Category: News

Fitness games are still relatively popular, but there’s only so many workouts that can be stored on a DVD. Microsoft foresaw this problem, and has teamed up with DailyBurn to bring its daily workout videos to Internet Explorer on Xbox.

DailyBurn announced today that it has built a Web app that’s accessible via Internet Explorer for Xbox 360. The Web app features all the workout videos that subscribers enjoy on DailyBurn with the added bonus of a custom experience tailored specifically for Xbox.

DailyBurn on Xbox already sounds good enough, but the app also features tablet integration that allows users to keep track of their calories burned over the course of the workout. It also keeps track of other stats so you adjust your workout accordingly.

DailyBurn is now available on Internet Explorer for Xbox. Just hit up the URL and start losing weight with your Xbox.

News today from Twitter where security guru Dan Rosenberg, @djrbliss, posted an image of a Samsung Galaxy S 4 with what appears to be an unlocked bootloader that he managed to hack. Rosenberg had already achieved root on the new devices on launch day when he figured out an unlock tool intended for Motorola devices would also work on the Galaxy S 4 thanks to the use of Qualcomm chips. The downside is that nothing much can be done once rooted and the risk related to bricking a brand new device is a little higher than normal as no recovery options or stock images are available yet. Hopefully Rosenberg’s work is about to change some of that as his image appears to indicate that he has recovery running. Rosenberg is expected to release more details later today on exactly what he has achieved and how others may replicate his efforts.

source: @djrbliss

Come comment on this article: Samsung Galaxy S 4 bootloader unlock picks up steam with latest hack

Police have reportedly taken three classmates of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev into custody for questioning, but are stressing that they are not considered to be suspects at this time.

Authorities arrested the three students to find out whether bomb-making materials were taken from Tsarnaev’s dorm room at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth just after the bombings. They were all roommates of the accused bomber; two were reportedly arrested several days ago, while the other was taken in this morning.

The students have apparently been under close FBI scrutiny for two weeks and will attend a court hearing later today. They are expected to face charges of obstruction of justice, as it is believed they aided Tsarnaev after the bombings. Authorities say they have no evidence at this time that there is a danger to the public at large.

“Please be advised that there is no threat to public safety,” the Boston Police said in a statement.

Recently, consumer electronics have tended to be more about closing things down then opening them up, but New York-based Adafruit is working to help reverse that trend, and to make it so that people aren’t afraid of what’s inside their devices, and instead become more comfortable with electronics components and the concepts behind how gadgets actually work. Adafruit founder and CEO Limor Fried was on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY today, and talked about how her company is going about achieving that goal.

The mission helps the company generate revenue, by priming an audience early on to become buyers of the components, DIY kits and open-source devices Adafruit sells through its online store. The key is to start young, Fried says, and to take advantage of urges that children already have around exploring their environment and the things around them.

“At a certain age, they just want to be comfortable with it, and everyone here probably liked to take stuff apart,” he said. “That’s how we learn, we take stuff apart and then we learn from them. That’s how software works, too.” With software, we pull apart the code to find out how it’s put together, she said, and we should be doing the same thing with hardware.

“We open the box,” she said, referring to our instincts when young. “The gadgets you have now, tablets and smartphones, theyr’e not easy to open anymore, so we provide that.” The idea is to make sure that if the need to break something down and repair it does arise, we aren’t afraid of it, and we don’t feel like we need eight years of specific education just to replace a broken capacitor.

Adafruit recently launched a video series for children called Circuit Playground to help familiarize them with electronics at a very early age. The company also put out a coloring book for electronics, which you can print out and use under a creative commons license. This is designed less to provide a rigorous early-age electrical engineering education regimen, and more to help get kids comfortable with terms, designs and shapes early on so that they’ll find it easier to pursue that kind of formal training later on. Basically, it’s about planting the seed for a generation of makers to come.

