There has recently been a rash of articles and blog posts about the Rosie Coffee Table. I have been bewildered that a fairly basic touch screen personal computer has gained so much interest. Is it because it is in a coffee table? I think that it will be a while before touch screens stretch beyond basic kiosk uses due to a whole host of factors particularly the lack of applications and the glacial speed of user adoption of new user pointing and manipulation devices. As sad as it may seem, I think the speed of change in this area will not accelerate until my kids start hacking and it will be a truly transformative experience much like the iPhone is to your basic WAP experience and will be something more similar MIT’s high resolution multi touch system that Jeff Han demo’d at TED:

Technorati Tags: Rosie Table , Jeff Han

Hewlett Packard is offering a state of the art video conference solution, HP Halo, that they claim is a “high-bandwidth, full-duplex, no-perceived- delay connection experience between HP Halo studios.”

From the demo it looks like it rocks but then again for $450k per node it better. Oh and that is just the start, you get to pay $18k a month for the service which allow “remote diagnostics and calibration, ongoing service and repair, and a 24×7 concierge service, eliminating the need for enterprises to operate or otherwise service the HP Halo Studio.” I guess I will have to stick with GoToMyPC and Skype.

Source: HP
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Websense, a well known security vendor has created software that turns the worlds most popular web search engine into an Internet virus scanner, capable of finding websites hosting malware. Using a binary search feature Google is able to look inside hosted .exe files that are normally unreadable. Researchers at Websense developed software tools that use this feature and are able to "google" for stings known to be used in popular malware worms such as Bagel and Mytob. They uncovered more than 2,000 websites hosting these malicious files and also were able to detect legitimate sites that had been hacked.

Websense has stated they do not plan to make the code public at this time and only plan to share it with a select group of researchers. Some people fear that this same technique could be used to manipulate the search engine and trick users into downloading malware. Now that the word is out, it will be interesting to see if similar tools are developed and made available to the public that use the same technique. Source: PC World

SeisMac turns your Macbook into an earthquake/nuke detecting machine. Using the internal sudden motion sensor built into your Macbook, the software produces a three-axis graph of your laptops movement. SeisMac can also be used with Powerbook and IBook models that have a sudden motion sensor built in. SeisMac is freeware and available for Mac OS X 10.4 or later. Now we can detect any secret underground nuclear tests going on around town. via Gizmodo

Download it Here