Google has launched a nonprofit website program - with free domains, hosting and Adwords money for any companies that qualify.
The Google site set up for this wants to help nonprofits "reach and engage supporters, improve you operations and raise awareness for your cause."
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First released for Windows XP in December of 2008, Google Chrome is a browser developed by, yes, Google. Versions for Mac OS X and Linux followed a few months later and since then Chrome has become one of the most popular browsers — 19.26% of you are reading Brand New on Chrome, in third "place" behind Safari and Firefox. Chrome's most current stable release is version 10.0.648.134 (but you knew that, right?) and currently in development is dev version 11.0.696.12 which is not released to the public yet but for those that are taking it for an early spin they have gotten a glimpse at the new logo for Chrome. The new logo for Chrome surfaced after a new logo for Chromium — the open source version of Chrome — made its debut earlier this year.
It's certainly nice and welcome to move away from logos that looked as if they came out of a mash-up of Fisher-Price and Tron and the new "abstract," flat logos are slightly slicker but there is still something odd about them. There is shading still involved, so dimension is meant to be implied, yet it's hard to tell what that dimension is supposed to be. If the light source is coming from above, how come there are shadows being cast from bottom to top as seen in the green-to-red transition? The red-to-yellow pane indicates one kind of dimension but the rest doesn't follow. Realistic dimension is not about taking one shape and step-repeating it, shadow and all, a couple of times to form the circle. The previous versions of Chrome and Chromium were garish but at least it was clear what the dimension was. With the new ones, Google tried some kind of compromise between full 3D rendering and flat and it didn't quite pay off. Maybe I'm just misinterpreting what I'm seeing or trying to extract too much sense out of it — indeed, I'm just glad for the move towards simplicity.
Thanks Lucian Marin for first tip.
The generator is about the size of a saucepot, and would replace the 1,000-pound power train in most cars — no transmission, cooling system, emissions regulation or fluids needed. Norbert Müller and colleagues at Michigan State University showed off the new motor prototype at a meeting with the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency.
It consists of a rotor carved with wave-like channels. Fuel and air enter through central inlets, and the rotor spins to block their exit through a separate outlet. The sudden build-up of pressure generates a shock wave, compressing the mixture. Then it’s ignited, and as the rotor keeps spinning, the outlet opens again to let the hot gases escape. New Scientist explains in further detail.
The novel generator would use about 60 percent of fuel for propulsion, according to MSU. This is a dramatic improvement over typical car engines, which use only 15 percent of fuel for forward movement. The system could also make cars 20 percent lighter, improving fuel economy even more.
MSU received a $2.5 million ARPA-E grant to develop the technology. Müller said he hopes to have an even larger 25-kilowatt prototype by the end of this year.
by dooce in Nubbin
© Armstrong Media, LLC. All rights reserved. Originally published by Heather B. Armstrong for dooce.com as The most adorable thing you will see all day. This post cannot be republished without express written permission.
Spurs-a-jingle boffins in America say that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), most puissant matter-rending machine ever assembled by humanity, may also turn out to be the first time machine ever built. According to the physicists' calculations, instruments at the mighty particle-smasher may soon detect signs of "singlets" which it has not yet generated, sent back from their creation in the future.…
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is finally coming to the PC later this month, after hitting consoles last November. To make amends, the publisher is releasing a digital deluxe version of the game, complete with a wide range of extras, including a copy of the game's soundtrack. The problem? It looks like that soundtrack may actually be a torrented version.
As one Reddit user discovered after preordering the game, all but one of the soundtrack's 23 songs lists the phrase "encoded by Arsa13" in its ID3 tag. A quick search reveals several uploaded versions of the AC:B soundtrack that came packed with the collector's edition of the game on various torrents, attributed to one Arsa13.
So did Ubisoft actually take a pirated version of its own soundtrack to include as a bonus? It certainly looks that way, though the company doesn't seem to have much to say about it, telling Eurogamer simply that the situation is under investigation.
But this wouldn't be the first time that something like this happened. Back in 2008, Rainbow Six Vegas 2 users who had digital versions of the game were having issues, as the game required a disc to be playable. Ubisoft updated the game with a patch that allowed the game to be played without a disc. Problem was, that patch was actually created by pirate group Reloaded and used without attribution.
Ars has contacted Ubisoft for comment but has yet to hear back.
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