Eclipse Office Partitioning System

Espantoso sistema para casa ou escritório.

Designer: Marcus Ward Curran

The system comes complete with a desk, task chair, integrated speakers, a wireless recharging mat, and a wireless camera/projector stuffed into the hood for teleconferencing. The best part of the system is the hood that could be lowered and the optional contoured furniture can be arranged to fit against the Eclipse system.

Bacteria-Run Computer Solves Math Puzzle

Eric Bland, Discovery News

May 28, 2008 -- A new living computer, bred from E. coli bacteria instead of stamped from silica, has for the first time successfully solved a classic mathematical puzzle known as the Burnt Pancake Problem.

While this bacteria-based computer is more proof of concept than practical, a living computer might one day solve complex mathematical problems faster than silicon supercomputers.

In a biology-based computer, each bacterium becomes a single computer that runs a different part of the problem simultaneously. Since a million bacteria-based computers can fit into a single drop of water, all of them working together could speed up the calculations dramatically.

"this will open the door to a wide variety of biological computing."

Machines 'to match man by 2029'

By Helen Briggs Science reporter, BBC News, Boston

Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, a leading US inventor has predicted. Humanity is on the brink of advances that will see tiny robots implanted in people's brains to make them more intelligent, said Ray Kurzweil.

The engineer believes machines and humans will eventually merge through devices implanted in the body to boost intelligence and health. "It's really part of our civilisation," Mr Kurzweil explained. "But that's not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to displace us." Machines were already doing hundreds of things humans used to do, at human levels of intelligence or better, in many different areas, he said. Man versus machine "I've made the case that we will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029," he said. We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains... to make us smarter .

"We're already a human machine civilisation; we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that." Humans and machines would eventually merge, by means of devices embedded in people's bodies to keep them healthy and improve their intelligence, predicted Mr Kurzweil. "We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons," he told BBC News.

The nanobots, he said, would "make us smarter, remember things better and automatically go into full emergent virtual reality environments through the nervous system".
Mr Kurzweil is one of 18 influential thinkers chosen to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century by the US National Academy of Engineering.
The experts include Google founder Larry Page and genome pioneer Dr Craig Venter.
The 14 challenges were announced at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, which concludes on Monday.

A very real future for virtual worlds

What is Second Life?
Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely created by its Residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by millions of Residents from around the globe. Its residents, represented by their character avatars, have been busy building homes, attending pop concerts and indulging some of their stranger fantasies. In this virtual world residents can do literally anything they please. Because Second Lifers can actually own the virtual goods they create, the world enjoys a booming virtual economy; residents can spend Linden dollars, which have a real world value.

BBC NEWS

...These are interesting times for Second Life. In the four short years it has existed, it has seen media coverage go from hysterical to hectoring. It has been hailed as both a harbinger of the next big thing and a brake on the burgeoning development of virtual worlds.

In many respects, online virtual worlds are at the point now that the web reached in the early 1990s.

"Virtual worlds are inherently comprehensible to us in a way that the web is not," said Mr Rosedale. "They look like the world we already know and take advantage of our ability to remember and organise."
"Information is presented there in a way that matches our memories and experiences," he said. "Your and my ability to remember the words we use and the information we talk about is much higher if it's presented as a room or space around us."
Equally important, he said, was the visibility or presence that being in a virtual world bestows on its users.
By contrast, he said, when visiting a website people are anonymous and invisible.
Shopping on Amazon might be much easier and enjoyable if you could turn to one of the other 10,000 or so people on the site at the same time as you and ask about what they were buying, get recommendations and swap good or bad experiences.

For virtual worlds to be able to extend this usefulness to the mass of people a lot of work has yet to be done, said Mr Rosedale.

What it might take, he said, was software that would let people browse virtual worlds like they do webpages. Built in to that software would be an identity management system that re-drew yourself to match those different spaces.
"I think it is going to happen, that kind of portability of identity is important but I could not hazard a guess right now about how quickly it will happen," he said.
"But," he said, "with a sufficiently open platform then people will move into it quite rapidly."
It might, he speculated, one day outstrip the web as a means for people to communicate and work together.
"Because virtual worlds like Second Life do not impose language barriers like the web does - that almost certainly means their ultimate utility range is larger," he said. "We are at the very early stages of something very big."

