegon County Prosecutor's Office and was edited for length by MLive.

MUSKEGON, MI – Julia Charlene Merfeld said she wanted her husband killed because "it was easier than divorcing him."

That explanation came in a meeting with a man Merfeld thought she was hiring to do the murder.

Merfeld, 21, of Muskegon didn't know the man was really an undercover police detective, or that she was being recorded on a hidden videocamera.

"When I first decided to do this … it's not that we weren't getting along," she says on the video. "But … terrible as it sounds, it was easier than divorcing him.

"You know, I didn't have to worry about the judgment of my family, I didn't have to worry about breaking his heart, all that stuff like this. It's, like, how I got a clean getaway."

Another motive, authorities have said, was the 27-year-old husband's $400,000 life insurance policy . Julia Merfeld told the fake hit man he'd be paid $50,000 from the proceeds, in a series of weekly $9,000 installments to avoid suspicion from her bank.

Merfeld pleaded guilty June 27 to solicitation to murder.

Her husband and intended victim asked that she get no jail time at all, the sentencing judge said in court at the time of her guilty plea. Instead, Chief Muskegon County Circuit Judge William C. Marietti committed to cap her minimum sentence at six years. The maximum can be anything up to life in prison, depending on Marietti's decision at her sentencing July 30.

After Merfeld's guilty plea, the Muskegon County Prosecutor's Office released videos of two meetings between Merfeld and a Michigan State Police detective. The recordings were released to MLive and the Muskegon Chronicle at a reporter's request.

Each conversation lasted about 11 minutes. Each took place in the fake hit man's vehicle parked outside the Harvey Street Meijer store in Fruitport Township. They were recorded on April 9 and 10, 2013. Merfeld was arrested soon after the second meeting and has been lodged in the Muskegon County Jail ever since.

The recordings are almost startlingly sharp. In them, the baby-faced young wife, wearing a Batman sweatshirt in the second meeting, discusses her murder plan in a matter-of-fact manner. Occasionally she laughs. She calmly discusses possible dates for the killing, checking her calendar on her Batman-stickered smartphone.

At one point late in the second conversation, she briefly appears to be having second thoughts. After the supposed hit man tells her he'll fire two bullets into her husband's head and that "he's gonna die," she smiles uneasily, says "it makes me sad," and at one point says softly, "It's a bad idea for me."

But within seconds she's back on track, saying "OK" after the fake killer tells her the killing can't be called off "after today." And seconds after that she interrupts him to ask "what happens if you get caught?" He assures her he'll "take the hit" and not give her up as long as she pays him, to which she replies, "absolutely."

The man who tipped off police, her co-worker Carlos Ramos, told MLive earlier that Merfeld offered him $50,000 to kill her husband. Instead he called police, who then set up the meetings that led to her arrest.

Merfeld and her husband had recently moved to Muskegon from New Jersey as the result of a job transfer for the husband. They have two young children who were staying with relatives in New Jersey at the time of the April meetings.

At no time in the conversations does Merfeld express any hostility toward her husband or complain of any action of his. She stresses that she doesn't want him to suffer.

When the "hit man" asks whether she wants him to use a gun or a knife, she says, "unless you can do it painlessly breaking his neck."

Early in the first conversation they discuss her preference that the victim be killed outdoors rather than in their West Forest Avenue home, for a couple of reasons. For one, Merfeld wanted a friend to move in with her after his death, and she didn't want the woman to be scared of moving into the house after it had been broken into.

Also, she says, a shooting indoors "would be messy in the house," then laughs.

By the second meeting, it's been decided the murder will be done inside the Merfelds' home while Julia is at work. Her husband will be in the pantry, she tells the "hit man." The hired killer will steal items such as a computer to make it look like a robbery.

For the second meeting, Merfeld brings along and hands the "hit man" a sheaf of notes he has requested, including directions to the home and a floor plan, then a photo of her husband, saying, "that's him." She also hands the purported killer a $100 bill as a down payment to show she's serious, as he had requested in the first meeting.

As the final conversation ends, the supposed killer shakes Merfeld's hand and wishes her luck. She replies with a smile just before she exits the vehicle:

"Thank you. Good luck to you, too."

Email John Hausman at jhausman@mlive.com or follow him on Twitter at @johnshausman

09 Jul 03:20

Yes, Please | Party of One - NYTimes.com

by Khalid

Khalid Shagari
“The heaven was being oneself. Perhaps even being oneself for the very first time, without tradition scrutinizing you, without expectation hounding you, without class defining you and without a sense of other people lording it over you. That’s an unforgettable experience”
… As beautiful as that might be, there are dangers to traveling and there are even more dangers to traveling alone. There aren’t a broad range of destination a solo traveler can consider.
Do any of you prefer traveling alone? Did you travel alone before ? how was it?

From Evernote:

Yes, Please | Party of One - NYTimes.com

Clipped from: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/yes-please-party-of-one/

Yes, Please | Party of One

Slim Aarons/Getty ImagesThe photographer Slim Aarons lounges by the Acropolis, circa 1955.

Why suffer through grumbling vacations with others when it's so much more blissful to go it alone?

The first rule of travel is that you should always go with someone you love, which is why I travel alone. The writer's life is more openly narcissistic than most, yet it takes a true connoisseur of self-involvement, a grand master in the art of selfishness, to experience the world's delights as they are meant to be enjoyed: through one pair of eyes, via one set of ears, with the perfect use of your own nostrils, tongue and touch. I believe that traveling alone is the last great test of who you are in a world where everyone aches to be the same.

I mean, you meet people. But you also meet yourself. That is the beauty of going it alone. For me, it all started with a trip from Scotland to America when I was 18. I had been there in books and movies, of course, and, in my youth, I had studied my countryman Robert Louis Stevenson's strictures about New York. "You must speak to no one in the streets," he was told, "as they would not leave you till you were rooked and beaten. You must enter a hotel with military precautions." As it turned out, I fell on New York like an old pal. I arrived and immediately went for a drink on 34th Street and thought I was in heaven. The heaven was being oneself. Perhaps even being oneself for the very first time, without tradition scrutinizing you, without expectation hounding you, without class defining you and without a sense of other people lording it over you. That's an unforgettable experience, especially in youth, because the lasting feature of the solo traveler lies in his hunger for singularity. Even today, when I grab my passport and head for the airport, I have something of Emerson in mind, wandering into the woods to establish "an original relation to the universe." But I also have Jean-Paul Sartre in mind: "Hell is other people."

The fun starts with the choices. Will I be solo tobogganing in New Zealand? Will I be watching Wagner's "Ring" cycle in a series of Bavarian chapels? Attending a vegetarian cooking course in the Taurus Mountains of Turkey? Drinking approximately 400 shots of tequila on some God-forsaken beach in Thailand? Doing yoga in Amorgos, Greece, in front of a perfect blue sea? Or will I be cycling through the back roads of France with the promise of lunch up ahead and no conversation?

Every vacation is an ego trip for somebody. It's just that in families the person actually commanding the ego trip has to pretend he or she is running a functioning democracy. (And vacations, like failed states, are always run by one person.) People argue so much on vacation because the occasion so often falls short of the desire: the desire is for rest, peace, no pressure, and a sense of being away from one's usual self, and your average family holiday sets fire in comic sequence to each of these high hopes. And often as memorable and meaningful as a family holiday is, it just doesn't feel like a holiday.

What feels like a holiday is turning up alone at the Hotel Danieli in Venice on a beautiful day. You open the window onto the Grand Canal and you feel the breeze. You order tea from room service and press your face against a cotton pillow. You take out the books you will read and you run a warm bath. You lift pictures of your loved ones from your suitcase and place them gingerly on the bedside cabinet and blow them a kiss. You switch off your phone. Then you take off your shoes and die of bliss. "From midday to dusk I have been roaming the streets," wrote Henry James in a letter to his brother William from Rome. "At last — for the first time — I live!"

Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New YorkA photograph from Robert Kinmont's ''8 Natural Handstands'' series (1969/2009).

