What Is Microsoft's New Mystery Product?


Microsoft has some sort of new hardware product in the works, and it's revealing it only one tiny corner at a time. The kooky crew from Redmond created a new Twitter account -- @msfthardware -- and has been using it to send out subtle clues about its latest creation

. So far, two photos have been published of the top-secret product.

If we take the liberty of attempting to piece them together, we see a thin, black, rectangle-shaped device with the word "Microsoft" along what appears to be the bottom back side.

The only other hint Microsoft has dropped has been the following sentence: "Don't be so touchy...flat is where it's at."
All right -- so what is this thing? A handful of possibilities come to mind, all of which could fit into our "flat" and "touchy" clue: Read more ...

Hello mikaok

Reference: mikaok [Aug 6, 2010 7:35:56 AM] post

Nice link there about GPU-based-crunching-benchmarking. As one line in the Starcraft2 realtime-strategy game goes, "It's about time" :-)

Good day
;

Fotopedia reinvents the coffee table book on iPhone and iPad

Ready for an endless visual journey?

Fotopedia, in cooperation with the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, is proud to present Fotopedia Heritage,

Welcome to an endless visual journey

890 UNESCO World Heritage Sites
20 000 Pictures, 3 000 Points of Interest
Thousands of photographers, Hundreds of curators


which brings together 20 000 photos, illustrating 890 World Heritage Sites and 3000 points of interests, thanks to the contribution of thousands of photographers and hundreds of curators. It is a free application on iPhone and iPad.


Fotopedia Heritage is a new way to experience fotopedia the first collaborative photo encyclopedia. The team led by Jean-Marie_Hullot

(former CTO of NeXT and Apple's application division) built the application while the Fotopedia community added and curated the photos thus ensuring high relevance and quality.
Explore our heritage deeper and deeper navigating carefully chosen tags, learn more about each place reading rich descriptions from UNESCO and Wikipedia and browse an interactive map, localize precisely each site. And if you are planning a trip, you will be just one click away from TripAdvisor travel information for the World Heritage Sites you are interested in.
They said it!
"UNESCO's World Heritage mission, embodied through the World Heritage Convention, is to support countries around the world in identifying and protecting the planet's most oustanding cultural and natural sites. Fotopedia Heritage offers a beautiful way to navigate and discover these sites. This application helps raise awareness about our cause and encourages everyone to ensure our world's heritage is here for the next generation."
- Francesco Bandarin, Assistant UNESCO Director General for Culture, and Director of UNESCO World Heritage Centre
"This application reinvents the coffee table book experience. It is made of more photos than a book can hold and complemented with rich and useful web information. There is no end to the journey proposed by Fotopedia Heritage, there is no last page in this book"
- Jean-Marie Hullot, Fotopedia founder and CEO
"Jean-Marie and his team have not only produced a beautiful and compelling iPad application on the UNESCO World Heritage sites. In their efforts to make the world accessible to millions, they have captured the spirit of Creative Commons and shown others that the marriage of creative excellence and open use can benefit the whole of humanity."
- Larry Lessig, founding board member of Creative Commons
"Without the work of the Creative Commons movement it would be impossible to bring the beauty of the UNESCO World Heritage sights to the millions of Internet users, we owe them a collective thanks for their work".
- Jean-Marie Hullot, CC photographer and South East Asia passionate

Why do we all use Qwerty keyboards?

Look down from the screen on which you are reading this, and wonder. Q-W-E-R-T-Y. How on earth did this pattern of letters get so locked into our language?

It seems so random. Patchily alphabetic, and in places wantonly arbitrary.
Yet it is also the ultimate software - hard-wired into tens of millions of brains and hundreds of millions of fingers around the world.
It is the ultimate user-machine interface - replicated on the keyboards of computers, and some of the most sophisticated PDAs and mobile phones across the world.
Yet it is pretty much unchanged since it was standardised in the 1870s.
"Imagine you're on the maiden flight of that new ultra-modern aircraft, the Dreamliner. And you notice it's being towed to the runway by donkeys. Better still, camels," explains comedian Stephen Fry, the presenter of a new series on BBC Radio 4 that kicks off with a look at the origins of Qwerty.......

Home computers discover rare star

By putting their home computers to work when they would otherwise be idle, three "citizen scientists" have discovered a rare astronomical object.
The unusual find is called a "disrupted binary pulsar"; these pulsars can be created when a massive star collapses...................