News aggregator
Energy-saving LEDs 'will not save energy', say boffins
Federal boffins in the States say that the brave new future in which today's 'leccy-guzzling lights are replaced by efficient LEDs may not, in fact, usher in massive energy savings.…
BT ad banned for 'misleading' customers over broadband speeds
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned a BT television advert, after the watchdog concluded that customers had been misled by the telecom giant’s broadband speed claims.…
Morning Buzz — August 25, 2010
Google Earth for Android now features the ocean. Which will, you know, come in handy when I go visit Spongebob Squarepants.
Gov Gab has an overview of legislative changes to your credit card terms.
Jason Titus will be leaving Yahoo.
Google is testing an instant search feature. I wonder if this will be for the query words you actually typed in, or the words that Google has “corrected” them to?
Finding food carts with Bing. It only works in Portland, so far…
YouTube has a Fall TV Preview available.
The state of Colorado now has a cold case database online.
It’s official: Yahoo search is now powered by Bing. Sniffle.
Firefox 4 has a new beta.
Googler Matt Cutts is back from Mt. Kilimanjaro and he brought pictures. Love that sunset! Check ‘em out. Good morning, Internet…
You might also like:HP bangs on glass as 3PAR marches to the altar
If 3PAR decides the HP re-bid is a superior offer it is going to give Dell three days to come up with a better acquisition offer or be jilted.…
WikiLeaks readies next release
WikiLeaks used Twitter to tell the world it is to release a CIA document later today.…
Facebook Places 'sparks interest in similar services'
Alternative location service echoecho reckons Facebook Places is driving up interest in the subject, to the good of the whole industry and, in particular, echoecho.…
WD debuts four-port powerline boxes
Are your one-port powerline Ethernet adaptors proving insufficient for hooking up all the gadgets you want to connect to your network? Western Digital has the answer.…
Paris Hilton tweets armed intruder drama
Paris Hilton entertained her 2,520,223 Twitter followers yesterday with a quick tweet revealing that some bloke had just tried to enter her Hollywood Hills pad armed with "knifes".…
Alibaba opens up coffers for eBay listing service
Chinese auction house Alibaba is expanding its US presence by grabbing Auctiva - the Californian firm which makes tools for business users of eBay.…
Stockholm schoolgirls fined for bugging staff room
Two Stockholm schoolgirls have been slapped with a fine for bugging the staff room at their seat of learning.…
Marten Mickos defends honor of Ubuntu's Koala food
Marten Mickos – the former MySQL chief executive who now heads build-you-own-cloud outfit Eucalyptus Systems – has defended the Eucalyptus platform against recent criticism of both its "open core" model and its ability to scale beyond a relatively small number of servers.…
Argentine court overturns ruling on search engines' link liability
An appeals court in Argentina has ruled that search engines are not responsible for the content of sites that they index. The court overturned a lower court's ruling against Google and Yahoo! Argentina.…
Ten Essential Wireless Headphones
Product Round-up The last batch of stereo Bluetooth headphones I looked at, back in 2008, were something of a mixed bag, with some cumbersome designs and very variable audio quality. Fortunately, the current generation provides much better stereo quality, and we’d happily recommend any of them as an alternative to a conventional set of wired headphones.…
ARM chips put on their server boots
The ARM RISC processor is taking a few baby steps closer to being a credible alternative to x64 processors for servers, according to ARM Holdings, the British company behind the popular chip.…
Java lobby lowers Android and iPhone defenses
Carriers and handset makers are rallying to make it cheaper and easier to deliver applications on phones using the "official" brand of Java on mobile.…
Intel details 10-core Westmere-EX server silicon
Hot Chips Intel has confirmed that its upcoming Westmere-EX server processor will be a 10-core, server-enhanced, single-die beastie.…
Google tests phone calls from Gmail
Google is testing a service that lets you make phone calls from Gmail, according to a report that includes a screen shot of the test.…
Microsoft punts 'significant' Office for Facebook update
Microsoft claims to have significantly reworked the Office applications for Facebook adjunct to its main, $14bn Office applications business.…
Remix Your Politix With Museum of the Moving Image
Here’s the ResearchBuzz part of why I’m doing this writeup: Museum of the Moving Image has a Web site called The Living Room Candidate, available at http://livingroomcandidate.org. This site contains over 500 commercials covering every presidential election from 1952 on up. That’s quite an archive. The site also has free downloadable lesson plans and the ability to view the commercials by type (biographical, fear, backfire, etc.) or by issue (civil rights, taxes, war, etc.)
The site has been up for a couple of years. I am covering it now because of the newly-launched AdMaker, an editing tool that will allow you to remix campaign ads or make new ones. The new tool is available at http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/admaker.
This page only has a couple of full commercials for remixing (one with John McCain and another with Nixon/Humphrey) but there’s also a feature that allows you to mix your own commercial.
You’re given snippets of media and tools in several different categories, including images, audio, video, transitions, effects, etc. Editing is via a simple click and drag layout; clicking on the end of a snippet and pulling it allows you to edit it down where you want it. (Video is added with audio, but an audio control on the right allows you to control the volume.) You can only add one layer of video at a time but multiple layers of audio are supported.
Don’t see what you like in the available media? AdMaker allows you to easily upload your own and integrate it into your commercial. And that’s how I ended up with video of a bear wandering around the woods with a voiceover of Bill Clinton saying he’d inhale if he had to do over again, all to the background soundtrack of Laurie Anderson’s Sharkey’s Day. And if you registered with The Living Room Candidate, you can save your masterpiece for later perusal.
I had a tremendous amount of fun with this. I hope Museum of the Moving Image expands the number of clips available in AdMaker. I can imagine some talented people making great ads.
You might also like:Embotics plays nanny for VMware virtual machines
Another VMworld event is coming down the pike from VMware with everyone riding its virtualization wake, and containing VM sprawl is still a problem. Which is why Embotics is kicking up its V-Commander server virtualization management system for VMware hypervisors to the 3.6 release level.…
