sobota 21. januára 2012

No Car Thief Can Fool This Japanese Car Seat

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Even though nothing can prevent someone from smashing your car window, it would be nice to ensure that your entire vehicle could never be stolen right off the street. Anti-theft tracking devices and biometric car starters are a good start, but what if someone actually figures out how to steal your fingerprints and disable the GPS system? The Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology in Tokyo thinks your body weight should do the trick.

Geekosystem relays news and images of a new kind of car seat that can actually recognize the person sitting in it. When someone settles in to take a drive, the seat's various pressure sensors will read the driver's body weight and create a map that matches the exact distribution of their mass. All that data's collected in an external computer, and once the pressure map is properly registered, it acts as the "key" for the car.

So far, the pressurized car seat is about 98 percent accurate, but thanks to the mapping software, someone who weighs the same as the driver shouldn't be able to fool the system so easily. As Geekosystem rightly points out, there's a lot of variables to wonder about here. If the seat locks your body weight in at a specific setting, how will it recognize you under different circumstances?

It's fair to say that no person sits in their car the exact same way every time. And with the pressure sensors in mind, you'll undoubtedly need to empty your back pockets before every drive. Or, suppose that you lose (or gain) enough weight to throw off the sensors, rendering you unable to drive your own vehicle -- will you have to reset the system every time?

[Images via Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology, Geekosystem]

McKinley Noble is a former GamePro staff editor, current technology nerd and eternal mixed martial arts enthusiast. He also likes Japanese sports dramas and soap operas. Follow him on Twitter or just Google his name.

Get more GeekTech: Twitter - Facebook - RSS | Tip us off


nedeľa 15. januára 2012

IT Groups Reveal Their Best Enterprise Tablet Tricks

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

New generation tablets are being adopted en masse by enterprises, despite the lack of any support infrastructure from the manufacturers. Many enterprise users, and IT groups, are making determined efforts to secure and manage tablets with whatever tools are available.

[BACKGROUND: 3 tips for avoiding tablet management headaches]

We talked with IT pros and executives from three companies that have deployed tablets:

Bayada Nurses, a Moorestown, N. J. company that provides nursing and other home-based healthcare services. It has 14,000 nurses, aids, therapists, social workers, based in 52 branch offices in 20 states. It has rolled out 2,000 Android-based, 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tabs so far;

Main application: Homecare Homebase (HCHB), a Web-based app for managing and reporting on home-delivered services to patients.

Hawthorn Pharmaceuticals, a Madison, Miss., specialty pharmaceutical company founded in 1998. Of 160 employees, 120 are sales staff. It has rolled out the Apple iPad, replacing discontinued HP iPaq PDAs running Windows Mobile.

Main applications: iPoint CRM application, from Pharmaceutical Operations Provider; Fiberlink MaaS360 for mobile device management and software distribution

The Ottawa Hospital, Ottawa, Ontario, which has 3,000 iPads deployed to doctors, interns and pharmacists.

Main applications: custom-built apps, one for electronic ordering by doctors of lab tests, medical imaging, medication; another for electronic patient health record; MobileIron, for iOS device management.

1. How to get tablet apps your end users need?

All three of the deployments here were at least initially built around one mission-critical application.

Bayada was actually piloting a Windows Phone-based version of the HCHB application (which requires an on-device database), when the vendor introduced the Android tablet version. Bayada quickly shifted to the tablet. "When we went live on the [larger-screened] tablets, the training time, the user satisfaction, the whole mood [of our employees] was totally different," says David Baiada, division director and practice leader for Bayada's Skilled Visit Services.

When Hawthorn Pharmaceuticals discovered that iPoint was being ported to Apple iOS, the company asked the software vendor to speed up development. "We were maxed out on the iPaq," says Clay Hilton, director of information technology. "We wanted to do more. We wanted to gather additional data."

Ottawa Hospital, a very early adopter of the original iPad, was ahead of its software vendors. It turned to outside software development shops, through an RFP process. CIO Dale Potter insisted that the developer provide a full-time ergonomics expert for the application design process, so that the app's screen flows matched and mirrored the workflows of end users. The hospital also made the decision to invest heavily in internal iOS development: there are now close to 70 programmers.

"Cross-platform development is an expensive proposition," says Greg Jenko, executive director, mobility services for Accenture, the big IT consultancy and systems integrator. "CIOs with BlackBerries, Androids, and iPhones are not going to invest in developing for all three. They'll pick one. The iPad is the one today."

2. How big a problem is tablet security?

All three companies take tablet security seriously, yet none ran into any stonewalls. The general consensus: tablet security is manageable, if you manage it.

Potter is blunt. "Security is grossly over-rated as a topic," he says. In the case of Ottawa, very little data is stored on the tablet. In fact, his analogy is that the iPads are like TV screens: all information is streamed to the device. When the user logs off, everything is flushed from memory. "And there are all kinds of security strategies that can be applied to the device, such as providing strong passwords," he says.