Asked about Adafruit’s identity, and whether it’s an educational organization or a business, Fried said her company is an ‘educational, tutorial company” that then has essentially a gift shop at the end. The model works in the same way that art supply stores functions; you could technically make your own paint, she says, but most people don’t because it’s easier to buy. Budding electronics hobbyists can likewise build their own PCBs, but they instead turn to supply stores and pre-fab components like those supplied by Adafruit. But in the end, the emphasis is on education and open source.

Fried envisions a world where people treat hardware the same way they do software, by mostly leveraging open source tools to quickly start up their own companies. But that change represents a major shift that will require fundamental changes in how we think about hardware, and Adafruit is trying to bring that about starting as early in our educational lives as possible.

Amazon is not one to miss out on any revenue market and today proves this by making its free Kindle apps more appealing to customers who are either blind or visually impaired. The upgrades are not available on all platforms yet, but are certainly a move in the right direction.

New features will allow customers to access the read aloud feature for the more than 1.8 million titles available in the Kindle Store and seamlessly navigate within their library or within a book, including consistent title, menu and button names.

Customers can also read character-by-character, word-by-word, line-by-line, or continuously. The update brings the ability to search for a book within their library or search within a book, add and delete notes, bookmarks. It even highlights lookup words in the dictionary or from Wikipedia.

“We’re excited to introduce these new features to our Kindle for iOS app, making it easier than ever for our blind and visually impaired customers to access the vast selection of over 1.8 million books in the Kindle Store on their iPhone or iPad”, Dorothy Nicholls, Vice President for Amazon Kindle, says.

All of this sounds great, but for now it will only sound wonderful to Apple fans — the enhancements are for the iOS Kindle app only. However, the online retailer promises that these will come to other mobile devices soon. For now, Apple customers can visit the iTunes Store to grab the latest version of the free Kindle app and take advantage of the new updates.

Sprint Nextel today announced that it is still planning to shut down the Nextel National Network by the end of June.

The company has stated that June 29 will be the final day of full Nextel iDEN network service. On Sunday, June 30, iDEN phones will not receive voice or data. Sprint stated the equipment that powers the network will be switched off that day “in rapid succession.” The Nextel push-to-talk service will be converted to Sprint’s CDMA network.

By the time the shutdown comes, Nextel customers will have had just over one year to prepare for it. In addition to the letters and emails Sprint has already sent throughout the year, the company will also be sending text messages and using “other communications tactics” in the days leading up to the shutdown.

“Our shutdown communications are meant to give customers more than enough lead time to plan their migration,” said Bob Azzi, SVP of the network division at Sprint. “This has been especially important for public safety, first responders, health care users and others who rely on the service to protect and preserve people’s lives. We strongly urge customers to migrate now, rather than wait until the last minute.”

Sprint has been losing large numbers of subscribers who are leaving the Nextel platform. The wireless carrier is currently in talks for a $20 billion merger with SoftBank, though it is also entertaining a $25 billion offer from Dish Network.

The growing pains of big data were apparent at the Data 2.0 Summit on Tuesday in San Francisco.

During one panel, the assertion that data science is dead was indeed debated. Along with the habitual tension between end user requirements for businesses and consumers and the “elitist” ideas of data scientists and engineers, other themes explored included increasing accessibility to data, as well as changing behaviors and encouraging better decision-making with data. Everyone from sales and marketing people to fitness enthusiasts, it turns out, can be motivated by pretty pictures.

As IBM’s Alah Keahey put it during a panel, “there is a hunger for friendly data,” and visualization can help to humanize those threatening terabytes. Here are a selection of new, and new-to-us, visualization tools that came up at the meeting.

Bringing climate change home: Databasin.org

A mapping and analytics platform from the Conservation Biology Institute that has 10,000 datasets on everything you need to understand how extreme weather will impact natural resources, renewable energy, and endangered species. Here is one projection of maximum temperatures in 2080.

Sparkvis by Chloe Fan

This app is for the quantified self junkie who loves to interpret their burned calories as abstract art. The research behind the colorful display of Fitbit (see disclosure) data is explained here. Image via QuantifiedSelf.com

Disqus Gravity

The commenting platform’s diverse content is brought together in an interactive and live visualization. Pulling from about 500 sites that use Disqus, Gravity brings together the “small” data of individual comments within the context of 11 content categories. Another visualization, Orbital, shows realtime comments geolocated on a spinning globe.

