This animation was presented at IEDM 2006 to show how phase change memory (PCM) devices switch between amorphous and crystalline states.

Two weeks and less than 10,000 lines of code result in this demonstration of a starfighter action game on an iPhone that takes advantage of the device’s accelerometer, touch screen and high contrast display. This is a great use of the interface and should inspire some creative thinking the software development community.

My immediate thought upon seeing Steve Forstall’s demo is that there could be a lot of flying iPhones, similar to the stories we’ve heard about the Wiimote. Remember those videos of plasma screens when the Wii debuted?

Now just imagine it’s a device that costs more than $500 direct from Apple in the U.S. and often much more than that in Europe.

That being said, I’m excited to see how software designers take advantage of that new Apple iPhone SDK.

That and Spore. Given more than two weeks to work on this game, I think this could be a killer gaming app for the device.

This video from a 15 year old UK student demonstrates a successful installation of gOS on a laptop nearing a decade of service.

He installed some snark in his YouTube video notes as well, noting that:

I managed to install gOS on a 9 year old IBM ThinkPad 600E laptop. This video shows just how well Linux will run on pretty much any hardware. Vista doesn’t look much better than gOS and would never even boot on old hardware like this, let alone run demanding applications such as GIMP.

You can download and try gOS from ThinkgOS.com.

CommonCraft.com is already well known in the blogosphere and social media world for creating brilliant, lucid short videos that explain tricky concepts.

The two-person team that make up CommonCraft (Sachi and Lee LeFever) put it simply: they solve explanation problems.

I love that tagline. It’s rather similar sort of thing we try to do here at WhatIs.com. To that point, I’ve embedded three of CommonCraft’s previously released videos on our site, each of which explore and explain a different social media technology:

• RSS in Plain English
• Wikis in Plain English
• Social Networking in Plain English

The newest addition to the mix is a video explaining what Twitter is and how it works.

As you may know, Twitter is a popular microblogging service that launched almost exactly one year ago at the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas. While we’ve blogged about it right afterwards. Due in no small part to the high percentage of geeks and “digerati” at the festival who had the opportunity to try it out and start networking with each other, Twitter really took off. Twitter is now a leader in the “social messaging” category that includes Pownce and Jaiku, spanning the gap between our online and offline worlds. Each allows users to update a microblogging service using SMS messages, a Web interface or a desktop application. (Twitter relies on third party apps for the last based upon its APIs. Try Snitter if you have Adobe Air installed.)

CommonCraft’s video sheds worthwhile additional insight. Watch it below:

There’s plenty of interesting activity going on out there, too. Just check out this mashup of Twitter, Google Maps and live election results for intriguing insights into the 2008 presidential primary season.

And if you’d like to find/follow me on Twitter, head over to http://twitter.com/digiphile.

Well, somehow it happened again. Another year has come and gone, to this eye even more quickly than the one before. I can’t help but think that as the speed of our connections goes up, time itself seems to pass more quickly. That may because I have relativity on the brain, given that Schrodinger’s cat was the Word of the Day, but the pace of news and technology certainly didn’t slow down in 2007. Find out what was important in our Enterprise IT Year in Review.

Vista and Leopard hit our desktops, the iPhone slipped into our back pockets and Google’s growth accelerated. Facebook created new connections and rebuilt old ones. Green computing became the IT term of the moment, though cloud computing looms on the horizon. The writers strike accelerated our move to watching video on our computers, whether it was offered on Joost, Hulu, Miro or, of course, YouTube. Next up: HD IPTV.

Viruses, worms, phishing attacks and good old spam all conspired to make cleaning out your inbox a dodgy proposition at best. Simply writing about the Storm Worm or Rock Phish could make you the target of a denial of service attack. We discovered new repetitive stress injuries with the Wii and rocked hard with Guitar Hero. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD recalled the format wars of the 80s. The Web 2.0 buzz moved towards a Web 2.0 bubble, even as blogs, wikis, RSS, social networking and AJAX all started to see meaningful adoption in the enterprise and beyond. Net neutrality became real, as stories of ISPs throttling P2P applications surfaced. Mobile broadband is now a legitimate, if pricey, option for connectivity.

In a mega-roundup of the best enterprise news, tips and stories for 2007, we’ve pulled together the stories and tutorials that mattered to you. As you look ahead to the new year, remember the news that mattered. Review the tutorials that helped you do your job better. Browse through the blogs and trivia that informed or entertained you. Read the first installment of the year in review here or surf on over to Overheard in the Blogosphere for a 2007 What’s In/What’s Out Technology Roundup.

Then, look ahead to 2008, where we promise to do it all over again.

