Weekend Open Forum: Where do you buy online?

Tech enthusiasts were among the first consumers targeted by dedicated online retailers and since brick and mortars charged hefty margins, online shopping was made even more attractive from the get go. Early etailers included the ubiquitous Newegg, which now exceeds $2 billion a year in sales, Buy.com, TigerDirect, and many sites dedicated to photography and audio equipment. As you might recall, PC manufacturers like Dell and Gateway were also quick to take full advantage of online ordering and made a huge asset out of it.

As online shopping became more mainstream, and for many a necessity, dozens of star retailers on many different categories have emerged. You have Zappos for buying shoes, Steam/Impulse for games, iTunes for music, Expedia/Orbitz or any other of the numerous travel sites, Fandango for movie tickets, and the list goes on. Amazon has also remained a pioneer in the industry and today you can buy nearly anything you could possibly want from their site, either direct or from smaller retailers using Amazon's impeccable logistics.


As the holiday shopping season gets rolling, our question for you is: How much do you rely on online retailers and where do you prefer to buy stuff? Not only tech, but things in general like clothes, gifts for family and friends, food, flowers, anything you are used to buy online these days. Even if it's a local store, we want to hear about it. Discuss.

* Graph used for illustration purposes only. Source: Lifehacker, Permuto, US Census Bureau.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41326-weekend-open-forum-where-do-you-buy-online.html

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Skype video chat coming to Facebook? The code seems to be there [TNW Industry]

Could we be about to see Skype video chat built into the Facebook website? One app developer claims he?s found code that points to that very feature.

Back in September there were whispers that ?Deep integration? between Facebook and Skype was on its way. That seemed to be borne out by Skype introducing support for Facebook contacts in its latest beta release. What making Skype calls from Facebook though?

In a blog post today, Facebook app developer Tal Ater claims to have stumbled upon a Javascript object on the Facebook website called VideoChat with a number of properties that specifically mention Skype.

Facebook was previously reported to be testing a video chat feature back in May 2009, when similar code (not featuring mentions of Skype) was found. At the time Facebook said it had no plans to release the feature to users.

The new code (which can found on Facebook?s servers here and mirrored by Ater here), features mentions of SkypeIDs, a pretty clear signal that Skype integration is at least being considered. The code is apparently only loaded sporadically, leading Ater to speculate that Facebook is ?bucket testing? the code across a small section of its userbase.

We?ve contacted Facebook for comment on this and will let you know when we hear more.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/industry/2010/11/28/skype-video-chat-coming-to-facebook-the-code-seems-to-be-there/

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Crytek: the PC is "a generation ahead," but PS3 and 360 holding it back

Crytek believes that because developers are focusing on the PS3 and the 360, the game quality on the PC is being held back. This is happening despite the company saying that the PC is already "a generation ahead" of Sony's and Microsoft's consoles.

Crytek is currently working on Crysis 2 for all three platforms. The original Crysis was an exclusive for the PC. That being said, Crytek has already stated that Crysis 2 will be graphically superior on the PC.

"As long as the current console generation exists and as long as we keep pushing the PC as well, the more difficult it will be to really get the benefit of both," Cevat Yerli, founder, CEO, and President of Crytek, told the latest issue of Edge, according to CVG. "PC is easily a generation ahead right now. With 360 and PS3, we believe the quality of the games beyond Crysis 2 and other CryEngine developments will be pretty much limited to what their creative expressions is, what the content is. You won't be able to squeeze more juice from these rocks."

Developers have very low sales expectations for the PC, compared to consoles. It's a vicious cycle: the PC market doesn't give the same revenue as the console market, so companies don't spend much on the PC version of a game. This is certainly true for games like Unreal Tournament 3: it would have been much better had it been released as a PC exclusive.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41323-crytek-the-pc-is-a-generation-ahead-but-ps3-and-360-holding-it-back.html

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Apple reportedly refreshing iPad in January; April will bring MacBook Pro with light peak [TNW Apple]

Around the backchannels here at TNW, we?ve been discussing the pros and cons of a late-year purchase of new Apple products. According to what we?re reading over at Edible Apple, it might be a good thing that a number of us have waited.