IBM Many Eyes

Originally conceived by visualization guru Martin Wattenberg and colleagues in 2007, Many Eyes lets you plug in any dataset and generate nifty figures. Here, for example, is the distribution of U.S. foreign aid over a 60-year period.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM. Om Malik, founder of GigaOM, is also a venture partner at True.

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Samsung’s Galaxy Camera certainly made a splash when it was released last year and the Korean giant has plans on introducing some sort of a follow-up to the unique device. A mysterious EK-GN120 device surfaced on the Bluetooth website and obtained the coveted Bluetooth 4.0 certification. While there are no particular details that indicate what the new camera will bring– there is some speculation that the newest edition of the Galaxy Camera will be well… more than just a camera, thanks to the device being listed as a “mobile phone” under the Product Type. So it’s possible that the new device will feature some sort of calling functionality or something of that nature.

So now that the cat is out of the bag, we’ll be on the lookout for any new leaks regarding this intriguing new device— so stay tuned.

source:  Bluetooth SIG
via: SamMobile

Come comment on this article: Samsung quietly working on the EK-GN120, a Galaxy Camera that’s also identified as a mobile phone

Here’s a question for you: Is a company-provided device a benefit? You don’t pay for hardware, software or service but might get older gear as hidden personal cost. I ask, because if Gartner is right, you’ll soon pay, whether or not you want to. A survey of CIOs finds that 38 percent of companies plan to stop providing employees with devices by 2016. Wait a bit before reading on and think about what that really means.

“We’re finally reaching the point where IT officially recognizes what has always been going on: People use their business device for nonwork purposes”, David Willis, Gartner vice president, says. As someone working from home full time since May 1999, I must confess to rarely using company-issued computers or other devices. But that was my choice, and one often not supported by IT departments. Now, for many workers, there will be only choice of bringing their own.

BYOD Trends

So-called “bring your own device” is not a new trend. Cell phones, laptops and PDAs like BlackBerries and Palms are among the devices coming in the back door before being approved to go out the front door, starting in the 1990s. Numbers are larger with smartphones and tablets, but nothing more. What’s different now: Economics. As companies slash budgets amid troubled times, letting more employees bring their own makes increasing sense. Meanwhile, cloud services shift some of the in-house software development and corporate need to support specialized homegrown applications across managed devices.

“BYOD strategies are the most radical change to the economics and the culture of client computing in business in decades”, Willis says. Mid-size companies with 2,500 to 5,000 employees are biggest adopters. Globally, BYOD is standard operations in three of the four BRIC countries — Brazil, India and China. Adoption is lowest in Europe; United States twice as much.

In many emerging markets, there is no switch from company supplied to bring your own. But in geographies like North America, compelled-BYOD means employees will pay for devices or services they didn’t before. Fundamentally, companies shift some, or all, the financial responsibility to workers.

Shifting Costs

Right now, about half of companies with BYOD programs subsidize devices. Gartner sees rapid increase in the number of companies offering nothing whatsoever and recommends they do just that. Rather, at most, there should be compensation for service, such as cellular for smartphones. “The employee owns the device, and the company helps to cover usage costs”, Willis says.

Conceptually, BYOD eases other, hidden costs. If the company supplies device and software, employees demand support and complain more. If they bring their own, they feel more ownership, responsibility, reducing IT helpdesk and related costs.

By 2017, Gartner expects that one-half of employers will demand employees provide their own devices for work purposes. This represents a stunning shift in costs. Most companies don’t provide cars or other transportation for people to get to work. Should they provide laptops, smartphones and tablets, too? That’s a question for you to answer in comments.

Security Matters

BYOD is the answer to the “How do you we cut tech costs?” question, but not necessarily the right one. During my days as an analyst in the last decade, I counseled companies to beware of commingled behavior and data around devices employees used professionally and personally. For sure, someone buying the device is more likely to use it personally — hey it’s theirs — creating, if nothing else, security risks. They potentially increase, when the starting point of management is employee rather than employer.