Let me dispel a few myths. You will be lonely. No: you won't. My solo travels in Paris have brought many perfect hours of being alone but not a moment of loneliness. People who depend on other people are often in hiding from themselves. Two and a quarter million people live in the City of Light: you will see many of them and you will pass them in the street, but when you see Notre Dame after dark and walk home and perhaps stop to have a drink in the Marais, you can feel that the only thing that is missing from your experience is the common dependency on someone to distract your attention. You are living without it: you are on vacation.

Distraction can be nice. Of course, it can. One of the reasons many people travel is to find a structured way of distracting themselves to the point of oblivion. I've been to Ibiza with a crowd of boys and forgotten my own name. I once went on a group holiday to Machu Picchu on which the people — a group of solo travelers looking for adventure — spent the whole time involved in a rolling soap opera that only used the forgotten city as a kind of verdant background. They couldn't see the sites: they only saw each other and themselves in each other's eyes. Everyone needs something specific, I guess, and you can't travel far away from your basic needs. But traveling alone offers the chance to test the limits of what you think you know about yourself. Who knew that he needed a barefoot walk on a long white beach and the sight of a thousand jellyfish thrown up on the sand? Who knew that he needed a bottle shop serving perfect Australian shiraz, a jacaranda tree sprouting blue against a hopeful red sky over Byron Bay — who knew he needed these exact things in order to know he could survive the sickness of a child and the depression of a parent? I know that man, reader, and he went there alone.

Show me the world, says the group traveler. And show me two weeks when I don't have to think. Fair enough. But not for me: I want to think new things on holiday and the best way to do that is to go it alone, allowing yourself a space — a beautiful space, with any luck — that is circumscribed neither by your need to perform nor your need to blame. Get up when you like. Skip as many museums as you like. Eat or don't eat. Dance or don't dance. Swim far out if you want to. Drink Champagne at breakfast. Write a paragraph if you have one to write. Say nothing for days and dream of home. Keep the light on all night.

I love a solo holiday. It tends to refresh the part of oneself that is most depleted by modern life — patience. I once went to Germany on a 10-city expedition. It was winter and the trains slogged through enchanted forests and past emerald lakes to places where castles and universities jostled in the mind beside evidence of man-made problems. I loved the snow, and felt, halfway through my travels, that I was actually moving slower than I had when I was back at home. I was taking my time, giving things their due, and the solo holiday had in some way increased my reserves of contentment. I had been on mindless holidays and they were fun and I couldn't remember them. But my travels in Germany left me quite refreshed with thoughtfulness.

I've had solo pints of Guinness in the pubs of County Kerry and County Cork. I've walked across the sage- and juniper-scented maquis of Corsica on a spring day, where you can still find the world of Napoleon's childhood. More than once I went to the Isle of Iona in the Scottish Hebrides, the burial ground of the early Scottish kings, and watched darkness descend on the Sound of Iona while evensong came from the old monastery. I wasn't on these travels for visions or transformation, but simply to feel the force of the world, for a day, for a night, as it operates outside the chatter of commerce or media or mass psychology. I love these things, but not on holiday, when one might hope for a place where you can resist the temptation to be drowned out.

It's not for everybody. It's not for people who are apt to get anxious about the good times they could be having. Life is so virtual nowadays that people might spend their lives casually mourning a version of reality that can only exist elsewhere. The virtue of many modern holiday destinations is that they provide the perfect conditions in which high-paying customers can feel entirely homesick. This has been excellent news for the comic novel, but I'm sure I couldn't love it. The wanderlust of the solo traveler doesn't kill homesickness, it partners it, making the vacation all the better for involving one's profound wish to go home to normal life a little changed. If I ruled the world, and you can rest assured that I don't, I would send each person for a fortnight away on their own. It wouldn't serve the divorce lawyers or the councils of war very well, but it would make people much happier to know the entire world was theirs.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 19, 2013

An article on May 12 about the joys of traveling alone quoted incorrectly from a letter that Henry James wrote to his brother William from Rome. He boasted about roaming the streets "from midday to dusk" (not "dust").

A version of this article appeared in print on 05/12/2013, on page M2100 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Party of One.

30 Jun 20:01

The Room: The Decade’s Biggest Cult Film -- Vulture

by Khalid

Khalid Shagari
Watch it, you wont regret it.

My Favorite line:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAY995sHdRQ

Make sure you see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xaVf6sxBSYk

From Evernote:

The Room: The Decade's Biggest Cult Film -- Vulture

Clipped from: http://www.vulture.com/2013/06/the-room-10th-anniversary-history.html

How The Room Became the Biggest Cult Film of the Past Decade

By Nate Jones

Ten years ago, in June 2003, a small independent film with a terrible script, a no-name director, and a cast of unknowns opened for a short run in Los Angeles. It was panned by the few critics who saw it and closed two weeks later, having grossed $1,800. But the film had something that set it apart. For while there are plenty of bad movies, there are no movies that are bad in all the ways The Room is bad. It suspends all normal rules of drama. Conflicts are introduced and then disappear instantly. Characters experience rapid mood swings, and everyone speaks in a weird brand of English filled with bizarre idioms. ("Keep your stupid comments in your pocket!") The sex scenes are scarier than the scary scenes.

The Room hit theaters at the right time. As it turns out, its unending series of bizarre moments were perfect for the dawn of the Internet's GIF and YouTube culture. As word of "the Worst Movie Ever Made" spread throughout message boards, an embryonic Room fandom coalesced around a series of midnight screenings in L.A. The movie's director became the center of a strange cult of personality, one that grew to include some of the top names in Hollywood. With their help, The Room became an international phenomenon, replete with a computer game , a stage adaptation, countless memes , celebrity parodies , ironic scholarship , an upcoming tell-all memoir , and regular screenings in three countries. Here's how the biggest cult movie of the past decade came to be.

Sometime in the Twentieth Century
Tommy Wiseau, The Room's mysterious star-director-writer, is born. Little else is known.

Wiseau: "[My past] has nothing to do with what I do. My private life is my private life."

Juliette Danielle, Room cast member : "We tried for a long time to find out where he's from. We never got an answer."

Sometime in the Late Twentieth Century
Wiseau is inspired.

Wiseau: "I got the idea of The Room from life," he says. "I conducted a lot of research, detailed work about human behavior, based on my environment. So I decided that I have this 'concept,' you know, about human behavior, and that's where everything started.

The idea begins as a 600-page book, which Wiseau considers turning into a stage play. Eventually, he decides to make a film, written by, directed by, and starring himself.

1998
In an acting class in San Francisco, Wiseau meets Greg Sestero, who will become his right-hand man.

Sestero : "He went up onstage and was just so entertaining. The whole class was laughing and chanting his name, and he was getting into it with the teacher and I thought, This guy's kind of cool. We just clicked. He told me, 'I have a movie I'd love to make, and I think you'd be great.'"

2002
Production begins on The Room, though how Wiseau raised the film's $6 million budget is a mystery. In interviews, the director says that he got it from his leather jacket business.

Wiseau : ''If you work, you have to save money, right? I didn't get money from the sky. I was preparing, let's put it this way.''

The cast has no illusions that they're making a serious film.

Danielle : "I can remember one time that I just lost it. It's the line where Johnny has locked himself in the bathroom and he says, 'In a few minutes, bitch.' I was doing okay until I saw the entire crew in my field of vision, stifling their laughter. I couldn't help it. Tommy came out and demanded to know what was so funny. That made it worse!"

But Wiseau's eccentricities hamper production.

Anonymous crew member : "[The script] was actually a lot longer. There was stuff that was just unsayeable. I know it's hard to imagine there was stuff that was worse. But there was.''

Sestero: "[Production lasted] almost six months. It took longer than Transformers. That is sad."

June 27, 2003
The film has its world premiere in Los Angeles. Wiseau arrives in a limousine.

Sestero: "People were hypnotized with laughter. Some people [walking out of the theater] looked dismayed. One guy said he may never get hard again."

Variety critic Scott Foundas : "Given audience reaction at screening attended, pic may be something of a first: A movie that prompts most of its viewers to ask for their money back — before even 30 minutes have passed."

By the end of its two-week run, the film has found a super-fan in screenwriter Michael Rousselet.

Rousselet : "'It was like our own private Mystery Science Theater. I was calling friends during the end and saying, 'You have to come to this movie.' We saw it four times in three days, and on the last day I had over 100 people there.''

A Los Angeles billboard that was essentially The Room's only piece of advertising.

