It Saves Money

Perhaps the most obvious reason you’re considering using server virtualization is that it can save you quite a bit of money. Instead of having to invest in multiple servers for your business, you may be able to get by with fewer. One server could host a number of different operating systems and be used on many different computer modules. This means that you will have to buy fewer servers in the beginning stages of your business. You’ll also be able to save money on electricity costs because you won’t have so many different servers running at all hours of the day and night. Although server costs have dropped dramatically in recent years, virtualizing your server means not having to invest as much in the equipment for your business.

It Saves Space

Another big advantage of using this type of virtualization is that it can save space. Depending on where your business is located, space may come at a premium. Instead of having to devote a large room to holding all of your servers, you may be able to fit them into a utility closet or another small room. That means that you can rent less space and save even more money on a monthly basis.

It Allows for Different Operating Systems

A big benefit of using this strategy is that you can implement different operating systems on the same server. Instead of having to install Windows or Linux on the entire server, you could use a different operating system for each section of the server. This allows every employee or department to have the operating system that they want or need.

It Requires Less Maintenance

When you have fewer servers stored about, you also have less maintenance to engage in. When there are multiple servers to deal with, you may have to perform regular maintenance on them more often. This will take up more of the limited time that your IT staff has to deal with these problems. If you’re outsourcing your IT work, this will result in fewer billable hours, which again helps you save money.

Other Concerns

Using virtual servers has the potential to change the landscape of your IT configuration. However, it is not always appropriate for every business. If you do not use applications that require a lot of resources from your server, it can work well. Check with your IT professional to make sure that creating a virtual server is in your best interest before moving forward.

By the time she’s 21 years old, a student will play nearly 10,000 hours of video games. But can kids play their way to learning? An increasing number of educators are recognizing that students aren’t responding to old-school lectures, and they’re looking to engage the gamer generation by bringing gaming into the classroom.

Since 2009, an entire school, New York City’s Quest to Learn, has used gaming-based learning principles to help students achieve. Instead of sitting kids in front of a screen all day, the school uses a gaming curriculum centered on systems-thinking. It helps students learn history and math by adopting the behaviors and habits of, for example, real historians or mathematicians. To top it all off, the students are also learning how to design their own games.

Via: GOOD

iPhones vs. the Police:

But things are different nowadays. Smart phones have cameras, and almost everyone has a smart phone. A court is therefore less likely to be ignorant of what actually occurred between the policeman and me. The policeman and I may have videotaped it. Bystanders might have, too. I am reminded of the utopia dreamed of by the eighteenth-century anarchist William Godwin, who hoped that someday everyone in the world would become so sincere and so expressive that all sides of every story would be fully narrated, and there would no longer be any need to deceive. Everyone would be his own narrator, and in the world that this sincerity revealed, perfect knowledge would include perfect forgiveness.

Japanese manufacturer NSK is developing a robot guide dog that can see and navigate its visually impaired owner through obstacles, including stairs, using a Microsoft Kinect controller.

This video introduces the concepts behind Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer, a new open-source toolkit for building small electronic devices using the .NET Micro Framework. Starter Kits and modules are already available.

At Maker Faire 2010 New York, the .NET Micro Framework team and Microsoft Research (Cambridge) showed off their new device: the .NET Gadgeteer. It’s like LEGO for electronics.

In this video, Colin Miller explains some of the details on the board. The board itself has a multitude of connectors, and each is labeled with a letter. A sensor is then used to tell the end user which port to plug into, and all of this allows Collin to create a basic camera using only about three lines of code!

Colin did misspeak, however. He referred to the Device Solutions board as the Embedded Fusion board. That was the old name.

• Become a Good Programmer in Six Really Hard Steps

Tech News

• Appeals Court Reinstates $675,000 File Sharing Verdict
• Europe’s Odd Anti-Piracy Stance: Send Money to the US!
• Senate Judiciary Committee Passes Amendment to Prohibit Prosecutions for Terms-of-Service Violations… Faking Your Name On Facebook Won’t Be a Felony
• Tougher online privacy rules for preteens proposed.
• Sunday, the German Pirate Party is expected to be voted into Parliament in Berlin.