Willis sees security differently, and perhaps he’s right. The new trend recognizes what I’ve done for 14 years — “use a personal device in business. Once you realize that, you’ll understand you need to protect data in another way besides locking down the full device”. He’s right about that. Nevertheless, is it really sensible for companies to essentially encourage data leakage that increases security and privacy risks?

Debating this topic in BetaNews group chat today, Ian Barker makes an astute security observation: “I suppose if it’s your own laptop you’re less likely to leave it on the train!” Yeah, that’s an even more common trend, eh? Bring your own device home from work?

Photo Credit:  CLIPAREA l Custom media/Shutterstock

Enrique Llamas couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Lacking confidence? Not a team player? Not willing to contribute to group discussions? Enrique had thought he was all of those things. So why did he receive such a negative performance evaluation? Enrique felt hurt by the news and wanted to figure out where things could have gone wrong.

Enrique had started his job as a consultant at a firm in Houston, Texas, a few months earlier and was very keen on making a positive impression with his superiors. But this was Enrique’s first experience working abroad, and he wasn’t entirely sure how to do that. In Mexico, where Enrique was from, he knew exactly what to do. To succeed, a young consultant should get along with others, do good work, and respect his boss. Enrique figured that the same things mattered in the U.S., so that’s what he did. He worked long hours and made sure that his work was top quality. Interestingly, that did not seem to be a problem in his performance review.

What was a problem, however, was the fact that he was not a “team player” and was “unwilling to contribute in team discussions.” That was only partially true, Enrique thought. With peers, he was quite willing and able to participate, but when his boss and his boss’s boss were in the room, Enrique did what he would have done in Mexico: let his superiors guide the meeting and be available to help or contribute if asked. Enrique was very concerned about this negative evaluation and was also highly motivated to succeed. What could he do to improve things going forward?

If you think that it’s hard to impress your boss in your native culture, imagine what it’s like in a different culture where the way you’d naturally make a positive impression falls flat. That was certainly the case for Enrique and is also the case for hundreds of thousands of professionals in the world who work for bosses with very different expectations for how to make a positive impression. Consider, for example, the case of an employee from China working for a Brazilian manager in Brazil. In China, employees are typically valued for their formality, reserve, and self-control, but in Brazil, it would be close to the opposite. The Brazilian professional culture is quite informal and emotionally expressive. People will typically call each other by their first name at work and often by their nicknames. This is true with colleagues and even with bosses. In many Brazilian companies, there is little formal protocol, and the atmosphere is light and casual, often with a great deal of joking among colleagues. So, imagine someone from China trying to get to know and ultimately impress her Brazilian boss — and how challenging it might be to make this switch.

So how do you impress a foreign boss? The good news is that you start with what you’d typically do in your native culture: do great work, show loyalty to your boss and to the organization, and help your boss accomplish his or her professional goals. The challenging part, however, is that the way in which you accomplish each of these tasks can vary quite significantly across cultures. For example, “doing great work” in some cultures can mean listening carefully to what your boss tells you to do and then performing a given task in a very precise and accurate manner. In other cultures, it might mean something completely different, like taking the initiative, volunteering for assignments, thinking outside of the box, and being an independent producer that your boss can always count on. You can see how these different images of effectiveness can be in great conflict. So, the first key piece of advice when trying to impress a foreign boss is to step outside of your own cultural comfort zone and work hard to learn how to impress in the local context you’re in.

The second piece of advice is to get to know your boss. Not all foreign bosses are the same. That should be obvious, but it’s something people often overlook in a foreign culture because they are blinded by the most obvious difference — national culture — when the reality is that many other differences matter as well. For example, regional culture can play an important role in determining your boss’s expectations. What impresses in Manhattan may not necessarily impress in Sioux City, Iowa. Industry culture matters as well. What impresses at Morgan Stanley might not necessarily impress at Facebook or Caterpillar, or at that small advertising agency down the road. Finally, personal experience also matters a great deal in determining a boss’s expectations. Imagine two American bosses: one, a “local” who grew up in the United States, speaks only English, and who has spent his entire career working for American companies; and the second, a “cosmopolitan,” who lived and worked for a decade in Asia, and possesses a strong working knowledge of Mandarin. Do you think these two would necessarily have the same expectations of a foreign-born worker trying to impress?

