Contact lenses with circuits, lights a possible platform for superhuman vision

Movie characters from the Terminator to the Bionic Woman use bionic eyes to zoom in on far-off scenes, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual cross-hairs. Off the screen, virtual displays have been proposed for more practical purposes – visual aids to help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and even as a way to surf the Web on the go.

The device to make this happen may be familiar. Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

The new MacBook Air featured at the MacWorld 2008 is the thinnest notepad ever built. It’s a full-size notebook encased in a 0.16 to 0.76 inch of sleek, sturdy anodized aluminum. And at just 3.0 pounds, you can almost put it in your pocket…

It comes with a 13,3″ screen with 1280-by-800 resolution, Intel Core Duo, 2GB RAM, 80GB storage, a built in web cam and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth wireless networking and then some…. It even claims to last 5 hours running on batteries while working.

Very nice looking “gadget”, but I still want an iMac for my birthday

The music industry is likely to replace the copy protection (DRM) with digital watermarks.
Recently the worlds 4 main record companies have all started selling digital music without Digital Rights Management (DRM). Amazon’s MP3 service is the first company out offering MP3’s from all 4. But even though the DRM is gone it doesn’t mean the companies are opening the doors for unlimited copying.

That being said, there’s no real copy protection any more. But if you share your newly bought MP3 in a file sharing network (P2P) it’s not unlikely that the file can be tracked back to the initial buyer through a hidden number placed in a digital watermark inside the file.

According to Wired, none of them has taken it to this level yet. Sony only uses “anonymous” watermarks that only gives some information about the “spread”. Warner and EMI have not yet implemented watermarks. Attorney Fred Von Lohmann at Electronic Frontier Foundation says to Wired that anonymous watermarks may be used to filter content by the ISP’s, given the record industry gets their way.

According to yesterdays announcement on Weblog Tools Collection there will be no more (major) updates from the WordPress development team until March.

The announcement can be read below:

As discussed in the developer mailing list, the next release of WordPress will be in March instead of January because of the holidays and the amount of changes that will take place in the codebase as well as the admin section. The decision was made to consider 2.4 a skipped December release and move straight on to 2.5. The reasons for the change in the schedule include some good things cooking in the oven and the developers do not want this to become a rushed release.

So to sum things up. There will be no 2.4. Instead, we will see 2.5 which is scheduled for release in March. Various official docs and roadmaps will be updated in due course.

I’m not 100% sure if this is a good thing or not, but at least it gives me some time to prepare my next WordPress Theme…

Anyone out there know of any major database changes, please let me know!

The first release candidate of Service Pack 3 for Windows XP is now available. Visit Microsoft to download the Standalone Update Package (Windows® XP Service Pack 3 Release Candidate).

Microsoft gives the following overview of what to expect:

This is the self-extracting executable that contains the update package for Windows® XP Service Pack 3. Windows® XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) includes all previously released updates for the operating system. This update also includes a small number of new functionalities, which do not significantly change customers’ experience with the operating system.

This pre-release software is provided for testing purposes only. Microsoft does not recommend installing this software on primary or mission critical systems. Microsoft recommends that you have a backup of your data prior to installing any pre-release software.

Early feedback from other users indicate that SP3 provides slightly better overall performance. SP3 also includes NAP (Network Access Protection) support which helps determine your computers “health” before granting access to on-line update services.

For those of you with a somewhat “fishy” XP license, be aware that SP3 will ask you for the product key, but this time AFTER the installation. Just so you know…