Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Like a vivid fever-dream Michael Bay might have after a night of pounding Sparks, this video of our nation's darkest hour and greatest triumph will have you screaming for a sequel. Confirming our belief that the out-of-control spy satellite which the Navy shot out of the sky in February really did contain a planet-destroying plague of zombie juice and / or Aliens, this roller coaster ride of a film retells the whole drama -- replete with swelling strings and in-your-face rage rock. Enjoy the epic video after the break, as well as a recap of our extensive coverage of the event, and rest easy knowing that once again great disaster has been averted... or has it?

[Via Wired]

Continue reading Spy satellite shoot-down: The Movie

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Filed under: GPS

It looks like those relying on GPS to find the quickest route possible could soon be getting a boost, with Inrix now touting its new "third generation" routing platform, which promises to bring with it all sorts of new traffic jam avoidance measures. One of the key components of that, it seems, is Inrix's so-called Total Fusion system, which the company claims to be the very first traffic data service that "intelligently combines real-time, predictive and historical traffic information for over 800,000 miles of roadways across the U.S." That gets backed up by Inrix's Connected Services platform, which'll let navigation companies integrate all sorts of other aggregated data, including weather information, fuel prices, and movie times, to name a few. There's no word as to when we'll actually see any of that in an actual product, however, although Inrix has apparently already signed up at least one automaker that'll apparently remain nameless until later this year.

[Via Autoblog]

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A new news aggregator called Eureka Science News is officially launching later on tonight. It’s been a while since we heard from an aggregation site that didn’t have a user-generated aspect to its curating process, but that’s exactly how Eureka works.

Instead of looking to users and readers, Eureka has its own AI algorithm that deems which news is recent, relevant and the most important. Eureka tags and organizes all its featured news content, and presents it in a manner that allows the user to simply choose a category and begin perusing through the news.

Outside of bookmarking or emailing stories, there really aren’t any social elements to Eureka right now, but there will be a few interactive options in the future. Once Eureka reaches a certain audience level, the plan is to incorporate features like commenting for individual articles. The launching of Eureka Science News emphasizes the divide between user-driven ranking processes and algorithmic processes that attempt to do the job of a knowledgeable editor.

Even though we’ve seen a trend moving towards the combining of these two camps, we still have a long way to go. Human editing, especially in the interactive sense, is picking up steam from sites like Mahalo, despite early hesitation from some in the early adopter crowd. Eureka is a rather niche site, being focused on science news, but it will be interesting to see such a service grow from here.

With Eureka’s plans to add a bit of social interaction, and having seen the route traditional media has had to take with its online offerings, it’s clear that a main source of success from combo content aggregators and recommendation tools comes from the ability to engage users through participation.mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/21/eureka-science-new/

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The problem with interviewing smart higher-ups like Shane Kim is they will always say exactly what they mean to say, and you’re never going to pull one over on them, as you might with someone lower down the ladder — like a loose-lipped coder. While he did say a lot of words, Kim essentially refused to comment on everything the interviewer brought up: differential console success, any future hardware or software, and difficulties with XBLA development.

The biggest thing that could really be taken away was his comment that once one of the big three was “well on their way to 100 million units” then it might be possible to declare a “winner.” I think declaring a winner in such a huge market is a bit pointless, but if you have to, I think waiting for the 100m mark silly — like waiting until the post-game show to call who won the Super Bowl.

Everyone knows that I’m not the biggest fan of the iPhone and I usually steer clear of most comparisons because I find them useless. That being said, I’ll reiterate the uselessness of this comparison between the current gen iPhone and RIM’s upcoming BlackBerry Bold by the iPhone blog. I don’t even care about the fact that the Bold is the clear winner because we have no idea what the 3G iPhone will ship with. But if you’d like to take a look for yourself then feel free to do so after the jump.

Filed under: Meta

As of a couple redesigns ago, Engadget's content column has been variable width, meaning the wider your browser, the wider the content. Readers with big widescreen monitors can feel the full effect, but we're also cognizant of the reading issues go along with having too much width, so we've been toying with the idea of going back to a fixed-width layout for the site. What do you think, how wide is wide enough for reading Engadget?

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Filed under: Cellphones

We briefly mentioned using junk data to overwrite the the iPhone's flash as a last-ditch method of securely clearing off your user data yesterday, and although we were half-joking, that's more or less your only option until Apple provides a proper secure erase feature. Security researcher Rich Mogull has helpfully laid out the steps for you, and they're basically what you'd expect: restore your iPhone, don't sync any personal data to it, and then manually transfer three different playlists large enough to fill the flash. Essentially you're doing a manual three-pass overwrite, which is pretty much exactly the long and tedious process it sounds like -- but we wouldn't dream of selling or giving away our iPhones (or any other phone with personal data on it) without struggling through it.

[Via Hack A Day]

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Sonico, a social network that provides Spanish- and Portuguese-language services to people primarily located in Latin America and Spain and claims to be adding some 150,000 new users every day, has reportedly amassed a registration base of some 15 million individuals, according to data recorded in March by comScore). This news came a mere 9 months since its launch.

Due to its strong growth, Sonico, founded by Rodrigo Teijeiro, currently the company’s CEO, now claims itself as the regional leader among competitors like Hi5 and Orkut, both of which have catered to portions of Latin America for a significantly longer period of time. Only in the Brazilian market does Sonico allow that it is the second-largest network, behind Okrut. Sonico reasons that this is due to limited time (3 months) that it’s Portuguese language support has been available.

Like most other networks of its kind, Sonico delivers to users most all of the popular services, from messaging, to media sharing (a purported 750,000 photos are uploaded to the site daily) to gaming to e-commerce utilities. The network lists itself as member of the OpenSocial community.mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/21/sonico/

PolicyMap is a new website that offers more than 4,000 points of data about any location in the United States, including demographics, real estate markets, crime, schools, housing affordability, employment type, energy consumption, and public investments. It's powered by a new Application Programming Interface (API) from commercial mapping service PushPin.

That means that outside developers can access the same data that PolicyMap does and integrate it dynamically into other services on the web. Making this kind of information easily accessible could lead to some very interesting location-aware mashups.

Standard use of PolicyMap is free, but subscribers get access to proprietary data and projections, custom regions, more reports, and the ability to upload your own data.

I'll be moving next month, just six blocks away from where I live right now, but that part of the neighborhood is quite different. This is interesting data to look at. I did not know, for example, that a certain 10X10 block area I walk my dog through regularly is filled with people who have donated to the Presidential campaign of John McCain. No wonder I was the only one shocked when an openly gay man was elected Mayor of our city last night! I thought the whole city was filled with conservative lawn signs - but it's just that little patch.

Continued below, just tech no politics.

As ProgrammableWeb's John Musser pointed out in a post titled Demographics by API: Placestat and PolicyMap, the new REST API could really produce some magic if combined with last week's launch of the Yahoo! Geo-location Database and API.

Policymap was developed in collaboration with a nonprofit called The Reinvestment Fund. Thanks to them and to Pushpin for making this information both publicly and programatically available.