Samsung have just announced their 3D-ready PDP plasmas to the Korean market, today.

Samsung PAVV Cannes 450 is the name, has 3D content support, comes in two sizes, both 42 and 50-inches with a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and should work just fine with 3D glasses or high performance 3D software. It uses Cell Light Control, 2008 Daylight technology and a DNIe+ chipset and will have three entertainment modes : games, movies and sports. The prices are $1,850 for the 42-inch version and $2,656 for the 50-inch version.

There is also a HD version, dubbed Cannes 550 and should be sold for $4,145.

Electronic Arts is going to provide the 3D content.

Source and picture copyright: AvingUSA

If you haven’t heard by now the trucks or buses in Pakistan are given special treatment. All sorts of decorations and colorful paintings are applied no matter if it’s on the interior or at the exterior.

The result? Artists turned the streets of Pakistan into a national gallery without walls, an exhibition with something new every few minutes. They are against of mass production and this is how they fight it. Almost every truck or bus that gets out of their hands screams uniqueness.

Curious to know how much you’d have to pay to get your truck painted? It starts from $500 and goes above $1,000. If you need the body adjusted and then the truck painted then the price climbs up to $2,500 which is what a driver makes in two years. For special requests it even goes up to $13,000. Art is expensive …

If you have the time and want to read a small story about truck & bus paintings in Pakistan there’s a good one. Here is a small gallery. Let us know if you like them.

Pictures copyright : AutoMen, dibopics, iancowe, Khalid Bin Ismail, P Donovan, noorkhan, go2net, Suh@il , Raja Islam, Bobulix

A record fine of $1.3 billion has been issued today by the European Union to Microsoft because the company “charged unreasonable prices” for software information to developers that wanted to build Windows compatible products. If we were to make the total amount for the fines Microsoft has to pay we’ll end up with about $2.5 billion.

Though Microsoft had taken measure to make sure the company is meeting the anti-trust regulations in Europe, said that the issues for which they’re fined today have been taken care of.

Just to bring a smile on Bill’s face, EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said “We could have gone as high as 1.5 billion euros ($2.23 billion). The maximum amount is higher than what we did at the end of the day”. They are still skeptical and have all their eyes on Microsoft to see their next steps.

After Microsoft’s offer of acquiring Yahoo, here comes the real buzz story. Yahoo releases a social bookmarking extension called Yahoo Buzz. It looks like a Digg clone, but more than rating news and articles, Yahoo Buzz combines the search relevancy with users voting to give a story a Buzz Score.

Social networking success has attracted Yahoo in the business. The company didn’t end too well last year, but now after rejecting Microsoft proposal, its name has gained popularity and sympathy. Currently Yahoo Buzz is in beta and includes content from nearly 100 publishers, each of which has a “badge” that lets readers vote and submit stories to Buzz in real-time. The users will generate a “BuzzScore” while rating the news stories, videos, images, or blog posts on the Web. The company said, the algorithm will include the top stories in a good placement on Yahoo.com. As an additional option, Yahoo Buzz will also allow users to submit Buzz stories to social new sites such as Digg, Facebook, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.

Yahoo plans to develop a new ecosystem based on Yahoo Buzz. It will develop new syndication and monetization tools for publishers who share relevant content and advertisers. I like this new idea and I am sure Yahoo will certainly create some buzz.

via Yahoo News

Samsung is going to push hard to bring the 250GB SSD by the end of 2008, said flash memory marketing chief Michael Yang. They are already producing the 128GB version that should start shipping in the third quarter of the year while the 64GB SSD is already packed ultra-thin notebooks such as Lenovo ThinkPad X300 or Apple’s MacBook Air.

The new drive is going to use MLC technology (multi level cell) which is slower than the SLC (simple level cell) drive but reduces cost because it stacks more data on the same cell. However, there is no official word on using Parallel ATA like we have in the MacBook Air or they will upgrade to Serial ATA connectors.

Yang also mentioned the fact that they may start working on new dimensions (smaller of course) to make even thinner laptops. So far companies developed on the 1.8 or 2.5-inch platforms.

via CNET

Just because you paid a lot of money on your GPS navigator this doesn’t mean you are going to get to your destination (safe). To make the story short here is what happened to a truck driver that followed the instructions and got stuck on a “tractors only” road on Wednesday.

He truck was carrying timber from north Wales to Birmingham and managed to block the track at Halton in Wrexham county

“He knocked down branches on the way and damaged trees and is now well and truly stuck.”

The result is, farmer Margaret Evans became very sad because the truck stuck in her farm lane and she now has to use a two miles longer road to get to that particular part of her land.

The company that owns the truck, Maxi Haulage Ltd from Ayrshire, announced that the don’t provide sat-navigation on their vehicles, but the drivers use their own. More on that matter there was a big sign saying that the track was not suitable to heavy goods vehicles (HGV). How was the GPS navigator supposed to know it?

You’d better trust your own instincts, too, not just your GPS.

