PCWorld - At the Body Mechanix Gym in San Francisco, Joel Hornsby is the bona fide, certified "Mind and the Machine" master trainer. Can he be replaced by a videogame? To help me find out, Hornsby was good enough to spend an afternoon testing four fitness-focused games for the Wii. We set up a Wii balance board, then fired up some software to see what he thought of Jillian Michaels' Workout Ultimatum 2009, Gold's Gym Cardio Workout, EA Sports Active Personal Trainer, and Wii Fit (the Nintendo title that kicked off the videogaming/personal training craze when it launched a year ago).
What follows are two perspectives--that of an an over-the-hill, out-of-shape Average Joe gamer (me), and Hornsby's professional opinion--to help you select the best-bet at-home game workouts for you.
Read More
PCWorld - Among the many new provisions the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), is federal funding for electronic medical records. Known as HITECH, the law gives incentives to healthcare organizations to digitize personal health information before 2020. Lost in the rush, however, are the details.
"I look forward to medical records going electronic," said Howard Schmidt, the former White House cybersecurity czar, "but I have a tremendous amount of concern about building a really, really good healthcare infrastructure … and then securing it later." Schmidt spoke with PCWorld at RSA 2009.
The law, which also updates parts of HIPAA, gives the Secretary of Health and Human Services until mid-August to define what constitutes an electronic medical record. In Schmidt's view initial requirements should start with strong authentication and encryption, and so far, the Secretary has done just that. Citing existing NIST and FIPS standards, HHS guidance includes healthcare data at rest, data in motion, as well as the proper destruction of Protected Health Information. Unfortunately, some health practitioners have begun purchasing e-health systems before the full complement of standards is known.
Read More
PCWorld - It will be interesting to see how Apple reacts to news that Palm's Pre knows how to interact with iTunes. While not a business feature, iTunes support would make buying or switching to the Pre much easier for millions of the iTunes faithful.
Multitasking, another key feature of the Pre, may be a more difficult sell as customers may not understand what the ability to run multiple applications simultaneously gets them. Isn't task switching enough? Especially if you can already listen to music and read email at the same time?
Key to gaining acceptance will be excellent Pre demos showing users what the ability to run more than one application at a time can accomplish. This is fairly easy on a big-screen desktop PC, but on a tiny handheld out-of-sight has always meant out-of-mind for the user,
That could change as developers build applications--Android, Blackberry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile all support multitasking--that do or watch things in the background while only occasionally popping up a report to the user.
Read More
Gizmodo - OK, mind blowing: A scientist at the Observatoire de Paris basically invented GPS for interstellar travelers: Simply tune in the radio signals from four pulsars, crunch some numbers having to do with relativity (natch) and read your position within the galaxy—to within a meter.
It makes sense. GPS is, after all, a system of satellites pulsing regular radio signals, which are triangulated by a receiver which must, even this close to earth, account for some relativity. Like the GPS satellites, the pulsars' locations are known, and also like the satellites, the pulsars pulse (hence the name) at known regular intervals, measured in milliseconds.
Bertolomé Coll and his associate Albert Tarantola determined that the point zero of the theoretical pulsar positioning system would be midnight on January 1, 2001, at the titillatingly named Interplanetary Scintillation Array in the UK, an homage, since this is the first radio telescope to pick up pulsars. Once you have the zero point locked in, your spaceship will know its whereabouts in space and time, and possibly how to steer clear of stars or asteroid fields when making that damned jump to hyperspace.
Read More
Gizmodo - That camera looks a little precarious, and I'm not sure how much I want to depend on my pants to hold something up, but I can see how a DSLR belt holster might be useful.
As far as design goes, it's simple and smart: the holster fastens to your belt like any other dad-clip, and latches onto cameras by the tripod mount. Carrying a camera around this way could be a bit rough on both your leg and your lens, but as a way to temporarily free up your hands it's more liberating than a dangly neck strap. Shipping this summer.
