Bit.ly Quantifies Internet Impatience, Old Links Get no Love

Oh internet, we love your animated GIFs and sad Keanu websites, but how much attention are we really giving each link? According to a recent study by URL shortener Bit.ly, a standard link is clicked for an average of three hours until traffic subsides by 50 percent, eventually fading away into oblivion. If we're talking about a super timely news story like an earthquake hitting the east coast, well, its half-life was a paltry five minutes. When URLs are shared on social networks, they last around 3.2 hours on Facebook and 2.8 hours on Twitter, but those on YouTube persist more than twice that long. There, link half-life is 7.4 hours -- probably because it's home to phenom bomb memes.

 

 

Ecko Zip Earbuds Pump Tunes Through a Functioning Zipper

These in-ear beauts will set you back just 30 beans -- or about a half-dozen servings of Ron Ron Juice. Other offerings include the $13 Zone earbuds, $15 Chaos II (that Chaos I was off the hook), the $20 Stomp, $25 Lace (which include a shoelace-inspired cord), and the $40 Chain, which, as you probably guessed, features a beaded dog-tag chain cord. At those prices we wouldn't expect stellar acoustics, but if you're rockin' out to any of these budz, you're probably most concerned with lookin' good. And nothing says six-pack like zippers and chains. Get them here or just search on Amazon.

Windows 8 Boots Up Faster Than a Bull Ride

What's Microsoft got to compete with the MacBook Air's near-instant on? According to a recent demonstration from its Building Windows 8 blog, the ability to take a machine from fully powered off to booted up in just under eight seconds.

The key change behind the improvement? In Windows 7, all user sessions are closed, as are services and devices in the kernel session. Windows 8, though, doesn't close the kernel session. It puts it in hibernation mode. By writing the kernel session to a disk—instead of having to restore it completely with every start up—Microsoft has seen improved boot times of 30-70%.

If you want a complete shutdown, you'll still have the option to revert back to Windows 7-style. But why drive a Volvo when you can roll in a... uh... 30% faster Volvo? More.

 

 

This Is How 9/11 Looked From Space

Taken by the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus camera on NASA's Landsat 8, this image shows the 9/11 attack site. If you think that this is not impressive, think again: it was taken the next day, September 12 at 11:30am.

The image shows New York and the smoke from the World Trade Center in true color. More here.

 

 

How to View a Private Youtube Video

It’s just simple if you know the URL of the private YouTube video that you like to see. You can easily see some of the still frames of that video even without the permission from the owner. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or7--7Ny16Q

Just copy the ID of any YouTube video from its URL (in the above case, Or7--7Ny16Q) and replace it in the following links.

* http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Or7--7Ny16Q/0.jpg
* http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Or7--7Ny16Q/1.jpg
* http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Or7--7Ny16Q/2.jpg
* http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Or7--7Ny16Q/3.jpg

What actually the reason is that YouTube creates thumbnails of every video that’s uploaded in their server and those images are made public even in the case of private videos. An image is worth a thousand words. So, its easy for you to know what’s inside a Private Youtube Video.

 

 

Viewsonic's $200 ViewPad 7e Android Tablet now Available for Pre-Order

Viewsonic has been at the low-cost Android tablet for some time now, and it showed no signs of letting up on that effort at IFA last week, where it debuted its newViewPad 7e. If that managed to pique your interest, you'll be glad to know that the device is now available for pre-order for $199.99 (though there's still no promised ship date). 

That will buy you a 7-inch screen, a 1GHz Cortex-A8 processor, Android 2.3 for an OS, 4GB of built-in storage, a microSD card slot for further expansion, and even a mini HDMI port that will let you output full 1080p video. Get it here.

The Next Version of Android After Ice Cream Sandwich Will Be Called Jelly Bean

The next version of Android after Ice Cream Sandwich will be called Jelly Bean. It's supposed to pack "game-changing stuff" that was originally supposed to be on Ice Cream Sandwich but didn't quite make it in time.

Ice Cream Sandwich so looking sounds kinda crazy at this point but at least we know the name! I'd have much rather seen Jello (probably nixed for copyright issues since they have enough of that) or just jelly (jelly sounds incredibly funny by itself) though.

And if you want to take a look back into history at how far Android has come, these have been the updates to Android so far: Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Gingerbread, Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich.

Twitter Doesn’t Give a Damn Who You Are

Twitter had a meeting yesterday to talk about how big it was. But what really came across was that while Facebook and Google+ value your identity, Twitter doesn't care who you are, as long as you've got something to say.

