Developages - Development and Technology Blog

Ant sends news of a report, released a couple of weeks back by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Oregon, on the alarming rate of extinction of the world’s languages. While half of all languages have gone extinct in the last 500 years, the half-life is dropping: half of the 7,000 languages spoken today won’t exist by the year 2100. The NY Times adds this perspective: “83 languages with ‘global’ influence are spoken and written by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish and plants.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by kdawson

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds

Well if there are still any doubts as to who’s winning the portable console war, let them be dispelled here and now: in the less than three years since it’s been on the market, the Nintendo DS (in both its Lite and Phat flavors) has sold a total of 50 million units, according to the unofficial VG Chartz. Sony’s PSP (released less than one month later in Japan)? Less than half that number. While the PSP will surely get a sales boost now that it too has slimmed down, DS still seems to be the clear choice of the majority of gamers. Next challenge for Mario and friends: hitting 100 million faster than the iPod.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Evan Blass

go_jesse writes in to make us aware of a MarketWatch article reporting on the battles that WiMAX partners Sprint and Clearwire are fighting — sometimes with one another — to put together enough spectrum to fill in their planned WiMAX coverage map. The problem is that decades ago the FCC passed out licenses in what would become the WiMAX band to schools and non-profits nationwide. Once Sprint began knocking on their doors asking to license their spectrum — once they began seeing dollar signs in a forgotten resource — dozens, then hundreds of these organizations applied to the FCC to renew long-dormant licenses. The FCC has granted the first of these requests and Sprint has asked it to reconsider. Confusingly, Sprint’s partner Clearwire has sided with the schools and non-profits. The article sheds light in one messy corner of the battle to provide a “third pipe” into US consumers’ homes.

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Original post by kdawson

Filed under: Cellphones

A lot of people out there aren’t too happy with Apple right now. Some of them express their displeasure with expletive-filled tirades in the comments section of any pertinent blog post they can find. Other, arguably more creative folks use the popular medium of the day to make the object of their frustration appear foolish and hypocritical in an entertaining manner. To witness just such a protest, head over to the video after the break…

[Thanks, Scott]

Continue reading iPhone protest vid uses Apple’s own words to support the “crazy ones”

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Evan Blass

An anonymous reader writes “InfoWeek blogger Alex Wolfe reports that some iPhone users are mad as heck at Apple for bricking up their device in response to non-Apple-authorized software downloads. In a discussion thread on Apple’s own iPhone forum, one user posts that he’s ‘Seeking respondents for possible class action lawsuit against Apple Inc. relating to refusal to service iPhones and related accessories under warranty.’ Some who have replied to the post agree that Apple is being unbelievably arrogant and is ripe for legal action. But others say Cupertino is well within its rights to control its own device.” Apple seems to have removed the cited post, but it is reproduced as screenshots in the article.

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Original post by kdawson

Filed under: Transportation

Let’s face it, we’ve only got what, maybe three or four hundred years left to enjoy the great outdoors before pollution levels eventually prohibit even stepping foot outside without our personal breathing apparatus. Well Suzuki thinks that it will be in this bleak and toxin-filled future that motorized single-passenger vehicles like the Segway will finally thrive, and is preparing to capture a piece of this potentially lucrative market with a concept transportation system known as PIXY + SSC. Scheduled to be unveiled at the 2007 Tokyo Motor Show, this dynamic duo consists of a rolling transporter (SSC, or Suzuki Shared Coach) which can carry up to two PIXY runabouts — fully-enclosed, three wheeled pods that will let you comfortably navigate a toxic or post-nuclear world. Suzuki plans to make these available “well before it becomes impossible to walk to our dealerships.” Click on for a high-res pic…

[Via Autoblog Green]

Continue reading Suzuki’s PIXY + SSC concept thrives in post-nuclear wastelands

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Evan Blass

Did you get a chance to learn how to make your own walkman mellotron this weekend? Make sure to check it out and subscribe to get all of them downloaded automatically!