Late 2003
The first wave of Room diehards begin a campaign to bring the film back.

Wiseau : "We got several phone calls from the theater that people were campaigning because they wanted to see The Room. I said to myself, What the heck? We got thousands of e-mails."

2004

The Room begins regular midnight screenings at the Laemmle Sunset in Los Angeles. Fans take to the Internet to sing the film's praises.

IMDb user Brickyard Jimmy : "See this film at all costs. See it twice. Or three times. Or as one kid that I met from Woodland Hills has, 12 times! See it until you can recite every precious line of dialogue this movie has to offer. Let The Room become your new religion."

Room fever infects the L.A. comedy scene. Members of the State seem particularly prone.

David Wain : "I was at Paul Rudd's house a couple of years ago, and he said, 'You have to watch this. Within two minutes, I'm like, 'Okay, this is my favorite thing I've ever seen.'''

December 2005
Wiseau releases the film on DVD, allowing Room fans to mock the film from the comfort of their homes.

May 5, 2006
NPR runs the first trend piece on Room screenings.

NPR : "During the movie, audience members shout out their own commentary about the dialogue, the sets — and notably, the framed photograph of a spoon that inexplicably reappears. Each time this happens, plastic spoons are thrown at the screen, in the can-do spirit of Rocky Horror Picture Show fans"

March 8. 2009
Tim and Eric, Room fans both, get Wiseau to guest-direct an episode of Awesome Show. Watch it here.

The experience is a strange one, even for them .

May 21, 2009
Monthly midnight screenings begin in New York City. The Room is now bicoastal.

July 24, 2009
The Room makes its London Premiere at Soho's Prince Charles Theater.

The Independent : "The Room's crappiness is so compelling that, rather than market it as the Greek tragedy it was so obviously meant to be be, Wiseau nowadays insists it was conceived as black comedy."

April 30, 2010
The Room celebrates its one-year NYC premiere with a sell-out show at the 1,200-seat Ziegfield Theater. Wiseau is on hand to embrace the circus.

Entertainment Weekly :"While Sestero hung back, quietly signing autographs and taking pictures with fans, Wiseau — wearing a suit and those trademark sunglasses — was immediately bombarded with requests to pose in photos with football-wielding fans dressed in his likeness, and to sign shirts that read 'I heart Tommy Wiseau.' […] In fact, during the half hour that Wiseau rubbed elbows with fans outside the theatre, he was constantly surrounded by a mob worthy of Rob Pattinson, which made unknowing passersby curiously ask folks in line, "Who is that?"

September 7, 2010
With the arrival of an online computer game, The Room becomes fully meme-ified.

Vulture : "Can you find Lisa's red dress in time?"

May 23, 2011
Sestero becomes Wiseau's Boswell in earnest, signing a book deal with Simon & Schuster to write a tell-all about the making of the film. The Disaster Artist will hit shelves in October.

June 11, 2011
Wiseau's vision finally comes full circle with a stage adaptation of The Room, which premieres at the AFI Silver Screen in Maryland. (Watch a video of it here .)

2013
Wiseau announces a special tenth-anniversary tour for the film , with appearances in Hollywood, Minneapolis, and Denver. He will likely introduce each of them with what has become his trademark phrase.

Wiseau: "I always say, 'You can laugh, you can cry, you can express yourself, but please don't hurt each other.'"

29 Jun 19:57

Powerful Ad Campaign, How Facebook ‘Likes’ Don’t Help | Fstoppers

by Khalid

From Evernote:

Powerful Ad Campaign, How Facebook 'Likes' Don't Help | Fstoppers

Clipped from: http://fstoppers.com/powerful-ad-campaign-how-facebook-likes-dont-help

Powerful Ad Campaign, How Facebook 'Likes' Don't Help

"Liking isn't helping"

Ad agency Publicis Singapore, put together that powerful tag line for Crisis Relief Singapore's latest ad campaign. The C.R.S. is a disaster relief organization run by volunteers. The jarring ads reveal the fact that simply clicking on a 'Like' button doesn't help crisis situations.

The three ads: Flood, War and Earthquake, used real press photographs with dropped in 'Thumbs Up' to reflect the famous Facebook button. It is a powerful statement that definitely tugs at the heartstrings and shines light onto the fact that simply clicking on a button doesn't help.

The compelling motive can best be summarized in the copy, "Be a volunteer. Change a life."

Flood

Earthquake

Via Design Taxi and Buzzfeed

27 May 06:43

Google Blimps To Bring Wireless Internet To Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Other Developing Countries

by Khalid

From Evernote:

Google Blimps To Bring Wireless Internet To Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Other Developing Countries

Clipped from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/25/google-blimp-wireless-internet_n_3333834.html

Google Blimps To Bring Wireless Internet To Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Other Developing Countries

Reuters | Posted: 05/24/2013 5:51 pm EDT

(Reuters) - Google Inc intends to finance, build and help operate wireless networks from sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia, hoping to connect a billion or so people in emerging countries to the Internet, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

The Internet search giant - which has for years espoused universal Web access - is employing a patchwork quilt of technologies and holding discussions with regulators from South Africa to Kenya, the WSJ cited people familiar with the strategy as saying.

Access to the vast trove of information on the Internet, and the tools to make use of it, is considered key to lifting economies up the value chain. But countries are often hampered by the vast sums needed to build infrastructure, thorny regulations or geographical terrain.

To reach its goal, Google, which benefits the more people have access to its search and other Internet services, is lobbying regulators to use airwaves reserved for television broadcasts, which at lower frequencies can pass through buildings and over longer distances, the WSJ reported.

It is also working on providing low-cost cellphones and employing balloons or blimps to transmit signals over hundreds of square miles from high altitudes.

The company has already begun several small-scale trials, including in Cape Town, South Africa, where it is using a base station in conjunction with wireless access boxes to broadcast signals over several miles, the newspaper reported.

Chief Executive Larry Page has made no secret of his plans to use his company to work toward broader, non-profit goals. Google on Friday declined to comment on its plans.

(Reporting by Edwin Chan; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

Also on HuffPost:

Cooper Griggs likes this

24 May 12:03

Is HTC Coming Out with a HTC One that Runs Stock Android?

by Khalid

Khalid Shagari
I doubt it with the supply issues htc is having there is too much in their plate

From Evernote:

Is HTC Coming Out with a HTC One that Runs Stock Android?

Clipped from: http://gizmodo.com/is-htc-coming-out-with-a-htc-one-that-runs-stock-androi-509649190

Is HTC Coming Out with a HTC One that Runs Stock Android?

Please be true, please be true, please be true. After Google announced that it would be selling a pure Android version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 on Google Play , the entire world screamed joys of Hallelujah Halle Berry. An awesome phone running completely stock Android has always been the dream. Now, HTC might be making real life better than any dream by making the HTC One pure Android too.

Supposedly, according to Geek.com's sources , HTC is considering making a stock variant of the HTC One. That'd mean there would be no HTC Sense to muddle the Android experience. That means we'd use a phone the way Google would want us to use it. What's unclear now is if it happens, how we'll get the pure Android HTC One.

Google's version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 is sold unlocked for $650 on Google Play. Would HTC go down that same route? What should be noted is that Geek.com had initially reported on the stock Android version of the Galaxy S4 before it was announced. They nailed that rumor. Maybe this one will be true too. In any case, I'm crossing my fingers. You should too. [Geek via Phandroid ]

24 May 09:50

Consumers Go Crazy For Wii U Following Xbox One Reveal - Wii U News @ Nintendo Life

by Khalid

From Evernote:

Consumers Go Crazy For Wii U Following Xbox One Reveal - Wii U News @ Nintendo Life

Clipped from: http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2013/05/consumers_go_crazy_for_wii_u_following_xbox_one_reveal

Consumers Go Crazy For Wii U Following Xbox One Reveal

Posted Fri, 24 May 2013 | 03:00 BST by Darren Calvert

One of Amazon UK's biggest movers and shakers

It's no secret that the Xbox One reveal did not go as smoothly as Microsoft might have hoped. For some, the idea of buying a giant Betamax-styled brick that blocks used games and requires the Kinect camera to function was a big turn-off — even if it does make changing the TV channel a fraction of a second quicker. Even dog-based shooters failed to win the crowds over, and to top it all off there is no backwards compatibility whatsoever either.

