The recent announcement about the Amazon Kindle Fire (henceforth known as Fire) have created quite a stir in the tech world. It’s a cheap tablet that was aimed to hit those people who don’t want to spend $500+ on an iPad or similar device. What do you lose? A camera or two, an SD reader, 3G capability and some internal memory. This is offset by … Continue reading Kindle lights Fire under Playbook’s tail
I honestly can’t figure out who I should be angry with this week. Is it Motorola or Verizon? Are they both equally at fault? I don’t know. But since I have already shit on Motorola a time or two, Let’s give Verizon Wireless a little time on the TWIFY stage.
I miss the good old days. Back in the day, folks used to get mad at Facebook whenever they issued a new update. It was usually because they arbitrarily moved some random feature around, or changed something for no good reason. Lately, they’ve actually had a string of pretty great updates! The curious thing is, a significant number of those updates are almost universally a … Continue reading Facebook Is Scared S#!tless of Google+
This Week In “Fuck You” – By now, you know the latest dick move perpetrated by GameStop, so I won’t go through any of that again. I will say that this is the last time I will buy anything from any GameStop. I’m not even going to walk into one unless I am saying hello to one of my friends that works there. I’m not going to be one of those people that say “I fucking hate [insert company or product here]!” that continues to support said company or product. I’ve seen a lot of shit go down at GameStop that I didn’t agree with, but this is far and away the worst thing. Like Popeye says: “I’ve had all I can stand, and I can’t stands no more!” Continue reading “TWIFY: GameStop.”
Go ahead and file this under both “Yeah, right” and “Durrrr…really?” A series of random quotes from anonymous scientists hidden under the sensationalist title of “Facebook will destroy your children’s brains” sums up what a lot of the digitally connected already know: People who don’t use social media services don’t have any idea how they really work. Statements like “What concerns me is the banality … Continue reading Facebook is destroying our ability to interact – or is it?
Why hello there, faithful reader/listener! Unless you live in RSS land, you’ve no doubt noticed quite a few changes on our website today. I believe I owe you an explanation for the changes to sooth your outrage excitement curiosity. The biggest change you’ve noticed is with our logo, as the Halloween font that has graced us since our site first launched last year is gone. … Continue reading Welcome to the new(er) Noisecast!
We’ve all heard about it. We’ve seen pictures, videos, and articles about it, but what it is really like to work at the Large Hadron Collider? When the glitz and glamor of media coverage die out, what happens? I don’t know about you, but I want to know what happens at CERN on any given tuesday. I don’t care if it’s slow, boring, or mundane. I want to know more about life at the LHC. Well friends, my wish has just been granted. And yours too (assuming we’re wishing for the same thing here).
Continue reading “Large Hadron Collider: The Insider Perspective”
We’ve all seen the comparisons made between Google Plus and Facebook lately. But Facebook may not be the only one that fell into El Goog’s sites when they launched Plus this past week. For a long time now Skype has been most peoples go to tool for video chat and calling. Mainly because it works and it has a simple user interface. Well now so does Google’s new Hangout feature.
For those of you who aren’t part of the elite Plus user base a Hangout is Google’s version of video chat. It supports up to 10 users at any time, can be private or public, and allows you to watch Youtube videos as a group. Using the service is as easy as clicking the “Start a Hangout” button on the right of your stream. After being in a fair share of Hangouts I can’t say that it is without fault, sometimes audio/video gets scrambled people get kicked out of the chat, and sometimes the whole Hangout will fail altogether. But being as this is a Beta we can hope and expect to see most of these issues resolved by launch. Continue reading “Can Google’s Hangout Kill Skype?”
Yesterday, in a Twitter town hall meeting (which shows that this president knows how to feel the pulse of the people) President Obama spoke his mind on the current state of National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
“We’re still using the same models for space travel that we used with the Apollo program, 30, 40 years ago. And so what we’ve said is: Rather than keep on doing the same thing, let’s invest in basic research around new technologies that can get us places faster, allow human spaceflight to last longer.”