When impressing a foreign boss, the devil is in the details. Don’t underestimate cultural differences, but also don’t be blinded by them. Consult with colleagues, find a cultural mentor, and do your own careful observations. In short, customize to your context, and your work will pay dividends in any cultural environment.

Edge-based intrusion prevention and security information and event management (SIEM) are failing to meet the demands of faster and more sophisticated threats, and a new generation of analytic tools have evolved to meet those challenges. These tools have the power to reshape the security dynamic, but they may require you to rethink your infrastructure, staffing and policies.

Where can human analysis and augmentation provide the greatest benefit? How should businesses recruit and train security staff to best handle the new realities? Or should you outsource to an MSSP?

For a discussion about these and other questions related to security analysis, join GigaOM Research and our sponsor Click Security for “The data-driven security analyst,” a free analyst webinar on Tuesday, May 14, 2013, at 10 a.m. PT.

Our experts will address these questions:

• Security analytics: truly proactive or just faster forensics?
• The benefits and limitations of automation
• The new security toolkit
• The new security analyst: policeman or investigator?
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• Cormac Foster, research director, GigaOM Research
• Salvatore D’Agostino, CEO, IDmachines
• Bob Gourley, editor, CTOvision.com
• Brian Smith, CTO and founder, Click Security

Register here to claim your spot in this May 14 webinar.

Not everybody can be online all the time. For those moments, it’s best to leave a message. That was a little difficult in Skype for Windows as you could only leave text-based messages before, but that all changed this week.

Skype announced this week that it’s rolling out the preview of Skype Video Messaging for Windows desktop users. To be more specific, Windows 7 users can now send short video messages to friends that are currently offline. The feature will be coming to Windows 8 soon.

Windows desktop users are just the latest to get Skype Video Messaging. Microsoft notes that the feature is available in preview for those using Skype on Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android. Those on Windows 8 and Windows Phone can receive video messages, but they have yet to gain the ability to record messages. Skype says it will be fixing that soon.

If you want to try out Skype Video Messaging for yourself, you’ll have to download the Skype 6.5 beta for Windows. You can grab that here. Alongside the new feature, the beta also includes two small fixes to help increase stability when calling:

In other news, Skype recently announced that Outlook.com users can now make video calls from within their browser. More info on that here.

It looks like HTC is going to be refocusing its efforts this summer, starting with announcing that it will be dropping HTC Watch support in 6 European countries come May 31.  These countries include Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands.  Due to the massive unpopularity of this application, this won’t affect too many of you. HTC released this comment:

“As we continue to deliver new content for HTC Watch, we’ve made the decision to focus our efforts on markets with the highest engagement. After May 31, we’ll discontinue support for HTC Watch in countries with less application traffic”.

There is a solid alternative in Google Play Movies, which would obviously be a solid fallback plan— however, the Google service is only available in Spain, with none of the other countries listed above.

If you’re from one of the above countries and know of some good alternatives, let us know below in the comments!

Come comment on this article: HTC ditching HTC Watch support in 6 countries on May 31

There has been much hue and cry about the New York Times passing USA Today in circulation to become the second-largest newspaper in the United States, thanks in part to a boost from the NYT’s digital susbcription plan, which reportedly boosted circulation to almost 2 million daily readers. These numbers are notoriously dodgy, however — and if anything, they have gotten worse instead of better with the arrival of online measurement and new digital devices.

The real bottom line is that until newspapers start coming clean about their readership — both to themselves and to their advertisers — they are going to continue to miss the forest for the trees.

