Samsung Galaxy Tab vs. Apple iPad: Specs Compared – “But no company can dominate an entire market forever – even one that essentially created it. Having eyed Apple enviously for months, other companies are now attempting to elbow their way in on the tablet space. And Samsung is among the first to the table with the Galaxy Tab. Can the supersized version of the company’s successful Galaxy S smartphones compete? We stacked it side by side with the Apple iPad to find out…”

Launch date announced for Sakshat, the $35 Indian tablet – “The Sakshat, the $35 Indian tablet everyone’s been buzzing about, has an official launch date of early next year and will be brought to you by the same company that once made the world’s cheapest Windows laptop…”

Fisherman catches massive 30lb ‘goldfish’ – “The orange koi carp weighs 30lb – the same as an average three-year-old girl – and is thought to be one of the largest of its kind ever captured…” See also: Scale Sham: Is Giant Goldfish Real?

Get on the Optical Bus – “At IBM, we have now developed a first-of-its-kind optical data-transfer system, or bus, built right onto the circuit board. With it, we will soon unveil computer systems 100 times as fast as anything available today. With that much muscle, scientists will at last be able to visualize wondrous things in detail: how the climate will react to man-made greenhouse gases, how neurons organize to form a brain, how to custom design a drug to treat an individual patient….”

Sony shows Amazon how to do touchscreen ebooks – “Sony has announced it has managed to create the world’s first touchscreen e-reader which doesn’t impede the quality of the e-ink screen – the next-generation of the Sony Reader Touch. When TechRadar caught up with Amazon at the launch of the Kindle, Steve Kessel, senior vice president for Kindle at Amazon was vehement that it would never make a touchscreen device as it would impinge on readability…”

Video: How to Film a 23-Mile Free Fall – “When Felix Baumgartner attempts to free fall almost 23 miles from the edge of space, he will have what amounts to a flying television studio taking us along for the ride. Even as the 41-year-old Austrian daredevil trains for the jump, engineers develop the spacesuit he’ll wear and the parachutes he’ll use and Red Bull writes the checks covering it all, a team of filmmakers is assembling the elaborate system of cameras that will record his fall…”

Laws of Physics Vary Throughout the Universe, New Study Suggests – “A team of astrophysicists based in Australia and England has uncovered evidence that the laws of physics are different in different parts of the universe…”

Threat of ‘cyberwar’ has been hugely hyped – “There’s a power struggle going on in the U.S. government right now. It’s about who is in charge of cyber security, and how much control the government will exert over civilian networks. And by beating the drums of war, the military is coming out on top…”

Welcome to the smarter city

Adam Savage Presents Problem Solving: How I Do It

Lake Michigan’s ecosystem facing collapse – “An invasive species of mussel called quagga has recently begun eating its way through the phytoplankton population of Lake Michigan, which could have dire effects on the lake’s ecosystem, scientists now warn…”

Halo Reach trailer:

Apple Tells Developers, “We Don’t Need Any More Fart Apps” – “The best bullet of them all (our emphasis added): “We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don’t need any more Fart apps. If your app doesn’t do something useful or provide some form of lasting entertainment, it may not be accepted.”"

Kevin Rose talks about the New Digg V4 on DiggNation TV – “First, this Diggnation Response video was not the best move in my opinion. Kevin doesn’t seem to realize that it’s not all about the bugs and Fail Ox “issues” as he talks about in this video. The problem with new Digg is You can’t ignore the core user base that put Digg in the great position it was in a few weeks ago….”

Digg v4 Troubles are Symptom of a Bigger Problem – “Digg v4 was also suffering from a surprisingly amount of down time. In the first few weeks of launch, it wasn’t that uncommon to visit Digg.com and see their Oregon Trail throw-back graphic saying that the site was down and should be back shortly…”

Don’t know a chickadee from a warbler? There’s an app for that! – “Looking for a convenient way to identify birds during your next citizen science excursion? Consider the WildLab Bird iPhone app, which uses photographs, audio, and maps to help you determine which bird you’ve spotted and makes it easy to share the observation with researchers at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology…”

Coming to OnStar: Facebook – ” Motor City auto experts at The Detroit Free Press wrote that the new service will be offered on the system as early as this month. An unnamed insider told them “OnStar will offer subscribers the chance to have their Facebook and text messages read to them. Users will also be able to text and update their Facebook accounts through voice commands, the person said, declining to be identified because the plans aren’t public.”"

New formula shows who’s really top of the tweeters – “The most influential Twitter feeds don’t necessarily have the most followers. That’s the insight given by a new technique for ranking twitterers, which has been used to create a chart of the top 100 news-media Twitter feeds…”

Microsoft legal punch may change botnet battles forever – “With court backing and a novel use of a civil procedure, Microsoft appears to be close to obliterating the Waledac spam botnet, changing the way online criminal operations are defeated…”

The Neurobiology of Evil – “Is a person’s propensity toward evil a matter of malfunctioning synapses and neurons? Michael Stone, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and author of “The Anatomy of Evil,” says it is. Ever-more-detailed brain scans are revealing the biological origins of psychological issues in “evil” people, from those who are mildly antisocial to serial murderers….”