Software

• 15 Add-Ons to Become a Gmail Power User
• Code Hero is a game designed to teach programming. It uses the first-person shooter idiom, where you are armed with a Code Gun that shoots JavaScript. It reminded me a little of hacking the Gibson.
• Google spawns yet another language – Dart

Research and Science

• 6 Things You’d Never Guess About Google’s Energy Use: YouTube can stream for three days on the energy it takes to make a DVD.
• Gamers solve molecular puzzle that baffled scientists

Internet

• Downloads Are Slowest in Idaho
• Google changes their search algorithm once every 17.5 hours
• Samsung Claims That iPads Are Stolen From Kubrick

Gadgets / Hardware

• 3D Printing Now Lets Us Manufacture Blood Vessels, Organs, Food
• Is the Keyboard The Only Thing Keeping BlackBerry Afloat?

Entertainment

• The 6 Levels of Extreme Apple Fandom.
• 10 Hackers Who Made History
• BitTorrent Crushes iTunes in Apple Inspired Ads
• Feeling nostalgic? olduse.net is Usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago. Also available over NNTP.
• Infographic: The Evolution of the Transaction

Discussion / OpEd

• ACLU on Massive Surveillance Society: Reclaim Privacy, American Liberties
• Privacy and Security Fanatic: ACLU: You have every right to photograph that cop
• Programming Can Be Fun Again
• Are jobs obsolete? “The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with ‘career’ be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?”

Business

• The AppStore Business Model is Dead
• Many consumers still unwilling to buy electronics online
• Massive Exodus From Netflix Over Fee Increase
• Netflix Subscribers Down Over 1 Million, Stock Down 15%
• The US has sunk to 25th in a global ranking of Internet speeds, just behind Romania — because our nation’s regulators abandoned an earlier commitment to foster competition in the marketplace for Internet access providers

• Codecademy – a free website that provides interactive lessons on coding for web development. Founders Ryan Bubinski and Zach Sims have started the site with eight Javascript lessons, and plan to expand the coursework to other languages.
• Flipping Book Reader – a PDF Reader with an interactive interface where you can flip pages like in a real book. It provides a number of stylish and unique features such as the option to switch to a two page view, book shelf for all accessed documents, a thumbnail view of the table of contents, a customizable interface and the utility to scroll page up/down using the mouse pointer.
• NotiPage – a freeware app that alerts you when selected webpages are updated. Very useful for following forum threads and fix sites that don’t offer RSS.
• ShareMyPlaylists – a web service that makes it easy to share your Spotify playlists on Facebook and Twitter as well as with the ShareMyPlaylists community. It gives you access to a large library of user created playlists that you can browse in your browser but play in Spotify.
• ZenOK – a new cloud storage service that is offering 21GB of storage. It supports file compression, automatic versioning, and file encryption

Tutorials

• Create a Hidden Partition on USB Flash Drive

Tech News

• iPhoneGate 2! It’s being reported that Apple lost another iPhone prototype in another bar. You may recall that last year, a prototype of the iPhone 4 was lost by an employee of the company, found by a bar patron and sold to a tech blog – the suspected phone sellers in that case have pleaded not guilty.
• US spent $125,000 to educate Ukraine’s cops on Internet piracy. Whether the investment will pay off is doubtful though, as some cops have no Internet connection at their workplace.

Software

• Google Launches Offline Versions of Gmail, Calendar & Docs

Research and Science

• Google has changed the way students research – and not for the better
• OnLive Founder Claims “Impossible” Wireless Breakthrough
• Weight-gain. LOL! “Teens love text messages–and those texts may help them lose weight, if they’re done right. A study tested out various types of weight management-themed text messages on overweight teens to see what they liked, finding that they favored positive messages but disliked thoughtful questions.”