Nintendo might well have been feeling a little nervous before the Xbox announcement, but it would seem that consumers are voting with their feet and suddenly buying the Wii U in droves if Amazon UK's movers and shakers list is a reliable barometer.

At the time of writing we're seeing an increase of 386% as the sales rank of the Wii U Premium Pack skyrockets on Amazon from #243 to #50. With Nintendo's E3 Wii U Nintendo Direct only weeks away, we should see interest continue to rise as it's upcoming games are revealed. Some armchair analysts may have written off Nintendo's home console, but it would seem that the race is far from over.

[via amazon.co.uk ]

About Darren Calvert

Darren is Nintendo Life's Batman: fearless in the face of danger, he loves gadgets and talking in a really, really deep voice. As Operations Director he stays mostly behind the scenes in a room he insists on calling "The Batcave".

almajid likes this

22 May 22:58

HTC One and the harsh reality of the Android ecosystem — Tech News and Analysis

by Khalid

From Evernote:

HTC One and the harsh reality of the Android ecosystem — Tech News and Analysis

Clipped from: http://gigaom.com/2013/05/22/htc-one-and-the-harsh-reality-of-the-android-ecosystem/

HTC One and the harsh reality of the Android ecosystem — Tech News and Analysis

A few days ago when hanging out with a friend, I got a chance to play around with HTC One, the newest and shiniest Android phone on the market (of course until it wasn't when Sony launched its Experia Z.) I was quite impressed by the build quality, the industrial design and the beauty of the device. Despite its supersize — I have normal people's hands — it did feel like something I would want to buy, especially if I was picking amongst the ever increasing array of Android smartphones.

Maybe, I thought to myself, HTC was going to make a comeback. I mean, these were the guys who jumpstarted the Android smartphone ecosystem in partnership with Google and T-Mobile USA. These were the guys who innovated fast and even came up with their own skin for Android . They pushed the design and speed envelope. They had edgy marketing . They were the first movers and their early sales were red-hot.

And yet, when they spent $300 million on headphones maker Beats by Dre , it became obvious that this company was going to run into some stormy weather. Of course, it was an idea that didn't go down well with many of its fans and its investors — HTC eventually sold back half its stake .

This (relatively) tiny Taiwanese company was going to get squeezed by cheaper Android phones on one end and Samsung on the other. In fact, as far back as 2010 we have argued that the real smartphone battle was going to be between Apple and Samsung. And when it comes to hardware, nothing really has changed. It is Apple vs Samsung.

According to Strategy Analytics, Samsung now accounts for about 95 percent of the total operating profits of the global Android business. During the first quarter of 2013, Samsung had an operating profit of $5.1 billion, while LG made $100 million and all other vendors (HTC, ZTE, Huawei, Sony and no-name brands) collectively made $100 million in operating (not net) profit.

It is hardly surprising to see that HTC is in trouble. A report in The Verge suggested that HTC's chief product officer, Kouji Kodera, has left the company. The report also implied that other senior executives are leaving the company . The most recent high-profile bet — the HTC First, which was launched in partnership with Facebook — has been a flop and one wonders if the company really has the wherewithal, both intellectual and financial, to undertake such experiments.

I am not sure if people remember, but Motorola was another company that found itself on a Sysephian quest and eventually found a $12 billion bailout from Google. The trouble with the smaller Android players is that despite all the talk about a PC-like ecosystem of sourcing components and using others to assemble their products, it is fundamentally not true.

Apple has used all the billions in the bank to lock up supplies for processors, memory chips, radios, displays and other such components at favorable prices. It has worked out long term manufacturing arrangements with the likes of Foxconn. It has its own retail outlets. While most of us try and focus on Apple's hardware and software integration, we forget that it is software, hardware and supply chain integration that allows the company to sell 37.5 million phones in the most recent quarter . It allows the company to make phones that meet the needs of different carriers.

Samsung too is an integration beast . It owns memory chip plants. It makes its own processors. It makes displays and it owns the factories. It has the unique ability to churn out new products faster than anyone else in the consumer electronics business and thus overwhelm the market with dozens of models. Just look at the many flavors on its latest Samsung S4 device and you start to see that this is a game only for big boys.

The only other company with Apple and Samsung-like manufacturing oomph was Nokia. I say was, because they are losing a grip on the phone business. However, their supply chain and manufacturing was legendary. It still is. I have yet to see a badly made Nokia smartphone — I just see smartphones with an OS that makes no sense. I bet if they entered the market with their own flavor of Android — something we suggested in 2010 — they would instantly become number three in the smartphone market, behind Samsung and Apple.

Sadly, smaller players like HTC can't compete with the manufacturing and marketing capabilities of Samsung. The HTC One, which is an awesome looking device, was hit by manufacturing issues earlier this year. So it needs to rethink its strategies. HTC needs to become comfortable with the idea of being a one or two product company, and hope that it can keep comping up with winning products every single time. Even that is a long shot. The marketing budgets of Samsung and Apple are enough to finance some small nations.

HTC's story is all too familiar to those who have studied the first mover phenomenon. A story in Economist points out that innovators captured seven percent of their market over time. THey point to various examples like White Castle who invented the idea of fast food burger joint but McDonalds is the big daddy now. Apple and Samsung are going through some of that as well. The lesson here for everyone — even tiny startups — is as Scott Anthony once perfectly said (and I paraphrase him): no one remembers who was leading the race midway through, and everyone remembers who finished first. And in order to finish first, a lot has to go right.

So where do companies like HTC go? And sad as it might be, perhaps nowhere. I am going to do my bit to give them some support — I will buy that HTC One, just because it is actually a great little device. It truly is.

5-year HTC stock chart, source: Yahoo Finance

21 May 00:24

Where Tumblr Came From

by Anil

Khalid Shagari
A good look at tumblr and their beginning

Seven years ago, my wife Alaina Browne and I were living happily in San Francisco when she went off to NYC to visit with our friends and attend a party. By the time she flew back, we were on a path that not only led to our return to New York City, but to getting a front-row seat to the birth of what would become Tumblr. Along the way, I've had the chance to see Tumblr from the perspective of a user, a competitor and a fan. Since so much of the conversation today is about the dollar amount of their sale, and the speculation about their future with Yahoo, I thought it'd be nice to look back at a few distinct moments in their evolution, as seen by an interested outsider.

Before the Beginning

Alaina had come back excited from visiting New York, telling me about having been introduced to Ed Levine by our friends David Jacobs and Meg Hourihan. Ed wanted to build a food community site called Serious Eats, and had hired two young guys recommended by Fred Seibert to build out the site. I heard secondhand from my friends about the content management system that was being built by Davidville, the consulting company run by David Karp and Marco Arment. David and Marco were building a tool to power Serious Eats, but I didn't know anything about them except that they were really young.

Serious Eats had gotten a launch sponsorship, and as a result needed to get up and running by the holiday season. But by October, all that I'd seen of the publishing tool they were building was a very simple single-column blog that presented photos really nicely, but had no way to show standard banner ads at all. After debating whether the ads that needed to be delivered could be fit into the simple structure of the tool that had been built, the team decided in favor of just launching Serious Eats on off-the-shelf technology because they needed to get running quickly. As David Jacobs described in his post on the Yahoo/Tumblr deal, the team picked Movable Type since they were all very familiar with the software and knew those of us who worked on making that app.

In short, some of the fundamental constraints that shaped Tumblr in its most nascent stages was that publishers weren't yet able to get advertisers to buy native, in-stream ad units, and that traditional ad buys made units that were not easy to integrate into super-simple tumblelogs. Hmm!

Update: I think Marco had some objections to my characterization of this point in the evolution of their work. His tweets on the matter follow:

As usual, Anil Dash is wrong: dashes.com/anil/2013/05/s…Serious Eats and Tumblr shared no code except our generic PHP MVC framework.
— Marco Arment (@marcoarment) May 20, 2013

What we built for Serious Eats wasn’t too simple — it was too complex and overreaching.It wasn’t a single-column blog for photos… at all.
— Marco Arment (@marcoarment) May 20, 2013

Given that I made no assertion over how much code was shared between the two companies, and since a simple CMS is usually little more than a nice wrapper around an MVC framework, it seems there's little in dispute here except whether the content management system was a poor fit for being too complicated or for yielding output that was too simple. I'm happy to believe Marco has a better memory of the project than I do, since he worked on it and I barely even visited.

