Here at Google, we receive a lot of feature requests - and it feels great every time we fulfill one of them. The ability to utilize the power of Google Maps from Flash is one of those requests that has been popping up on blog posts and other forums since the beginning of time or more accurately, the beginning of the Javascript Maps API . Over the past few hours, I ve had the enjoyment of finally seeing this particular feature request - a Maps API for Flash - come to fruition. Tiredness will grab me soon, no doubt. If you re one of the first readers of this post, rest assured that I m unlikely to still be awake: long hours have been worked; pre-launch nerves have jangled. Now it s time to let our baby loose into the world and see how the developer community will embrace it.
So, what do I like about the API for Flash? Smoothness and speed are a big part of it. We ve designed it so that Flash graphics can be used for each tile layer, marker and info window - opening up possibilities like dynamic shading, shadowing, animation, and video. When the user zooms the map, magnification changes happen smoothly and place NAMEs fade in. After the user drags a marker, it gently bounces to a halt. Generally, Flash allows for much greater embellishment, and, well... flashiness. I get excited just thinking about the creative ways developers might take advantage of having a Flash API for Google Maps.
What was one of our main design decisions for this project? We knew that version 1 of any software project is not perfect, so we opted to split the interface and implementation. As a result, you can build against the current version of the API, and as we add enhancements and tweaks, your website benefits automatically from each update. When you wish to take advantage of new API functions, only then do you need to download the latest API and rebuild.
Check out the demo... I am not big on flash, but I like that they are embracing something new....
Jamie Lidell has been releasing EPs or full-length albums for about a decade now, but his most recent album, Jim, hits all the right notes. Part funk, part soul, and a whole lot of “Minneapolis Sound,” Lidell helps revive one of the greatest eras of music. Check out this track:
Check it out... “Minneapolis” Great “Minneapolis” sound... :P
The LIFE SIZE MOUSETRAP is a fantastically hand crafted, 16 piece 50,000-lb. interactive KINETIC SCULPTURE set atop a 6,500-square-foot, 2,000-lb GAME BOARD.
This giant Rube Goldberg style contraption comes complete with a VAUDEVILLIAN style show, original MUSICAL SCORE by The one woman band Esmerelda Strange, Sexy Mice CAN-CAN DANCERS, Clown workers, acrobatic HI JINKS, and other SPECTACULAR SCENES dedicated to the pursuit of spectacle laden FUN!
One of the ironies of the current broadband situation in the US is that staunch free marketeers defend the status quo even though the result of their views has been duopoly and high prices. Meanwhile, other countries including those with a reputation in some quarters for socialism have taken aggressive steps to create a robust, competitive, consumer-friendly marketplace with the help of regulation and national investment. Related Stories
Critics, it s time to stop the quibbling: the data collection practices that show the US dropping year-over-year in all sorts of broadband metrics from uptake to price per megabit might not prove solid enough to trust with your life, but we re out of good reasons to doubt their general meaning.
On March 26, 2004, George Bush talked up the importance of broadband. This country needs a national goal for... the spread of broadband technology, he said. We ought to have... universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007, and then we ought to make sure as soon as possible thereafter, consumers have got plenty of choices when it comes to their broadband carrier.
But multiple reports show that countries around the world are beating us at broadband, and we re putting our economy and technological leadership at risk through a truly stunning failure to cast a national vision. Other countries are doing better at this, and they re doing it through a combination of financing, fear competition , and federal mandates.
Microsoft vies for budget laptop market with XP price cuts
Topic: Technology
12:14 pm EDT, May 12, 2008
Microsoft plans to offer hardware vendors significant price cuts on Windows XP licenses for low-cost computing products, but the deal will only be available for computers with low hardware specs. This tactic is part of Microsoft s strategy to stifle adoption of Linux by computer manufacturers that are targeting the budget market, where low cost and high flexibility give the open source operating system an edge. Related Stories
The popularity of the game-changing Asus Eee PC, which ships with a heavily-modified version of the Xandros Linux distribution, spawned a whole new class of inexpensive computers. Other vendors have entered the market with their own competing products, many of which also use the open source operating system. Windows is a poor fit for such computers, which are designed and priced like budget appliances. Vista requires too much hardware overhead, while Windows XP licenses add extra expense to the budget hardware that can be avoided by using Linux. So as products like the Eee bring Linux into homes and schools, Microsoft has struggled to squeeze into the growing budget hardware niche.
According to IDG, which obtained details about the price cuts from hardware vendors, Microsoft will offer Windows XP licenses for $26 for developing countries and $32 for the rest of the world. In order to qualify for these deep discounts, products will have to be limited to a maximum of 1GB of RAM, 10.2 inch screens, and single-core processors clocked no higher than 1GHz though there are apparently some exceptions . Products must also not have hard drives exceeding 80 GB in capacity and cannot have touch-screen technology.
How about just cut the price period? Up sales... increase $$$ flow!
Throttle 5 million P2P users with $800K DPI monster
Topic: Technology
12:13 pm EDT, May 12, 2008
Procera Networks will announce today a new standard in deep packet inspection DPI gear: an 80Gbps monster called the PacketLogic PL10000 that is targeted at tier-1 network operators. At up to $800,000 a unit, these aren t cheap, but when you want to throttle, inspect, and shape traffic in real-time on a major network, this is now the fastest thing on the market and by a large margin .
Procera s appliances all run the same software, so the difference between them is in the interfaces and the number of racks the units take up. The PL10000, the company s top-of-the-line offering and provides 5 10Gbps channels and 9 1Gbps channels in a 12 rack unit. It can handle 80Gbps of total speed, but most ISPs will want to keep an eye on traffic moving in both directions, bringing this down to 40Gbps each way.
White House insists it has e-mail recovery under control
Topic: Society
12:12 pm EDT, May 12, 2008
The Bush administration last week filed responses to a federal magistrate judge's questions relating to ongoing litigation over what critics say is thousands of missing e-mails. Administration lawyers submitted a 22-page legal brief and a 7-page declaration from Theresa Payton, CIO of the White House's Office of Administration. The brief strenuously objected to the demands of the lead plaintiff, the National Security Archive (which filed suit alongside Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington), that special measures be taken to preserve hard drives and removable media that could be useful in future forensic efforts to retrieve e-mails.
Doveryai, no Proveryai : Security flaw turns Gmail into open-relay server...
Topic: Technology
12:10 pm EDT, May 12, 2008
A recently-discovered flaw in Gmail is capable of turning Google's e-mail service into a highly effective spam machine. According to the Information Security Research Team (INSERT), Gmail is susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack that allows a spammer to send thousands of bulk e-mails through Google's SMTP service without fear of detection. This attack bypasses both Google's identity fraud protection mechanisms and the current 500-address limit on bulk e-ma
This project was inspired by Aftotech’s Hard Drive Speakers page 4 . Basically the voice coil drive circuit was located on the hard drive controller board and disconnected by cutting a trace. The voice coil was metered and was found to be 10 ohms, this was within range to be driven directly from my stereo speaker output.
This is bad ass... What a great (but useless) idea... time to get the VOM and some torx bits out...
