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With public setbacks behind it, Silverlight shines

A year ago, Microsoft's Silverlight video technology was under fire.

Two high-profile situations--a decision by Major League Baseball to dump Silverlight in favor of archrival Adobe Flash, as well as a series of glitches at Netflix that were blamed on Silverlight--had generated negative publicity.

Since then, however, the complaints seem to have died down. And now, Silverlight is apparently on a roll.

The streaming-video technology is coming off a mostly glitch-free NCAA Men's college basketball tournament. This week, CNET parent company CBS said that CBSSports.com streamed more than 11 million hours of live audio and video during … Read more

Nothing fancy

Watermarks can add a professional touch to any document as well protect content from plagiarism. Advanced Bulk PDF Watermark Creator makes it incredibly simple to add watermarks to multiple PDF documents.

The application's interface is plain and partly truncated at the bottom, though none of the buttons were cut off. We tried to resize the window but were unable to do so. The program is broken down into four steps that are labeled on the interface. First, we had to select the input directory and add the PDFs we wanted watermarked. Second, we entered the text for the watermark. … Read more

Jackie Chan pens deal with electric motorcycle maker

Hong Kong actor, filmmaker, and martial artist Jackie Chan has teamed up with Ashland, Oregon-based Brammo Inc., maker of electric motorcycles.

Brammo's first product is the Enertia, a fully electric motorcycle that became available in select Best Buy stores in August 2009. It has a top speed of over 60 miles per hour (95 km/h), a range of 42 miles (68 kilometers), and a charging time of about 4 hours.The Enertia sells for $7,995.

The deal will have Jackie Chan's company, JCAM Advanced Mobility Company Ltd., sell the Brammo electric motorcycle product line in Hong … Read more

IBM hopes to make mobile devices more accessible

IBM is embarking on a research project to design mobile gadgets that are easier to use for people who have disabilities or aren't fully literate.

As part of the project, announced Wednesday, Big Blue will collaborate with India's National Institute of Design and the University of Tokyo's Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology.

The goal is to develop a common interface for mobile devices that will make them easier to use. As digital information becomes more vital, IBM said, it believes the Internet needs to be more accessible to a wider range of people, including those … Read more

Image seeker

Sooner or later, whatever your hobbies, interests, or tastes, you're going to find yourself tediously clicking through a Web page full of pictures, manually opening and saving each and every one, until it becomes more of a grim quest to be finished than a quick grab of some fun pics to sort through and maybe use later. You could just bookmark the site and return when you need a picture of Elmer Fudd to complete a masterpiece e-mail, but you can't be sure they'll still be available, which is why you were saving them to your hard … Read more

South Korean bus prototypes use road to recharge

Reuters

South Korea is trying a new way to turn public transport green by using a technology popular in electric toothbrushes and razors to power buses and cars.

The country's top technology university on Tuesday unveiled a new electric transport powered by recharging strips embedded in roads that transfer energy through magnetic connections. There are no direct connections with wires.

Vehicles with sensor-driven magnetic devices on their underside suck up energy as they travel over the strips embedded a few centimeters under the road.

"The technological concept behind the idea has been around for about 100 years. We have … Read more

MIT floats ideas in DARPA balloon challenge (Q&A)

MIT's Riley Crane only found out about DARPA's red balloon challenge a few days before it started. Yet his team went on to win the contest through its savvy use of the Internet.

The challenge posed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency asked people to find the coordinates of 10 red weather balloons floating above the U.S. in one day. Since no one individual could plot the location of all 10, participants had to figure out how to work with others to solve the puzzle.

Team MIT's strategy was to build a Web site designed … Read more

MIT wins DARPA balloon challenge

A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has won $40,000 from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for correctly finding the locations of 10 red balloons scattered across the U.S.

Launched on Saturday, the DARPA Network Challenge released the 10 red balloons into the air, then dared contestants to find their latitude and longitude by the end of the day. Since no one person could track down all 10 in just one day, the point of the contest was to see how participants would use the Internet and social networking to team up with others to solve … Read more

Intuitive image converter

Advanced Batch Image to PDF Converter is an easy-to-use tool that converts images into PDF files. It's not the most beautiful or sophisticated program, but it works well, offering just the right number of features.

The program's interface is plain but intuitive, with each step of the process helpfully numbered. You select the images to convert, choose the output directory, and select document properties and image scaling. The program quickly converts the selected images to PDFs and stores them in the designated directory. We liked that users can choose portrait or landscape orientation, and we found it especially … Read more

DARPA's latest challenge: Locate these 10 balloons

A new DARPA contest is using balloons to test our social-networking skills.

After kicking off the Internet 40 years ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is again tapping into the Net for a new challenge. The DARPA Network Challenge will award $40,000 to the first person who can identify the latitudes and longitudes of 10 red weather balloons positioned at different parts of the sky across the continental United States.

The 8-foot balloons are scheduled to lift off on Saturday at 7 a.m. PST and remain in their locations throughout the day, until sunset. The contest will … Read more