The Google Email Uploader is a desktop utility for Microsoft Windows that uploads email from other desktop email programs (like Microsoft Outlook) into your Google Apps mailbox. More information can be found at http://code.google.com/p/google-email-uploader/.
Download it here or share this link with your users: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/email_uploader.html
Shared by cephyn
quit worrying about the LHC - this is the real scary stuff.
On March 19, 2008, the Earth was caught full-on in the beam of nature’s deadliest beast, a gamma-ray burst.
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| Swift’s view of GRB 080319B. Courtesy Swift team/Penn State University/NASA. |
Lucky for us, the GRB was far away– far, far away: 7.5 billion light years distant, literally more than halfway across the visible Universe.
Had we been much, much closer, like a thousand light years away, the energy from the beam would have torn our atmosphere away, boiled our oceans, and irradiated the planet with a million times the lethal dose of high-energy gamma and X-rays.
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are scary, scary, scary.
But it wasn’t that close; it was a million times farther away than the lethal distance (in fact, all GRBs are really far away, and so pose little real danger to us here on Earth). All we saw was a flash of light — actually, a flash of gamma rays, detected by NASA’s remarkable Swift satellite, designed to do this very task. But what a flash! Even from that terrible distance, the amount of light the GRB gave off made it visible, briefly, to the naked eye!
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| Artist’s impression of a GRB. Click for a way cool animation. Courtesy NASA. |
A GRB is born in the fury of an exploding massive star, when its core collapses into a black hole. A vast amount of energy is released, more than the Sun’s entire lifetime’s output. A hellish mix of forces focuses, squeezes this exploding energy and matter into beams, extremely narrow cones of emission, cosmic blowtorches which march across space. If you are too close, and in the path of a beam, well, saying "you’re toast" doesn’t quite cover it. But if the beam misses you, you don’t get the gigantic burst of light; the energy drops of very rapidly if the aim of the GRB is off. Even a miss by a fraction of a degree is enough to change its apparent brightness hugely.
Scientists making models of GRBs had an idea that this narrow, intense beam is inside a wider, mushier beam of energy. It’s easier to get hit by by the wider beam (like you don’t have to aim a shotgun as carefully as you do a rifle), and so the idea is that what we see from almost all detected GRBs is this wide beam. Actually being in the path of the narrow beam would be very rare.
And that’s what makes GRB 080319B (the second GRB seen on March 19, 2008), so remarkable: it was aimed squarely at us, and we were bathed by light from the narrow beam. We were looking right down the monster’s throat. The beam was incredibly tight; only about 0.4 degrees wide (take a look at a protractor to get an idea of how skinny this is). Had the beam been aimed just a scosh off, just a tad, the GRB would have appeared far, far dimmer. We still would have seen it, but it would have looked like just another GRB, and not the single most luminous event ever witnessed by humans.
Probably all GRBs have this narrow beam, but they miss us, so we don’t see them. And because the beam is so narrow, scientists say that this sort of thing would happen once a decade or so. Good thing we had Swift running at the time! Swift was able to detect the burst, then rapidly (within seconds) send the news to observatories all over (and above) the planet, so that they could instantly follow up with their own observations. This allowed astronomers to detect the burst at a wide range of wavelengths (radio, infrared, optical, ultraviolet, X-ray and gamma ray), which is critical: it gives us insight into how the beams are formed. That in turn tells us about how the black hole formed, how the star exploded, what sorts of material were involved, and their physical characteristics.
All of this tells us more about the Universe, which is good.
But it also tells us about gamma-ray bursts. And there is just something about them, something terrifying about the energy, the power, the raw fury of them, that fascinates me. They really aren’t a threat to us — we think they can only come from great distance — but they still represent nature at its fiercest. Sometimes the pursuit of science may seem cold and emotionless, but that is far, far from truth. And like GRBs, the closer you get to the truth, the more powerful, the more energetic, and the more passionate science gets.
And may I add, I have a whole chapter about these beasts in my upcoming book, Death from the Skies!, which is available for pre-order on amazon.com.
Digg for programming questions? Joel on Software and Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror start letting users into their well built site.
The highly anticipated general release of StackOverflow, the social site for programming questions developed by rock star programmers Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, hasn't happened yet - but the doors are cracked open and many new users are streaming in this morning.
You can get in via this beta URL, using"twitter@twitter.com" as your email and "falkensmaze" as your password. At least you can get in that way for now. Below are screen shots and our first impressions of the new service.
The idea behind StackOverflow is to offer a really well designed site where programmers can find answers to questions that are more obscure than they can get answered elsewhere. Site founders Spolsky and Attwood are software gurus focused on developer relations and user experience. They've got a very capable team with them as well, as is evidenced by the product so far.