The latest circulation gains for the NYT and others came courtesy of the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly known as the Audit Bureau of Circulations), an industry group composed of advertising agencies and publishers. The group notes that the numbers are not really comparable to the previous year’s results for a number of reasons, including the fact that some newspapers have launched new subscription formats, stopped printing every day and so on.

Counting readers multiple times

As Edmund Lee at Bloomberg points out, the AAM survey — which is somewhat ironically locked behind a paywall — also allows publishers to count their readers multiple times, according to rules adopted recently by the group. In other words, newspapers can count someone who reads the newspaper in print, on the web and on their Kindle as three separate readers. But doesn’t this inflate their readership numbers unreasonably? It sure does. The bottom line is that no one really knows what the “real” readership numbers are for newspapers.

@mathewi @BGrueskin It's not *unduplicated* audience. Doesn't strike me as any more phony-baloney than "passalong" readership numbers.—
Scott Klein (@kleinmatic) May 01, 2013

Some argue this has always been the case with newspapers, which is true: publishers have routinely engaged in all kinds of shady tricks to boost their circulation — including special discounts for bulk purchases by hotels and airlines and other giveaways, and even dumping large quantities into ravines or pulping them after printing. On top of that, many papers have inflated their readership numbers for years by claiming that each copy gets read by as many as five people, an estimate that borders on the ridiculous.

Newspapers need to come clean

This defence boils down to: “Newspapers have always done this, and no one believes these numbers anyway, so what difference does it make?” A pretty weak defence, you might argue — and you would be right.

@mathewi @BGrueskin That’s harder than it looks. We can’t even come up with web metrics we all agree on.—
Scott Klein (@kleinmatic) May 01, 2013

The other line of defence is that online measurement is also chaotic and confusing at best, and that since websites can’t even agree on whose numbers are correct, why should newspapers be any different? It’s true that measurement of online traffic is murky, with providers like comScore often giving wildly inaccurate estimates when compared with a site’s internal numbers. But this is a little like saying newspapers don’t have to tell the truth because no one else does either.

If newspapers are competing with online publishers and digital-native content companies for both readers and advertising, which they clearly are, then they have to be better than their competition — being just as inaccurate is hardly helping their cause. And they should be spending a lot more time on trying to measure real engagement (repeat visits, time spent, etc.) than on simplistic and flawed vanity metrics like raw circulation numbers. That is a mug’s game.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Donskarpo

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Last year, the Walt Disney Company bought Lucasfilm and announced that Star Wars: Episode VII will be coming in 2015. Other Star Wars films, will also be coming in the future, including spin-offs. Since that time, Star Wars fans have debated and speculated on where the new movies will take the franchise and whether the original movies’ stars will (or should) make an appearance.

Now, the rumors and teasing that Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher may return to their roles as Han Solo and Princess Leia Organa have been addressed by one of the actors.

Fisher spoke during a panel at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo this weekend, telling the crowd how much fun it was to choke Jabba the Hut in Return of the Jedi. According to a Calgary Herald report on the event, Fisher joked about starring in the upcoming Disney Star Wars movie. From the report:

“I like being bought by Disney, because they never wanted to buy me before,” she said during a talk at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo. “I’m glad they are doing a new movie because they are sending a trainer to my house so I can get in really good shape. So I’m really eating a lot of sugar in advance, as you can see. By the time I really get down to it I will have eaten everything.”

Though Fisher could have been joking, her appearance in the next Star Wars movie is all but confirmed at this point. Her social media followers will no doubt be watching closely to see whether Disney’s trainer can whip the 57-year-old author into slave bikini shape.

Carrie Fisher182 days ago

Powered by socialditto  681 likes ·  148 comments

There’s some new information that has surfaced regarding Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Note  III smartphone, courtesy of our friends at SamMobile. According to an insider, the upcoming phablet will come with all sorts of bells and whistles including a 5.99-inch Full HD Super AMOLED display with diamond pixel structure, a 13MP camera, Exynos 5 octa-core chip with Mali 450 GPU (also featuring 8 cores), a whopping 3GB of RAM and the latest version of Android (presumably Android 4.3?). In other words— the device will roughly be a larger variation of the existing Samsung Galaxy S 4 smartphone. Design-wise, it is expected the G-Note III will follow a similar look to the Galaxy Mega 5.8, though the bezel will probably be reduced in order to accommodate the larger display— though no one knows yet if the device will feature the oh-so-mouthwatering flexible display technology we’ve been hearing more about lately.

