Sep 27
In a typically detailed post on the Building Windows 8 blog Monday, the Windows 8 team underlined the advantage of using a Windows Live ID to sign into different Windows devices. According to Katie Frigon, the group program manager of the You-Centered Experience team at MS, doing so will let users have “a truly personal experience that seamlessly bridges their online and offline tasks, is simpler to set up and use, and persists across their set of Windows 8 PCs.” Hit the jump for more.
- Just to be clear, the ability to sign in using a Windows Live ID is optional. But
Read more…
Tags: Live, Live Id
Sep 27
“Solar energy is forecasted to provide a significant fraction of the world’s energy needs over the next century, as sunlight is the most abundant source of energy we have at our disposal,” says Graham Fleming, Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of California (UC) Berkeley who holds a joint appointment with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). “However, to utilize solar energy harvested from sun¬light efficiently we must understand and improve both the effective cap¬ture of photons and the transfer of electronic excitation energy.”
Fleming, a physical chemist and authority on the quantum phenomena that underlie photosynthesis, is one of four international co-authors of a paper in Nature Chemistry, entitled “Lessons from nature about solar light harvesting.” The other co-authors are Gregory Scholes, of the University of Toronto, Alexandra Olaya-Castro, of London’s University College, and Rienk van Grondelle, of the University of Amsterdam. T
Read more…
Sep 24
HBO is out and Netflix is in.
With a bid of approximately $30 million per movie, Netflix put together the deal with DreamWorks Animation to send its movies and television specials through the streaming-video company. There was no mention of Qwikster, the company that Netflix is splitting off to handle its DVD-by-mail business, but speculation is that the new company will indeed be included in the DreamWorks content package.
The timing couldn’t be better for Netflix as they continue to struggle with several public relations snafus.
“This is one of the few family entertainment brands that matter,” said Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer. “It’s a
Read more…
Tags: Dreamworks
Sep 21
Forget invisible ink or lemon juice – spies can now send messages hidden in genetically engineered bacteria. The new method, dubbed steganography by printed arrays of microbes (SPAM), uses a collection of Escherichia coli strains modified with fluorescent proteins that glow in a range of seven colours.
Each character of the message is encoded using two colours, creating 49 possible combinations – enough for the alphabet, the figures 0 to 9 and a few other symbols. “You can think of all sorts of secret spy applications,” says David Walt, a chemist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, who led the research.
Messages are grown on agar plates then transferred to a thin film that can be sent in the post to the recipient. The
Read more…
Tags: Genemodified Microbes, Microbes
Sep 21
As the markets closed today, HP announced the CEO Leo Apotheker was out, and Meg Whitman was in as the new CEO. Whitman has been on the Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) board of directors since earlier this year, and brings experience from eBay and other companies to the top position of a company with more problems than Jay-Z.
HP has had a rough year in terms of sales and leadership, and is currently getting a semblance of direction from a divided board that was apparently so exhausted that they didnt bother to interview Leo Apotheker before hiring him less than a year ago. Now
Read more…
Tags: Hpq, Whitman Hpq