rainbowfamilymusic.com

It’s hard to say what the union could produce besides ugly children. But it’s not just a hypothetical hybrid: programmer Chris Anderson has released software called AppDrop that brings App Exchange to EC2. Programmer Andy Baio spotlighted the development Monday on his blog.

Baio quotes Anderson as saying there’s room for database improvement,Louis vuitton Watches, though, including software that could bridge to the more conventional MySQL database software.

OK, now I need to mention the caveat that this isn’t really one cloud computing foundation running inside another.

What do you get when you cross Amazon’s EC2 on-demand cloud computing infrastructure with Google’s new App Exchange foundation for Web applications?

“It wouldn’t be that hard to write a Python adapter to MySQL that would preserve the BigTable API,” or application programming interface,Rolex Watches, Anderson is quoted as saying. “And while that wouldn’t be quite as scalable as BigTable,Cubic Zirconia jewelry, we’ve all seen that MySQL can take you pretty far.”

In fact, Anderson just has the single-computer version of Google’s App Engine software running on EC2 rather than the real online one. That means software written with Google’s App Engine software developer kit can run on EC2 servers, but it can’t take advantage of some of the central features of App Engine. For example, it stores data on that particular server and can’t employ Google’s BigTable data-storage service to tap into Google’s large and load-balanced infrastructure.

FCC: Comcast illegally squeezed BitTorrent

YouTuber charged over threats to poison baby food

Homeland security: We can seize laptops for an indefinite period

Download today’s podcast

Today’s stories:

Yahoo face-to-face with shareholders

California judge rules Sprint’s early termination fees illegal

Why Facebook left Scrabulous alone

Federal regulators voted 3-2 on Friday to declare that Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent traffic last year was illegal. It’s the first time any U.S. broadband provider has ever been found to violate Net neutrality rules. But it’s not an open-and-shut case. Though Comcast has since stopped the practice, it’s unclear whether the FCC actually has the authority to rule on this kind of issue. CNET News’ Declan McCullagh stops by to explain the implications.

Also on Friday’s podcast: Yahoo shareholders finally get their say; a California judge says early-termination fees for wireless plans are illegal; and the Department of Homeland Security says it can confiscate any laptops taken across U.S. borders.

Hands on with LG’s Netflix Blu-ray player

Listen now:

I thought I’d give the two a comparative whirl with a simple search for something a Chinese user wouldn’t necessarily need to search for: what is the exact date of the Spring Festival/Chinese New Year in the Gregorian calendar. The result? Google wins, giving me the date, as well as an icon indicating this is the coming year of the rat. It also links to a board for Spring Festival greetings…

(Credit: Google/Sinobyte)

The blog says the test was conducted by Enquiro. This result would seem to suggest that Google, like when it’s compared to other English search engines such as Yahoo, seems to get users to what they want more quickly. I’d caution, however, that there may be a complication in that the test subjects may have been more familiar with the Baidu layout and were thus more interested in culling more information from familiar locations on the page. Both sites have exceedingly clean front pages.

In a test conducted with Chinese subjects, eye scanning on Google.cn was more focused in the upper left hand corner compared to Baidu despite the fact that both search engines have nearly identical page layouts. Baidu users also scrolled down the page more than the Google users, but clicked on less sponsored listings–less than 1 percent compared to 3 percent for Google. …

Google is also rumored to be experimenting with a more, say, cluttered home page for the Chinese market, along the lines of the leading Chinese search engine Sohu.com. I’d love to see comparisons of user experience including Sohu’s Yahoo-esque portal. Yahoo itself, so far, is something of an also-ran, with a live beta online. Why it advertises that it’s a beta and doesn’t just launch with continual improvements the way Google has is beyond me.

On Baidu, less than 45 percent of all clicks took place in the first 3 organic listings. This was much less focused than Google.cn where over 70 percent of all clicks took place on the top 2 organic results alone. Baidu pages also had significantly longer reading times–an average of 55 seconds–compared to 30 seconds on Google.cn.

Baidu also links to its festival page, which gives us a history of the holiday, but it’s significantly harder to find the most simple fact you might be looking for: the exact date. On the other hand, Baidu’s page gives you a nice history (translated) of the holiday.

(Credit: Baidu/Sinobyte)

I’d meant to note this earlier, but SEO Hong Kong posted a summary of some findings when Chinese Internet users were tested comparing China’s leading search engine, Baidu, with the newer Google.cn.

Rafe’s point is that if the service wants to be the utility it is, it can’t be flaky, which I agree with. However, I think that Twitter is better off limping along keeping it’s users engaged–at least to some extent.

Twitter went from being the ultra-hip, high-flying service to semi-defeated in the span of just a few months.

I personally went from nay-sayer to enthusiast in the blink of an eye. I enjoyed seeing what my friends were doing and found that most of us could communicate effectively within the 140 characters.

Maybe I am talking out of both sides of my mouth here—my last Tweet said that “Twitter is dead to me without IM and SMS” but I would really like to see the system be successful. Technology aside, that brand is way stronger than any of the other me-too’s that have shown up recently.

