Technology › Panasonic to start taking orders for world’s largest 3-D plasma TV
Panasonic Corp on Wednesday announced it will start taking orders for its professional-use ultra-large Full HD 3-D plasma display panels (PDPs) on July 1. The… Read more on Japan Today
Iran’s Ahmadinejad blasts nuclear powers on China visit
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Friday blasted global nuclear powers for keeping atomic technology from other states, after Tehran was hit with new UN sanctions over its suspect programme. Read more on AFP via Yahoo! News
Will Basix PolyTune? Even though PolyTune for iPhone is meant for tuning guitars and basses, it is capable of tuning any sound source. In this video, the Danish vocal group, Basix, test if they can sing the notes of a guitar strummed with open strings. First, they test the chromatic mode one by one, and then, they check if they are spot on in polyphonic mode. They most definitely are! Win a PolyTune Pedal Tuner! Make your own PolyTune video and win a PolyTune pedal tuner With the new PolyTune iPhone App, you can tune your guitar anywhere. But why not try PolyTuning something else? We asked the Danish vocal group, Basix, to test the PolyTune App using their voices only. Check out this video to see the result. Will Basix PolyTune? And more importantly, which ‘things’ can you PolyTune? Why not try PolyTuning six motorcycles, six glasses of wine, six lawn mowers, or…? We will add a few more videos in the ‘Will it PolyTune?’ series soon for inspiration. When you have made your video, please upload it to your YouTube Channel and post it as a Video Response to the ‘Basix trying out PolyTune iPhone App’ The 10 videos with most views by July 1, 2010, will win a PolyTune pedal. So, get creative and find six ‘things’ that you think will PolyTune!
The battle between Dish and TiVo rages on. As reported by Bloomberg, a judge has ruled that Dish and EchoStar must pay TiVo around $200 million for continuing to provide DVR service to its customers after being told to stop because it was violating TiVo’s patents. Dish and EchoStar plan to appeal the ruling.
The new ruling brings Dish and EchoStar’s total payments to TiVo to around $400 million in damages and other fees after a five year legal battle. In this latest round, Dish and EchoStar say they tried to work around TiVo’s patents, but a judge ruled that they had failed to do so. The $200 million figure is based on a $2.25 per month royalty for every Dish DVR user, extending from April 2008, when an appeals court reaffirmed TiVo’s patent, to July 1 2009.
(Relatively) good news from China for the World Wide Web as a whole today: The government today announced it will (partially) back down over its controversial internet monitoring filter software “Green Dam Youth Escort”. As a reminder, the software is supposed to protect Chinese web users from harmful content, especially from online porn, and was to be made mandatory with all PC shipments in the country from July 1 this year.
But today Li Yizhong, China’s Minister of Industry and Information Technology, said this won’t happen, at least not to that extent. Even though some PC makers started shipping Green Dam with their hardware to Chinese customers already, Yizhong made clear it’s up to the makers if they ship the software with their PCs or not.
But all’s not well in China’s web scene: Yizhong also said the mass installation of Green Dam in public spaces such as schools and Internet cafes won’t be stopped. In addition, the government is still working on improving the software and doesn’t rule out the possibility of either forcing PC manufacturers to ship different filter software or Green Dam with their hardware in the future.
China’s Green Dam initiative apparently inspired the Malaysian government, which started publicly thinking about censoring the web through a similar piece of software a few months ago. But (by coincidence?), Malaysia dropped these plans for the time being just today.
Green Dam, a filtering software that’s supposed to protect China’s population from harmful content (and can be called a piece of garbage on more than one level), seems to trigger anticipatory obedience (you could also call it business sense, I guess) within some PC companies. Even though the Chinese government postponed its plans to make the software mandatory with all PC shipments in the country from July 1, Acer, Asustek and Lenovo already bundle their hardware with Green Dam.
Lenovo has started shipping Green Dam-equipped PCs in China without telling their customers. Apparently the world’s fourth largest computer manufacturer is afraid nobody will buy Lenovo PCs anymore if it does. Asustek is less cautious and has begun shipping PCs with a Green Dam CD in early July. And Acer plans to do the same from the beginning of August.
Not all companies are joining the Green Dam bandwagon though. Sony began shipping its PCs with the software as early as June this year but stopped in the meantime. Other makers, such as HP or Dell, haven’t even started.
The battle between Dish and TiVo rages on. As reported by 
