Gadgets Future

Wal-Mart has the largest repository of recorded video on the planet. It just so happens that not all of it is in the retail giant’s control. In particular, one production company is sitting on a vast treasure trove of Wal-Mart footage and has decided to start using these video archives to make a little cash on the side.

Flagler Productions, who recorded countless hours of internal Wal-Mart meetings from the 1970s through 2006, was fired two years ago. While that move effectively cut off most of the company’s revenue stream, Flagler discovered there are actually plenty of people out there interested in viewing such material — especially if it involves managers prancing about in drag at an executive meeting. According to the AP, Flagler is charging $250 an hour to outside parties for “video research” and additional fees for a DVD copy of film clips.

How are they able to do this? Amazingly, no contract was ever signed between Flagler and Wal-Mart, and as Techdirt observes, copyright law dictates that whoever filmed the footage technically owns it.

To date, there’s been tremendous interest in the videos by those involved in various lawsuits against Wal-Mart, including plaintiffs’ lawyers and union critics with a bone to pick with the world’s largest retailer.

Among other gems never meant for public display, there’s apparently one scene of male managers parading in drag at an executive meeting. This footage was subsequently used by union-backed critics at Wal-Mart Watch for a recent advertisement questioning the retailer’s attitude toward female employees.

As you might expect, Wal-Mart has offered to buy back the rights to the footage. Unfortunately, there seems to be a substantial gap between what the retail giant is offering ($500,000) and what Flagler’s thinks these archived videos are worth ($145 million).

Says a Wal-Mart spokesperson:

“…we did not pay Flagler Productions to tape internal meetings with this aftermarket in mind.”

[AP via Techdirt]

by Nilay Patel, posted Apr 10th 2008 at 8:19PMAlthough other countries have deployed gun-toting robots and there’s no shortage of companies trying to develop weaponized bots for Uncle Sam, it looks like the first test of actual killer robots in battle has ended in a whimper: the Army’s TALON SWORD gunbots, are headed home, after being plagued with control issues. Yeah, that’s right — control issues. Apparently it was too hard to prevent the Army’s gun-equipped robot from moving its gun “when it was not intended to move.” Reassuring, no? The Army doesn’t sound too enthused about another go-round, saying, “once you’ve done something that’s really bad, it can take 10 or 20 years to try it again.” Ouch. On the plus side, at least that’s 20 more years before we’re all put to work in the mines, no?

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Filed under: Robots

by Darren Murph, posted Apr 10th 2008 at 4:49PM
Granted, it’s becoming increasingly simple to just Twitter your day away with the smorgasbord of connectivity options out there today, but if you’re just too productive to bother with that, the Tame concept is likely to become your next best friend. The cube shown above can be equipped with customized statuses that will inform anyone trying to contact you (via Facebook, text, cellphone, IM, fax, telegraph, can-and-string, etc.) exactly why you aren’t responding. For convenience, each panel is assigned a color depending on the severity of your away-ness (i.e. red for “I’m on a 14-hour flight to Fiji with no blackberry service.”), which can easily be glanced by the owner if dashing off in a hurry. Of course, this thing would be entirely more appealing if it included a robotic secretary that actually screened your calls and passed along those that were important, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.

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Filed under: Misc. gadgets

Arcade type controllers are close to extinction, thanks to games requiring analog sticks and other crap like that. If you’re old school (or plain old), take a look at the Neo Geo Stick 2 – now, that is a joystick on which you can slam the buttons and perform a 14-hit combo like a real gamer. It is absolutely awesome for fighting and arcade games.

And with this, you cannot use the front buttons to perform throws or counter-attacks, it’s time to learn real skills. You hear that Randy?

Imation has announced its new Atom Flash Drives, a small flash drive the size of a paper clip measuring only 1.20 x 0.5 x 0.22-inches. If Super Talent’s got the world’s slimmest flash drive, the Imation atom flash drive may well be the tiniest.

The atom flash drive features a unique and iconic design in aluminum finish, plugs directly into USB ports, and has password protection and drive partitioning software. This tiny little device can hold data from 1GB to 8GB of data. 