One of the first guys who I followed was Rafe Needleman, who is a friend (and my editor in the past) and is a very informed consumer of technology. Rafe is calling for Twitter to shut down and remodel. While that sounds great in theory, it’s unfortunately not very practical.

“On close inspection, the similarities with E.T. are obvious, but it’s hard to say with any certainty what, exactly, it is,” said Malcolm Robinson, Head of Strange Phenomena Investigations, according to the Telegraph.

The image, which you can see here, suggests that E.T. has lost his way. Perhaps he has lost his bike.

(Credit: CC Dalbera)

That is the troublesome question patting at the heads of certain UFO experts, whose attention has been drawn to the apparent apparition of E.T. on Google Street View.

If you were able to get on a bicycle, put a little child or two into the front basket, and fly off into the bluest yonder, would you make your home in Berkeley Heights, N.J.?

I demand a full investigation, don’t you? I’m worried that Steven Spielberg might make a sequel.

This is rumored to be E.T.'s great-great-great-great grandfather. He resides in a museum in Belfast.

The kindly Google Street View camera took the image on the corner of Diamond Hill Road, about 8 miles from Morristown Municipal Airport.

Perhaps the Mob is experimenting with more refined scientific techniques in shipping coke and dead bodies. Or perhaps this was a spaceship bringing E.T. back to Earth after he’d had an argument with his mom.

There is much debate as to why New Jersey seems to have become something of a epicenter for unexplained flying objects. Three months ago, unsettling, blinking red lights were seen in the Morris County sky.

The S560 has 15 scene modes to choose from, as well as the ability to let the camera automatically select the appropriate mode. These modes include a Smile Mode, which snaps a picture when the subject smiles; a Food Mode made for capturing close-ups of (you guessed it) food; and Portrait Mode, which couples a Smile Mode with a Blink Warning.

(Credit:
Nikon)

Look for the Coolpix S560 in September 2008, available in a choice of three colors: graphite black, cool blue, and cherry blossom.

The back of the S560 houses a 2.7-inch LCD monitor with anti-reflection coating to help you see the redesigned shooting displays and icons in bright light. And, available across the Coolpix line–S560 included–you’ll get a helping of Nikon’s technology enhancements, like Face-Priority AF, In-Camera Red-Eye Fix, and D-Lighting, which compensates for excessive backlight or insufficient flash in images.

For $249.95 the Nikon Coolpix S560 offers 10 effective megapixels, a 5x Zoom-Nikkor lens, the company’s Optical Vibration Reduction (VR) Image Stabilization technology, and a bunch of features to make taking pictures easier and end results better. (Yeah, sorry, it’s kinda humdrum all the way around. On the other hand, that means it should be simple to use.)

There are, in fact, several ways to disable this feature entirely. One way is to follow the instructions on this page, which involves a small tweak to your about:config file. Doing so will disable the drop-down of links completely, but not your auto fill. There’s also an add-on extension that mimics the behavior of the address bar found in
Firefox 2 with slightly smaller favicons, link text, and sorting.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Reader Jim points us toward this post on Mozilla Links about the feature back in the second beta that has accumulated nearly 300 user comments. Notice the date though (November 2007), and the latest comment was just a few minutes ago. Most of the comments praise the new feature, while some power users are complaining about the structuring of the links and want the option to disable bookmarks as part of the equation.

There’s no better way to incur user wrath than to change one of the fundamental features of a product. Apple’s been doing it for years with each revision, usually prompting a positive cheer from most while alienating a certain margin of its fervent user base that vows to never buy or use the product again. Browser maker Mozilla is not without its own minority that appears to be up in arms about the updated address bar.

What do you think of the new address bar in Firefox 3?

(polls)

The Smart Location Bar, dubbed the “awesome bar” by the company, drops in a mix of your bookmarks and browser history as you type. For example, if you’ve got CNN.com bookmarked, or have visited it in the past, simply typing in a “C” would drop down a stream of links with some of the most relevant or highly visited sites rising to the top. It’s been designed as a time-saver, but a group of users have come down on the new feature because it can’t be turned off easily and has a quirky habit of putting some links in front of others.

Similar threads exist in Mozilla’s own community forums, although most quibbles are linked up to Mozilla’s knowledge base articles which show how to tweak and edit certain features step-by-step.

Cellulosic-ethanol company Coskata on Friday announced that it has broken ground on a plant in Pennsylvania that will be operating by early next year.

The $25 million plant in Madison, Pa., will make 40,000 gallons per year. At that size, it’s meant to demonstrate the process at commercial scale. Its plans also call for a full-scale facility, producing 50 million gallons to 100 million gallons a year of ethanol, by 2011.

The company has said it can produce ethanol at $1 per gallon and that its process is clean, able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 84 percent, compared to gasoline. Corn ethanol, meanwhile, makes about the same greenhouse gases as gasoline production.

The plant-building plans were announced by Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell. Many states are eager to provide incentives to start-ups like Coskata, such as tax breaks, to create clean-tech “clusters.”