In making sense with Apple?s release schedule, the iPad is due for an update in January. Apple reportedly has two special events planned in the first quarter, which would likely mean that we?d see one in January for the update of the iPad, then another in April.

As far as the timing is concerned, it?s honestly not a surprise to see Apple refreshing the iPad in January. We?ve heard rumors for quite some time now about the parts being ready for manufacturing, as well as some rumored specifications of the new device. Given the 1 year timeline on a new item such as the iPad, January makes perfect sense.

What, then, would come in that April event? Look for significant changes to the MacBook Pro line, as well as an update to the aging Final Cut Pro. Edible Apple states, and we agree, that the MacBook Pro update is likely more than just a specifications refresh. In, fact, we?re guessing that Apple is carving an entirely new device.

Expect, first and foremost, to lose your standard hard drive. Given the success of SSD within the new MacBook Air line, it wouldn?t surprise us at all to see Apple pull standard drives out of the manufacturing market. A bump up to 512 GB of storage should be on tap to make the transition less painful for those of you who don?t live primarily in the cloud.

There?s also the rumor of the upcoming light peak technology. What is it? The short version is that it?s a way to transfer massive chunks of data at incredible speed. What kind of speed? How about symmetrical 10 Gbps? That?s pretty freaking fast.

If you still need a bit more convincing about the cool factor of light peak, here?s a demo from Intel:

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2010/11/28/apple-reportedly-refreshing-ipad-in-january-april-will-bring-macbook-pro-with-light-peak/

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Blog - Card Trick Leads to New Bound on Data Compression

Here's a card trick to impress your friends. Give a deck of cards to a pal and ask him or her to cut the deck, draw six cards and list their colours. You then immediately name the cards that have been drawn.

Magic? Not quite. Instead, it's the next best thing: mathematics. The key is to arrange the deck in advance so that the sequence of the card colours follows a specific pattern called a binary De Bruijn cycle. A De Bruijn sequence is a set from an alphabet in which every possible subsequence appears exactly once.

So when a deck of cards meets this criteria, it uniquely defines any sequences of six consecutive cards. All you have to do to perform the trick is memorise the sequences.

Usually these kinds of tricks come about as the result of some new development in mathematical thinking. Today, Travis Gagie from the University of Chile in Santiago turns the tables. He says that this trick has led him to a new mathematical bound on data compression

Gagie achieves this new bound by considering a related trick. Instead of pre-arranging the cards, you shuffle the pack and then ask your friend to draw seven cards. He or she then lists the cards' colours, replaces them in the pack and cuts the deck. You then examine the deck and say which cards were drawn.

This time you're relying on probability to get the right answer. "It is not hard to show that the probability of two septuples of cards having the same colours in the same order is at most 1/128," say Gagie.

He goes on to consider the probability of correctly predicting the sequence of cards pulled at random from a deck of a certain size and after a few extra steps, finds a lower bound on the probability of doing this correctly.

This turns out to be closely related to various problems of data compression and leads to a lower bound than has been found by any other means.

"We know of no previous lower bounds comparable to [this one]," he says.

That's impressive, a really neat trick in itself.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1011.4609: Bounds from a Card Trick

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War Machines: Recruiting Robots for Combat

And while smart machines are already very much a part of modern warfare, the Army and its contractors are eager to add more. New robots ? none of them particularly human-looking ? are being designed to handle a broader range of tasks, from picking off snipers to serving as indefatigable night sentries.

In a mock city here used by Army Rangers for urban combat training, a 15-inch robot with a video camera scuttles around a bomb factory on a spying mission. Overhead an almost silent drone aircraft with a four-foot wingspan transmits images of the buildings below. Onto the scene rolls a sinister-looking vehicle on tank treads, about the size of a riding lawn mower, equipped with a machine gun and a grenade launcher.

Three backpack-clad technicians, standing out of the line of fire, operate the three robots with wireless video-game-style controllers. One swivels the video camera on the armed robot until it spots a sniper on a rooftop. The machine gun pirouettes, points and fires in two rapid bursts. Had the bullets been real, the target would have been destroyed.

The machines, viewed at a ?Robotics Rodeo? last month at the Army?s training school here, not only protect soldiers, but also are never distracted, using an unblinking digital eye, or ?persistent stare,? that automatically detects even the smallest motion. Nor do they ever panic under fire.