Internet

• The Awl dissects the editing process of one Wikipedia entry: Lolita. The over 2,000 edits give us a glimpse into the strange collaboration of Wikipedia editors.
• Facebook Improves Picture Interface: Images now load bigger and faster – which is especially good news for people who use their Facebook accounts as portfolios to show off their art and photography.
• Flickr Announces GeoFences: Flickr has rolled out a new feature called “GeoFences,” which basically allows you to define areas on a map where your geotagging of photos will not show up. You can set it up from the Geo Preferences page in your account.Note though, this feature isn’t perfect yet, Thomas Hawk notes that it has a huge security flaw in that anyone can download the original image and view the geolocation data from the EXIF data.
• Google Reports “Considerable Progress” In Fight Against Piracy
• The Pirate Bay Founders Launch File-Hosting Site
• Tumblr is sending bloggers to New York Fashion Week (again) in an attempt to reach out to the fashion industry, but some in the industry are not impressed.

Gadgets / Hardware

• Apple is working on a television for 2012, sources say.
• Haberdashery for technology swaps fabric and thread for chips and solder.
• Raspberry Pi $25 PC intended to get kids back into programming
• The Shrine of Apple is an archive of photos and specs for all Apple’s products.
• Toshiba Introduces World’s First Super High Def, Glasses-Free 3D Television
• The typewriter lives on in India. ‘India’s typewriter culture survives the age of computers in offices where bureaucracy demands typed forms and in rural areas where many homes don’t have electricity.’

Entertainment

• Things Apple Is Worth More Than

Discussion / OpEd

• 12 Things A Programmer Really Needs To Know
• Five ways Apple will never be the same without Jobs as CEO
• If Software Is Eating The World, Why Don’t Coders Get Any Respect?
• Marc Andreessen on Why Software Is Eating The World
• Some thoughts on the supposed lack of developers that points out multiple factors for the impression – and the fact it’s probably not true.
• Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
• Without Steve Jobs, Is Apple Still Cool?

Business

• Amazon Offers To Hire 7,000 If California Waits On Sales Tax
• Facebook’s Plan to Beat Google: Sweet Offices, More Startups
• The real reason Google bought Motorola: Patents are nice, but those lovely tax losses are worth more – $700m a year in tax deductions through 2019.
• Steve Jobs’s Law: Why Founders Make the Best Leaders

• Color Scheme Designer 3 – allows a user to create harmonious color schemes using their choice of one of six customizable combinations from the color wheel. There is an option to show what a given scheme would look like to users with various types of colorblindness. The resulting scheme can be exported in several formats including HTML+CSS and Photoshop ACO, and a given scheme can even be shared as a link.
• Fresh WebSuction – a utility for downloading entire websites. Includes a comprehensive list of features to download website on your system.
• HotkeyP – a portable application to create macro commands and assign hotkey combinations in order to perform almost any kind of task, such as, open files, run applications, shut down, log off or restart your PC, change windows opacity, simulate mouse actions and so on.
• Watch2gether – a web service that makes it more fun to watch YouTube videos with friends. Instead of sharing links to the video, it lets you create a private session where you can watch them together.

Tech News

• 1st Circuit Court establishes a clear First Amendment Right to Film Officers In A Public Space (This Is A Big Deal)
• China accidentally broadcasts evidence of cyberwar against US: A translation of the screenshot says “Choose Attack Target,” and then the operator selects an IP address of 138.26.72.17. That IP belongs to the University of Alabama
• IBM Builds Biggest Data Drive Ever: The system could enable detailed simulations of real-world phenomena—or store 24 billion MP3s.
• UK government will not seek to close down social media networks: In meeting with communications firms, they solicited advice about how to monitor the sites instead of how to prohibit criminals from using the sites

Software

• At 20, Linux is invisible, ubiquitous
• Want a Faster Firefox? Pale Moon 6.0 Can Help

