Like something out of science fiction, our amazing friends at Shinoda Lab (University of Tokyo) have created a sort of ‘tactile feedback’ that works along with animated 3D holography to give you the sense that these optical illusions are real. Amazing!

If you find yourself disoriented while navigating your new operating system, there are a few choices you have to help bring the new Windows 8 interface back to the “ole days” of Windows 7 if you so choose.

Classic Shell is an open-source program that gives you a highly customizable start menu in Windows 8 (and 7 for that matter), along with other Windows enhancements. At 3 million downloads and climbing, looks like this is the new “hot app” for Windows 8.

Start8 is a similar start-menu enhancement app for Windows 8. This one integrates nicely with the new interface as well, gives you the option to boot directly to it (instead of the default Windows 8 “Start Screen”), as well as some other nifty options.

There is also a great article with information on many other Winodws 8 start-menu-giving apps here.

Leave a comment below to let us know your experiences with these applications.

Physicists Jian-Wei Pan and Anton Zeilinger were long time rivals (but still close researchers and good friends) have worked since the 1980′s in the field of quantum physics, making a lot of headway together and building toward the idea of teleporting data on a quantum level. This article is in-depth, and well worth the read if you’re interested in the exciting, emerging world of quantum physics and how technology can benefit from it.

I’ve thought about when I switched from Myspace to Facebook. There just seemed to be a specific point where it would have been more productive to invest my time in my (newly created) Facebook profile – and a majority of my flock of friends and family I had connected with had migrated as well.

And then I’ve thought about my transition from Friendster to Myspace. Friendster was one of the very first generalized social networking websites. It was great in its own regard, though it was primitive compared to what Facebook and Google+ are today. At its core, though, it was a beautiful creation and a great idea to bring casual conversation to a worldwide audience.

Going back further, I reminisce about the rise of the Internet and the subsequent decline of dial-up Bulletin Board Systems. Anyone who knows me personally from the mid-90′s and earlier knows how nostalgiac I am about BBSes even today. There has always been something about them that Internet-based social networking websites today can’t seem to hold a candle to – something I could never put my finger on.

Just the other night I was reading a paper called “The Temporary Autonomous Zone”, which describes communities of past and present – all different types from 18th century pirate utopias to the (then) modern computerized communities of Bulletin Board Systems. It described the social aspects of these communities and their decentralized (some would say anarchy-based) nature. Though most of them hold no place in history books, their ideals were always the cornerstone of their purpose. Many of them were actually meant to be temporary; the lifespan of the community was inherent to its validity.

Myspace, Facebook and Google+ all have the same idea – connecting and socializing with people you know in real life. What seems to be the common decline with these sites in general is quite simply that once your userbase reaches a certain threshold, the communal foundation itself starts to wobble and eventually comes tumbling down on top of itself. More specifically, once your “friends” list becomes more than you can handle, you start to question the validity and value of the people you have connected with as well as the community as a whole.

For me, it started with a “friend sweep” – going through my list and removing the friends who I didn’t find completely necessary to communicate with. My first sweep list consisted people I knew in school and past jobs, but never really conversed with anyway. Then came the ones who I did genuinely care about, but just couldn’t stand to see one more post about their political stance/life story/band/business happenings. After many months and multiple sweeps, however, the stale smell of wasted time still hung in the air for me. This resulted in me leaving the site for a time, declaring my independence and recaptured freedom and liberty. (Dramatic, aren’t I?) Of course, I have come back and left a few times, repeating the same shenanigans. The desire to communicate with those I care about draws me back. The feeling of distance, the feeling that people are screaming through a bullhorn at a ginormous crowd (i.e. their friends list) makes me leave because I feel like I have no real connection with them.

With all of this back and forth came a realization to me that old-school dialup Bulletin Board Systems rarely encountered these kinds of issues. For the most part, BBSes always seemed to hold a small, passionate community that kept themselves on target with what they were trying to accomplish (which was the same goal as modern social networks – informal human to human communication). “How,” I would ask myself, “could a seemingly ancient technology hold the true key to social networking when modern equivalents seem to keep getting it wrong?”

And it suddenly came to me – It’s the community, stupid!

A small, strongly connected group of individuals who share a common trait(s) or interest will always genuinely care about the community they are involved in. They will work hard, without any more reward than keeping the community valid and prosperous. This is apparent in many independently run web-based message forums (which are probably the closest Internet-based equivelant to a BBS). But as soon as you start trying to cater to those outside of this specific group, the essence of the commuinity itself devalues. People will lose faith in the direction of the community. They will start looking elsewhere, somewhere that caters more to their specific motivations for human to human communication.

Dial-up BBSes always had the inherent quality of being location-based. Back in the days before the Internet and free, unlimited nationwide calling, BBSers were restricted to calling boards in their own geographical area to avoid long-distance charges. When you fired up your terminal emulation program, you usually had a list of commonly called boards, most of which would reside in your own area code. These were your communities. They were all their own separate islands in the respect that they were each governed by their own “SysOps” (system operators). SysOps were simply people (like myself when I operated one in Sonoma County) that ran BBS software on their computers which were hooked up to a dedicated phone line. Each BBS would have its own message section, private e-mail system, file repository, and online game section. Each BBS would have its own set of users, or members. With the exception of BBS message “nets” such as Fidonet and Metronet (both of which still exist today), no cross-board communications were possible.