Marco also offered some other snarking at Meg about whether the client or consultant was to blame for an underspecified set of goals for the content management system, but these things are almost always everybody's fault, and that's sort of beside the point which is that the ideas of Tumblr were in tension with conventional blogging of the era.

Tumblelogs Take Off

Meanwhile, David and Marco took that simple publishing system they'd built and kept refining it. They were insistent even in those early days on calling the output "tumblelogs" instead of just "blogs", which I mentally filed away as "those sites like projectionist".

tumblr-2007-screenshot

At the time, Tumblelogs had been around for a little while, best known to us old-time bloggers due to Jason Kottke's seminal post on Tumblelogs, which defined the format just as it was about to take off, and featured project.ioni.st as its leading light. But in a classic case of geeks looking at a thing from a technical standpoint instead of from a cultural one, many of us who were familiar with blogs already saw tumblelogs as "just a simple blogging template", similar to what we were already doing on Movable Type or WordPress at the time, rather than a fundamentally different medium.

Despite that myopia, there was a lot of momentum around simplified, media-rich blogging at that moment in history. Twitter had launched just a few months earlier in mid-2006, without any of its current photo or video capabilities, but with a super-simple posting experience similar to what made Tumblr so easy to use. Much of the early team behind Movable Type had moved to working on a platform called Vox, which was a simpler blogging tool for sharing media from other services, but included privacy features similar to the Flickr or LiveJournal, which kept it from being as dead-simple to use as Tumblr. WordPress, too, had incorporated a feature called "Asides", based on a popular plugin from Matt Mullenweg, and it made regular posts of photos, quotes and video clips easy to integrate into a more traditional blog.

At a technical level, many of these efforts were descended from a super-geeky concept that folks had been kicking around a few years earlier, called structured blogging. The technical focus of people in the community resulted in it having the super-nerdy name "structured blogging" and yielded a set of poorly-adopted technical specifications rather than a usable experience for normal people. But the fundamental idea behind structured blogging was that people would want to easily post the cool stuff they were finding on other sites and publishing in other media such as photo or video. And Tumblr proved that the idea of this kind of sharing was exactly right, even if the "structured blogging" name and implementation was exactly wrong.

One of the most important justifications for putting "structure" around different kinds of content was so they could be aggregated together into a reader, something like Google Reader, or earlier tools like Bloglines or My Yahoo or Userland Radio. The difference with Tumblr was that David and Marco very early on built in their reader, just like Twitter and LiveJournal had done, making viewing and creating take place in almost the same environment, and forming better connections between users on the site.

Tussling With Tumblr

By the time Tumblr opened up to the public just a few months later, it was clear they'd hit a perfect mix of features to connect with an audience that cared more about expression than technology. Gina Trapani was one of the early, enthusiastic users, and as Marco rightly pointed out in a podcast the other day, part of what made Tumblr so popular early on was that they let people use their own domain name, with a beautiful design, for free. Other free tools were either more complicated, or like WordPress or Blogger, they charged extra to use a domain name and/or constrained the template customization that a user could do.

Since I worked at the time for a company that mostly made its money by selling paid software and support for blogging, I didn't really see Tumblr as a threat so much as an interesting new entrant that offered the best free product for many users. I jokingly made a reference to Tumblr a year later on a promo page for TypePad, which I worked on at the time and after Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet picked it up, Marco took offense, to my great surprise. In retrospect, it was obvious that Marco would see us as competitors and my joke as disrespect, but at the time I really had thought it was clear I was being playful but respectful because Tumblr had made something cool and I had met, and liked the founders.

Elbow to Elbow

When I say that I knew Marco and David a little bit, it's impossible to overstate how close the NYC tech community was at this point. The office where Tumblr was still based back then was 419 Park Avenue South, and Tumblr shared the space with Serious Eats, Next New Networks (now YouTube Next Lab) and Frederator, Fred Seibert's studio.

When I ran into David around that time a few blocks away at Shake Shack, I excitedly pulled him aside and said "I really think Tumblr is like LiveJournal 2.0", which is another one of those endorsements that probably sounded to him like a slight or an insult or some willfully obscure reference, but to me was about as high a form of praise as I could offer — LiveJournal is and was the most seminal social networking platform that's ever existed, and almost nobody had captured the addictive, expressive environment of its friends list as well as Tumblr's dashboard did.

Part of what I learned in my very-limited interactions with David and Marco in those early days was how disconnected and arrogant my own view of blogging and social software could be. Because Tumblr recapitulated many earlier ideas, albeit in a vastly superior way, I had thought it wasn't really as new as it has turned out to be. And some of this is just generational; My very first impression of meeting the then-20-year-old David and 24-year-old Marco was "Wow, these guys have a really good eye, and are really full of themselves." I still think both those things are true, and that those traits have served them very well.

But there was also a half-generational gap between me and these millennials, a cultural difference I hadn't yet understood or reckoned with. It led me (and many others I know) to underestimate what Tumblr's importance was, and actually retroactively made my analogy to LiveJournal seem more apt than perhaps I'd intended.

What's Next

In the case of LiveJournal, I got to watch first hand as many of the most fundamental parts of social networking and blogging were invented and then mishandled as advertising was introduced. But I never thought those mistakes were intrinsic to this kind of evolution in communities - it just required leadership that understood and truly respected a community.

In the case of Yahoo's acquisition of Tumblr, I mostly don't have a lot to say — my Activate cofounder Michael Wolf is on the board and we've done work that makes me far from objective in this regard, but even if we hadn't, I'd be optimistic about this deal. For me, it's the concepts I wrote about in Stop Publishing Web Pages — we've found a model for user interaction and social connection that really works, and it feels like the more places that's adopted and embraced, the better. Whether that's on Yahoo's homepage or Tumblr's Dashboard, or in some new app on my iPhone, we're reaching a consensus around how we want to connect with each other.

It's been fascinating to watch Tumblr evolve, and as a member of the New York tech community, I am thrilled for the whole team (and its inestimable investors) on the success of the company. As a blogger, it's still a really sweet moment to watch the medium of blogging be validated in this way, since a huge number of dollars is a clear signal even to those who don't understand the artistic and expressive importance of blogging. And as someone who still loves hacking on these kinds of software, it's been tremendously useful to see my own assumptions and preconceptions be challenged by a new generation of young entrepreneurs and creators who take this medium I've watched since its inception, and push it to fascinating and inspiring new forms.

19 May 15:54

The Web We Lost, and Other Losses

by Anil

I got the chance to revisit some of the themes of the Web We Lost in the broader context of how we confront our mortality and impermanence in the digital realm on WNYC a few weeks ago. I'm pleased with how the conversation came out, and if you've got 15 minutes, you can listen to it here.

19 May 15:27

220 Story Sky City Gets go ahead to start construction in June 2013, so it should complete by the end of 2013

by Khalid

Khalid Shagari
Is this the future?

go to the link for videos:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/05/220-story-sky-city-gets-go-ahead-to.html

From Evernote:

220 Story Sky City Gets go ahead to start construction in June 2013, so it should complete by the end of 2013

Clipped from: http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/05/220-story-sky-city-gets-go-ahead-to.html

220 Story Sky City Gets go ahead to start construction in June 2013, so it should complete by the end of 2013

Lloyd Alter at Treehugger reports that Broad Group has gotten permission to proceed with the construction of the 220 story Sky City skyscraper starting in June, 2013 in Changsha.

Broad Sustainable Construction informs Lloyd Alter and Treehugger that a long and arduous approval process has been completed, and that they are starting excavation and construction on Sky City in June, 2013.

The Sky City concept significantly reduces the per capita use of land, and the CO2 emissions generated getting around. They call it "a way of development for higher life quality and lower impact on the environment" They see this as the future of Chinese city building: "Urbanization can not be materialized at the cost of land and environmental pollution."

