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Daily Crunch: Zen

admin — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:00:46 +0000

Here are some recent stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: The Zen Table Practices Mindfulness So You Don’t Have To The Wheel: What Is The Foxconn Debate Really About? iModela Adds CNC Milling To Your Home 3D Printing Arsenal

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Daily Crunch: Zen

Micron CEO Dead At 51

vertical8 — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:30:12 +0000

The CEO of Micron Technology, Steve Appleton, died in a small plane crash today in Boise, Idaho. He was 51. Appleton worked at the company since 1983, starting on the night shift production line. He died piloting a Lancair experimental aircraft around Boise. He is survived by his wife Dalynn and his children. Micron is a major semiconductor supplier and most notably built a number of memorable laptops and hard drives during the early days of the dot com years. The company currently produces the Crucial and Lexar memory lines, among other hardware. via Micron

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Micron CEO Dead At 51

The Zen Table Practices Mindfulness So You Don’t Have To

bestcbstore — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:00:08 +0000

Remember those little Zen rock gardens they used to sell for desks? So you could take a minute of your busy day to contemplate the void? Thanks to the magic of Kickstarter , you can build your own automatic, desktop-based Zen garden that will rake itself into endless patterns. The toy is a little pricey – $999 for the “table” kit, half that for the desktop version – but the concept is pretty cool. It’s basically a robotic Etch-a-Sketch with a few tricks built in. To wit: An optional 3G modem can be built into your table to receive new programs for sculpting via the cellphone network, along with a service plan subscription that will push new designs to the table as they are created Hello? This is Zen Table? The coffee table version is 56″ x 39″ x 19.5″ while the desktop version is 13″ x 9.5″ x 2 1/2″. Created by video game developer Simon Hallam, the Zen table lets you draw nearly anything into the silicone sand, allowing you to complete your mandala without having to get off from work. They’re about $4,000 below their funding goal, so get over there and get zenning! Project Page

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The Zen Table Practices Mindfulness So You Don’t Have To

Some Refurbished Xooms Could Put Personal Data In The Wrong Hands

user — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:55:56 +0000

Maybe it was too thick, maybe it was too heavy, maybe you just didn’t like Honeycomb. Regardless of your reasoning, you may want to keep your eyes peeled on your credit score if you bought and returned a Motorola Xoom between March and October 2011, because your personal information may be in someone else’s hands. That’s the story from Motorola, anyway. As it happens, the standard refurbishment process that occurs when a customer returns a piece of hardware didn’t go exactly as planned for some devices. Motorola estimates that out of batch of 6,200 refurbished Xoom Wi-Fi tablets, about 100 of them weren’t properly erased before they were resold in batches on daily deals site Woot.com. Though the odds are in your favor that you weren’t affected, I doubt that same line of reasoning will provide much comfort to someone who was. Motorola doesn’t go into much detail about how exactly the process went awry. Were the tablets simply not wiped before they were resold? Did some glitch cause user-stored data to remain on the device even after a factory reset? According to them, the “information that may be accessible to the purchasers of the impacted refurbished tablets may include any information that the original user elected to store on the tablet.” That could potentially include media like photos and video, as well as “user names and passwords for email and social media accounts, as well as other password-protected sites and applications.” With tablets supplanting notebooks and PCs for a growing number of users, this sort of snafu is the last thing Motorola needs as they and bounce back from a disappointing fourth quarter , though they’ve been pretty forthcoming about the whole mess. If you were one of the people who returned a Xoom between March and October 2011, let Motorola know — they’ll be setting you up with a free 2-year subscription to Experian’s ProtectMyID identity theft alert service. They would also like to have a word with you if you bought a refurbished Xoom from Woot, so mosey on over to their returns site to see if your new old tablet is one of the troublemakers.

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Some Refurbished Xooms Could Put Personal Data In The Wrong Hands

The Wheel: What Is The Foxconn Debate Really About?