Internet

• After 14 years, Rob Malda is walking away from Slashdot.
• As Wikipedia expanded to lesser known languages it ran into a problem: What is knowledge for Wikipedia purposes? Traditionally knowledge has been defined by citations, but many languages don’t have a lot of written material, greatly limiting what could be created on Wikipedia. The solution (NYT) may be that People are Knowledge (45min), a project funded by a Wikimedia Foundation grant.
• Facebook is phasing out its Places feature as part of a sweeping new privacy-centric redesign.
• Facebook Served a Trillion Pageviews in June, Google Says
• Government won’t ban rioters from social networks
• The “nymwars” rage on. Despite a passionate post on their own public policy blog earlier this year, outlining all of the reasons that Google is a strong supporter of the use of pseudonyms on the internet, Google is continuing to take an uncharacteristically draconian approach to the use of pseudonyms on Google+. Google+ users with pseudonyms not only risk losing access to Google+, but also access to other Google services including Picasa and Google Reader as well. Naturally, this is a significant inconvenience for users who are known primarily by their pseudonyms, and a more significant inconvenience to users who use pseudonyms to protect the physical safety of themselves and their families.

Gadgets

• 2012 – the year of 3D printing?
• 3-D Design Simplified A new website could accelerate the adoption of 3-D printing.
• Android Is No. 1 Target of Mobile Hackers
• Why a $25 PC? Because it’s the price of a textbook

Entertainment

• Nerds Triumphant? The one-liner judged as the Funniest Joke of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is about computer passwords. Runners-up and the joke judged WORST also listed.

Discussion / OpEd

• Apple Will Be Just Fine, Thanks To Aggressive Jobsian Minimalism
• Copyright Infringement and Theft – The Difference
• Kids today need a licence to tinker: Forget the old approach of the national curriculum, we need to open young minds to the creative possibilities of computing

Business

• Research in Motion Unveils BlackBerry Music Sharing Service: Nice idea, though it may be too little, too late for this company that has never quite adapted to the New Smartphone World Order.
• Samsung Denies Eying HP’s PC Division

Skype

Contacting friends and clients through the highly popular voice over IP (VOIP) service, Skype, can be accomplished on the iPhone with this officially sanctioned app. Geeks can video chat, instant message and make international business calls just as they would on a desktop computer. Use Skype from any location where their iPhone receives mobile internet service.

WordPress

Updating a blog or website using the content manager WordPress is simple with this app for the iPhone. Geeks can keep their users up-to-date on the latest news while out of the home or office. This app is especially good for liveblogging events, allowing a blogger to get the information to their visitors before any other site while also improving their popularity.

GoToMeeting

While Skype has most video chatting uses covered, it is limited to one-on-one conversations. GoToMeeting allows geeks to host video conferences with multiple people. With this app, it is possible to have a staff meeting while everyone is out of the office, as long as their iPhones have a mobile internet signal.

KeyNote

Create impressive presentations, similar to Microsoft Powerpoint, directly from your iPhone with this app. While it costs $9.99 to download, KeyNote is a very powerful tool and can
be very beneficial for making a presentation that shows just how tech savvy the user truly is when it comes to mobile technology.

To Do

Keep track of everything you need to do with this convenient app. It costs $5 to download, but will save geeks with busy schedules a lot of headaches when managing their time.

DropBox

Geeks will never have to rely on flash drives for transporting important files ever again if they download the DropBox app from the Apple App Store. Files can be uploaded to online storage and accessed from an iPhone, allowing geeks to get to their most priceless files from nearly anywhere.

Twitter

While social networking can be a distraction for some geeks, the constant news updates and marketing benefits of installing the Twitter app on the iPhone are unparalleled. Twitter for smartphones carries many of the same functionalities as Twitter for the computer. Add to that the convenience of carrying your web with you, and the Twitter is one app not to be passed up.

Dragon Diction

Typing notes is a thing of the past with the Dragon Diction app. Simply launch the app, start talking and it will convert your words into text. Save it to your iPhone’s clipboard or notes, paste it into an e-mail, or send it out as a text message. Make typing a hands-free experience and really impress your geek counterparts.

Documents to Go Premium

While the Microsoft Office suite is not available for iPhones, Documents to Go is the next best thing. For $16.99, geeks can create and open Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files from anywhere. It even syncs with their desktop computers and other services, such as DropBox and Google Docs.