The community is for developers working in any programming language and use of the site is completely free. The name StackOverflow refers to an infinite loop or recursion in the programming languages C or C++ and sure enough, a lot of the conversation on the site is self referential so far. The team's got plans for that, though, so we're confident this will be less the case than it is on other sites.
So far, we like it a lot. What does it look like? Check out these screen shots.
The front page.
My Question Got Answered!
I got a good answer to an admittedly simple question, in 2 minutes. Awesome.
Asking a Question.
Pretty smart UI here, quite helpful and fun to use.
A User Profile
Above, the top half of a user profile, below the bottom half. Note that you can see how often a user votes things up or down but you cannot see specific voting history. The user feed is nice.
The UI here has lots of really nice little touches, it's responsive, communicative and relatively clear. We like it a lot and that was one of the site's big goals, to build an effective UI.
Account creation looks very good, it happens automatically via cookie until you register, but OpenID association with your account is not implemented particularly well. Attwood is blaming OpenID providers for that on Twitter, but we're seeing a few too many problems to buy that.
There's already an active community of beta testers on the site and they've developed extensions like a Firefox and IE7 search plugin, a couple of Greasemonkey scripts and a Ubiquity script. That's pretty awesome.
There's a sophisticated credibility system at work here, where users who build up their reputation are given new capabilities. Those capabilities include commenting on questions instead of just answering them and doing some moderation.
The "community mode" is interesting, things are wiki style on the site and once a certain number of edits have occurred the original asker of the question no longer owns it - it becomes a community question, with lower credibility thresh holds required for interaction, etc. The Community User username is tied to these threads and acts as an automated bot repairing things like malformed tags through out the site. That sounds really helpful.
Finally on the positive side, we got some good replies to our questions really quickly and we're already having a lot of fun just browsing the site.
We like StackOverflow a lot so far, but there are some real concerns that deserve to be raised. As the site's owners have voiced throughout its development, the quality of discussions may go down rapidly when they open up to the world at large. We hope that's not the case but we will watch the reputation and bios of the people who answer our questions.
More importantly, perhaps, we're not sure the Digg-style home page is the best way to organize these discussion. Is it on the basis of the newness or hotness of questions that things should be ranked? Or should top answers be highlighted? We know that the site's developers have spent a lot of time wrestling with these questions, so we won't pretend to know better, but we hope the core prioritization principles work out well in this context.
There are some features that we expected to see here but don't. An easy way to mark a thread for reading later would be really helpful, as would a feed for those items in our account. A feed for answers given to our questions would be nice. So would the option to get an email notification when one of our questions is replied to, or another question we're interested in. GetSatisfaction's "I'm interested in this too" feature would make a world of sense - let me know when someone else gets an answer to this question because I'm curious. Finally, a "thanks for this" button like Ma.gonlia would make sense and offer a different kind of feedback.
We've already subscribed to the feeds for several topic tags and we're excited about everything we expect we can learn from the StackOverflow community. General availability of the site is expected sometime this week or next.
Filed under: Cellphones
The increasingly high cost of text messaging has already caused a bit of a stir in Canada, and it looks like Democratic Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin is concerned with the situation in the US as well, with him now opening an inquiry to attempt to get the carriers to explain themselves. Apparently, Kohl is a bit puzzled as to why some customers are now paying 20 cents per message when they paid just 10 cents in 2005, a period that Kohl notes just happens to overlap with some consolidation in the wireless industry, when the number of national carriers shrunk from six to four. Those carriers, as you might expect, aren't saying much just yet, with Sprint only going as far as to say that it looks forward to "responding to the Senator's inquiry about the text messaging options we offer our customers and we will fully cooperate with his request," and the rest saying even less.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
For me, this surreal moment - like the entire surrealism of the past ten days - is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It's about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?
So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him. On core moral issues, where this man knew what the right thing was, and had to pick between good and evil, he chose evil. When he knew that George W. Bush's war in Iraq was a fiasco and catastrophe, and before Donald Rumsfeld quit, McCain endorsed George W. Bush against his fellow Vietnam vet, John McCain in 2004. By that decision, McCain lost any credibility that he can ever put country first. He put party first and his own career first ahead of what he knew was best for the country.
And when the Senate and House voted overwhelmingly to condemn and end the torture regime of Bush and Cheney in 2006, McCain again had a clear choice between good and evil, and chose evil.
He capitulated and enshrined torture as the policy of the United States, by allowing the CIA to use techniques as bad as and worse than the torture inflicted on him in Vietnam. He gave the war criminals in the White House retroactive immunity against the prosecution they so richly deserve. The enormity of this moral betrayal, this betrayal of his country's honor, has yet to sink in. But for my part, it now makes much more sense. He is not the man I thought he was.