By going up, hundreds of acres of land are saved from being turned into roads and parking lots. By using elevators instead of cars to get to schools, businesses and recreational facilities, thousands of cars are taken off the roads and thousands of hours of commuting time are saved. It makes sense; vertical distances between people are a whole lot shorter than the horizontal, and elevators are about the most energy efficient moving devices made. A resident of Sky City is using 1/100th the average land per person.

The modular factory mass produced skyscrapers are five times more energy efficient than conventional ones, using 8 inch thick insulated walls and triple glazing. There is exterior shading on the windows that cuts cooling requirements by 30% and what cooling or heating is needed comes from a co-generation plant using waste heat from power generation.

In one building, there will be accommodation for 4450 families in apartments ranging from 645 SF to 5,000 SF, 250 hotel rooms, 100,000 SF of school, hospital and office space, totaling over eleven million square feet. The building footprint is only 10% of the site; the rest is open parkland.

If you would rather walk rather than wait for one of the 92 elevators, there is six mile long ramp running from the first to the 170th floor. Beside the ramp are 56 different 30 foot high courtyards used for basketball, tennis, swimming, theatres, and 930,000 square feet of interior vertical organic farms.

The building is designed to be earthquake resistant to Magnitude 9, and to a 3 hour fire resistance rating, provided by ceramics installed around the structure. 16,000 part time and 3,000 full time workers will prefabricate the building for four months and assemble on site in three months. The Broad system is based on prefabricated floor panels that ship with everything need to go 3D packed along with it, so they are not shipping a lot of air. It all just bolts together. BSC claims that by building this way, they eliminate construction waste, lost time managing trades, keep tight cost control and can build at a cost 50% to 60% less than conventional construction.

The building is to cost $628 million and have 11 million square feet of space inside, which is about $60 per square foot. A 1000 square foot apartment would cost the developer about $60,000 and might sell for about $100,000. This would lower the cost of living in megacities like Shanghai, Changsha or New York. The lower cost versus $300 to 1000 per square foot for buildings like the Trump Tower Chicago or Freedom tower means that skyscrapers could hold not just expensive offices but also regular apartments, grocery stores, hospitals, schools and other regular applications. The low cost enables a city inside a skyscraper and not just high end offices, luxury apartments and high end restaurants.

They plan to build one hundred and fifty 30-story apartment building, hotel, office plans using the new system. They have started building a 1.33-million-square meter "NO.1 Sustainable Building Factory" and it will be able to produce 10 million square meters of mass produced skyscrapers (about 100 million square feet) each year. The 30 story building is 183000 square feet so the factory can produce about 500 of the 30 story building each year and many more factories will be built.

The Changsha Broad Air Conditioning Company has unveiled designs for the 200-storey Sky City tower, a sustainable mixed use project. At 666 meters tall, the building will house 1.2 million square meters (12 million square feet) of space for residential apartments, retail, offices, restaurants, schools and a myriad of other facilities. The building will be manufactured in a factory and assembled on the construction site. Additionally, the tower will have the capacity for 70,000 to 110,000 residents. It will use 400 kilograms (1000 pounds of material) per square meter). 480,000 tons of building. Even with reducing the occupancy by half so that units are 1320 square feet instead of 660 square feet the amount of material is 12 tons per person for 40,000 people. The Broad Group building also includes offices and retail shopping. Instead of being 6 times more efficient with material it is more like 8-10 times, since it is replacing 72 tons of house and the extra buildings for offices and shops. It is 20 times more efficient if the higher occupancy levels are used.

Other Broad Group Technology

Non-electric air conditioning withstood the world's toughest stress test serving over 250 pavilions in the largest, crowdest, hottest, and most dynamic architectural site. Achieving "zero fault" operation for 6 months, contributing to a successful Expo. Also saved 73,000 tons of CO2 emissions, and realized "Low Carbon Expo".

Successfully developed super-size " Heat Recovery Fresh Air Unit", realizing 99.9% air purification efficiency, ensuring abundant fresh air supply and high efficiency heat recovery.

Earlier Plans for a 666 meter tall skyscraper but now modified for 828 meter skyscraper

A Chinese company developed new factory prebuilt construction that can make a 15 story building in 6 days plans to build the second tallest building in the world over 6 months. 93% of the construction work is done in the factory vs at most 40% in western countries.

The Changsha Broad Air Conditioning Company has unveiled designs for the 200-storey Sky City tower, a sustainable mixed use project. At 666 meters tall, the building will house 1.2 million square meters of space for residential apartments, retail, offices, restaurants, schools and a myriad of other facilities. The building will be manufactured in a factory and assembled on the construction site. Additionally, the tower will have the capacity for 70,000 to 110,000 residents.

They are trimming their costs to 7,000 yuan to 8,000 yuan per square meter. The company then adds its profit margin and sells its properties for around 10,000 yuan per sq m - or about half the price of properties in Shanghai outside the city center. This would convert to a 660 square foot unit costing about US$100,000. The whole building is 1.2 million square meters so this project will cost about US$1.25 to 1.46 billion and will sell for $1.83 billion. Numbeo has Shanghai cost of living and Shanghai apartment prices are currently three to six times as high to buy as these apartments would be

Comfort of Skycity
• 100% fresh air, no mixed with return air, eliminate infection. 3-stage filtered fresh air , 99% nano-particulates be filtered. Indoor air is 20-100 times cleaner than outdoor air. Central vacuuming system keeps indoor air quality.
• Space blocks and all rooms remain at 20~27 ℃ all year round, glass wall enable
sunshine lighting up the streets.
• The clear height of residences and office is 2.8m, the clear height of space blocks are 5.6m, 9m, 12m respectively.
• Four 4meter wide streets start from the ground to the floor 121 at 400m, the total length of street is 12km, shops, agriculture markets, handcraft shops, restaurants, amusement parks, sports centers, natatorium, cinemas, opera houses, museums, libraries, training centers, schools, kindergartens, clinics, banks, police stations, etc. on both sides of street, same as city downtown. Botanical garden, natural parks, fishponds, waterfalls, sand beach can be found in some floors, same as the suburban.
• 16 large observation elevators and 31 high-speed elevators can serve 30,000 people every hour.

Safety
• Level 9 earthquake resistance, scale model will be tested by national authorized institution.
• BROAD unique technologies "diagonal bracing, light weight, factory-made" ensure the
highest earthquake resistance level with minimum materials.
• Trapezoidal construction structure corresponds the law of mechanics, which can withstand earthquake and storm.
• Sky gardens locate on floor 71, 121, 156, 176 and 191(12,000m2 in total), also function as the helipads, which are able to evacuate tens of thousand people during fire emergency, provide extra fire protection than conventional skyscrapers.

Energy Conservation
• 150mm exterior insulated walls, triple-paned windows, exterior solar shading, interior window insulation and heat recovery fresh air, 80% more energy efficient than conventional buildings.
• Adopting "distributed energy system", turbines provide power independently, exhaust from turbines is the source for cooling, heating and sanitary hot water. 50% more energy efficient than the power grid.
• Indoor HVAC is controlled by occupancy sensor, fan speed will be automatically adjusted to the lowest load when people left.
• Elevator generates electricity when ascending unload and descending full load, also choose the floor outside the elevator, and other electricity saving methods can save 75% more electricity than conventional elevator.
• LED lamp, 90% more energy efficient than incandescent lamp and 50% more energy efficient than fluorescent lamp.
• Separated drainage system, rain water is used for plant irrigation, bathing water will be directly drained after settled, bathroom sewage and kitchen waste go to biogas tank, biogas is used as fuel for air conditioning, and solid wastes become organic fertilizers.

Sustainability
• Annual energy conservation 60,000 ton oil equivalent
• Saving 600,000 ton construction materials
• Saving 1.4 sq. kilometers land (volume ratio 50)
• On-site construction waste is less than 1% of the total weight
• Zero raise dust on-site
• Zero water consumption on-site
• Recycle processes of living garbage from the building
• All steel structure, reuse after abandoned

The company's presentation of Sky City, incl. specs and drawings.