Can A Man Really Get Pregnant? Sure, But It Might Kill Him – “With male pregnancy, though, something funny happens: Some say it is possible while others say it isn’t. To understand how different professionals can reach such opposite conclusions, we must delve into the thought processes of ‘the scientist’ and ‘the clinician,’ respectively…”

Good dancer and bad dancer

With $46M grab, can Kno make the education tablet a reality? – “The advent of a “digital” textbook in schools and colleges is something that’s been talked about since the early days of the computer, although it has never had a chance to crystallize. But now, with devices like the iPad breaking new ground and technology finally catching up to the dream, it’s an exciting time to be a student…”

Not Ready for Summer to End? Try YouTube’s Vacationer – “The Vacationer channel offers a carousel of escapist frolics shot in pleasant and exotic locations. Provided by such entities as National Geographic, the Travel Channel, HowCast, Lonely Planet and more, the content ranges from videos on steel drums and belly dancers to clips of of a 24-hour sojourn in New York City….”

Bay of Fundy may get world’s largest turbine – “The company that recently installed the world’s largest tidal turbine off the coast of Scotland wants to test the same machine in the Bay of Fundy off Nova Scotia…”

How an Anti-Piracy Firm Became Banned In Its Own Country – “A notorious Switzerland-based anti-piracy tracking company has to stop harvesting the IP addresses of citizens using P2P networks. The Swiss High Court ruled that IP addresses constitute personal information and when Logistep collected them without the owner’s knowledge, that amounted to a breach of privacy laws. From its eDonkey Razorback beginnings, via France through to yesterday’s conclusion, here is the full story….”

Google Instant:

Google Scribe – “Google launched a very interesting tool that offers suggestions as you type: Google Scribe. It’s not exactly the service I anticipated 3 years ago, but Google Scribe works surprisingly well. For example, I started to type “This works sur” and Google suggested “This works surprisingly well”, which is exactly what I wanted to type. Instead of typing 14 characters, I could only type “1″ or press Enter to select the first suggestion….”

This Article Was Fully Composed On Google’s New Automatic Writing System – “From now on, instead of using the usual two dozen baboons to randomly write Gizmodo’s articles, I am going to use Google Scribe, a new Google Labs application that suggests the next word or group of words as you write…”

LG Releases Mixologist 5000 – “Trend-setting electronics and appliance manufacturer LG released the Mixologist5000 to a few test locations earlier today. Dubbed “the bartender in a box” the Mixologist 5000 serves a noble purpose – to provide “resort-quality mixed drinks at home, minus the work.””

Daimler to Launch the Twitter of Ride Sharing – “What’s a German car company doing getting into social networking and tech-enabled carpooling? Trying to figure out new business models for an era of accelerating urbanization, declining car ownership and expanding access to the mobile web….”

Missile Beats Flying Lightsaber In Crucial Test – “Missile 1, Flying Laser 0. So much for America’s real-life “lightsaber.” The Missile Defense Agency has spent billions to trick out a Boeing 747 with a laser to shoot down missiles. But the so-called Airborne Laser Test Bed just failed a crucial test that it was expected to pass: shooting down a mock nuclear-armed missile from 100 miles away…”

Sulzberger Concedes: “We Will Stop Printing The New York Times Sometime In The Future” – “We estimate that the NYT currently spends about $200 million a year on its newsroom and generates about $150 million of online revenue. If the paywall is highly successful–attracting, say, 1 million subscribers who pay $100 a year–this will add another $100 million of online subscription revenue (assuming the company doesn’t lose ad revenue). With $250 million of revenue, the NYT might be able to sustain newsroom costs of about $100 million…”

Vancouver taxpayers on hook for $1-billion as most Olympic Village units unsold – “Sixty-six per cent of Vancouver’s pricey Olympic Village condos remain unsold — a total of 483 units at the massive False Creek development that served as athletes’ housing during the two-week 2010 Games…”

Google logo clickthrough causes sales windfall for toy maker – “But the first three results this search returns are not for the Fullerene molecule, but rather they are for a magnetic desktop toy going by the same name. That little curiosity earned the company more than $250,000 in orders that day, or more than 10,000 units….”

The new iPod Touch 4 has only 256MB RAM; No 512MB – “That’s right folks, the new iPod Touch 4 has only 256 Mb of ram and not 512 Mb like expected. It’s got the same amount than the iPhone 3GS and iPad. Disappointing it is, but it’s to keep the low selling cost of the iPod Touch 4….” See also: Oops! Apple blunders, no vibrator in iPod touch

Jailbreak hole in iOS 4.1 will be hard to close – “Just hours after Apple released iOS 4.1 to great fanfare, hardware hackers found a way to jailbreak devices that run the new operating system. More surprising still, there doesn’t appear to be anything Steve Jobs can do to stop them in the near future….”

Plan to organize the Internet turns out to be a pipe dream – “As the Internet continues to grow, it may be in everyone’s best interest to organize how its various parts connect to each other, according to a paper published in Nature Communications. A group of researchers have developed a system that structures the Internet’s nodes by coordinates, and allows each node to send information through a short hyperbolic path by knowing only which of its neighboring nodes will get the information closer to its destination. While the theoretical implementation works almost perfectly, the geographical realities of the Internet’s arrangement suggest that efficient, scalable arrangements like this one may never come to pass…”

Original Models: A Look at Iconic Tech Prototypes – “If necessity is the mother of invention, trial and error is the father. In these prototypes of now-iconic products, you can still glimpse the sweat and ingenuity it took to bring them to life…”

[[[Jump to - Interesting Reading #572 – Google TV, iPad Canibalism, Best jobs, earthquake flyover, plumbing disasters and much more…]]]

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