Read More
Techgeist - Linux just got a major slap in the face today from Asus. One of the highlights of Linux going mainstream was the wildly popular Asus Eee PC preinstalled with a customized Linux distro geared towards web applications. While I personally never got what the big deal was, I was still happy for all the Linux people out there waiting for this day, but it looks like the cause for celebration won't be lasting much longer.
Asus and Microsoft have teamed up and have made a site called It's Better With Windows. The page touts how easy it is to get up and ready with Windows on an Asus Eee PC, while slyly stating that you won't have to deal with an "unfamiliar environment" and "major compatibility issues." While it is silly to state such a thing since Asus built the Linux distribution specifically for the Eee PC, I give Microsoft two points for snarky comments.
As for all the (most likely) ticked off Linux fanatics out there, don't worry, the page is ugly as sin and no one will visit it. If they actually just struck out the horrid typography, background and overall design, the video alone would be more effective then what is currently up. On an ironic note, Microsoft and Asus used Flowplayer, an open source video player, to embed and play the video touting Windows superiority.
Microsoft, you never fail to amaze me in such unique ways.
Read More
PCWorld - We’ve been hearing a lot lately about Apple’s alleged plans to add an iPhone-like camera to its next-generation iPods, and now iLounge has posted its rendition of what the 5th generation iPod might look like. The “artist’s rendition” is based on rumors, gossip, and other scuttlebutt culled by the site’s editors, and it’s probably a pretty good take of what the 5th-gen iPod nano may look like -- assuming iLounge’s sources are accurate.
At first glance, the imaginary next-gen iPod (above) looks pretty much the same as its predecessor (below), except for the wider screen ratio that stretches to 1.5:1 from 1:33:1. The Click Wheel is slightly smaller and positioned a bit lower on the nano’s body, and a digital camera is placed at a seemingly awkward spot on the nano’s backside.
Read More
PCWorld - Do tiny TVs, intelligent cell phones, and superpowerful netbooks and headphones make you drool? Get a tissue--you can't buy any of this terrific tech in the U.S. just yet.
How Come the Rest of the World Gets to Have So Much Fun?
Sometimes the kids in Asia and Europe seem to get all the best toys. Though that isn't really true, you can find some wicked-cool gear over there (such as the high-design headphones pictured above) that you simply can't get here--at least, not yet. We've selected ten of the most cutting-edge gadgets available west and east of the continental United States. Some will be arriving stateside shortly. Others you may be able to order from specialty importers. But the rest you'll only be able to dream about.
Read More
PCWorld - Technology was supposed to make our lives easier--so why does it seem to do the opposite? If living in a perpetual state of tech overload has you frazzled, we have some solutions for you. The enlightening tips in our "Simplify Your Life" package will show you how to travel smarter, save money on the things you need, conserve time and effort, eliminate headaches, clean up your workspace, secure your PC and your data, and manage your media. The path to the ultimate state of 21st-century Zen starts right here, right now.
Read More
Advertising Age - Microsoft has used attack ads to go after Apple, and now it has Google in its sights.
The software giant is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing, the search engine it hopes will help it grab a bigger slice of the online ad market. That's a big campaign -- big compared with consumer-product launches ($50 million is considered a sizable budget for a national rollout) and very big when you consider that Google spent about $25 million on all its advertising last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, with about $11.6 million of that focused on recruiting. Microsoft, by comparison, spent $361 million. Certainly Google has never faced an ad assault of anything like this magnitude.
JWT has been tapped for the push, which will include online, TV, print and radio. Another sign of the campaign's size: At a time when most agencies are laying people off, JWT added creatives on the Microsoft business last week.
People with knowledge of the planned push said the ads won't go after Google, or Yahoo for that matter, by name. Instead, they'll focus on planting the idea that today's search engines don't work as well as consumers previously thought by asking them whether search (aka Google) really solves their problems. That, Microsoft is hoping, will give consumers a reason to consider switching search engines, which, of course, is one of Bing's biggest challenges.
Read More
|