Roambi

Stock market geeks can get all of the latest trading information from this app. Roambi is mobile business intelligence that transforms data into a convenient dashboard on your iPhone.

Blake Sanders is a tech writer at broadband comparison site Broadband Expert and specializes in mobile internet, mobile phones, as well as the latest in broadband provider news and information.

Credit: Photo courtesy of rickyromero via Flickr Creative Commons.

• AdBlock – a Firefox extension that completely blocks ads and delays on popular streaming sites, including: Hulu, CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox
• Adobe Muse – a cross-platform Adobe Air application designed to simplify the task of creating a website without writing HTML code. It provides a number of handy tools and step-by-step management options to let you plan, design, preview and publish your website. (Is Adobe Muse the new Frontpage?)
• All Comics (Beta) – a web service which allows you to upload, save and view your comic book collection online. All you need is to sign up with an All Comics account and upload. Comics can then be accessed from any platform with Javascript.
• Gtalklet – an extension for Chrome that lets Google Talk users chat while surfing.

Tutorials

• Create a Hidden Partition on USB Flash Drive

Tech News

• Advertisers start using facial recognition to tailor pitches
• German Pirate Party On Course to Election Win
• New IBM computer chip mimics the human brain (More)

Software

• The A-Z of programming languages: From Pizza to Scala: How Martin Odersky created the programming language behind Twitter
• First Firefox 7 Beta Promises Dramatically Lower Memory Use

Research and Science

• 13-Year-Old Designs Super-Efficient Solar Array Based on the Fibonacci Sequence

Internet

• Court rules that two teenage girls’ raunchy Facebook photos are Constitutionally protected speech: “The provocative context of these young girls horsing around with objects representing sex organs was intended to contribute to the humorous effect in the minds of the intended teenage audience.”
• Germany vs. Facebook: Like Button Declared Illegal, Sites Threatened With Fine
• Google Maps adds weather forecasts
• Infographic: Twitter Psychology
• Large ISPs Profit From BitTorrent Traffic, Study Finds
• Missouri Teachers Sue State Over Facebook Ban
• PROTECT IP Act would cost taxpayers $47 million, private sector much more (about $142 million); the controversial legislation would force private ISPs, search engines, and other parties to censor websites accused of copyright infringement
• StumbleUpon Delivers Half of U.S. Social Media Traffic
• When Google+ gives Facebook a run for its money
• WordPress Now Powers 22 Percent Of New Active Websites In The U.S.

Gadgets

• 94% of tablet purchasers only want an iPad
• What’s Inside a redbox DVD rental kiosk
• With HP tablet dead, who can challenge Apple?

Entertainment

• The 50 Best Websites of 2011
• Hanging With Hackers: Inside Germany’s Great ‘Geek’ Convention
• How a Tweet Led to a Full Steak Dinner Delivered to the Airport
• If PHP Were British

Discussion / OpEd

• Dear MPAA: Stomp Your Feet And Repeat It As Many Times As You Want, But Infringement Is Not Theft
• Marc Andreessen on Why Software is Eating the World
• When Google Runs Out of Data to Exploit, What’s Next?

Business

• Functional Programming Is Hard,That’s Why It’s Good
• Google’s 16 biggest purchases, and how they worked out
• HP to stop selling PCs and phones, focus on software
• Personal Computers: Dying or Just Starved for Change?
• Silicon Valley Booms but Worries About a New Bust
• The Truth About THE Google-Motorola Deal: It Could Be a Disaster
• Sorry, This is Not the End of the PC Era
• Why Amazon Can’t Make A Kindle In the USA

The app, rumoured to be called BBM Music, is thought to be released shortly after the launch of Blackberry App World 3.0. It will come loaded on new devices, and may be downloadable to some older Blackberry handsets. For a subscription of an estimated £3 a month, BBM users will be able to share their songs and music with their contacts and browse and download songs directly to their handset from RIM’s own music library.