Watch the video - Link
Read the pdf - Link
Subscribe in iTunes - Link

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Original post by Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women

Roland Piquepaille alerts us to research out of University College London in which virtual robots, trained to “see” as we do, were duped by optical illusions the same way humans are. Here’s one of the illusions the software system fell for.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by kdawson

Filed under: Desktops, Media PCs

We know, not everyone sits within touching distance of their HTPC, but tossing a seven-inch touch panel into such a chassis provides excellent bragging rights if nothing else. Thermaltake’s DH 102 HTPC enclosure manages to include just that, along with a piano black mirror coating and aluminum front panel, wireless remote, front-mounted jog dial, USB 2.0 / FireWire ports, built-in Media LAB interface, and space for a number of internal hard drives. Unfortunately, pricing details have yet to be released, but if it ends up a bit too pricey for you, there’s always the DH 101 that forgoes the snazzy (albeit potentially unnecessary) touchscreen and replaces it with a smaller LCD (or none at all).

[Via DarkVision Hardware]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Darren Murph

yroJJory writes to recommend a piece up at SFGate on the history of Silicon Valley and its roots in radio, accompanied by some great old photos. “When the Traitorous Eight [founders of Fairchild], as they’re sometimes called, held their hush-hush meeting in San Francisco, they had reason to fear discovery — but no way to know that by quitting safe jobs for a risky startup, they would earn a place among what Stanford University historian Leslie Berlin calls the ‘Founding Fathers of Silicon Valley’… Roughly 30 years before Hewlett and Packard started work in their garage, and almost 50 years before the Traitorous Eight created Fairchild, the basic culture of Silicon Valley was forming around radio: engineers who hung out in hobby clubs, brainstormed and borrowed equipment, spun new companies out of old ones, and established a meritocracy ruled by those who made electronic products cheaper, faster and better.”

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Original post by kdawson

By way of the awesome AfriGadget site comes this Wired story about a paraglider builder/flier from South Africa:

Cyril is the only black South African currently registered with the sport’s ruling body. And it all started with a glider he made from plastic bags, purloined rope and baling wire, a glider that flew — sort of — though it both amazed and horrified the professional paragliders who saw it.

Freedom Flight: Kid’s Homemade Paraglider Leads to Fame - Link

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Original post by Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women

An anonymous reader writes “A project called OpenChange is working to develop an open source client library for Microsoft Exchange. They are heavily dependent on Samba code for the underlying protocol support and have been forced to move to GPLv3 once Samba moved. This has gotten in the way of legally adding support to other software such as KDE, which is unwilling or unable to go GPLv3.” It sounds like all the developers involved expect the GPLv2/GPLv3 issues to be resolved in time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by kdawson

Filed under: Cellphones, Transportation

They sure do look beautiful flying in formation during their annual migration, but when one of Illinois’s rare Aves Razeruses crashes and burns on a busy Moscow street corner, well, it’s never a pretty sight. Check out another pic of the carnage after the break…

[Via Tech Ticker Blog, thanks chirag]

Continue reading Ginormous RAZR 2 crashes into Mercedes, film at eleven

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Evan Blass

Recently at my university where I’m a student and a sys admin, we have been experiencing some odd outages, in particular since the 25th of September. The outages seemed to occur between 8 PM and 12:00 AM — peek gaming hours for our dorms. It just happens that Halo 3 came out on the 25th of September. Upon further investigation we found that our network routers were shaping TCP packets, but not UDP. Once we applied UDP shaping as well, all network outages ceased. Gamers complained, but university students attempting to access network resources such as our UNIX clusters were satisfied.

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Original post by fender177 (posted by kdawson)

Filed under: Portable Audio

Audio Technica’s no stranger to high-end cans, and we must say, its flagship set for 2007 (its words, not ours) looks mighty sexy. The ATH-ESW9 Sovereign Wood Headphones are crafted from “Japan’s finest Hokkaido cherry tree,” feature 42-millimeter neodymium magnet drivers with fiberglass housing support, and come bundled with a carrying case to keep these beauties clean when not in use. You can pick these up to listen to (or just look at) come October 19th for ¥37,800 (or about $330).

[Via AudioJunkies]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Darren Murph