Source

We may not need futurist and inventor Raymond Kurzweil to tell us that solar energy is going to rule in 20 years or the fact that nanotechnology could give global warming a big chill (pdf link), but it’s always a good thing to be reassured. He is one of the distinguished futurists that predicted the demise of the Soviet Union and foresaw the explosive growth of the Internet and wireless systems.

Getting back to solar energy, Kurzweil said that we already have 10,000 times more sunlight than we would need to convert into electricity and serve the whole world. However, 1% of total energy we use comes from sunlight and wind. He also stated that we may be 5 years away from the point where solar power becomes efficient and competitive to fight fossil fuels.

“We also see an exponential progression in the use of solar energy,” he said. “It is doubling now every two years. Doubling every two years means multiplying by 1,000 in 20 years. At that rate we’ll meet 100 percent of our energy needs in 20 years.”

A bright future

The technology is going to develop and becoming efficient is similar to using nano-engineered materials for solar panels which not only makes them lighter but also easier to install. This is something Google likes and invested in it ever since the technology was developed.

Other technologies that will bring solar power mainstream are solar concentrators made of parabolic mirrors that would collect solar energy from a very large area and sends it to a small collector or a small but efficient steam turbine.

“You could, for example, create hydrogen or hydrogen-based fuels from the energy produced by solar panels and then use that to create fuel for fuel cells, he said. There are already nano-engineered fuel cells, microscopic in size, that can be scaled up to store huge quantities of energy”, Kurzweil said.

Knowing Raymond Kurzweil’s history as a futurist, we can only be happy that the technology is on the right track to “rule” in 20 years. If you trust him and would like to know more on what is going to happen you can read his predictions : The Age of Intelligent Machines(from 1990), The Age of Spiritual Machines (from 1999) and The Singularity is Near (from 2005).

photo by Jan Egil Kristiansen

Although it’s not official, Toshiba Corp. plans to give up on its HD DVD format for high definition DVDs in favor of Blu-Ray format created by Sony Corp. The format war which reminds of Betamax-VHS battle in the ’80s. Toshiba has lost against Sony when Warner Bros. announced to release high-definition DVDs in Blu-ray format.

The second step in the battle for the high definition DVD format came when Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the giant retailer store, decided to abandon the HD DVD format and only stock its shelves with Blu-ray movies. In addition big players like Best Buy Co Inc and Netflix went for Blu-Ray format. Even the exclusive deal with Microsoft was put in doubt when the software company said it could use Blu-ray technology for its Xbox 360 game console, which currently use HD DVD technology.

The confusing format war is about to end. Sony’s marketing techniques have prevailed against HD DVD format. Toshiba will suffer considerable losses running to hundreds of million dollars. In the end there is a victory for the industry and for the consumers.

Breaking News: TorrentFreak has been shut-down by the FBI

Breaking News: TorrentFreak has also been shut-down by the Motion Picture Association and the German Federation Against Copyright Theft (GVU)

I’ve been a reader of TorrentFreak for some time now. They seemed to have a very big readership (if I’m not wrong up to 32,000+ RSS subscribers) all interested in BitTorrent news and related information, getting about 1 million unique users a month. Yes, that’s definitely a big blog that made it to Digg’s front page very often, but what is going on you may ask.

Well it’s either a hacker’s joke or they really got shot down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for criminal copyright infringement and are under investigation. However, when I refreshed I saw that they got closed by the German Federation Against Copyright Theft (GVU) and the Motion Picture Association for Illegal Downloading.

I think it’s obvious. Someone has control over TF and if you consider that for the last 48 hours they had server problems. These are just two screenshots I’ve taken but the “intruder” could have more.

If you’re one of their readers, like I am, I will keep you posted on what’s going on in a while.

Android, Google’s open source software platform for mobile phones, is just a few inches away (make that 2 months) away from being adopted as the best thing to ever happen to the market. Though we may have better applications for our cellphones, a fully open platform should be associated with greater risks than a phone running Symbian or Windows Mobile.

It’s not news anymore, but in 2004 when cellphones viruses got smart and were able to dial unwanted calls or send unwanted messages, we were not ready to accept that software development has higher risks associated. But Android is not the only open-source software the market is expecting. Apple, also decided to open its software platform to third party developers.

Where these lead? We have Android that everyone is waiting like it’s going to change the world and we have Apple’s where people want it just because it wasn’t open from the begining. The mobile community/industry wants open source software badly and hackers could work on it, just as bad.

“Concerns about specific mobile security risks or … reliability of services is a crucial issue for operators, particularly in mature markets,” Victor Kouznetsov, senior vice president at McAfee’s mobile unit, said in a statement. He also said that “Consumer fears are growing in tandem with increased mobile functionality”.

In a recent study by McAfee it was revealed that one in seven global mobile users have been exposed to mobile viruses or know people that were exposed. Is the mobile market prepared? Probably not. Will they go open source? Definitely.

Maybe they’ll invent mobile phones antiviruses that we install and then screm we can’t browse the menu fast enough

photo by monirguru