vertical8 — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:20:31 +0000

Thirty spokes meet at a nave; Because of the hole we may use the wheel. Clay is moulded into a vessel; Because of the hollow we may use the cup. Walls are built around a hearth; Because of the doors we may use the house. Thus tools come from what exists, But use from what does not. – Tao De Ching There’s a carousel in a small Cape Cod town that we visited this summer and the kids rode it a few times. The carousel is quite old and quite handsome and it makes a great diversion of an evening. I’m reminded now of trying to take pictures of the kids while they rode the carousel. For a while I’d wave and try to get their attention as they roared past, their laughter dopplering around the edge of the curve, and then, after four or five tries I’d give up and just watch. It’s a wheel, an endless circle, designed to delight and enthuse and distract. Reading the recent back and forth between Stephen Fry – an Apple apologist – and Mike Daisey – an Apple user/abuser – I’m reminded of that carousel. The gist is this: Mike Daisey woke up the NPR-listening world with his long piece of Foxconn for This American Life . It was a great piece – dramatic, educational, and eye-opening – but it’s definitely nothing we haven’t seen before. Some could say that it was The Jungle of Chinese manufacturing, a tell-all with just enough outrage to make us rethink a great horror. But the problem is this: Daisey is an actor and knows how to bring out the story, just as John Steinbeck was a writer and knew how to populate the Dust Bowl with Christ figures. That doesn’t make the story less effective – it makes it more so – but it does make the story less true. The problem is the endless circle of blame and apology. Daisey is correct in many of his assumptions, but offers a way forward that is currently unenforceable. But if you argue against Daisey’s points, you’re an apologist. But, as Paul Krugman writes : Such moral outrage is common among the opponents of globalization — of the transfer of technology and capital from high-wage to low-wage countries and the resulting growth of labor-intensive Third World exports. These critics take it as a given that anyone with a good word for this process is naive or corrupt and, in either case, a de facto agent of global capital in its oppression of workers here and abroad. We keep going over the same ground here. The argument can be delineated like this: Foxconn is an evil sweatshop. Apple is a huge Foxconn customer. They should change things. Two of those things are true, a third is false. To be clear, I’m with the crowd that says that Apple is, at best, ignorant of Foxconn’s problems and at worst ignoring them. I agree things must change and Apple is in a great position to do it. But I don’t agree with the first point. I’ve seen sweat shops and Foxconn is a factory. If many of the major brands (I recall that Ford was a customer at one factory I visited) knew that their promotional USB keys were made in a building that looked like a gulag, they’d be skewered. Here’s hoping they are, one day. However, Daisey’s Foxconn story – written outside of the factory – and my own research , written inside the factory – don’t jibe. His discoveries that people get sick or are injured in factories are naive and I suspect his sample size of employees who approached him is far smaller than we realize. To go into the Foxconn factory is to see a place staffed by college-age kids and engineers who work 10 or so hours a day building electronics. There is no great Dickensian work house nor are there sad-eyed madonnas of the assembly line chained to the soldering irons. This isn’t the mundanity of evil – this is just mundanity. Nor am I saying that Daisey’s interviewees are malingerers with an axe to grind. I’m sure their lives are ruined or much harder thanks to Foxconn. The value of Daisey’s efforts is his ability to give these people a voice in an environment that would normally quash that voice. He’s doing what artists must do – reflecting a time and place through his own lens. My own opinion is simple: Apple needs to do more for the people in its manufacturing chain. I will not pretend that Apple can simply wave a magic wand and make every Foxconn employee rich and happy, but it has the cash and the wherewithal to further disrupt the Chinese supply chain and improve the lot of Foxconn’s employees. But I also agree with what one Gawker commenter said : “I believe Tim Cook will do more good for those employees (and already has, in point of fact) than Mike Daisey ever will.” Apple on the aggregate couldn’t care less about our existence nor does it deserve our undying respect and admiration. On an personal level there are plenty of folks inside Apple working and worrying about worker’s rights in China, but as an entity we are talking supply chains and price management. Apple makes excellent tools for our digital age, that’s it. To defend or excoriate the company is like screaming into the wind. However, through their constant rejiggering and improvements, they have essentially created a Western, ISO-compliant factory environment in a corporate culture that used to force underperforming employees to stand outside wearing a sign that said “I am a bad worker.” What Daisey did is made us think. Did he do it the right way, using the right tools? Absolutely not. Will he improve the lot of the workers he interviewed? I doubt it. But will his efforts – and the efforts of many who came before him – help bring the Chinese worker out of penury? Sure, eventually. I opened this piece talking about a carousel in Cape Cod, a delightfully bourgeois setting for a piece on poverty wage labor practices. I get to go to Cape Cod and put my kids on a carousel because my job involves dicking around on the Internet all day (I suspect Daisey’s does too). My one wish is that every Foxconn employee, at some point in their lives, will be able to sit down to an unhurried meal, chat with family, and maybe ride a carousel. I think it’s in Foxconn’s best interests to ensure that that happens – and soon – and I think that we’re nearly there. Things will get better, I’m sure of it, and I also feel that they already have.

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The Wheel: What Is The Foxconn Debate Really About?