It was a harder transition for Hawthorn's Hilton.

"I cringed at the thought of purchasing for our sales force 100 devices running iTunes," he admits. "I was used to a certain amount of control [over client devices]. This was outside my comfort zone."

[Tech argument: Corporate-owned vs. employee-owned mobile devices]

Hawthorn makes use of some of the security features in Fiberlink's MaaS360 management application, such as automatically locking the screen or wiping the device after a set number of failed logon attempts. Hawthorn doesn't use VPNs for the iPads, in part because so much of the tablet's usage is Web-based. "We've got a sales [department] extranet, a Web portal accessed with username/password," he says. "Seventy-five percent of our employees never touch the corporate LAN."

Bayada relies on a framework of controls and application-level security to safeguard personal health information, says Baiada. The tablet's SIM card can be remotely disabled if the device is lost or stolen. "We wanted to start 'open' and then restrict as needed," he says.

Can you secure a corporate iPad to the degree you can a corporate laptop?

"You can get pretty dang close," says Accenture's Jenko. Passwords, a range of enforceable password policies, and the growing security capabilities of mobile device management applications, are all necessary elements. "The biggest challenge is that it's a completely different set of tools from those used with laptops," he says.

3. How will you manage the tablets?

"Mobile device management is a massive topic," says Ottawa Hospital's Potter. "We're not doing it well, because no one is. It's becoming critical to our deployment."

Ottawa Hospital currently uses MobileIron. "At the time, it was the only game in town," Potter says. The hospital is readying an RFP to revisit mobile device management as it prepares to deploy about 1,500 iPhones, to cover 5,000 nurses working in shifts. Shift-based device management for iOS gear is "quite a hot topic," Potter says.

Ottawa Hospital and Hawthorn rely on third-party management applications, which create an infrastructure that both Apple and Google lack. Both OS vendors have been introducing management APIs that can be used by these applications.

Fiberlink's Maas360 offers its own application catalog for internal apps, and lets Hawthorn's IT group track software downloads and updates to the iPads. Recently, the group pushed out a self-install app to the sales team. Everyone had picked it up within 18 hours, but the next morning, Clay could see that five iPads had not run the installation. IT staff called each of those users and told them to run the app.

One of the biggest complications with iOS is that it doesn't support an administrative password, and therefore, third-party management applications can't either. As a result, there's no simple, standard way to restrict what users can do with the device, as they can be restricted with a Windows PC, for example.

"My users are as 'powerful' as my technical team," Potter says. "They can download anything they want, upgrade their operating system. It's a whole different game."

John Cox covers wireless networking and mobile computing for Network World. Follow him on Twitter or Read more about anti-malware in Network World's Anti-malware section.

Blog RSS feed: http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/2989/feed


Microsoft Revamps Bing Maps Routing Feature

Bing's Maps search engine has an improved capability for generating driving directions, according to Microsoft.


The improvements, courtesy of a brand new algorithm for computing driving-direction queries, include reduced latency and higher performance, Microsoft said in a blog post.


"For any of our route calculations we're now processing requests twice as fast as we ever have," Chris Pendleton, a lead program manager for Bing Maps, wrote in the blog post.


For developers, the new routing engine, called Customizable Route Planning, includes a new API for alternate routes. It lets developers request up to three routes with one request, according to Microsoft.


More details about the inner workings of the new feature can be found in a paper published last year by the Microsoft Research team.


Online maps are one of the most popular vertical search engines, because they deliver local business listings, driving directions, street-level images and other useful geographic information for people looking to find locations.


Although Google remains the dominant player in search, Microsoft continues investing on and enhancing Bing, with the hopes that it will eventually eat into Google's usage market share. Beefing up Bing's Maps search engine is key in achieving these aspirations.

streda 11. januára 2012

Sony Sued For Preventing Playstation Network Users From Suing Sony


Along with the mixed news coming out from Japan regarding the PlayStation Vita launch, it appears Sony has another lawsuit to deal with.


You may remember that Sony updated the PS3 Terms of Service in September to forbid users from filing class action lawsuits against Sony if they wanted to access the PlayStation Network service. Of course, you can always send a physical letter to Sony cancelling that part of the contract. Given the hassle of doing such for a free online service, opting out was probably not worth most PlayStation Network users’ time. Now a Northern California man may have filed a lawsuit against the very clause that forbids PlayStation Network users from filing lawsuits.