Bill Gates: The skills you need to succeed

VIEWPOINT By Bill Gates Chairman, Microsoft

One of the most important changes of the last 30 years is that digital technology has transformed almost everyone into an information worker.

... Today and in the future, many of the jobs with the greatest impact will be related to software, whether it is developing software working for a company like Microsoft or helping other organisations use information technology tools to be successful.
Lifelong learning is vital
Communication skills and the ability to work well with different types of people are very important too.
A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.
This isn't true at all.
Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs. ....Ler mais

BBC News

Microsoft desenvolve tradutor para cegos

A Microsoft e a organização de audio-livros «DAISY» estão a desenvolver uma ferramenta para permitir aos invisuais traduzir documentos de word em padrões de audio digital. O projecto deverá estar disponível no próximo ano

O objectivo da parceria entre as duas empresas é produzir um programa gratuito de tradução de documentos escritos em Open XML – o formato padrão de arquivo para documentos do Office 2007 – para o DAISY XML.
A organização «DAISY» - Digital Accessible Information System – não tem fins lucrativos e foi formado em 1996 por bibliotecas de audiobooks para a transposição de audio livros do formato analógico para o digital, adoptando um padrão livre baseado em formatos de arquivos de internet.

Google Phone

The Google Phone will be available by the middle of 2008 .

Google, will give away its software to hand-set makers and then use the Google Phone’s openness as an invitation for software developers and content distributors to design applications for it. And as the cellphone morphs further into a mobile personal computer, a new software standard is likely taking shape. Whoever takes the lead in this market may become a technological gatekeeper wielding the same power, and reaping the same profits, that Microsoft does through its Windows operating system.

It plans to do that, industry executives said, by offering free mobile software and then presumably cashing in by providing a menu of services linked to those products, like e-mail, photos, news and other services.

NYTimes.com

Gold and diamonds

From Engadget

Now there's a new Apple gadget on the block that literally makes every other Apple device look dull. A company called Computer Choppers has put together a Gold-plated MacBook Pro, with an appropriately diamond studded Apple logo. 24-carat gold HP Laserjet p2015 Voodoo's OMEN24k PC is certified gold
The gold aluminum keyboard

Pentax shiny LX Gold SLR

Minox DC1011, now gold-plated Gold and silver USB drives

Gresso's new USB flash drives come adorned in wood and diamonds

Nintendo giving away gold Game Boy Advance SPs

LG Royal Gold 71 Inch TV

Jens Of Sweden Excentrique MP-400 gold-plated playa

Samsung pimps out 18K gold YP-Z5

From Engadget

Microsoft Surface - Exclusive Review

Novas utilizações para as ligações USB enquanto estamos ligados ao computador. Que tal aquecer os chinelos... ou observarmos o nosso próprio ouvido atravé de uma microcamara...

Thanko

NetKulture

tech news

Sansung PDA-PC Com WiMAX e EV-DO CDMA

Samsung Ultra Smart F700

O Ultra Mobile PC, abreviadamente UMPC, apresenta-se

como sendo a próxima geração de computadores móveis.

É um intermédio entre o Tablet PC e o Pocket PC.

UltraMobile é um PDA com portátil, com um microfone e

uma webcam da Fujitsu.

The Apple iPhone is not only a mobile phone, it is an iPod

as well as an internet communications device.

LG Prada mobile phone. Presenting a complete touch-control devise.

Toca Piano?

BABY GRAND MASTER THE KING OF VIDEO INSTRUMENTS
When you first touch the controls of the Baby Grand Master™, be prepared to experience an entirely new sensation. Unexpected power suddenly fills the room. You immediately notice the rich fullness of the video and sound. The controls respond almost intuitively to your fingers. Designed to take advantage of the latest high technology, the Baby Grand Master™ interface is remarkably intuitive. It's understandable that no video instrument in modern history has ever made itself seen and heard so immediately, or so dramatically.

E que tal mudar de posição para variar?

Dores nas costas? horas a mais no computador?

Office Organix parece ter a resposta.

Parece confortável?

E que tal se estivesse mais reclinado?

Ou mesmo deitado...


Visão panoramica?

Apetece-lhe esticar as pernas?

Teclados ergonomicos...

Office Organix TM