And when he had the chance to engage in a real and substantive debate against the most talented politician of the next generation in a fall campaign where vital issues are at stake, what did McCain do? He began his general campaign with a series of grotesque, trivial and absurd MTV-style attacks on Obama's virtues and implied disgusting things about his opponent's patriotism.
And then, because he could see he was going to lose, ten days ago, he threw caution to the wind and with no vetting whatsoever, picked a woman who, by her decision to endure her own eight-month pregnancy of a Down Syndrome child in public, that he was going to reignite the culture war as a last stand against Obama. That's all that is happening right now: a massive bump in the enthusiasm of the Christianist base. This is pure Rove.
Yes, McCain made a decision that revealed many appalling things about him. In the end, his final concern is not national security. No one who cares about national security would pick as vice-president someone who knows nothing about it as his replacement. No one who cares about this country's safety would gamble the security of the world on a total unknown because she polled well with the Christianist base. No person who truly believed that the surge was integral to this country's national security would pick as his veep candidate a woman who, so far as we can tell anything, opposed it at the time.
McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States. And that is why it is more important than ever to ensure that Barack Obama is the next president. The alternative is now unthinkable. And McCain - no one else - has proved it.
More than 100 companies are strutting their stuff at the Demofall '08 and TechCrunch50 conferences out on the West coast this week. At events like this, which involve dozens of beta demonstrations of new products in development, a lot of the items blend together into a white noise of over-hype, but a handful of this week's debuts are intriguing. Let's take a look at 10 of the neatest up-and-coming offerings that aren't yet available—and the tools already available to you that replicate some of their eyebrow-raising tweaks. Photo by TechCrunch50-2008.
Not to sound like a doting parent here, but Rate Surfer is really a tool of last financial resort. Still, for those carrying balances between multiple credit cards, it can help you put more dollars toward getting back to financial freedom. You give the webapp access to your credit card accounts, and it monitors them for rate changes. If one card's got a better rate than another, it suggests moving your balance over. It may not be the best situation to be in, but Rate Surfer is nothing if not an honest tool for those with a serious credit fix.
There are, of course, many, many tools for any system that let you take a commercial DVD and copy it, or put it on your hard drive for as-you-like viewing. Until now, however, no major media player has stepped forward with a consumer-level, legal software package. RealDVD aims to be exactly that—it keeps the DVD's copy protection intact, and adds an iTunes-like layer of its own. At a $30 introductory price, it's still paying a ransom to use your own possessions, but it might make an easy-to-use solution for legal-conscious parents or less-geeky friends.
The alternative: Adam covered this ground when RealDVD was announced earlier this week, offering up a guide to ripping full DVDs without the nasty DRM.
Aiming to serve as an intelligent index for your inbox, Postbox is a mail client that focuses on auto-sorting emails into topics, rather than just showing what's newest. So if you're part of a team of writers who are, for example, covering the latest browser release, Postbox keeps track of every URL, image, and all the text about that browser are available in a front-and-center tab, while your bills, PR pitches, and other get-to-laters are in discrete topics lists in the lower-right. That's how it looks, anyways, and we're always intrigued by new approaches to email.
The alternative: Taking the reins into your own hands and setting up a system like Inbox Zero or a personalized version, like Gina's Trusted Trio.
There are a lot of startups dedicated to hooking into, organizing, or otherwise taking advantage of people signed up to multiple social networks and social media. Most aren't going to help you get much done, but these two deserve some mention, and together might work quite well. Popego looks at what you look at on the web, checks out your social profiles, and recommends web content with adjustable filters. You can see sites that Popego thinks you and your friends enjoy in common, show only videos that you might find interesting, and make other adjustments. For those who use social media mainly as a career-boosting tool, Angstro is perfect—it shows you news and items about the people you follow on Facebook and LinkedIn, not all the stuff they've dashed off and posted. So if one of your clients makes an announced sale, or your old boss suddenly winds up at a company you'd really like to work for, Angstro is the one letting you know. Now, that's some helpful network noise.
height="101" class="right" align="right"/>If you only had 10 seconds in an elevator to pitch 2Pad, you'd do well to say it looked a lot like the Gmail-only Xoopit, taking all the photos and videos in your inbox and setting them up in a easy-browse gallery. 2Pad, however, works with Hotmail, AOL, and other webmail services, and offers separate storage and retrieval for varying-price plans.
The alternative: For Gmail users, well, Xoopit.
If you're your own worst enemy when it comes to stemming the high tides of email, OtherInbox can act as a personal levee. The web-based mail client provides you with an email address that you tweak for all the email sign-ups for deals, alerts, notifications, and other bacn you invite. So you'd give Facebook an address of facebook@yourname.otherinbox.com, and OtherInbox's interface separates out all your commercial/non-human email for quick reading, archiving, and deletion.