Happy New Year from WhatIs.com!

-Alex

P.S. Please take a moment to let us know what you liked — and didn’t like — on our site this year. Just let us know in the comments. Thanks!

Thank to its ubiquitous advertising spots on BoingBoingTV, I’ve discovered the IT Room. Clearly, I’m part of the target audience of this new take on tech support humor, ’cause I found the trailers and initial 4:22 minute webisode (embedded below) hilarious.

Download link

If you like it, you can watch it online or subscribe with iTunes or RSS – or even via email. Folks, we’ve left the old ways of watching TV in our living rooms at a set time far, far behind.

The IT Room has ambitions to be more than just a series of webisodes created by Motiv Studios, written by a group of writers in a snark-laden conference room. The producers want the audience of IT geeks (and perhaps a few end users) to submit their own IT horror stories, which they can then use to create further episodes.

Is it a way of dodging the ongoing writer’s strike? Perhaps. We’ve had some luck with getting users to submit their own IT bloopers in the past, though we haven’t assembled a crack comedy team to make them into video shorts quite yet. The monkey promises to give the best written IT horror story a Dell Latitude, so there’s some extra incentive in there, too. The site gathers submissions in a transparent and decidedly techie way — you contribute the story as a blog post, visible to all.

Cleverly, there’s a Digg button next to each post, a move that the rather more old media Wall Street Journal just made as well, leading to wide spread speculation that Murdoch might be interested in acquiring the social news site. (That move also allows you to subscribe to an RSS feed of all of the WSJ’s content on Digg– neat!)

The cynic in me notes that Motiv works on marketing programs for Dell, though this is obviously more than just extended commercials. There’s no Dude getting me a Dell (instead, he’s offering me a pint), happily, but until I see a battery meltdown or a frustrating tech support mobisode focused on relentlessly calm Indian associates offering scripted responses, I’ll be a tad suspicious…. even as I snarf my coffee a bit when I tune in.

[Photo credit: Noel Dickover]

Ah, All Hallows Eve has come around again, though the holiday is being celebrated with costume-clad kiddies collecting candy and pumpkin-brew besotted co-eds in these parts, as opposed to the bonfires of Samhain, the celebration end of the harvest that is the ancient ancestor to to Halloween.

In honor of the holiday, we’ve opened the Vault of Tech Terror up again and added a new Halloween tech trivia quiz to the archives. We made the Word of the Day zombie army. And we asked our readers the following three questions:

1) Should you ever travel to Hades, you’ll have to get by this three-headed dog, the namesake of a secure method for authenticating a request for a service in a computer network.What’s the secret word?

2) This underworld denizen is also a program or process that is dormant until a certain condition occurs, when it’s summoned up to do its processing. Is it a(n):
a. demon
b. zombie
c. troll
d. ogre
Answer

3) You might see “RIP” on a gravestone, but your network depends on it for managing router information within a corporate LAN. What does RIP stand for (other than, of course, “Rest in Peace”)?
Answer

We’re not the only ones celebrating the holiday in fine techie fashion. Wired, for instance, has a marvelous gallery of geek-o-lanterns, including the Death Star pictured above, carved by one Noel Dickover. (Hawkeyes, beware: Iowa has begun taxing jack-o-lanterns, geeky or not.)If you’re stuck for ideas for dressing up, Chris Pirillo came up with five costumes for geeks: Steve Jobs, an iPhone, Chris Crocker, the Blue Screen of Death or the FreeBSD Demon. BBspot does him six better, with 11 more costume ideas for geeks, including a personal favorite: a 1G iPod Nano “complete with scratches and class action suit.” Heh.

CNET has a gallery of frequently hilarious ways to geek out this Halloween as well.

Christopher Null, over at Yahoo Tech, has his own list of the best geek costumes, including the TRON guy and an exploding Sony battery.

Brent Evans did a great geeky Halloween costume roundup as well, including Lego bricks, a working PacMan costume, Rubix cubes and the Wii-mote. Nicely done! He also links to the Wired Flickr photo pool of techie costumes.

Browsing through the lists, its not hard to notice a decidedly male-tinge to the selections. For the ladies out there, here’s a top 10 list of the best Halloween costume ideas for girls. Along with Trinity, Sarah Connor, Princess Leia and Ripley, she offers up Ada Byron Lovelace. Well played! I loved the Matrix, Terminator, Star Wars and Alien, to be sure, but true geek-cred goes to anyone dressing up as the first computer programmer.

I’m vaguely surprised by the lack of a Bluetooth fairy out there.