The atom flash drives are compatible with Windows Ready Boost feature, so users have an option to speed up system performance on any Windows Vista PC.
Other than these features, the Imation Flash drives are so tiny that Imation couldn’t think of other innovative stuff to include in the flash drives any more. So, let’s just leave it at that. Pricing information of the Imation Atom flash drive is not yet available though.

Product [Imation Atom Flash Drives] Via [Pocket Lint]

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by Donald Melanson, posted Apr 10th 2008 at 5:22PM It’s not the first time IBM has tossed around “world’s fastest” language when discussing its Power6 processors, but the company’s now found reason to boast again, with it recently announcing that it’s released some new supercomputers based on its new “world’s most powerful microprocessor.” Getting that distinction is IBM’s latest Power 575 “Hydro-Cluster” supercomputer which, thanks to some nifty in-rack water-cooling measures, is able to accommodate the company’s speedy new 5GHz Power6 processor. According to IBM, that processor should deliver “two-to-three times the performance per core of comparable HP or Sun processors,” while still requiring only about the same amount of energy as previous Power5 processors. For its part, Sun is a bit skeptical IBM’s focus on speed, with a company spokesperson telling the San Francisco Chronicle that “it’s an easier marketing message to deliver to say that faster gigahertz means a faster processor,” adding that Sun instead focuses on multithreading to make its processors more efficient.

Read - IBM press release
Read - SFGate, “IBM chip is fastest on Earth”

[Via Slashdot]

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Filed under: Desktops

Remember this scene from Robocop? It’s the public unveiling of ED-209, and a programming glitch causes the giant killer robot to gun down an innocent suit. A chilling scene, and one which was almost re-enacted for real in Iraq.

Last year, three remote controlled, gun-toting robots, named SWORDS, were deployed in the war zone and then suddenly pulled from duty. Nobody knew why until Popular Mechanics quizzed the US Army’s Kevin Fahey at the RoboBusiness conference this week. Apparently, one of the robots went rogue: “the gun started moving when it was not intended to move” said Fahey. Unlike ED-209, the ‘bots were shutdown before any shots were fired, but it seems that the incident left people spooked enough to pull the plug on the operation.

Non-Answer on Armed Robot Pullout From Iraq Reveals Fragile Bot Industry [Popular Mechanics via the Reg]

Killer Ground ‘Bots Out of Iraq: How Come? [Danger Room]

When it comes to digital cameras, it’s fair to say that everybody likes the idea of a powerful zoom! That’s why Nikon added a whopping 18x optical zoom (27-486mm equivalent) that could prove very useful in many situations (wildlife, crowds…). Of course, with such a zoom comes some form of image stabilization to compensate for your body’s motion. Also, we like the fact that you can shoot 30 consecutive images at 13 frames per second. The Nikon P80 is a 10.1 Megapixel camera.

One of these is a photograph taken by the Hubble space telescope on December 17, 2002, featuring the variable star V838 Monocerotis. The other is the same photograph overlaid with a familiar logo. Can you tell which is which?

Below is another photo of the same star, from the Wikipedia entry on V838 Monocerotis. If the above photo has been photoshopped to look more like the Firefox logo, the editing seems minimal: it’s been rotated relative to the photo below, and some of the gas cloud may have been edited out around the "tail" of the fox.

If you’ve got a link to the original Hubble photo used above, let us know in the comments so we can compare. UPDATE: An eagle-eyed commenter, Wevah, spotted the original version of the Firefox-like nova photo on Wikipedia. It looks like the only modification was to rotate the image. It must be a sign from the stars!

Firefox logo spotted in deep space by the Hubble Telescope [New Launches]

Perhaps after all this while grappling with Blue Screens of Death while using Microsoft products, the company’s conscience has finally been pricked as they decide to help you save time instead of waste it with the aforementioned problem by launching a software technology known as “Clearflow”. Not only does this software helps drivers with directions, it can also be used to avoid traffic jams so that you will be able to arrive home in time for dinner with the missus. The technology involved has been in the works for the better part of the last half decade, thanks to the efforts of AI researchers from Microsoft’s Research lab. Clearflow aims to alleviate traffic congestion by applying machine-learning techniques. When launched, Clearflow will support 72 cities in the US and is available via Microsoft’s maps.live.com service.

Source: Techtree