Author: Terren

A couple of grains of salt could be all that’s needed to help bacteria produce hydrogen from wastewater or organic byproducts.

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HP handed out pink slips to employees in its webOS Global Business Unit on Monday. The computer company wouldn’t say how many workers it was letting go, but rumors suggest over 500 people are now unemployed. [AllThingsD] More »

edit@hollywoodreporter.com (
Kimberly Nordyke)
Ashton Kutcher made his debut on Monday night’s season premiere of the CBS comedy.

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Android’s box of sweets has gotten much more diverse since it launched its first dessert-themed operating system update Cupcake in 2009.

The brains of people who are obese may be wired differently for impulse control, such as resisting french fries or a doughnut when their blood sugar levels drop, compared with people who are not obese, a new study suggests.

Texting in Canada is still on the rise. The Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) recently announced that in Q1 Canadians sent 18 billion text messages. March had the highest stats in history with just over 6 billion, or an average of 199 million messages per day.

Today, in response to a report that showed the average American adult sends/receives 41.5 text messages per day, TELUS has stated that Canadian text messaging is on the rise too. TELUS Communications Manager Shawn Hall said that based on their estimations the number of text messages Canadians now send on a monthly basis has skyrocketed to 8 billion, which represents 270 million per day. Currently there are over 24.5 million wireless subscribers in Canada.

Source: Vancouver Sun

Related posts:

1. CWTA: Canadians sent 18 billion text messages in Q1 2011
2. Canadians send 154 million text messages per day
3. Canadians send over 135 million text messages a day

We’ve known about Google Wallet for awhile but, until today, it hasn’t been available for use. If you’ve got an Android phone with near-field communication (NFC) technology, you can now make use of the Google Wallet smartphone app to store all sorts of things. They’ve launched a digital credit card with Citibank already, but you can create a virtual credit card with the app and fund it from other sources. Either way you’ll be able to pay by tapping your phone anywhere NFC payments are accepted. Additionally, you can store loyalty cards, product offers, and more. As an added bonus, Google will give you $10 on their pre-paid virtual credit card if you set up Google Wallet before the end of the year. More »

OS X Lion has a serious security vulnerability allowing hackers to alter the password of any user account, writes security blog Defence in Depth. The OS reportedly allows non-root users the ability to view password hash data. As a consequence, an attacker can potentially use a basic Python script to glean a person’s password….

Bell acquired CTV and all their assets a year ago for $1.3 billion with the goal of accelerating “video growth across all three screens – mobile, online and TV”. Soon after they rolled out the ability to watch BNN on mobile devices and now they’ve gone ahead with live broadcasts of Grey’s Anatomy, The Amazing Race, Criminal Minds, Desperate Housewives, Pan Am and Whitney(?). All this falls under a new property of Bell Media called “CTV MOBILE” and it’s currently only available to Bell and Virgin customers… no word yet on if it’s an exclusive partnership or when Rogers, Bell, TELUS or any of the new carriers customers will be able to watch the shows.

Bell has 300,000 Mobile TV subscribers and this feature of course comes at a price, $5/month for 10 hours of Mobile TV data on smartphones and “Superphones”, tablets are $5 more per month.

Bart Yabsley, EVP, Content Sales and Distribution, Bell Media said “With CTV MOBILE, Bell Media is ensuring that viewers get Canada’s most-watched television programming on every screen, whenever and wherever they want to watch.”

Source: BellMedia

Related posts:

1. Watch Super Bowl XLV live on you Bell/Virgin device
2. CTV goes mobile with Bell “Live TV”
3. Bell offers customers Stanley Cup Playoffs on mobile devices

Canadians could be spending a lot more than $87 for a passport when the new, electronic versions come out next year.

In the latest sign of just how hot social reading tablet apps like Flipboard, Pulse and Zite are becoming, news came out this week that Google is working on its own such app.

Most of us are accustomed to money covered with dead historical figures and scenic historical monuments. In the Great White North, they are minting commemorative coins adorned with Québécois lake dragons and underwater panthers. If you live anywhere but Canada, your money officially sucks. More »

There’s just one week left before Steven Spielberg’s Terra Nova has to pony up and give us some freaking dinosaur action. And finally, the trailers are showing us more than just the same two dinosaur shots we’ve been seeing over and over. More »

Samsung’s latest Android Tab has already gotten the in-box hands-on treatment from the blue shirts at Best Buy, but now we have official word on pricing for the 8.9-inch WiFi-only model, set to hit stores as soon as Thursday. Willing to settle for the 16GB flavor? Get ready to hand over $469 to take one of these slim slates home, or pull out another Benjamin to double capacity to 32 gigs — that beefed-up model will run you $569. You’ll also get Android 3.1 Honeycomb with “the freedom of TouchWiz,” a 3 megapixel camera on the rear with 2MPs up front, and a dual-core 1GHz processor. Check out our Tab 8.9 hands-on, or hit up the source link for the full feature rundown from Sammy.

[Thanks, Kevin]

Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 WiFi gets US pricing, 16GB model starts at $469 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Sep 2011 10:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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1982: At precisely 11:44 a.m., Scott Fahlman posts the following electronic message to a computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman 🙂
From: Scott E Fahlman

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

🙂

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use:

🙁

With that post, Fahlman became the acknowledged originator of the ASCII-based emoticon. From those two simple emoticons (a portmanteau combining the words emotion and icon) have sprung dozens of others that are the joy, or bane, of e-mail, text-message and instant-message correspondence the world over.

See Also:

Photo Gallery
Emoticons Jump From Web to Real World 🙂

Fahlman was not, however, the first person to use typographical symbols to convey emotions. The practice goes back at least to the mid-19th century, when Morse code symbols were occasionally used for the same purpose. Other examples exist as well.

In 1881, the American satirical magazine Puck published what we would now call emoticons, using hand-set type. No less a wordsmith than Ambrose Bierce suggested using what he called a “snigger point” — \__/ — to convey jocularity or irony. Baltimore’s Sunday Sun suggested a tongue-in-cheek sideways character in 1967.

But none of those caught on. The internet emoticon truly traces its lineage directly to Fahlman, who says he came up with the idea after reading “lengthy diatribes” from people on the message board who failed to get the joke or the sarcasm in a particular post — which is probably what “given current trends” refers to in his own, now-famous missive.

To remedy this, Fahlman suggested using 🙂 and 🙁 to distinguish between posts that should be taken humorously and those of a more serious nature.

Fahlman’s original post was lost for a couple of decades and believed gone for good, until it was retrieved from an old backup tape, thus cementing his claim of priority.

Source: Various

Photo: Carnegie Mellon professor Scott E. Fahlman smiles away in his home office. (Gene J. Puskar/AP)

This article first appeared on Wired.com Sept. 19, 2008.