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Viral Video: Gaga Says Make Love, Not War (Also, Wear Outfits) [BoomTown]

Here’s a very funny video, caught by a concert-goer, at a recent stop on the Lady Gaga extravaganza, “The Monster Ball Tour,” in Washington, D.C.

In it, she stops her antics cold to end a fight in the audience during her performance of “Just Dance,” using it for maximum entertainment.

In other words, turning people acting like monsters into her little monsters.

Enjoy:

Will Google Instant Kill The Long Tail? [Voices]

By John Ellis, Contributing Writer, SearchEngineLand

From a paid search perspective, the first impression of Google Instant is alarming.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Will Google Instant Kill The Long Tail?

By John Ellis, Contributing Writer, SearchEngineLand

From a paid search perspective, the first impression of Google Instant is alarming.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

iTunes in the Cloud and Why This Scares Me [Voices]

By Adam Jackson, Contributing Writer, TheAppleBlog

Apple’s recent media event solidified what we all knew was coming: Rentals and non-local storage is the future of our digital content.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

iTunes in the Cloud and Why This Scares Me

By Adam Jackson, Contributing Writer, TheAppleBlog

Apple’s recent media event solidified what we all knew was coming: Rentals and non-local storage is the future of our digital content.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Packaging is All the Rage, and Not in a Good Way

By Stephanie Clifford, Reporter, New York Times

Doug Herrington’s office at Amazon.com suggests that he is particularly bad at getting items out of their packages.

Read the rest of this article on the original site

Packaging is All the Rage, and Not in a Good Way [Voices]

By Stephanie Clifford, Reporter, New York Times

Doug Herrington’s office at Amazon.com suggests that he is particularly bad at getting items out of their packages.

Read the rest of this article on the original site

The Death and Rebirth of Duke Nukem Forever: A History

By Ben Kuchera, Gaming Editor, Ars Technica

Duke Nukem Forever was announced in 1997, after its predecessor, Duke Nukem 3D, had rocked the PC market with a hero who liked kicking ass, hanging out with strippers, and murdering alien police officers that were, literally, pigs. It was inappropriate, raunchy, and amazing.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The Death and Rebirth of Duke Nukem Forever: A History [Voices]

By Ben Kuchera, Gaming Editor, Ars Technica

Duke Nukem Forever was announced in 1997, after its predecessor, Duke Nukem 3D, had rocked the PC market with a hero who liked kicking ass, hanging out with strippers, and murdering alien police officers that were, literally, pigs. It was inappropriate, raunchy, and amazing.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Why Ping Matters

By Matt Drance, Editor, Apple Outsider

When I was in elementary school, kids walked around the schoolyard with their miniature boomboxes blasting whatever they could get their hands on.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Why Ping Matters [Voices]

By Matt Drance, Editor, Apple Outsider

When I was in elementary school, kids walked around the schoolyard with their miniature boomboxes blasting whatever they could get their hands on.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Ongoing Brain Drain Claims Yahoo Finance Head [BoomTown]

Another significant departure from Yahoo: Steve Schultz (pictured here), who was GM of its important and powerful Yahoo Finance unit, has left the company to become COO of Pageonce, an online personal finance “assistant.”

Yesterday, the editor-in-chief of Yahoo’s Shine women’s site, Brandon Holley, left Yahoo to run Lucky magazine for Condé Nast.

Also recently gone from Yahoo (YHOO): Social platforms head Neal Sample to eBay (EBAY) and Jason Titus, who ran its communications products unit and whose next job is unknown.

Schultz, though, is landing at a Palo Alto, Calif., start-up that has raised $8 million in venture funding. Pageonce collects online financial information and displays it on a unified and personalized page.

Schultz, who has been at Yahoo five years, was, according to his company bio, “responsible for business and content strategy and oversees business development, partnerships, marketing and sales. Prior to this role, Steve led product efforts in Yahoo!’s personalization products group, where he launched Yahoo!’s unified user profiling platform and managed personalization strategy and implementation efforts for Yahoo.com and My Yahoo!”

In the interests of fairness, BoomTown lobbed an email into PR at Yahoo tonight for the name of the person taking over for Schultz and also a list of major execs the Silicon Valley Internet giant is hiring.

Yahoo said no one has been named yet to replace Schultz.

Here is the press release on his new job:

Pageonce Names Steve Schultz New Chief Operating Officer

Company Strengthens Executive Team with Recognized Leader in Consumer Finance

Palo Alto, Calif.–September 9, 2010–Pageonce, the award-winning personal finance assistant, today announced that the company has named Steve Schultz, as its new chief operating officer. Schultz is a demonstrated leader in the consumer finance category, and brings a wealth of experience in product development, strategic partnerships, and business strategy.

In this role, Schultz will lead Pageonce’s business and sales strategy, distribution partnerships, business development and help guide the company’s strategic development into mobile personal finance. Schultz joins Pageonce from Yahoo! where he was the head of Yahoo! Finance, the #1 financial news website, and Yahoo! Real Estate businesses.