Because the size of a BBS userbase was restricted to those in the same geographical area, their communities always had their natural ‘cap’. With this, BBSes never experienced the problems world-wide Internet social networking sites currently have. The biggest thing SysOps ever had to worry about were flamewars from a heated discussion gone awry.

So what can modern social networking giants learn from all of this? One thing I can say is that Google had it right when they first launched GMail and Google+ in that both platforms were initially on an invite-only basis. This created a huge curiosity and demand for being a part of the “exclusivity” of it all. Quite possibly creating an artificial limit to your network will help it thrive – be it restricted to family members, friends from school, specific workplaces… you get the idea. The key is to harness the power of the quality of your community and not the quantity.

- Jordan Erickson

I had recently “started over” with my phone, resetting it to factory defaults. I also formatted the SD storage (a 4GB micro-SD card) at the same time. But, when I connected it back to my Linux system to transfer some music to it, it was getting mounted as read-only.

Without thinking much, I delved into /var/log/messages to examine log output. It was, in fact, getting mounted automatically read-only (“…sd 16:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is on”) every time I connected the phone.

I tried manually adding an entry to /etc/fstab, manually giving the mountpiont rw permissions, removing/re-inserting the SD card into the phone, re-formatting within Android’s system settings, and even manually partitioning/creating filesystem within Linux. None of these things helped. At last, I simply thought to power-cycle my phone. Ta-da! Read-write access once again.

Sometimes the most simple troubleshooting steps make me facepalm myself. I figured Android didn’t experience these kinds of issues, but you learn something new every day. Cheers!

Upon receiving a call from a client stating that his e-mail was not sending out, I started on my normal troubleshooting processes. After about 5 minutes of investigation I found that his e-mail provider’s main website, GoDaddy.com, was unreachable. I found this hard to believe, since it is such a large company – I googled “Godaddy down” and came up with an article stating that the hacker group known as Anonymous had taken their services down.

The group member supposedly responsible, “Anonymous 0wn3r”, clarified that the group overall is not responsible for this hack, and that he/she acted alone. Said on Twitter, “RT: @AnonOpsSweden @YourAnonNews @AnonOpsLegion tell the people to not understand wrong the attack is coming only from me“

I guess this proves once again that anything can be the cause of your computer problems – even things that seem highly unlikely!

To think that just 30 years ago people were using technology that would, by today’s standards, be considered unusable is unbelievable to me. Of course, 30 years ago computer technology was geared toward much different goals (back-office business/corporate and government tasks) than what most people are used to today (playing Angry Birds?). But for me, to look back and see what people accomplished with what seems like a dinosaur computer system is amazing. I have heard many times that we sent our first man to the moon with the technology equivalent of a Commodore 64 computer. It makes me wonder, are we spoiled with technology today? Could we be using the incredible power and speed of today’s computer technology for much more than what we are? With software growing in size, taking advantage of faster processor speeds and more memory, do we really need to focus on giving desktop icons the capability of displaying millions of colors?

This video explains how Linux is developed. A much different model than many other software projects, Linux harnesses the power of collaborative development by thousands of developers across the world.

Windows 8 carries the biggest graphical interface change since Windows ’95 with their new “Metro” interface. This is a brand new user experience, with groupings of tiles that represent programs instead of menus. I was no big fan of the “Start” menu since Windows ’95 came out – to me, it was too easily cluttered with garbage. At least, with Windows XP, they consolidated a number of useful shortcuts and threw the rest of it into their virtual junk drawer dubbed “All Programs”. But the Metro UI isn’t the only big change that’s coming with Windows 8…

I find it interesting that, with so many negative reviews about the Office ‘ribbon bar’, Microsoft has taken it upon itself to integrate it into Windows 8 via the Windows Explorer ribbon bar. This means that working with files will require you to become familiar with it. Everyone that I have talked to has expressed their utmost dissatisfaction with the Office ribbon bar. Nobody seems to understand why the Office team ripped out the very stable and familiar toolbar interface, to replace it with something that is, according to them, extremely frustrating and counter-productive to accomplish goals…not to mention it’s ‘just another unnecessary interface change’, providing very little more than stressful sighs as one attempts to find the same tools and utilities they could easily locate with muscle memory in previous versions. It is akin to the constant “Control Panel” interface changes, along with their sub-category evolutions like from “Network Neighborhood”, to “My Network Places”, and then again to “Network and Sharing Center”.. I mean, do you really need so many redesigns? The goals of connecting your computer to a network and sharing files really haven’t changed that much over the years. I don’t see why putting the same options in different menus is necessary.

Of course, I guess nobody can really think that graphical user interfaces can always stay the same no matter how much time passes or how much new technology arrives, with no evolution or change to adapt to them. But, for something so standard as working in a word processor, or now with Windows 8, working with your files, is such a drastic change really necessary? How many radical changes were ever seen in the “interfaces” of typewriters during their heyday? If a typewriter company suddenly switched all of their keyboard layouts from QWERTY to DVORAK, making it impossible for anyone to use their brand without learning an admittedly more productive key layout, would their customers just sigh and sign up for the next DVORAK typing class? Or would they hang onto their old typewriters, which were never really broken in the first place, until they were forced to purchase a new one? And when they did, would they move to the newest model from the same brand (learning DVORAK in the process), or would they shop around for a competing brand with the still immensely popular QWERTY layout?

This is simply what has been the track record for Microsoft, and Windows 8 is simply the newest piece of evidence to the claim that they don’t really mind ripping out the carpet from underneath their customers. Not to sound harsh, but to me anyway, I just have to sigh and laugh. It’s their same old story – same old song and dance.