Google Facebook and Twitter now all have similar products. But Twitter CEO Dick Costello (somewhat inadvertently) made it clear yesterday that while all three have social networking features and make money from ads, they are in fundamentally different businesses.

At a very basic level, Google+ and Facebook are in the identity delivery business, and Twitter is in the information delivery business. That's a powerful distinction. It reflects a fundamentally different conception of what's more valuable: information or identity. It also gets at who is more valuable, advertisers or users.

Google and Facebook's social products are committed to a real names policy. Both can serve someone up to a network of peers or advertisers with some degree of certainty about identity.

Twitter takes exactly the opposite route towards building a network. You can be anonymous, or use a pseudonym, or even impersonate someone else as long (as you indicate that it's a parody). It will still connect you to others on its network, and allow you to both serve and receive data. And that's working well, for everybody.

Twitter has more than 100 million active users—that is a user who logs on more than once a month—and more than 50 million who log in daily. 40 percent of its active users don't tweet at all. They just log in to read. (In common parlance, they're lurking.) The ones who do tweet are sending more than 230 million tweets per day. It's big now. Very big!

In short, Twitter doesn't care who you are, it's still going to serve you an ad. And oddly, that may be the most effective tactic of all.

 

 

Dell Jams a Terabyte of SATA3 SSD Storage Into Precision M6600 Laptop

Dell is tweaking some of the options offered on its Precision M6600 and M4600 mobile workstations. You can now choose to add 512GB SATA3 SSD drives and (in the case of the M6600) a 4GB NVIDIA Quadro 5010M card. The interesting thing though, is that the 6600 has space for three drives: two full size and one mini-card slot. That means you could outfit this 17.3-inch beast with a pair of 512GB SSDs and one 128GB SSD, for a grand total of 1.1TB of solid state storage. Of course, with each half-terabyte drive adding a whopping $1,120 to the price of this professional lappy it's not exactly for those on a budget.

 

 

Sony Ericsson's Xperia Play 4G Hitting AT&T on September 18th

Sony Ericsson's Xperia Play has made the natural GSM shift in the States in order to grace Ma Bell's airwaves, and despite the "4G" naming convention, this fellow will be topping out at HSPA+. In other words, LTE lovers will need to look elsewhere. This marks the first launch of a PlayStation-certified smartphone for AT&T, and given that it's been around the block a time or two, the carrier is (smartly) pricing it at just $49.99 on a two-year contract -- a buck-fifty less than what it launched for on Verizon Wireless. 

It'll ship with Android 2.3.3, a 1GHz CPU, Adreno 205 GPU, a 4-inch display (854 x 480) and will arrive in an exclusive 'stealth blue' hue. AT&T customers will also be blessed with a gratis Multimedia Dock (DK300) and MC100 music cable, not to mention seven pre-loaded games at no charge.

 

 

The Father of the eBook Is Dead

Michael Hart invented the ebook. The idea that gave the Kindle a reason to exist, has helped float the iPad to its peak, and is currently killing bookstores. But before all that, he just wanted books to be $0.00.

There's a good chance you've used Project Gutenberg, one of the internet's great treasures. Among its 37,000 free texts, available in a multitude of languages, all for free, are some of humankind's greatest written works. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Moby Dick, Jane Eyre, the Declaration of Independence—all for free. It's an incredible, if somewhat dated looking resource.

It wonder what Hart, who died Tuesday at 64, would think of his creation. Ebooks are now an enormously lucrative commodity—enough to put expensive pieces of plastic into eager hands. But that seems to run a bit contrary to Project Gutenberg's ethos, that words should be available to anyone for no charge. Of course, Gutenberg's collection is all public domain stuff, and a lot of things flying into Kindles isn't.

But whether that's what Hart wanted or not, digitized text has become about a lot more than knowledge and opportunity. More.

 

 

Apple Already Planning Third Campus

In addition to their circular "spaceship" campus, because of company growth, Apple is already in the early planning stages of building a third campus.

Cupertino Mayor Gilbert Wong told the San Jose Mercury News that Apple executives had confided in him that they are already planning a third Apple campus after they finish the "spaceship" building, that has been dubbed Apple Campus 2. Additionally, Cupertino city officials have suggested that a sculpture of Steve Jobs be added to the Apple Campus 2 plans.

The location and design of the third office-park-that-iPhone built hasn't been announced, and Apple has declined to comment about it. We're guessing they told the Mercury News that "Apple doesn't comment of future products."