“Steve’s leadership and experience will be an invaluable asset to Pageonce as we continue to develop products and increase market share within the personal finance category,” said Guy Goldstein, Pageonce CEO and Founder.

During his tenure at Yahoo!, Yahoo! Finance doubled its market share attracting more than 40 million unique visitors according to Comscore. He led its business and content strategy, business development and strategic partnerships which included relationships with Intuit, Fidelity Investments, Dow Jones, ScottTrade, Bankrate and Bloomberg.com. He was also responsible for Yahoo! Finance’s original content strategy, oversaw the site’s push into mobile applications, and entered partnerships with dozens of new content providers. With Yahoo! Real Estate, Schultz helped lead the site from the #10 to the #2 real estate destination on the Web, was named one of the 100 most influential leaders in the real estate industry by Inman News in 2009, and architected a strategic partnership with Zillow.com in 2010.

“Pageonce shares my focus on developing and delivering forward-thinking personal finance products that fit the needs of today’s on-the-go consumers. Today that means focusing first on mobile,” said Schultz. “We have a very promising future and I’m looking forward to being a part of it.”

Tackling 54,000 Photos With Two Programs [Personal Technology]

Taking photos is fun. Sorting and editing them is not.

I’ve got 54,220 photos on my computer, including a few would-be National Geographic covers but far more out-of-focus portraits and poorly exposed sunsets that I’ve never bothered to fix or delete.

Thanks to plummeting prices on digital SLR cameras, amateurs like myself can now experiment freely with artistic shots, taking hundreds of photos without spending a small fortune in film. But those experiments generate a lot of homework by way of virtual stacks of photos in need of processing.

Lightroom’s dense panels of options.

Adobe Systems Inc.’s Photoshop is famous for helping photographers extract the most out of their shots in a digital darkroom. But at $699, Photoshop costs as much as a new camera and takes a graduate course to master. Moreover, Photoshop was designed to edit a single photo at a time, not for sorting through a collection.

A new generation of software from Adobe and Apple Inc. has emerged to fill the gap between Photoshop and entry-level photo-management software like Apple Inc.’s iPhoto and Google Inc.’s Picasa. For people who have graduated from point-and-shoot cameras, Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom 3 ($299) and Apple’s Aperture 3 ($199) offer tools to organize large collections and tackle the nitty-gritty of digital developing and re-touching.

I’ve been testing Lightroom (for Mac and PC) and Aperture (for Mac only) to organize, process and share photos I took at my friends’ recent wedding. While both programs were designed with professional photographers in mind, I found they were effective at helping a hobbyist like myself whittle 400 photos to just 40 in less than an hour.

The programs also let me edit photos far beyond the basics of brightness and contrast. One shot moved from the reject to the favorites pile after Lightroom let me take advantage of my Canon camera’s advanced image format to boost the exposure of an image taken during a dimly lit reception.

Many professional photographers have a strong preference for one of the two programs. I preferred the overall aesthetic and photo-editing tools in Lightroom for extracting the best from my photos. Nonetheless, Aperture’s strengths lie in some nifty organizational tricks, and I would recommend it for people interested in three specific uses: upgrading from a large iPhoto collection; taking video with an SLR; or tagging photos with locations.

At their core, both Lightroom and Aperture are databases, but don’t let that scare away your inner Ansel Adams.

Lightroom’s database gives you tools to organize your photos into folders on your computer, create collections from across folders, and tag photos with keywords, star ratings, and other features. For people like me who are lazy about applying tags to describe photos, Lightroom offers a spray-can tool to virtually “paint” keywords on bunches of photos at one time.

Aperture’s approach to cataloging is borrowed from iPhoto. You put your photos into “projects” (known as “events” in iPhoto), which the software will suggest when you import images from your camera based on groups that were taken around the same time. You can also add keywords, ratings and other tags.

But Aperture has two more tricks up its sleeve. You can tag photos based on the people in them, using the same technology Apple built into iPhoto to recognize faces. While that’s a good idea, I found that Aperture (like iPhoto) didn’t do an ideal job at distinguishing faces, especially in profile.

Apple says the face-recognition function works best if you identify both a couple of front-on and profile photos for any person, and also let it finish going through your whole collection before using it.

More useful is Aperture’s ability to tag photos geographically. Some new cameras collect GPS data with each shot and Aperture charts that info with pins on a giant world map, making it fun to track a journey or search for all the photos taken in one place.

Unfortunately, the majority of cameras don’t capture GPS data, but Aperture does offer some tools for adding in location data after the fact, such as importing it from a photo taken by an iPhone at the same site. Lightroom can also record GPS data for photos, but you have to work with third-party plug-ins to get the same functionality as in Aperture.