?One of the great arguments for armed robots is they can fire second,? said Joseph W. Dyer, a former vice admiral and the chief operating officer of iRobot, which makes robots that clear explosives as well as the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. When a robot looks around a battlefield, he said, the remote technician who is seeing through its eyes can take time to assess a scene without firing in haste at an innocent person.

Yet the idea that robots on wheels or legs, with sensors and guns, might someday replace or supplement human soldiers is still a source of extreme controversy. Because robots can stage attacks with little immediate risk to the people who operate them, opponents say that robot warriors lower the barriers to warfare, potentially making nations more trigger-happy and leading to a new technological arms race.

?Wars will be started very easily and with minimal costs? as automation increases, predicted Wendell Wallach, a scholar at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and chairman of its technology and ethics study group.

Civilians will be at greater risk, people in Mr. Wallach?s camp argue, because of the challenges in distinguishing between fighters and innocent bystanders. That job is maddeningly difficult for human beings on the ground. It only becomes more difficult when a device is remotely operated.

This problem has already arisen with Predator aircraft, which find their targets with the aid of soldiers on the ground but are operated from the United States. Because civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan have died as a result of collateral damage or mistaken identities, Predators have generated international opposition and prompted accusations of war crimes.

But robot combatants are supported by a range of military strategists, officers and weapons designers ? and even some human rights advocates.

?A lot of people fear artificial intelligence,? said John Arquilla, executive director of the Information Operations Center at the Naval Postgraduate School. ?I will stand my artificial intelligence against your human any day of the week and tell you that my A.I. will pay more attention to the rules of engagement and create fewer ethical lapses than a human force.?

Dr. Arquilla argues that weapons systems controlled by software will not act out of anger and malice and, in certain cases, can already make better decisions on the battlefield than humans.

His faith in machines is already being tested.

?Some of us think that the right organizational structure for the future is one that skillfully blends humans and intelligent machines,? Dr. Arquilla said. ?We think that that?s the key to the mastery of 21st-century military affairs.?

Automation has proved vital in the wars America is fighting. In the air in Iraq and Afghanistan, unmanned aircraft with names like Predator, Reaper, Raven and Global Hawk have kept countless soldiers from flying sorties. Moreover, the military now routinely uses more than 6,000 tele-operated robots to search vehicles at checkpoints as well as to disarm one of the enemies? most effective weapons: the I.E.D., or improvised explosive device.

Yet the shift to automated warfare may offer only a fleeting strategic advantage to the United States. Fifty-six nations are now developing robotic weapons, said Ron Arkin, a Georgia Institute of Technology roboticist and a government-financed researcher who has argued that it is possible to design ?ethical? robots that conform to the laws of war and the military rules of escalation.

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F.B.I. Says Oregon Suspect Planned Attack of ?Grand Scale?

The bomb, which was in a van parked off Pioneer Courthouse Square, was a fake ? planted by F.B.I. agents as part of the elaborate sting ? but ?the threat was very real,? Arthur Balizan, the F.B.I.?s special agent in charge in Oregon, said in a statement released by the Department of Justice. An estimated 10,000 people were at the ceremony on Friday night, the Portland police said.

Mr. Balizan identified the suspect as Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, a naturalized United States citizen. He graduated from Westview High School in Beaverton, Ore., a Portland suburb, and had been taking classes at Oregon State in Corvallis until Oct. 6, the university said on Saturday.

Mr. Mohamud was charged with trying to use a weapon of mass destruction. ?Our investigation shows that Mohamud was absolutely committed to carrying out an attack on a very grand scale,? Mr. Balizan said.

?At the same time, I want to reassure the people of this community that, at every turn, we denied him the ability to actually carry out the attack,? he added.

The terrorism attempt was the latest is a string of plots since last year involving Americans or immigrants who had become radicalized, often through exposure to extremist Web sites. In May, a Pakistani-born American was arrested in the plotting of a car bomb attack in Times Square, and later pleaded guilty.

But in contrast to that plan, which the authorities learned about only at the last minute, the F.B.I. had been tracking Mr. Mohamud since 2009 and his planning unfolded under the scrutiny and even assistance of undercover agents, officials said.