 

 

Electrified Bacteria Army Kills Uranium, Gives Captain Planet a Run for His Money

A certain type of "hairy" bacteria may just be the answer to cleaning up radioactive spills. Scientists at the University of Southern California found that under certain circumstances, Geobacter sulfurreducens could make metals like uranium less soluble -- essentially turning the metal into hard droplets rather than being absorbed. Researchers discovered that by lowering the bacteria's temperature, it caused hair-like pili to extend, which enveloped the poison uranium and ultimately reduced it through long-range electron transfer. 

The breakthrough could help deplete sources of uranium or other radioactive isotopes where bacteria normally can't survive -- like from the Fukushima nuclear plant that devastated Japan earlier this year. Scientists believe they've only scratched the surface with this development and are optimistic about the future of bacteria "electromicrobiology," which we can only guess grew in popularity after this '80s classic hit the airwaves.

 

 

How Old Are You In Venusian Years?

I just found out that I'll celebrate my next birthday at the end of September and I am old, at least in Venusian years. Curious about your own age if you lived on Venus and used its shorter calendar?

If you are, then you should point your browser to Nerdiversary, a light-hearted website that uses your birthday to list upcoming timely events in your life. You can calculate your age on Venus and Mars and find out how many seconds you've been alive (hint: it's an immensely large number). It's a fun distraction when you have a few free moments on your hand.

An Office Chair Worth Dying In

The Sayl Chair is Herman Miller's minimalist masterpiece. After long weekends, I'm overcome by the feeling that I'll die in my office. That's a disturbing thought, but I'd feel mighty comfortable dying in a Sayl—I'd look good, too.

The world first saw the Sayl office chair last year with a Y-Shaped support designed to hoist up your body much like towers and cables hoist a suspension bridge. The streamlined design looks great and saves on materials. I can see my epitaph now: Hard-working, comfortable, stylish AND eco-friendly. At $499 the Sayl's cheaper than other high-design chairs and seems like a worthwhile investment. The chair will probably last forever—and might turn out to be the last place you ever sit down. Get it here.

Velocity Micro Cruz T410 Gingerbread Tablet

Looks like the T408 has company. Velocity Micro today announced the Cruz T410, the bigger brother to the recently unveiled eight-inch T408. The 10-inch tablet rocks similar specs as its smaller sibling, including a 1GHz Cortex A8 processor, Android 2.3, a front-facing camera, WiFi, and pre-loaded Amazon content. The budget Android tablet will be available this month, running $299.99 -- $60 more than the T408, but still fairly affordable in the tablet world. Get it here.

 

 

What Does Instagram Do To Famous Photographs?

Instagram is great for spicing up plain photographs taken by your iPhone. It has several filters, unlimited uploads and lets you share your photos with social networks like Twitter and Facebook. No wonder it has 200 million hosted images.

But what happens when those plain photographs are replaced with famous images? Check out the picture above that shows the Instagram version on the left and the original on the right. Does Instagram improve or diminish the quality of these memorable shots? Get the app here.

BlackBerry Torch 9850 Officially Coming to Verizon September 8th for $200

After over a month of speculation and rumors, Verizon is ready to get the BlackBerry Torch 9850 into the hands of eager customers. At a cost $50 higher than its arch CDMA nemesis (not to mention a couple weeks behind), Big Red has jumped aboard to offer the touch-only smartphone for $200 with a two-year agreement. The devices will begin selling online September 8th, with units showing up in stores a week later. 

 

 

New Moon Landing Sites Photos Are So Sharp They Show Detailed Rover Tire Marks

NASA showed images of the lunar landing sites in 2009, punching all moronic conspiracy theorists a new stupid face, Buzz Aldrin style. Now they have released new higher resolution shots taken again by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

These images were taken with the low-altitude Narrow Angle Camera, according to Arizona State University researcher Mark Robinson, principal investigator for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC):

You can also clearly see the Lunar Modules' descent stages. Now, if they can get it any closer, we would like photos of Aldrin's used underpants.

Nokia Wants You to Create its Next Iconic Ringtone

On the streets, in crowded restaurants, and even in movies, you've likely heard the same song ad nauseam for the last seventeen years: the rockin' default ringtone used on virtually every Nokia device since 1994. And while it's evolved over the years, Espoo's always taken upon itself to choose the next version of the iconic tune. For the next iteration, however, the company is leaving it up to you to be the creative genius, and is offering a reward of $10,000 for the best one.

Five submissions will be chosen as runner-ups, each getting their entry offered in the Ovi store as well as a smaller cash prize for their efforts. So if you've always wanted to hear your own creation blasting out of millions of phones each and every day, now's your chance -- you have until October 2nd to get that spark of musical innovation.