Continue reading “NASA needs a revamp – Damn right, Mr President”
More than likely anybody reading this right now can remember the Facebook Privacy fiasco that was all over the news a couple of months ago. 500 million users all up in arms that Facebook, the free social networking service they signed up for under their own free will, wasn’t securing each and every bit of data they submitted with a force equal to that of Fort Knox. Now, as if nobody could have expected it, Google+ is facing some of those same criticisms.
Everytime I see a post on one social network or another regarding “breach of privacy” I wonder if the user has ever read the Terms of Service. Of course they didn’t read the Terms of Service! Nobody does, why would we? Social networking is cool, and of course we all want to be cool so we’ll agree to whatever they want just so that we can “poke” that person who sat in front of us in Biology freshman year. But if you would take the time to read these terms you would find something amazing in them. There is one person, in all of these networks, who is responsible for all of your information. You. You are the only person who can really control what information these companies can share about you. If you never post it to the site you never have to worry about where it goes. Continue reading “Social Privacy”
Facebook just unveiled their new video chatting service using Skype integration. There’s little doubt that, despite them being in bed together for a while now, video chatting wasn’t ready for primetime. Google+ changed things and likely forced their hands. That’s mainly conjecture, but here we have it, you can now video chat on Facebook, but would you want to?
The first problem you come across with Facebook’s video chat is the need to download a plugin (sorry, Chromebook users. No love for you). You only need to do this once and it’s at best an annoyance, at worst a hassle, for those of us adjusted to an “everything just works” mindset. With the call connected you’re greeted with the second problem. Continue reading “Give me group video chat or give me death”
Today, when someone mentions the site Myspace the immediate response in generally laughter. The site has been doomed for years and their average loss of about a million users a month since 2009 has all but put the final nail in the coffin for the social site. Many analysts speculate as to why it fell apart with accusations of mis-management, claims of Facebook being perceived as more trendy, and even the ever present “It’s too corporate, maaannnnn” argument. While most, if not all of these options may be true, I think there’s more to it than that.
This is a continuation of my day-long excursion at Raceway Park in Englishtown, NJ (turn your volume down before you click that one) with the SRT Track Experience. If you haven’t read part 1, you should read that first. This time we cover both of the road course modules and the Head-to-Head Challenge. Fun Fact: There used to be a drag race module as part of the experience, but it was taken out because none of the men liked it. The reason the men didn’t like it is because the women almost always beat them. That has nothing to do with anything in the article, I just thought it was funny when they told us so I figured you might as well. Let’s get into the article, shall we? ALLONS-Y! Continue reading “My SRT Track Experience: Part 2”
Research in Motion is in a tizzy. The recent first quarter earnings call showed a drop in net income, a projected drop in revenue of almost $1 billion, and the announcement of layoffs, sending the stock tumbling up to 20% in the aftermath. Furthermore, the PlayBook stats weren’t promising either as RIM reported that 500,000 units were shipped so far. That’s shipped, not sold. A third of that could easily be sitting around in the channel or on retail shelves. That’s not too bad when compared with Android’s Honeycomb tablets, which have had more retail time but only about 600,000 have been activated in the field. The silver lining to all of this is that international revenues were up 67%, year over year. However, we’ll get to how this is not necessarily a good thing later on.
Is RIM destined for failure? Will the BlackBerry brand end up being pawned off to some private investment group for peanuts? Can RIM ever get its mojo back? RIM may be bloodied and bruised, but it hasn’t been KO’d yet. Here’s how it can save itself. Continue reading “How to fix RIM”
Initially when I was invited to take a trip out to Englishtown NJ for the SRT Track Experience, I figured that I would write an article about how much fun I had driving someone else’s car like I had stolen it. I’d have a few pictures sprinkled in there, and maybe some video clips that I managed to grab while I was waiting my turn to drive. I’ve driven cars before, and I have even driven at triple-digit speeds. No big deal, right? Fortunately for me, I was wrong. There’s no way to describe exactly what goes on during the Track Experience in just a few short paragraphs. Anyone that tries to condense the experience into X number of words or pages simply isn’t doing it justice. Over the next few days I am going to try to explain what it feels like to drive some of the worlds best performing production vehicles as hard as you possibly can only to be shown at the end of the day that they were capable of even more. Spoiler alert: you’ve never had this much fun in your life. Continue reading “My SRT Track Experience: Part 1”