The authorities arrested Mr. Mohamud 20 minutes before the tree-lighting ceremony started. As he was taken into custody, he kicked and screamed at the agents and yelled, ?Allahu akbar!? an Arabic phrase meaning ?God is great,? the authorities said.

Federal agents said that Mr. Mohamud thought Portland would be a good target because Americans ?don?t see it as a place where anything will happen.?

?It?s in Oregon; and Oregon, like you know, nobody ever thinks about it,? an affidavit quotes him as saying.

The F.B.I.?s surveillance started in August 2009 after agents intercepted his e-mail messages with a man he had met in Oregon who had returned to the Middle East, according to a law enforcement official who described the man as a recruiter for terrorism. According to the affidavit, the man had moved to Yemen and then northwest Pakistan, a center of terrorist activity.

Mr. Mohamud was then placed on a watch list and stopped at the Portland airport in June 2010 when he tried to fly to Alaska for a summer job.

Later in June, aware of Mr. Mohamud?s frustrated attempts to receive training as a jihadist overseas, an undercover agent first made contact with him, posing as an associate of the man in Pakistan. On the morning of July 30, the F.B.I. first met with Mr. Mohamud in person to initiate the sting operation.

The planning for the attack evolved from there, with Mr. Mohamud taking an aggressive role, insisting that he wanted to cause many deaths and selecting the Christmas target, according to federal agents. Reminded that many children and families would be at the ceremony, Mr. Mohamud said that he was looking for ?a huge mass? of victims, according to the F.B.I.

He had been dreaming of committing an act of terrorism for four years, Mr. Mohamud told undercover agents: ?Since I was 15 I thought about all this things before.?

One of the unknowns in the case is the precise role of the unnamed man with whom Mr. Mohamud exchanged the intercepted e-mails. According to the affidavit, the man was a student in the United States from August 2007 to July 2008. At some point, while Mr. Mohamud was still in high school, the two met. In his initial meetings with the undercover agents, Mr. Mohamud described his dreams of joining the jihadist cause, and mentioned articles he had written on the subject.

Mr. Mohamud told the agents that in 2009 he had published three articles on the Web site Jihad Recollections, which was edited by a Saudi-born American, Samir Khan, from a home in North Carolina. Mr. Khan moved to Yemen, where he runs Inspire, an English-language Web site, on behalf of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

One of Mr. Mohamud?s articles was titled ?Getting in Shape Without Weights? and described the need to ?exercise the body and prepare it for war.?

It was not clear on Saturday whether Mr. Mohamud has yet obtained counsel.

Colin Miner reported from Portland, Ore., and Liz Robbins and Erik Eckholm from New York. William Yardley contributed reporting from Beaverton, Ore., Beth Slovic from Portland and Eric Schmitt, Scott Shane and Edward Wyatt from Washington.

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Blog - Card Trick Leads to New Bound on Data Compression

Here's a card trick to impress your friends. Give a deck of cards to a pal and ask him or her to cut the deck, draw six cards and list their colours. You then immediately name the cards that have been drawn.

Magic? Not quite. Instead, it's the next best thing: mathematics. The key is to arrange the deck in advance so that the sequence of the card colours follows a specific pattern called a binary De Bruijn cycle. A De Bruijn sequence is a set from an alphabet in which every possible subsequence appears exactly once.

So when a deck of cards meets this criteria, it uniquely defines any sequences of six consecutive cards. All you have to do to perform the trick is memorise the sequences.

Usually these kinds of tricks come about as the result of some new development in mathematical thinking. Today, Travis Gagie from the University of Chile in Santiago turns the tables. He says that this trick has led him to a new mathematical bound on data compression

Gagie achieves this new bound by considering a related trick. Instead of pre-arranging the cards, you shuffle the pack and then ask your friend to draw seven cards. He or she then lists the cards' colours, replaces them in the pack and cuts the deck. You then examine the deck and say which cards were drawn.

This time you're relying on probability to get the right answer. "It is not hard to show that the probability of two septuples of cards having the same colours in the same order is at most 1/128," say Gagie.

He goes on to consider the probability of correctly predicting the sequence of cards pulled at random from a deck of a certain size and after a few extra steps, finds a lower bound on the probability of doing this correctly.