BBM Music will pay a major part in Blackberry roll out of 7 new handsets later in the year. RIM are hoping that the service will make Blackberry phones a more attractive proposition since Apple announced their iMessage that will appear on iPhone handsets with September’s iOS5 update.

Like Blackberry Messenger, iMessage will allow Apple uses to send free, instant messages to one another over Wi-Fi or 3G. Users will be able to share text, photos videos locations and contacts, start group messages and even continue conversation on different iOS devices.

It’s widely though that this could be the push that encourages Blackberry users to switch to iPhone. Because of this, Blackberry will want to do all they can to encourage users to stick with, and adopt, their handsets. Although it is only in the rumour stages, Blackberry take on the Cloud music storage trend, BBM Music, could be the innovation to discourage their devoted fans from defecting to Apple.

If you want to view the latest mobile phones visit www.dialaphone.co.uk

• Cameyo – a free program virtualization app that can create portable executables from any application. A useful tool for people who often switch computers.
• Hide Folders – hide files And folders in Mac, just Drag & Drop
• Metro Sidebar – tack a Windows 8 Style sidebar onto your Windows 7 desktop
• Startino – a simple web service that combines a to-do list and task manager. You can start using it immediately with just a Google account. You can share tasks with just about anyone, categorize and edit them any time however you want.
• TinyChat – a free app available for iPhone users as well as iPad users that allows you to chat with up to 12 Facebook friends at once.

Tutorials

• 20 Awesome HTML5 Web Forms Tutorials
• How to embed audio and video files in pages with HTML5. Incredibly simple.

Tech News

• Canadian Politician Starts Movie Torrent Site
• Were the London Riots caused by social media

Software

• Described as ‘cryptography’s holy grail’, Homomorphic Encryption/Computation is a form of encryption where specific algebraic operations on the plaintext translate into different algebraic operations on the ciphertext, allowing the plaintext’s owner to ‘outsource’ computations to untrusted machines.

Internet

• A Month With Google+ Shows Why This Social Network Has Legs
• New technology could beat Internet censorship at its own game by making it virtually impossible for a repressive government to block individual sites.
• What is Google’s real market share in the US?

Gadgets

• Infographic: The Cost of Mobile Internet Around the World

Entertainment

• Hide Your Kids, Hide Your Wi-Fi: Mashable’s Favorite Wi-Fi Names

Discussion / OpEd

• Lost programming skills: What today’s coders don’t know and why it matters
• The patent system isn’t broken — we are
• Why every new generation of programmers are becoming dumber than the last
• Why U.S. Broadband is So Slow
• xkcd Password Generator

Business

• Apple close to being the most valuable public company in the world
• Are software patents the “scaffolding of the tech industry”?
• The Revenues of a Moderately Successful iPad App
• Ten Myths About Social Networking For Business

• DesktopOK – a small utility that saves and restores the position of all your desktop icons during screen resolution changes.
• Doro PDF – a robust PDF writer which allows creating encrypted and password protected PDF documents from any application with a printer option. You can configure advanced settings to manage the quality and color management of the converted document.
• GrooveWalrus – this stand-alone music player integrates Last.fm and Grooveshark into your desktop.
• Loudtalks – a free cross-platform push-to-talk (PTT) app for Android that turns your device into a walkie-talkie and allows you to talk with others in private or over public channels.

Tutorials

• HTML5 Visual Cheat Sheet

Tech News

• IBM develops ‘instantaneous’ memory, 100x faster than flash
• The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has supposedly started holding closed door meetings on extending the FISA Amendment Act to again extend the NSA’s domestic warrantless wiretapping program.
• Senator Leahy’s Protect IP Act would require that U.S. ISPs impose an ‘internet death penalty’ upon domain after merely a preliminary injunction from a U.S. court that suspects the site of being ‘dedicated to infringing activities’, even if the domain’s owner had never been notified and was not subject to U.S. jurisdiction. There is concern that the legislation would fragment the DNS system and facilitate DNS spoofing by obstructing DNSSEC (pdf). There is also an open letter opposing the bill signed by 108 Law Professors who study intellectual property law.
• U.K. Revises Music Copyright Law for MP3 Era (Finally)

Software

• Adobe Edge beta brings Flash-style design to HTML5
• How Voice Tagging May Change the Media Landscape: technology from Blurts allows users to respond to an online articles with a voice response.
• iPhone App Simplifies Business Card Exchanges: uME is a new iPhone app that allows you to exchange business cards electronically with another user.
• The OS X Lion Survival Guide
• Wolfram launches its own interactive document format

Research and Science

• Can Facebook Ruin Your Child’s Brain?