If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon . Thanks

18 May 21:50

Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> A Saudi Arabia Telecom's Surveillance Pitch

by Khalid

Khalid Shagari
"...actually Saudi has a big terrorist problem and they are misusing these services for spreading terrorism"
وش الكلام والعذر السخيف هذا. بأي منطق هذا الشي يتكلم وش العقول المنكوسة هذي يا ناس. طيب اذا افترضنا حسن نيتهم وانه هذا بالفعل هدفهم... يعني لما تتجسس على واتساب خلاص الارهابيين بيبلشون ما يعرفون يتواصلون مع بعض. بعدين مين هالارهابي الحمار اللي بيستخدم اكثر خدمة دردشة منتشرة بالديرة ومعلنين هيئة الاتصالات بشكل رسمي "اذا ما خلونا نراقب اتصالاتهم بنحجبهم".ربيعنا ما همهم لا ارهاب ولا اجرام. والله شي يفور الدم

هذا لينك للموضوع مترجم:
http://www.aitnews.com/latest_it_news/esecurity-news/106646.html

From Evernote:

Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> A Saudi Arabia Telecom's Surveillance Pitch

Clipped from: http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/saudi-surveillance/

A Saudi Arabia Telecom's Surveillance Pitch

Last week I was contacted by an agent of Mobily , one of two telecoms operating in Saudi Arabia, about a surveillance project that they're working on in that country. Having published two reasonably popular MITM tools , it's not uncommon for me to get emails requesting that I help people with their interception projects. I typically don't respond, but this one (an email titled "Solution for monitoring encrypted data on telecom") caught my eye.

I was interested to know more about what they were up to, so I wrote back and asked. After a week of correspondence, I learned that they are organizing a program to intercept mobile application data, with specific interest in monitoring:

Mobile Twitter
Viber
WhatsApp

I was told that the project is being managed by Yasser D. Alruhaily , Executive Manager of the Network & Information Security Department at Mobily. The project's requirements come from "the regulator" (which I assume means the government of Saudi Arabia). The requirements are the ability to both monitor and block mobile data communication, and apparently they already have blocking setup. Here's a sample snippet from one email:

From: Yasser Alruhaily <…….. .. .@mobily.com.sa>

Date: Thursday, May 2, 2013 1:04 PM

Subject: Re: As discussed last day .further discussion

we are working in defining a way to deal with all such requirements from regulator and it is not only for Whatsapp, it is for whatsapp, line, viber, twitter etc..

So, what we need your support in is the following:

is there any technical way that allow for interception these traffic?

Is there any company or vendor could help us on this regard?

is there any telecom company they implement any solution or workaround?

One of the design documents that they volunteered specifically called out compelling a CA in the jurisdiction of the UAE or Saudi Arabia to produce SSL certificates that they could use for interception. A considerable portion of the document was also dedicated to a discussion of purchasing SSL vulnerabilities or other exploits as possibilities.

Their level of sophistication didn't strike me as particularly impressive, and their existing design document was pretty confused in a number of places, but Mobily is a company with over 5 billion in revenue, so I'm sure that they'll eventually figure something out.

What's depressing is that I could have easily helped them intercept basically all of the traffic they were interested in (except for Twitter – I helped write that TLS code, and I think we did it well). They later told me they'd already gotten a WhatsApp interception prototype working, and were surprised by how easy it was. The bar for most of these apps is pretty low.

In The Name Of Terror

When they eventually asked me for a price quote, and I indicated that I wasn't interested in the job for privacy reasons, they responded with this:

I know that already and I have same thoughts like you freedom and respecting privacy, actually Saudi has a big terrorist problem and they are misusing these services for spreading terrorism and contacting and spreading their cause that's why I took this and I seek your help. If you are not interested than maybe you are on indirectly helping those who curb the freedom with their brutal activities.

So privacy is cool, but the Saudi government just wants to monitor people's tweets because… terrorism. The terror of the re-tweet.

But the real zinger is that, by not helping, I might also be a terrorist. Or an indirect terrorist, or something.

While this email is obviously absurd, it's the same general logic that we will be confronted with over and over again: choose your team. Which would you prefer? Bombs or exploits. Terrorism or security. Us or them. As transparent as this logic might be, sometimes it doesn't take much when confirming to oneself that the profitable choice is also the right choice.

If I absolutely have to frame my choices as an either-or, I'll choose power vs. people.

Culture Over Time

I know that, even though I never signed a confidentiality agreement, and even though I simply asked questions without signaling that I wanted to participate, it's still somewhat rude of me to publish details of correspondence with someone else.

I'm being rude by publishing this correspondence with Mobily, not only because it's substantially more rude of them to be engaged in massive-scale eavesdropping of private communication, but because I think it's part of a narrative that we need to consider. What Mobily is up to is what's currently happening everywhere, and we can't ignore that.

Over the past year there has been an ongoing debate in the security community about exploit sales . For the most part, the conversation has focused on legality and whether exploit sales should be regulated.

I think the more interesting question is about culture: what do we in the hacker community value and prioritize, and what is the type of behavior that we want to encourage?

Let's take stock. One could make the case that the cultural origins of exploit sales are longstanding. Since at least the 90's, there has been an underlying narrative within the hacker community of not "blowing up" or "killing" bugs. A tension against that discipline began with the transition from a "hacker community" to a "security industry," and the unease created by that tension peaked in the early 2000's, manifested most clearly by the infamous AntiSec movement .

Fundamentally, AntiSec tried to reposition the "White Hat" vs "Black Hat" debate by suggesting that there are no "White Hats," only "Green Hats" – the color of money.

As someone who also regretted what money had done to the hacker community, I was largely sympathetic with AntiSec. If I'm really honest with myself, though, my interest in the preservation of 0day was also because there was something fun about an insecure internet at the time, particularly since that insecurity predominantly tended to be leveraged by a class of people that I generally liked against a class of people that I generally disliked.

In short, there was something about not publishing 0day that signaled affiliation with the "hacker community" rather than the "security industry."

The Situation Today

In many ways, it's possible that we're still largely operating based on those original dynamics. Somewhere between then and now, however, there was an inflection point. It's hard to say exactly when it happened, but these days, the insecurity of the internet is now more predominantly leveraged by people that I dislike against people that I like. More often than not, that's by governments against people.

Simultaneously, the tension between "0day" vs "publish" has largely transformed into "sell secretly" vs "publish." In a sense, the AntiSec narrative has undergone a full inversion: this time, there are no "Black Hats" anymore, only "Green Hats" – the color of money .

There are still outliers, such as Anonymous (to the extent that it's possible to be sympathetic with an unguided missile), but what's most significant about their contribution is that they're not using 0day at all.

Forgetting the question of legality, I hope that we can collectively look at this changing dynamic and perhaps re-evaluate what we culturally reward. I'd much rather think about the question of exploit sales in terms of who we welcome to our conferences, who we choose to associate with, and who we choose to exclude, than in terms of legal regulations. I think the contextual shift we've seen over the past few years requires that we think critically about what's still cool and what's not.

Maybe this is an unpopular opinion and the bulk of the community is totally fine with how things have gone (after all, it is profitable). There are even explicitly patriotic hackers who suggest that their exploit sales are necessary for the good of the nation, seeing themselves as protagonists in a global struggle for the defense of freedom, but having nothing to do with these ugly situations in Saudi Arabia. Once exploits are sold to US defense contractors, however, it's very possible they could end up delivered directly to the Saudis (eg , eg , eg ), where it would take some even more substantial handwaving to think that they'll serve in some liberatory way.

For me at least, these changes have likely influenced what I choose to publish rather than hold, and have probably caused me to spend more time attempting to develop solutions for secure communication than the type of work I was doing before.

It's Happening

Really, it's no shock that Saudi Arabia is working on this, but it is interesting to get fairly direct evidence that it's happening. More to the point, if you're in Saudi Arabia (or really anywhere), it might be prudent to think about avoiding insecure communication tools like WhatsApp and Viber (TextSecure and RedPhone could serve as appropriate secure replacements), because now we know for sure that they're watching.

For the rest of us, I hope we can talk about what we can do to stop those who are determined to make this a reality, as well as the ways that we're already inadvertently a part of that reality's making.

Stay in touch,

16 May 01:17

Google's Larry Page says Oracle among those holding back tech industry

by Khalid

From Evernote:

Google's Larry Page says Oracle among those holding back tech industry

Clipped from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/may/15/google-larry-page

Google's Larry Page says Oracle among those holding back tech industry

by Dominic Rushe, guardian.co.uk
May 15th 2013

Chief executive defends Google Glass and slams sector's 'negativity and zero-sum games' in speech to Google I/O

The Google co-founder Larry Page spoke out on Wednesday about the "negativity" he believes is holding back the technology industry, a day after revealing that he has been suffering from a rare vocal-cord condition that has made it difficult for him to speak.