This turns out to be closely related to various problems of data compression and leads to a lower bound than has been found by any other means.

"We know of no previous lower bounds comparable to [this one]," he says.

That's impressive, a really neat trick in itself.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1011.4609: Bounds from a Card Trick

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War Machines: Recruiting Robots for Combat

And while smart machines are already very much a part of modern warfare, the Army and its contractors are eager to add more. New robots ? none of them particularly human-looking ? are being designed to handle a broader range of tasks, from picking off snipers to serving as indefatigable night sentries.

In a mock city here used by Army Rangers for urban combat training, a 15-inch robot with a video camera scuttles around a bomb factory on a spying mission. Overhead an almost silent drone aircraft with a four-foot wingspan transmits images of the buildings below. Onto the scene rolls a sinister-looking vehicle on tank treads, about the size of a riding lawn mower, equipped with a machine gun and a grenade launcher.

Three backpack-clad technicians, standing out of the line of fire, operate the three robots with wireless video-game-style controllers. One swivels the video camera on the armed robot until it spots a sniper on a rooftop. The machine gun pirouettes, points and fires in two rapid bursts. Had the bullets been real, the target would have been destroyed.

The machines, viewed at a ?Robotics Rodeo? last month at the Army?s training school here, not only protect soldiers, but also are never distracted, using an unblinking digital eye, or ?persistent stare,? that automatically detects even the smallest motion. Nor do they ever panic under fire.

?One of the great arguments for armed robots is they can fire second,? said Joseph W. Dyer, a former vice admiral and the chief operating officer of iRobot, which makes robots that clear explosives as well as the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. When a robot looks around a battlefield, he said, the remote technician who is seeing through its eyes can take time to assess a scene without firing in haste at an innocent person.

Yet the idea that robots on wheels or legs, with sensors and guns, might someday replace or supplement human soldiers is still a source of extreme controversy. Because robots can stage attacks with little immediate risk to the people who operate them, opponents say that robot warriors lower the barriers to warfare, potentially making nations more trigger-happy and leading to a new technological arms race.

?Wars will be started very easily and with minimal costs? as automation increases, predicted Wendell Wallach, a scholar at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and chairman of its technology and ethics study group.

Civilians will be at greater risk, people in Mr. Wallach?s camp argue, because of the challenges in distinguishing between fighters and innocent bystanders. That job is maddeningly difficult for human beings on the ground. It only becomes more difficult when a device is remotely operated.

This problem has already arisen with Predator aircraft, which find their targets with the aid of soldiers on the ground but are operated from the United States. Because civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan have died as a result of collateral damage or mistaken identities, Predators have generated international opposition and prompted accusations of war crimes.

But robot combatants are supported by a range of military strategists, officers and weapons designers ? and even some human rights advocates.

?A lot of people fear artificial intelligence,? said John Arquilla, executive director of the Information Operations Center at the Naval Postgraduate School. ?I will stand my artificial intelligence against your human any day of the week and tell you that my A.I. will pay more attention to the rules of engagement and create fewer ethical lapses than a human force.?

Dr. Arquilla argues that weapons systems controlled by software will not act out of anger and malice and, in certain cases, can already make better decisions on the battlefield than humans.

His faith in machines is already being tested.

?Some of us think that the right organizational structure for the future is one that skillfully blends humans and intelligent machines,? Dr. Arquilla said. ?We think that that?s the key to the mastery of 21st-century military affairs.?

Automation has proved vital in the wars America is fighting. In the air in Iraq and Afghanistan, unmanned aircraft with names like Predator, Reaper, Raven and Global Hawk have kept countless soldiers from flying sorties. Moreover, the military now routinely uses more than 6,000 tele-operated robots to search vehicles at checkpoints as well as to disarm one of the enemies? most effective weapons: the I.E.D., or improvised explosive device.

Yet the shift to automated warfare may offer only a fleeting strategic advantage to the United States. Fifty-six nations are now developing robotic weapons, said Ron Arkin, a Georgia Institute of Technology roboticist and a government-financed researcher who has argued that it is possible to design ?ethical? robots that conform to the laws of war and the military rules of escalation.

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