The alternative: Users of advanced filters and disposable addresses in Gmail or other advanced email systems already have these tools available to them.
MessageSling wants to replace your plain vanilla voicemail with a web-archived, SMS-alert-ready, voice-to-text email forwarding system. Signing up and switching is ingeniously easy—just type in a forward-enabling string on your phone—and the results look pretty neat, although the voice-to-text functions aren't explained fully at this point.
The alternative: As noted by our commenters this morning, also-free service YouMail offers many of the same features, with a slicker interface and personalized greetings.
The makers of Fitbit have their hearts in the right place—for many of us, keeping track of exercise and daily physical activity is just another task that makes getting in shape seem a chore, on the order of paying quarterly tax estimates or organizing receipts. The Fitbit is a small, wireless, rechargeable device that can be worn on your pants, shirt, wrist, or undergarments, and tracks how far you walked, how many calories were burned, and even your sleep patterns. From the screenshots, it looks like a data geek's dream, but time will tell if the tracker is comfortable enough to fit into people's lifestyles.
The alternative: If you're an iPod owner, and not all that interested in tracking your non-workout time, the Nike+iPod combo is a cheaper solution. The newest line of iPods actually have Nike+ receivers built in, so the chip alone only runs you $20.
The idea of "web clipping"—running through web pages, grabbing text or entire pages as you go, organizing them later—isn't very new. Snipd, however, brings a cross-platform, anywhere-you've-got-a-browser bookmarklet into the game. Of course you can search through all that text later, and organize your clippings into different job buckets, but what really might help is that, for the time being, bookmarklet tools like this are really helpful in extension-less browsers like Google Chrome.
The alternative: Setting yourself up with Google Notebook, which integrates nicely into Google Bookmarks and can serve as its own helper for Getting Things Done.
Check out a video of Snipd in action below:
This password-aggregating service hews closely to the secure password system our lead editor proposed two years ago: One password you can remember, modified for every web site login by a system you can understand. UsableLogin automates the second part of that equation—you type in a passcode, and it adds bits of cryptographic data to it for each site. The system appears to work through an extension, so time will tell if it ends up being a Firefox-only novelty or a great idea in password security.
What product on this list are you most interested to try out for yourself? Let us know in the comments.
In The Innovator’s Dilemma, author Clayton Christensen describes how new technologies emerge to take over markets. Initially, companies roll out products that serve the low-end of the market. They offer something cheaper and less functional than the product that currently dominates a market.
After establishing a toehold in a niche, a company expands the capabilities of its product until its features start to “bump up†against those of the incumbent vendors. The incumbents, the original “innovatorsâ€, find themselves fighting at the lower margin end of their business. Tired of spending resources to protect low margin sales, they take themselves further up the functionality ladder, where they can charge a premium.
Eventually, they run out of room at the top of the market. And the scrappy, less functional competitor has taken over the remaining market. This is shown graphically below:
In the recent New York Times article, How Many Reviewers Should Be in the Kitchen, Randall Stross looks at how Yelp is eating away at Zagat’s business model. Zagat publishes the very successful Zagat Guides. Zagat’s reviewers give the low-down on restaurants in cities around the world: price, quality, service.
I remember from my banking days that these were hit. And they cost money as well. Zagat has done well charging for their guides.
Yelp is the Web 2.0 site where everyday people rate their experiences with all sorts of services, restaurants included. Typical of these user-generated content sites, the quality of Yelp reviews was uneven early on. But it was a quick way to see what someone thought of a place before you went.
Well Yelp has gotten bigger and better. The site now has an army of reviewers. And power users with a flair for good reviews earn Yelp Elite status (my brother-in-law is one of them).
Yelp started out pretty low-end, as most Web 2.0 companies do. But it appears that Yelp is now migrating upmarket in terms of quality. It’s starting to bump up against market leader Zagat.
Here’s how Stross describes it in the New York Times:
Fortunately, the sites that welcome customer reviews have evolved significantly. One of the best, Yelp, has replaced the cult of the anonymous amateur with a design that highlights the judgments of the exceptional few. These dedicated reviewers produce work that, in quantity and quality, increasingly approaches that of their professional forebears, and they are willing to divulge personal information about themselves.
Because of Zagat’s 30-year history of subscriptions, the company’s mindset is one of actually making money via subscriptions, and that has served it well. The reluctance to give up something that’s generating real sales with real profits is understandable, but risks Zagat losing market share.
I don’t have a crystal ball, but there’s enough history where companies that you might have said, “Oh, they’ll never overtake so-an-so†end up doing just that. It’s not an overnight thing, it takes years. But it’s a real phenomenon.
Michelin Guides next?