In a raspy voice, Page told the audience at the internet giant's annual developers conference, Google I/O, that he believed a lack of cooperation between tech partners was holding back progress. "Today we are still just scratching the surface of what's possible," he told the conference in San Francisco.

Page blamed a "focus on negativity and zero-sum games" for the industry's failure to achieve its full potential. He said: "I've been sad that the industry hasn't been able to advance those things."

Computers were slow, the web was not advancing as fast as it should be and big technology companies were not co-operating enough, he said. "I think it's kind of sad we have all these computers out there that are connected to each other by a tiny, tiny, tiny pipe that's super slow."

Page named the tech giant Oracle as one of the roadblocks to faster progress. "Money is more important to them" than having any kind of cooperation, he said. The two companies have clashed repeatedly over patents.

Page said he was excited about Google's developments in driverless cars, maps, music and Google Glass, the company's controversial new headset device. He said people had said Google was "crazy" to diversify from its core search product, but he cited the success of Gmail and said: "Every time we tried to do something crazy we made progress. So we've become a bit emboldened by that."

Last year, Page missed Google's annual shareholders meeting in June and a conference call to discuss the company's quarterly earnings in July. He did not appear at last year's Google I/O. The absences had caused concern among investors, some of whom were concerned that Google was not giving them the full picture about his health, in the same way that the late Apple boss Steve Jobs had initially hidden his illness from the public.

On his Google+ profile Page, 40, said his left vocal cord has been paralysed for 14 years, after he had suffered a severe cold. The condition worsened last year, after another cold impaired his right vocal cord.

"While this condition never really affected me – other than having a slightly weaker voice than normal which some people think sounded a little funny – it naturally raised questions in my mind about my second vocal cord. But I was told that sequential paralysis of one vocal cord following another is extremely rare," Page wrote. "Fast forward to last summer, when the same pattern repeated itself – a cold followed by a hoarse voice. Once again things didn't fully improve, so I went in for a check-up and was told that my second vocal cord now had limited movement as well. Again, after a thorough examination, the doctors weren't able to identify a cause."

Concerns about Page's condition eased last October, when he took questions during Google's earnings call. Page has spoken in each of Google's three earnings calls since the one he missed. He provided further reassurance in Tuesday's post.

"Thankfully, after some initial recovery I'm fully able to do all I need to at home and at work, though my voice is softer than before," he wrote.

Google's stock rose as the conference got under way, by more than 2% to more than $980 a share on Wednesday afternoon. Google shares have risen by 50% since Page replaced Eric Schmidt as chief executive, in April 2011.

Page, who owns Google stock worth about $22bn, has made a donation to Boston's Voice Health Institute. He did not disclose the size of the donation but said it was large enough to support a "significant" research program that will be led by Dr Steven Zeitels from the Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General hospital voice centre.

Follow the Guardian on Twitter for the top stories, special features, live blogs and more from guardian.co.uk

Original Page: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/may/15/google-larry-page

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12 May 12:53

WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum Hates Advertising and the Tech Rumor Mill (Full Dive Video)

by Liz Gannes

Khalid Shagari
I've always thought Whatsapp were European that's why there was no exposure on them, interesting interview through and through

jan_koum2 It’s safe to say that WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum does not crave the spotlight. But he does have a lot to say.

Koum’s mobile messaging app now has more than 200 million active monthly users around the world — a larger audience than Twitter’s last public number.

But WhatsApp has largely resisted the public eye, ignoring most press requests and conference invites, and operating with a relatively tiny team of 40 people out of an unmarked office in Mountain View, Calif.

That’s not to say there aren’t questions about WhatsApp’s long-term viability. Can it make enough money to survive? Will carriers try to destroy it? Since its service is so simple, won’t fickle users switch to the oh-so-many free alternatives? Why hasn’t it expanded beyond basic messaging to become a platform?

So we were very interested to have Koum join us last month at D: Dive Into Mobile to answer those questions and explain a bit about how WhatsApp got to where it is today.

In a half-hour onstage interview, Koum addressed his antipathy toward advertising, his disinterest in selling WhatsApp to an acquirer and his dislike of people publishing rumors about that possibility, the business of selling 99-cent apps, WhatsApp’s relationships with carriers, the strategy of building native apps and many more topics. We’re republishing the full video below.

For instance, Koum said, after 10 years working at Yahoo, he developed a deep distrust of how ads corrupt the relationship between a company and its users. “The user experience would always lose, because you always had to provide a service to the advertiser.” That’s even more acute on mobile. “Cellphones are so personal and private to you that putting an advertisement there is not a good experience,” he said.

09 May 05:46

09.05.2013 06:42

Khalid Shagari
the incident happened 2 weeks ago taking a total of 800 lives.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/08/bangladesh-factory-collapse-death-toll

Many powerful photographs have been made in the aftermath of the devastating collapse of a garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh. But one photo, by Bangladeshi photographer Taslima Akhter, has emerged as the most heart wrenching, capturing an entire country’s grief in a single image.

03 May 21:44

747 cargo plane crash caught on video

by Jason Kottke

Yesterday morning, a 747 cargo plane taking off from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan crashed soon after taking off. A dash cam caught the entire thing on video:

It is amazing how quickly a powerful and fast jet airplane turns into a leaden hunk of metal. (via @VictorGodinez)

Tags: flying video

27 Apr 15:38

NEWS FLASH: Lance Armstrong to do Photo Shoot

by fatty

Austin, TX (Fat Cyclist Fake News Service) – In the wake of the recent announcement by the Justice Department that it will pursue a lawsuit against Lance Armstrong for unjustly enriching himself, a spokesman for Armstrong today made the following announcement:

“Lance intends to defend himself vigorously in the court of law.”

The spokesman continued, “Based on our extensive experience in these matters, however, by which I mean dating pretty much as far back as any of us can remember, the court of public opinion will simultaneously conduct a trial of its own, largely through the mainstream media and cycling press.”

“Toward the end of making the work of these people both more timely and accurate,” the spokesperson announced, “Lance Armstrong will today do a photo shoot for the use of journalists during this trial.”

“Specifically,” the spokesman explained, “Lance will do a photoshoot consisting entirely of various negative expressions.”

“This,” the spokesman continued, “is due to the fact that many of the existing photographs of Lance frowning, pursing his lips, or looking defeated have been overused to the point of being ridiculous by the press. Furthermore, many are woefully out of date.”

“This photo shoot is not only for the benefit of journalists and their readers, however,” said the spokesman. “The fact is, Lance’s attorneys are sick to death of seeing the same set of photographs over and over. We’ve seen these same old photos so often we’ve started giving them nicknames. For example, we call the following photograph ‘Sinister Lance’:”

Sinister Lance

“And we call this one ‘Perplexed Lance’:”

Perplexed

“This one is called ‘Vengeful Lance’:”

Angry at contador

“And then there’s the one we see more than any other single photo, which is affectionately known as ‘Sad Raspberry Lance’:”

Compressed lips

Photoshoot Objectives Made Clear

“We know that journalists are going to post photos of Lance in a variety of unhappy moods,” said the spokesman. “Our objective is to expand the range of these photographic moods, as well as update them so the photographs don’t look like they were taken in the 80’s.”

“The photos we’ll be providing will show Lance making the following expressions, most — if not all — of which will no doubt be used in the coming months:

Furious
Startled
Dismayed
Confused
Bored
Incensed
Enraged
Crushed
Dazed
Blank
Crafty
Distraught
Abashed
Wistful
Guarded
Pensive
Defeated

“Note that this is merely a tentative list,” said the spokesman, “and that we have engaged the services of an A-list acting coach in order to make the expressions in these photographs completely convincing.”

“Also, we are pleased to announce that all of these expressions will be provided in environments showing Lance both on and off the bike.”

Reached for comment, Armstrong demurred, noting only that he had a lot of work to do practicing his “apologetic” look.

Khalid Shagari

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Google's Larry Page says Oracle among those holding back tech industry

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