GameSpot reports that an anonymous man has filed a class action lawsuit against Sony in a Northern California court. The class action lawsuit aplies to anyone who bought a PS3 before the change in September, and the suit alleges that the updated Terms of Service are evidence that Sony is engaging in unfair business practices of forcing customers to forfeit rights or lose access to the online service they joined to when they bought their Sony PlayStation 3 console. The suit also claims that the optional opt-out policy via physical mail is unreasonable, and that Sony deliberately buried the Terms of Service change within the 21 pages of the contract that are only available for review on the PlayStation 3 (previous changes to the Terms of Service were available for review before release on the website).


You may remember the recent class action suit against Sony alleging that disabling the option to "Install Other OS" was evidence of deceptive business practices; that lawsuit was thrown out by district court judge who declared it bad business, but not illegal. This time the charges seem more serious, and we'll keep you updated as more information comes to light.


piatok 6. januára 2012

Warner Bros. Expected to Delay DVD Rentals By 56 Days

Planning to skip theatrical releases for this year's hot Warner Bros. movies such as The Dark Knight Rises and The Hobbit to watch them at home on your HDTV a few months later?  Better add another four weeks to your wait if you rent DVDs from Blockbuster, Redbox, or Netflix. Warner Bros. has reportedly reached a deal with the three DVD rental outlets to double the waiting period from 28 to 56 days between when a DVD goes on sale and when it can be rented, according to AllThingsD.


The new deal is expected to be announced during the Consumer Electronics Show, which starts next Tuesday in Las Vegas. The reported deal is yet another attempt by Hollywood to shore up faltering DVD sales. The final sales numbers for 2011 aren't in yet, but market research firm IHS iSuppli said in December it expects U.S. video purchases (physical and online) to drop by $9.9 billion for 2011 compared to 2010.


This will be the second time that Warner Bros. has tried to boost DVD sales by stalling prospective rentals. In 2010, Warner Bros. struck a deal with Netflix in which the online DVD rental outlet agreed to wait 28 days before offering a new DVD release to Netflix customers. Other movie studios including Universal Studios and 20th Century Fox soon followed suit and cut similar deals with Netflix. So it's a good bet Warner Bros. won't be the only movie studio lining up a 56-day delay window for new DVD rentals in 2012.


Two years ago, Netflix said that in return for waiting 28 days, it could offer more online streaming content to its customers. This time around Warner Bros. isn't giving the rental outlets any extra incentives to sign on the dotted line, AllThingsD reports.


Warner Bros. apparently believes it can stoke lagging DVD sales by creating what amounts to a false scarcity in the marketplace. In other words, if you can't rent the latest super popular movie on DVD, I guess you'll just have to break down and buy it, right? Sure, if this was 1986 and DVDs were VHS tapes. But in 2012, if you release a movie on DVD on Friday, it is guaranteed to show up online as a file-sharing torrent by Saturday, if not earlier.


The recent Warner Bros. DVD release Contagion, for example, was released on DVD on Tuesday. A quick glance at The Pirate Bay shows a number of DVD rips went online as torrents the same day and some even earlier. There are also a few good quality versions of the movie on pirate streaming sites such as videobb, novamov, and putlocker.


Hasn't Hollywood figured out by now that if you frustrate your customers by refusing to make your content easily accessible, you only encourage more piracy? Take a look at the music industry, which fought for years to combat piracy while at the same time restricting digital access to its content.


But a March 2011 report by market research firm NPD Group found that music piracy dropped from 16 percent of all U.S. Internet users in 2007 to 9 percent in 2010. The analysts attributed the change in part to the shutdown of Limewire in late 2010. But it's no coincidence that music piracy is dropping while cheaply-priced digital music services are multiplying, including download stores such as iTunes and Amazon, and subscription services such as Rhapsody, Spotify, and Mog.


Instead of trying to restrict DVD rentals, Warner Bros. should be figuring out how to get its movies in more people's hands at a good price.  Whether it's through streaming rentals on Facebook, Netflix subscriptions, or cheap digital downloads, the only way to reduce piracy and increase revenue is to make your content more available, not less. If the major movie studios don't learn to embrace digital distribution, then Hollywood risks getting left behind by its own customers.


 


Barnes & Noble: Pros, Cons of Selling Off Nook

 

For a company better known for its box stores than computing boxes, Barnes & Noble has done an impressive job of carving a technological place for itself in the burgeoning e-reader and tablet hardware market. Now it seems the company wants to cash in on all that hard work and take a back seat to companies like Amazon and Apple by spinning off its Nook hardware business, or possibly selling it entirely. Is it a good idea? Is it a dumb idea? Here are some pros and cons.