Halloweenforgeeks.com has a ton of DIY projects for anyone that wants to upgrade the normal porch offerings of carved pumpkins and spiderwebs. If you just want off the shelf geeky gizmos to make the holiday howl and friends freak out, PseudoMart.com has a great list of techie toys for Halloween.

Finally, if you’re swamped with work and haven’t been able to pull together a costume, you can always print out your own Halloween mask. Thanks, Lifehacker! Now THAT’s geeky.

Have fun out there!

Try the XEL-1. Engadget has a great photo gallery for your viewing pleasure.

Today, Sony unveiled the world’s first OLED television. That’s organic light-emitting diode, for you acronym-o-phobes.

The TV is only 3mm thick, has a resolution of 960 x 540 (though it’s described as 1080p) and comes with a TV tuner. More impressive, however, is the contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1 on the 11″ screen. The screen manages to be thinner than an LCD or PDP (plasma display panel) set because no backlight is required — ah, the wonders of OLED lighting!

You can attach your next-gen optical disc player (Blu-Ray or HD-DVD) to the HDMI port, along with USB and Ethernet inputs for other devices.

You’ll have to wait until December for this beauty, sadly — and travel to all the way to Japan!

As amazing as this may be to gadgethounds, I’m still holding my breath for FOLEDs– a flexible OLED screens — on, say, a t-shirt, jacket sleeve or smartnewspaper. The technology is still a few years out, even if this video shows a tantalizing preview of what’s to come.

This past weekend, many of the world’s foremost thinkers gathered at the Singularity Summit within the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. You might ask what the Singularity is, of course, as the focus of all of this heady cogitation?

It’s the point where a consciousness is comes into being (usually an AI) that is itself smarter than the humans who created it.

According to the Summit’s overview:

Vernor Vinge originally coined the term “Singularity” in observing that, just as our model of physics breaks down when it tries to model the singularity at the center of a black hole, our model of the world breaks down when it tries to model a future that contains entities smarter than human.

The summit’s Web site features videos, podcasts and coverage from all over the Internet of the yearly event, including a great piece from Peter Thiel on Wired.com exploring how to invest in the Singularity.

I can’t help but think of SkyNet, the decidedly nasty entity depicted so dramatically in the Terminator series, but there are more positive outcomes, many of which are amply explained here, where the summit’s organizers explain why the Singularity is worth working towards.  Whether humanity is willing or able to do so is another question entirely. We can only hope!

Speaking from a somewhat philosophical perspective, Joe Foran also had some deep thoughts regarding the concept, articulated in Virtualization and the Singularity on the Server Virtualization blog. If you’re wondering how virtualization and futurism blend together, look no further.

What can I say about Facebook that hasn’t been said? Newsweek has placed Mort Zuckerberg, the founder of the social networking giant on its cover. And the press has been hyperventilating about Facebook for months.

So what is Facebook? It’s a simple idea, done well: move the “facebooks” of incoming college undergraduates online, with headshots and interests constituting a basic profile, and then create the tools for nodes on the network to interact and browse each other’s profiles.

It’s also my “latest discovery,” as I joined earlier this spring, egged on by a neighbor. Back when I went to college, we had such a thing, printed on “paper,” bound and distributed to the freshman class (and just as quickly appropriated by upperclassmen frequently interested in more than discovering who else was into rock climbing or Pearl Jam). Facebook was, at its inception, a social network for college students, with access limited to only students in the same institution. Now, Facebook has laid claim to being a “social utility,” bidding to become the platform or framework we use to organize our online lives.

Audacious, perhaps, but not unprecedented. Friendster had the early start in filling that role but never recovered from an inability of its original technical architecture to scale to massive traffic demands or challenges from MySpace and other networks.

To be fair, over the past spring and summer, the social networking phenomenon has continued to explode in popularity and innovation, but Facebook has grown much faster and pulled in the digerati like no other.

Why? There’s no single reason. While the decision to open the formerly closed network to the Internet at large is an obvious place to begin, instead of limiting membership to isolated pools of collegians, other factors are in play. Making APIs available to developers resulted in a tsunami of applications that help to further interconnect nodes within each social network has attracted enormous amounts of energy (and, increasingly) venture capital to the platform.

Choosing to keep a clean, easily navigated interface has mattered as well. While MySpace is still the biggest social network — and by most measurements, the most popular site on the Internet, the contrast between the two services couldn’t be much larger, aesthetically, as Facebook (by comparison) radically limits the visual control a user has over a profile. It doesn’t hurt that all of the young college graduates enter the workforce with profiles, either.

If you need a sense of how bound into the tech community Facebook has become, consider how Silicon Valley reacted to a recent Facebook outage.