It’s in the digital darkroom that both programs earn their keep. The biggest reason an SLR-owner should upgrade beyond a basic photo editor is so he or she can work with so-called RAW files, sort of digital negatives that use extra data from the camera’s sensor to give you artistic control over factors like exposure long after you’ve shot the photo. Both programs work well with RAW, and moreover, editing photos on both programs is nondestructive, which means you can undo any changes you make—all the way back to your original photo—even after the photo has been saved. Sometimes the sky really can be too blue.

I found Lightroom’s editing features to be the most intuitive. It uses a three-paned screen clearly showing all of the available adjustments, your photo, and a history of the changes made to the image. I felt Aperture made me hunt for some of those features, but some users may prefer its optional floating palettes to Lightroom’s dense panels of options, and also its elegant system for brushing changes onto an image.

Lightroom boasts some cutting-edge editing features, such as the ability to adjust photos based on profiles of the lenses used to take them. That’s especially useful if you are working with a wide-angle lens that can distort images. With the click of a button, a warped wall at the edge of a wide-angle photo is made vertical again. The lens profiling wasn’t automatic with my older-model Canon SLR, but still worked.

To be sure, there are well-known Photoshop tricks that neither of these programs can do, such as stitching two or more photos together. They also can’t digitally cut your ex’s head out of photos. But if you really need to do that, finding the right photo-editing software is the least of your problems.

And to my disappointment, both programs are missing an increasingly popular service called HDR, or high dynamic range, where you merge photos taken at different levels of exposure into a new photo that takes the best aspects of them all. To make these sorts of images, you have to download external plugins. That’s the occasion I most missed Photoshop.

Finally, the programs both offer tools to showcase shots in professional-looking books and prints as well as on websites like Facebook and Flickr. Lightroom has the most options for producing Web galleries.

Aperture will appeal to users with cameras that do the newest trick in digtial SRL photography: take video. Such videos, which can feature beautiful photographic characteristics like short depth of field, can be imported and edited right in Aperture. The videos can be included in the software’s handsome mixed-media slideshows without the need for a separate video-editing program.

Either Lightroom or Aperture are a worthy upgrade for any semi-serious photographer. Both are available to download for free limited trials and I’d suggest testing the workflow of both before committing your photo collection.

Walter S. Mossberg and the Mossberg’s Mailbox will return Sept. 16. Email Geoffrey Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com.

ETF - RCA Dealer Brochure

ETF - RCA Dealer Brochure

elspethjane: Who knew the first publicly viewed television...

elspethjane:

Who knew the first publicly viewed television (manufactured by RCA) was possibly inspiration for Double Rainbow Guy’s quote? 

The 1939 New York World’s Fair

evangotlib: I want Cory Booker and Michael Bloomberg to have a...

evangotlib:

I want Cory Booker and Michael Bloomberg to have a baby.  That child will be the most amazing mayor of all time.

HP Says Many Good Candidates Are Willing to Follow Hurd [Digital Daily]

Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) search for a CEO to replace Mark Hurd is going better than expected. That’s the word from interim CEO Cathie Lesjak who says the company’s executive search committee is knee-deep in a good pool of applicants. “We’ve been very pleased with the selection of candidates,” she said at the 2010 Citi Technology Conference today. “There was some worry that there wouldn’t be that many. That certainly hasn’t been the issue.”

A well-timed bit of reassurance for addled HP investors who can’t be feeling too good about Hurd’s new gig with HP partner and rival, Oracle (ORCL).

Asked about the state of HP’s relationship with Oracle, Lesjak conceded that it was “strained,” but said she expects the two companies to patch things up sooner of later. “At the end of the day business will prevail,” she said. “Ultimately we’ll go back to being good partners.”

Hard to imagine given the words the two companies have exchanged recently and their developing rivalry in the servers and storage systems market. We’ll see, I suppose.

Don't feed the trolls.

jonprins:

I take a moral stance against book burning - destroying any written word is anathem. 

I protest it, but I protest any hand against it. It is expression, and to control expression is to acknowledge the attempt to control thought. 

I can think a thought is wrongheaded, and I can speak out against it. I cannot forcefully quell the thought. Nor can anyone - no matter the weapons they muster against it. Truly, to bring the weapons of censorship and governmental control to bear would only bring the thought battled against to the brink of martyrdom.

The only way to confront such overt hate is with logical discourse. And when you have outlawed a certain thought, you have outlawed logical discourse by proxy. 

Unfortunately, the minds lead to such hate are leadened against any thoughtful discourse that might sway them from such paths. Bringing debate to them only hardens them in their ways.

What is left?

Let the sparked kindling smolder. Do not give it that which it needs to burst aflame: attention is the air that breathes life into the fire that is hate.

Jon’s one of our developers here at blip.

kevin: There’s a Freakonomics movie out and you can rent it now...

kevin:

There’s a Freakonomics movie out and you can rent it now on iTunes. It’s a “Pre-Theatrical” release which in my opinion is pretty excellent. Given the subject matter and filmmakers behind this I don’t see how can be anything less than awesome.