Coskata has a technology that combines a gasification chamber and a bioreactor to make ethanol from a variety of feedstocks, such as wood chips or even tires. General Motors, Khosla Ventures, and Advanced Technology Partners are investors.

Well, some mischief maker in Jacksonville, Ore., apparently decided to re-enact the Tacoma house-trashing scheme. According to this Associated Press story, Robert Salisbury came home to nearly 30 people rummaging through his barn and front porch. Not only that, when he told the trespassers to give him back his belongings, he was rebuffed.

Investigators are still trying to track down the person who posted the ad–and it could likely be someone Salisbury knows. The Tacoma incident, after all, was fueled by a family feud.

By the time the police showed up, the plunderers had already crammed their
cars full of Salisbury’s stuff and taken off.

What’s shocking is that of the dozens of people who pilfered his property, she was the only one to catch wind of the scheme. Come on, people.

“I informed them I was the owner, but they refused to give the stuff back,” Salisbury told the AP. “They showed me the Craigslist printout and told me they had the right to do what they did.”

The Craigslist post advertised all of Salisbury’s stuff–even his horse–as free for the taking. The woman who showed up to take his horse finally started to feel uneasy about the whole deal when she realized that the horse looked perfectly healthy, and well, seemed to actually belong to someone. She left a note on the door and then decided to call Salisbury to make sure that the ad was legit.

Most folks recall the story about the Tacoma, Wash., house that was trashed after a woman posted an ad on Craigslist telling people to “please help yourself to anything on the property.”

Farantzos recruited DVD Jon, or Jon Lech Johansen, and the two have been working with about 10 others for the past eight months on the DoubleTwist software. Johansen says DoubleTwist allows him to bring the success he’s found to a wider audience.

By adding Facebook compatibility (with OpenSocial platforms next on their list), DoubleTwist users can share media through the social network. A Facebook application called TwistMe will allow users to drag and drop media content into a box on a fellow user’s Facebook profile. The friend will then see the shared files show up in his DoubleTwist desktop client.

The man notorious for cracking the DVD code, and Apple’s FairPlay DRM, is looking to make a legitimate business out of his expertise.

“Digital media is dominated by two players, Windows Media and iTunes, and they each have their own agenda…we see ourselves as the Switzerland of digital media. We are format and device agnostic.”

Social-network compatibility is key to enable real sharing of media between users, Farantzos said. “It closes the loop between the Web, devices, and the desktop.”

Beginning Tuesday, the first product from his company, DoubleTwist Ventures, will enter open beta. Called DoubleTwist, it’s a free desktop client that essentially allows any kind of music, photo, or video file to be shared between a long list of portable media players, and through Web-based social networks.

Instead of iTunes songs or videos taken with a Nokia N95 remaining locked on the phone, DoubleTwist software allows for dragging, dropping, and syncing of different media formats no matter the device.

It works like this: When a device is plugged into a PC (Windows XP and Vista only right now,
Mac OS X coming soon), DoubleTwist launches and recognizes all the media files on the device. Any file can be selected, dragged, and dropped into DoubleTwist to be synched up to a separate device, or shared with other users you’ve “friended” who also use DoubleTwist.

DoubleTwist also recognizes and imports all iTunes playlists and will read instantly which ones are protected by digital rights management technology. The software automatically plays the song files in the background (sans volume) and re-records them as MP3 files so they can be transferred to any device. Note: DoubleTwist only does this for songs you own or are authorized to play in iTunes.

“It’s one opportunity to write something for your Web site for use by a couple thousand geeks,” he said in an interview. But with DoubleTwist, the idea is to hide all the complexity of making easy transfers of files from the user so that even non-techie types will understand. “The goal is to make something your parents can use,” he said.

The idea, according to DoubleTwist founder and CEO Monique Farantzos, is that media files should be more like e-mail. It shouldn’t matter what service you create the file in, or on what type of hardware, it all should work together seamlessly, she says.

Farantzos says they’re not picking on any one particular brand of DRM, especially since the entire industry, led by Amazon, is leaning toward a DRM-free policy.

(Credit:
DoubleTwist)

Remember that feature Google rolled out back in November of last year that let users edit location markers? This morning the company’s released a new Maps visualization to let you watch a portion of those user edits in real time. Like some of the Flickr and Twitter mashups that have done the same thing with photos and messages, you can glean a certain level of entertainment off watching people’s changes, and as long as you’re sitting far enough back from your computer monitor you can avoid the Cloverfield-like nausea when the map quick pans to the next location (seriously).

Google Maps continues to be one of Google’s fastest changing services within the last year. Just yesterday it finally got list reordering as part of My Maps (previously user-created maps would remain in the order of the spot or landmark at the time it was created), and earlier this month it added live Doppler radar and satellite weather reports as a mapplet.

Watch near-live Google Maps location movement on a live map with Google's new tracker page.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

From my time watching the page this morning, nearly all of the changes remained within the United States with just a few trips to southern England. This could mean that either Google’s localizing the data feed, or trying to keep the transcontinental panning to a minimum.

See it in action an animated GIF after the jump.