There’s plenty of evidence too that spending time on Facebook has also evolved into a significant productivity drain (though some disagree) and security risk. (If you’re wondering which companies lead in embracing Facebook, along with the most risk, just read Elisa’s post). The trouble is that sysadmins with itchy trigger fingers may not be able to quickly shut off the flow of bandwidth by firewalling Facebook. Unlike other more informal networks, many professionals have been using to “friend” their coworkers, clients and collaborators, along with former college roommates and dorm buddies. While LinkedIn has long been the social network of choice for many professionals, Facebook has begun eating into that market. In the online social media world, the gaps between online and offline networks are continuing to close, along with whatever space remained between work and personal lives.

Netizens my age (proud members of the “XY generation” that bridges the gap between Gen X (children of the 80s) and Gen Y (folks who don’t remember life before CDs and email or who said “trust but verify“) and older may find some elements of Facebook surprising, though perhaps not more so than MySpace. Older users are joining, however, and finding a place. While privacy options for profiles exist, unlike MySpace, there’s significant potential for embarrassment and even calamity for college or career prospects for those who aren’t wary about posting photos or blog entries that don’t put them in a good light, to put it mildly. PR professionals and marketers would do well to consider the advice of social media gurus. And, as neighborhood applications crop up, there are also alarming security concerns regarding personal safety and property, given that clever criminals can posit where and when individuals are away.

While much of the value of joining these networks can be found in keeping touch with friends and alumni — and making new ones from within that social network — the amount of information that many people are adding to their profiles has also been identified as a valid phishing risk, with significant potential for social engineering hacks that allow access to corporate networks.

What to do? As is the case with the rest of the Web-based applications that have made their way into enterprise and personal desktops alike (users keep outwitting IT when installing consumer apps, apparently), the key is likely to be adaptive security policies that both recognize the increasingly blurred boundaries between work and personal life while respecting both the bandwidth limitations high usage may inflict upon a network and the need to limit the leak or theft of potentially damaging proprietary or personal data. No one is suggesting that developing, implementing or enforcing such a policy is easy, but the consequences of failing to try may extend well beyond a public relations disaster to the organization or individual who doesn’t consider Facebook to be a risk.

There are also no shortages of critics who view the closed nature of Facebook with some distaste — “yet another profile to populate” is a new form of fatigue in the digital age. Personal data portability may become a online movement. It’s certainly been the inspiration for a business plan or two. The founder of LiveJournal, for instance, has published a mini-manifesto for portable, open social networking, according to Mashable. (It may help that Google appears to be backing him). Other observers have noted that Facebook hasn’t been proven to be a rewarding platform for advertisers yet either, though the model is still evolving, as described in this excellent article from Business.com, the Facebook Economy.

In the meantime, I’ll enjoy watching classmates and friends pop up on Facebook; lest you wonder, you can find me there as well. Be warned: I’m sticking with adding friends, coworkers and neighbors, lest I develop social networking fatigue myself.

It’s not quite perpetual motion — but it might be the next best thing. Dr. Steve Beeby and a team of researchers at the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) at Southampton University in the UK have developed a kinetic energy generator that harnesses the energy of environmental vibrations and movement. When you think about it, Elvis was right: There’s a whole lotta shakin’ going on. And the scientists working on the VIBES (Vibration Energy Scavenging) project want to put all that energy generated to good use.

Actual size: less than 1 cubic centimeter

Although the generator is not the first of its kind, it’s said to be 10 times more powerful than any previous implementation. The technology, which has an industrial background, is being adapted for use with pacemakers. In this application, the beat of a person’s heart could power their pacemaker, which would mean that they would no longer require surgery to replace the batteries.

Here’s Beeby’s explanation (quoted in IndiaTimes Infotech):
“There is a big drive towards using wireless devices, but one of the challenges in supplying power to these devices is that batteries have a finite supply that needs to be replaced. We have a spin-out company that is now looking at powering pacemakers from the movement of the heart.

“As the power consumption of electronic devices continues to fall, the opportunity to use these devices to power them becomes more apparent. The potential is there for devices like mobile phones and MP3 players being at least augmented by vibration generators. There is quite a lot of energy available on a human such as the impact of a heel on the floor which could also be used.”

When you think about it, there’s no end of vibrational energy being generated all day every day. The VIBES team and other researchers are also exploring the potential of vibrations from roads and bridges. ~ Ivy Wigmore

For hundreds of years, enterprising souls, including Leonardo da Vinci, have tried to create a perpetual motion machine: a device that creates energy with no external source. Since August of last year, there’s been a huge amount of buzz around the latest contender called Orbo, from an Irish company called Steorn. Orbo was introduced in a