Daily Crunch: Dust

Achilles — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:00:11 +0000

Here are some recent posts on TechCrunch Gadgets: The Peek Bites The Dust Steve Jobs Impersonator With Angel Wings And Halo Used To Hawk A Worthless Android Tab The $199 PlayBook Returns For A Limited Time

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Daily Crunch: Dust

The Peek Bites The Dust

ACMAir — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 02:33:27 +0000

You may remember the Peek , a device that showed up back in 2008 (so long ago, now!) offering nothing but email. That’s right, nothing but email in an age when smartphones were already becoming popular, and the iPhone was changing the way people thought about interacting with their data. In a way, it was genius: limiting the service and the device made it easy to explain and simple to use. It does email, period. An interesting tack, and one that kept them rolling for a few years, but alas, Peek is finally going to take the big sleep. Despite revising the hardware and switching up the pricing, the Peek couldn’t maintain relevance in the face of smartphones and tablets. There was always the question of whether it was a legitimate market at all, but I object to that objection. I think it’s a brilliant proposition, and one many people found useful. But you just can’t fight progress, and while phones and tablets got more capable, they also got easier to use. Ironically, it might have been trying to compete that made the Peek at last irrelevant. The people who liked it didn’t think of it as a less-capable smartphone, but as a single-purpose device, like a fork or a measuring tape. That value proposition, focus, is something we’re seeing in practice in single-purpose sites like Imgur and so on. But the philosophy of the mobile phone as Swiss army knife has taken over in the hardware field, so devices like the Peek got left behind. The Verge talked to the CEO , and he said that there are a few thousand devices lying around in warehouses, and he’d like to put them into the hands of interested hackers. The Peek 9 was a perfectly workable piece of hardware, though not particularly powerful, but perhaps it could be made into something interesting or useful by a little creative coding. Head over there for more info. Update : It should be noted that this isn’t the end for Peek the company , only Peek the service and line of devices. Peek Inc actually just closed a big funding round to fuel its work bringing smartphone-type software to low-cost mobile devices. We’ll report more on that as the story develops.

The $199 PlayBook Returns For A Limited Time

admin2 — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 01:20:25 +0000

Back in November, there was a run on PlayBooks when the price was briefly reduced to $199. For a tablet that started out with a premium price, the deal proved enticing to many buyers. And again at the beginning of January, with a slightly odd promotion pricing all models at $299 . Well, they’re at it again: until the 11th, the PlayBook is priced to move : $199 for the 16GB version, $249 for 32GB, and $299 for 64GB. Unfortunately, the device won’t be shipping with the 2.0 version of the PlayBook software that we played with at CES . They will be rolling out the update soon, though. Now, despite the protracted beating that this poor half-baked tablet has received, I have to say that at $200, with the new OS, this is a really good deal. For the price of a Nook or Fire, you get a device with much better specs and some big-boy productivity software. If you want games and apps, it’s obviously not a good choice. But if you use a BlackBerry and are interested in time management, email, contacts, syncing, and all that lovely stuff, the PlayBook is now a fairly practical buy. For $200, that is. I sincerely doubt this is the last time the device will be on sale, though, and there are of course plans to obsolete it later in the year, at which time it will be going for peanuts. So there’s no pressure to buy, though if you’ve got a pair of Benjamins burning a hole in your pocket, I can think of worse ways to spend them.

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The $199 PlayBook Returns For A Limited Time

Steve Jobs Impersonator With Angel Wings And Halo Used To Hawk A Worthless Android Tab

admin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:51:26 +0000

Bad taste. Is nothing off-limits anymore? I’m always up for a good satire but this Action Electronics’ video promo airing on Taiwanese for the Action Pad misses the mark. It’s not the turtle neck, stage, or even the premise. For me it’s the angel wings and halo. The little props takes the ad from a tasteless parody to an absurd stunt. But personal feelings aside, this company won. Their ad spot went viral and the Action Pad won’t go unnoticed. PC World spoke with an Action Electronics’ spokesperson who indicated they’re not trying to “use his death.” She added “This is not meant to make fun of Jobs.” The tablet in question is just another budget 7-inch Android tablet . It runs Android 2.3.3 and costs 6990 yuan ($236 USD) — nothing special besides the marketing. The commercial started airing on Taiwanese TV late last month. The company even held a mock press conference with the impersonator, which is slightly less offensive because of the lack of angel wings and halo. Apple is known to aggressively defend its image and Steve Jobs likeness and generally quickly releases the legal hounds. But this is a slightly different case. This isn’t a Steve Jobs action figure. This is some company, desperate to sell their wares, turning to a dirty tactic that they knew would go viral. It’s hard to hate on swaggering bravado even if the result is fucking ridiculous and rude.

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Steve Jobs Impersonator With Angel Wings And Halo Used To Hawk A Worthless Android Tab

Daily Crunch: Swarm

admin2 — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:00:42 +0000

Here are some of yesterday’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: Swarming Robots Will Fly Menacingly Towards Your Loved Ones In Perfect Formation Mint.com Launches Android Tablet App The New Android Watch In The Google Store Isn’t What You Think Review: Panasonic Lumix GX1 Back To Basics: Sony Appoints Kazuo Hirai, Ousts Stringer

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Daily Crunch: Swarm