So what does that mean? Well it means that instead of merely looking at a 2-dimensional static profile with text and photos, you will be interacting with your friends in real-time in a virtual world. Second Life has really pioneered the concept of having that “second life” – or an avatar that represents your persona in the virtual world. Now California-based startup Vivaty has said that they are going to bring that experience to Facebook users. Instead of clicking on a link to someone’s photo albums, you will instead be invited into their room where you can see their photos on the walls. Look for it to be released later this year.

[via NewScientist]

I recently made a PayPal purchase of $10 CallOut credit for my Gizmo account.  The payment was processed successfully and $10 was taken from my bank account yet I did not receive the credit on my Gizmo account.  After numerous attempts at contacting Gizmo through their support ticket system (which is the only direct method they have for getting in touch with customer support), I have yet to receive a single response or any information regarding my payment.

I spent some time looking around the site for alternative methods of getting in touch with their customer support and came across their forums.  I thought perhaps a post in the forums might be of help to solving my issue.  Little did I know that I was far from the only one facing payment issues with Gizmo.  It appears to be a very common problem that money is being taken from people’s bank accounts or credit cards and not being credited into their Gizmo accounts.

Gizmo, what is going on here?  I was an avid fan of your service and have promoted it to numerous people over the years.  But come on, it’s been over 2 weeks since I first contacted you with regards to my issue and not a single response?  And what about all the other people who are in a similar boat?  We are waiting to hear from you.

UPDATE: Almost a month later Gizmo finally reimbursed me.  On May 7th I received an email in which they apologized for the delay saying they had “unforeseen internal problems”.  Too little too late Gizmo?  I won’t be giving them a dime of my money again.

Internet startup Yamli, which was co-founded by Habib Haddad and fellow MIT grad Imad Jureidini, has come up with what I think is an excellent solution to this problem. The Arabic words are still spelled out phonetically using English letters, but Yamli uses some nifty Ajax to communicate with their servers and determine the Arabic word you are trying to spell on the fly. The suggestions appear in a little drop down below the word that you are typing similar to how Google’s suggestions appear when you are searching for something on the web. Using this technology they’ve created a front-end to Google search that makes it incredibly easy to search the web in Arabic. They’ve also built a standalone editor where you can write some text in a similar manner and then copy-paste that text into an email or a document.

I tried doing a search for “madrast ilmushaghibeen” – which is a famous Arabic comedy. Yamli immediately recognized each word as I was typing it and suggested the corresponding word spelt using Arabic letters. I hit enter and got relevant links pointing to YouTube clips of the play. I then tried out the editor and it worked with more complex words too – it even spelled out my name correctly on the first try!

All in all, it’s an easy-to-use and very effective solution to the problem of interfacing with the Arabic web, which is one of the fastest growing segments on the Internet today. Great job guys!

That number resonates with me because I’ve read several books that discuss the future of technology and how we are on the cusp of approaching the computing capacity of the human brain. One of the better books I’ve read on the topic is The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil. In it he talks a lot about The Law of Accelerating Returns which states that the rate of technological change is actually accelerating, and not fixed.

To make this more clear, Moore’s Law says that computing power doubles every 18 months and most claim that this “law” has held consistent throughout the last half century. However, if we take a look at the improvements in supercomputing capacity then we notice that over a longer period of time, the rate at which speeds are doubling is actually shortening over time. Take a look at the table below, it shows the time taken for a thousand times increase in the top supercomputing speed globally. Notice that each successive 1000x increase has taken less time than the previous one. Hence the Law of Accelerating Returns.

So what does all this mean for us? Well Ray Kurzweil is renowned for having made many successful predictions, one of the most famous of these being that a computer would beat the best human at chess in 1998. It actually happened a year earlier in 1997. He made the prediction almost 10 years prior in one of his books.

Kurzweil estimates the computing capacity of the human brain at 20 million billion FLOPS – or 20 (here it comes) quadrillion FLOPS. It’s not easy to precisely calculate the computational speed of the human brain, but if we were assume he is correct then based on the historical data above we should see supercomputers reaching human-like speeds within the next 6 years – so by 2013. But due to the Law of Accelerating Returns, even if he is off by a factor of 10 or 100, that will only add a couple of years to the estimate. So we can very safely predict that by 2015 we will have machines with the computing capacity of the human brain.

Now that’s a milestone!

Check out the video:

This is a brilliant project being done in one of the few places on Earth where it is actually possible. Photographer Danny Goldfield has set out to photograph a child from every country on Earth, all of whom must be living in New York City.  He’s taken some beautiful pictures.

Newspapers in Belgium filed a lawsuit against Google stating that the Google News website was reprinting the articles from their websites without paying them or asking for permission. It’s total crap because Google only prints the first few sentences of some of the articles on its news page. Anyhow, the newspapers won the lawsuit and as part of the court order, Google was instructed to print the full ruling of the Google News case on all of Google-Belgium’s webpages or else Google would have to pay half a million Euros per day. I guess Google’s pissed, but they complied, and now Google Belgium users have this long ugly statement on every single Google page that’s in Belgium.

Check it out here.

UPDATE (29/09/06): Looks like they don’t have to display it anymore

Click here for link.

[via digg]

Hover your mouse over different parts of the body to see the latest in bionic technologies. Some of these are available now and others are in clinical trials. Ten years ago none of these technologies existed. In ten years we’ll be able to replace a lot of broken parts of the body. Good stuff!

Click here for the link.

What this means is that any data you send using this new browser gets wrapped in an anonymous package that no one can open. Then before going out to the web address you want it to go, it first goes into the Tor network, where it hops between a few computers. At the point of exit, the package gets taken off and the data that you would have sent directly to the web if you were using regular firefox or internet explorer, now gets sent, but from that other Tor computer and not yours. So it looks like it’s coming from the Tor computer and not from yours, but on the way to that Tor computer it’s unknown to anyone (e.g. Etisalat if u’re in the UAE).

If you didn’t get any of that, never mind. This is a howto right, and now you’re all wondering how do we do it? It’s really easy, but first a word of caution: IT’S SLOW! Yup, real slow. Remember the days when we used to surf the web on dial-up? THAT slow. Which means that it’s painful, but usable. If it gets unbearable, then you can try your luck by clicking on the “Flush Circuit” button in the menu bar. That will attempt to get you a new path through the Tor Network and so may speed things up.

Now, here’s the link.

After you download it double click on the .exe file and it will let u choose a directory to unpack the program. Choose any directory on your computer and then click OK. Once it’s finished, go to that directory and double click on the Torpark.exe file. This should then open the browser. Here’s a couple of screenshots for you to enjoy before taking the plunge:

This one shows that when I open up google.com, it takes me automatically to google.de (deutschland) because thanks to Tor, Google thinks I am in Germany, even though I’m not.

This one shows YouTube being brought up from a computer in the UAE even though it is banned. For those of you not living in the UAE and asking the obvious question: why the heck is youtube banned – just don’t ask!