Internet

• Black Hat: Lethal Hack and wireless attack on insulin pumps to kill people
• AT&T to Throttle Heaviest Data users Oct. 1
• FBI New York case information indicates that Bloods gang members in the Bronx, NY are utilizing PlayStation Network (PSN) to communicate each other.
• Forget WiFi, Connect to the Internet Through Lightbulbs
• Microsoft Playing the Underdog With Bing
• Science fair gold medalist, 17, invents better way to search Internet
• Spanish Court Rules That Linking to Potential Copyright Infringing Material Is Not Copyright Infringement
• Wikipedia says it is losing contributors

Gaming

• Nintendo Chairman Takes 50% Salary Cut: In a sign of just how bad things have gotten in the once-unstoppable company, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata volunteered to slash his own annual salary in half

Gadgets

• Android Tops in U.S. Smartphone Market, Apple Still Top Dog in Mobile Devices
• DIY Spy Drone Sniffs Wi-Fi, Intercepts Phone Calls
• E Ink Holdings estimates to ship 25-30 million screens this year.
• Five Tech Products that Will Be Dead in Five Years … 50% More Screens in Second Half of 2011
• IBM is working on a keyboard design that will adapt to a user’s finger anatomy. Touchscreen keyboard morphs to fit your typing style.
• Ground-Based Version of Satellite GPS Could Make Positioning Technology Accurate to Inches Anywhere. Is this the last piece in the driverless car puzzle?
• iPad 3 Coming Sooner Than Expected?
• iPad Losing Share to Android?

Entertainment

• In a two minute-and-forty-two-second advertisment against advertising, Microsoft explains why you should use their product instead of that of their competitor. No other company than Microsoft would produce a video like this. So utterly Microsoftian in its awkwardness. But it’s a fascinating competitive angle to take against Gmail.

Discussion / OpEd

• Can Windows 8 finally vanquish the ghosts of XP and Vista?
• How the internet created an age of rage
• It Was Never About The Money, Stupid: When the copyright industry goes out in a public confusion and asks itself what the right price is for a copy of a digital bitpattern, I always shake my head.
• The PC Isn’t Dead, But We’re In the Post-PC Era
• We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future. Our new economy is shrinking because technology leads to efficiency over growth. That is the notion I want to explore now.
• Why Google’s screwup on Google+ brand pages is a big deal
• Why Isn’t America Innovating Like It Used To?
• Why Ratings Will Ruin Wikipedia

Business

• Amazon could be the new Wal-Mart
• Apple Officially World’s Largest Smartphone Maker — Guess by How Much
• Apple Has More Cash Than Uncle Sam
• Why India Is “Geek Nation”

Plenty of robots can fly — but none can fly like a real bird. That is, until Markus Fischer and his team at Festo built SmartBird, a large, lightweight robot, modeled on a seagull, that flies by flapping its wings. A soaring demo fresh from TEDGlobal 2011.

A Jedi robot that can duel with humans — what could go wrong? Students at Stanford University have created a “JediBot” that can fight a duel against a human opponent. It uses a Microsoft Kinect sensor to track its opponent’s lightsaber, and then counterattacks whenever it makes contact.

The JediBot isn’t the fastest sparring partner you can find, delivering one swing every two to three seconds, but it does mean you don’t need to have any friends to practice your lightsaber skills.

I’m just waiting for someone to cross the JediBot’s sensor and software with a quadrocopter to create the lightsaber practice droid from Star Wars.