ProsGetting into the technology business has cost the company a lot of money. While the payoff for that spending has been relatively fast, B&N's stock hasn't performed as many investors would like to see it perform. A Nook sale would probably be looked on favorably by investors interested in the short-term rewards they could reap from the move.Even if the Nook business isn't sold outright, it could be spun into a separate business controlled by B&N. Investors have shown a liking to these kinds of arrangements recently so chances are B&N stock could get a bump from such a move.If B&N is to continue to play with big boys like Amazon and Apple, it's going to have to continue to invest in its Nook business. If that business was separated from B&N, the company might be able to attract "deep pocket" investors more inclined to pony up cash to a tech concern than a big box retailer with more than 700 outlets.By segregating Nook from its main business, B&N may be able to insulate it from the bumps and jolts of that business and allow it to operate more smoothly.ConsB&N may be selling short the role of its stores in the Nook story. Granted, much of the 70 percent increase the company saw in holiday sales of its Nook products came from third-party sellers, but the ability of technology neophytes to touch and play with a Nook contributed in no small way to sales, too. That store-Nook bond could be broken with a selloff or spinoff.B&N has a unique relationship with publishers that has contributed to the Nook's success. That relationship won't necessarily be transferred to a Nook spinoff.International expansion will be important for the Nook's future survival. The power of the B&N brand in international circles would do more to pave Nook's overseas sales than a spinoff brand would do.Content sales for electronic devices jumped over 113 percent for B&N last year. This year, the company could rake in anywhere from $450 million to $750 million from content sales. Those sales can be leveraged to sell more Nooks, Nook sales that will go directly to B&N's bottom line and not a spinoff's or someone else's entirely.This week B&N made a bold statement on where it sees its future by announcing it was getting out of the book publishing business, a business it has been in for 40 years. It said that it's recasting itself as a technology company. What kind of message will the company be sending to the public if the "technology company" sells off the golden goose of its technology?

Follow freelance technology writer John P. Mello Jr. and Today@PCWorld on Twitter.


Rockchip Aims for Android 4.0 Tablets Under $100

A company making ARM processors used in inexpensive Chinese tablets hopes to make a splash in the U.S. and Europe this year and drive down prices of Android 4.0 tablets to under US$100.


Chinese chip maker Rockchip will show close to 40 prototype tablets running Android 4.0 and Adobe Flash 11 at next week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The tablets will be based on the company's RK2918 chip.


Rockchip's ARM-based chips power some inexpensive tablets from China that sell on eBay and other sites. Chinese tablets, some of which are iPad knock-offs, serve basic Web surfing needs, but lack hardware and software support. Rockchip also supplies parts for products from Apple and Samsung, but with tablet shipments rising, the chip maker hopes to raise its profile and sell its new ARM-based chip in Europe and the Americas.


Tablets with Android 4.0 based on Rockchip will come to the U.S., Europe and Japan later in the quarter, said Yan Yan Xing, a Rockchip spokeswoman. A 7-inch tablet with the new Rockchip chip may be priced at $95 to $125, while a 10-inch tablet could be $150 to $200. The prices are variable though, she said.


"We do know that the Rockchip product will make these tablets competitive, in terms of pricing," a U.S. representative for the company said in an email.


A sub-$100 tablet based on a MIPS processor with Android 4.0 and a 7-inch capacitive screen surfaced late last year in China, but notable tablets with the fastest processors are still priced above $250. Acer this week introduced the dual-core Iconia Tab A200 starting at $329.99, while the most advanced quad-core Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime is priced between $500 to $600. An exception is the Amazon Kindle Fire, which is $199.


But the sub-$100 price could be a breakthrough for users looking for new ARM-based tablets with the latest Android OS. Users have complained about application compatibility issues on the Android 4.0 MIPS tablet, which could be resolved on the tablets with Rockchip chips as Android development revolves around ARM processors. Questions however remain if the new tablets with Rockchip chips will surpass the quality of the inexpensive Chinese tablets.


The demand for Android 4.0 will spur growth in tablet shipments, which will help Rockchip expand worldwide, the company said. But the chip maker has to contend with larger chip makers such as Nvidia, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, which make ARM-based tablet chips, and Intel, which offers x86 tablet chips.


Floppy Drives Play Daft Punk’s 'Derezzed' as Actual Chiptunes

Here at GeekTech, we love a good tune played by floppy drives. However, this video of Derezzed--from Daft Punk’s soundtrack for Tron Legacy-- being played by quintet of floppy drives is on a whole other level of geekdom.


If your really think about it, Daft Punk’s Derezzed is a chiptunes song…that was inspired by the original 1982 Tron movie…which is now being played as literal chip music…on hardware that’s at least 20 years old. It’s like some kind of retro, geeky Möbius strip.


Nerdism aside, this particular compilation was brought to us by a YouTube user named MrSolidSnake745, and by midimachine, a musician on Newgrounds.


MrSolidSnake745 also credits another YouTuber named Sammy1Am for the Moppy software, a musical floppy controller program built for the Ardiuno UNO that he used to make the music. If you want to make any of your own floppy drive music, Sammy1Am has put his Moppy software on Github with a full configuration guide.