While there’s no concrete date of the device’s release, it’s looking like we will see the device by late summer (August or September), so we’ll just have to sit tight and play the waiting game for now.

source: SamMobile

Come comment on this article: Samsung Galaxy Note III rumored to have octa-core processor and 3GB of RAM

Rob Kardashian is usually the family member we hear the least about; it must be difficult living in the shadow of your uber-famous sisters. But now, he’s in the spotlight, and for a reason he’d rather not be.

Photographer Andra Vaik says she snapped some shirtless photos of Rob and he became angry and grabbed her camera, stealing the memory card from it. Rob says he was incensed because Vaik was trespassing on private property when she took the pics, and that he didn’t want them getting out because they were taken at a time when he was trying to lose weight. He claims he offered to pay for a replacement memory card, but Vaik is having none of it. She’s suing him for robbery and assault, and while it’s not clear what her terms are, her lawyer made a statement regarding the incident.

“While this case is still in the preliminary stage, it is clear from our investigation that Robert Kardashian’s violent behavior and his use of force towards Ms. Viak was completely unjustified.”

Meanwhile, other members of the Kardashian family are battling their own dramas; Kim, who is pregnant with Kanye West’s baby, is still dealing with a nasty divorce from baller Kris Humphries, and Khloe just got canned from “The X-Factor”. Looks like their reality show will have no shortage of fodder anytime soon.

Atoms make up everything in the universe. So technically, a movie made out of atoms isn’t all that new. In fact, every movie since the dawn of film has been made of atoms, just like everything else. What’s unique about IBM’s latest project then is that researchers have made a stop-motion film by moving single atoms.

In what IBM calls the “world’s smallest movie,” A Boy and His Atom is a short film that was created by IBM researchers “using a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules (two atoms stacked on top of each other).” They mostly did it just because they could, and the results are pretty amazing:

It may not look like much, but the above movie is the result of IMB meticulously moving individual atoms to create a scene. It’s actually kind of mind blowing when you realize we can now move individual atoms – the basic building blocks of everything, living and non-living, in the universe.

Of course, making movies out of atoms isn’t IBM’s primary objective here. The company is researching atomic memory – a type of memory storage that packs data into incredibly tight spaces to increase the amount of storage possible in tiny spaces. Early last year, IBM was able to store a bit of data on just 12 atoms. As the technology advances, we’ll soon be able to store more and more data on smaller and smaller devices.

Until then, IBM can be content that it holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s smallest movie.

If you’re interested in learning how IBM manipulated the atoms to make the movie, check out the video below:

[h/t: Reddit]

The Washington Redskins are at battle again over whether the team name should be changed, but it doesn’t look like a resolution will come anytime soon.

Washington Councilman David Grosso says the time has come to make a decision regarding the team’s name, owing to its “racist and derogatory” meaning.

“We have to change it, and I’m calling on [owner] Dan Snyder and the NFL to step up and do the right thing,” Grosso said.

Grosso has even come up with a replacement idea: the Washington Redtails, after the Tuskegee Airmen.

“You can still sing the song and everything,” Grosso said. “Hail … to the … Redtails.”

Grosso has drafted a resolution, which he plans to unveil soon and states that “Washington’s name has been dishonored by association with the word ‘Redskins’. Because it is well known in America and in nations afar that American Indians have experienced utmost suffering and disrespect over the years.”

The Redskins’ name has actually been under review by the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board since 2006, when a group of Native Americans filed a case claiming the term “redskin” was disparaging to American Indians. Before that, the team went through a 17-year long case brought before the Supreme Court over the name that they ultimately won, so even if Grosso manages to convince the right people that things have to change, it could take years to be put into effect.