IBLOG SPACE

We have all seen what happens when some people run across double rainbows out in the wild. I don’t even what to know what that dude would have done had he happened on a twin rainbow. A double rainbow is when there are two separate rainbows over the top of each other. A twin rainbow is when one splits in to two separate bows. Google software engineer Iman Sadeghi performed research on the physics of rainbows at the University of California, San Diego for his doctorate. He created software that was able to simulate rainbows and the way they occur in nature. The software created the geometry of a raindrop and the reflection of the light that creates the colors we see in a rainbow. In a double rainbow, light that hits the water drops is reflected twice before emerging creating the double effect. In a twin rainbow, there are two types of raindrops involved with small round drops and then fatter, flat drops called burgeroids thanks to their resemblance to hamburgers. The burgeroids shift lig

Apple’s Mac App Store has hurtled past the 100m downloads point, less than a year after throwing open its doors to OS X users. Launching on January 6 2011 as Apple’s method-of-choice for getting new software onto MacBook, iMac and Mac Pro machines, the Mac App Store follows in the wake of the App Store for iOS, which is already seeing 1bn downloads per month. In that respect, the Mac App Store has a little way to go to catch up to its fast-paced mobile sibling. Still, “in just three years the App Store changed how people get mobile apps, and now the Mac App Store is changing the traditional PC software industry,” Apple worldwide marketing chief Philip Schiller insists. “With more than 100 million downloads in less than a year, the Mac App Store is the largest and fastest growing PC software store in the world.” Apple has pulled out some of the Mac App Store success stories to comment on the download potential for developers. AutoDesk, Pixelmator and djay have all been rolled out to say

Samsung shipped over 300m cellphones in 2011, the Korean company has announced, putting it only behindNokia in terms of global mobile might. The milestone has seen Samsung manage cumulative sales of 1.6bn devices worldwide, with this year’s particularly strong performance aided by high-profile devices like the Galaxy S II. Samsung’s production stats make for impressive reading. The company is selling, on average, over 820,000 devices every day, and Samsung’s factories are apparently producing over nine per second to meet demand. No details on the split between smartphones and feature/dumb-phones has been given, however. The achievement highlights just how dangerous Samsung is as a competitor to other manufacturers, with rivals like Apple already attempting to curtail the Korean firm’s progress using legal means. Several patent and design suits are underway between Samsung and Apple across the world, with each firm alleging the other has infringed on various intellectual property. Most

Steve Jobs’ death has many fans of Apple and companies that worked with and admired Apple and its co-founder Steve Jobs remembering the contributions he made to the tech world. In Hungary a software firm called Graphisoft has announced that it will be erecting a large bronze statue of Jobs in Graphisoft Park. The statue will be erected on December 21 and is intended to celebrate the vision and leadership of Jobs. Jobs and Graphisoft founder Gabor Bojar met in 1984 when Graphisoft had unveiled the ArchiCAD 3D design software for the Apple Lisa computer. Jobs apparently offered marketing and financial support for the company. The statue is being made by sculptor Erno Toth and shows Jobs in his trademark clothing. The bronze Jobs is wearing the mock turtleneck, jeans, and sneakers along with the round glasses and stubbly beard Jobs sported. The stature shows Jobs with one hand out holding a device that looks like an iPhone. The US Patent Office Museum has a Steve Jobs exhibit.

One of the things that the Large Hadron Collider or LHC has been trying to observe has been the Higgs boson particle. There have been rumors floating around for a while now that the Higgs boson particle had been observed at the LHC and the CERN folks running the LGC are set to make an announcement tomorrow. There is no official detail on what the announcement will be, but with the rumors, the thought is the announcement will be on the Higgs boson. The announcement is expected to be announced with a fairly high degree of certainty the particle had been observed. With science of this sort, there are grades of certain before the particle is declared discovered. To make the discovery official the certainty has to be sigma level of five. According to the rumors, the certainly at the LHC so far is 2.5 to 3.5 sigma certainty. That would work out to 96% to 99.9% certainly. The discovery of this particle apparently will mostly only confirm what physicists have thought about particles for a long

If you are the sort who can’t wait for the specifications for new DSLR cameras from the big camera firms, some details on the Nikon D4 have leaked that you will like. Details on this camera first started to surface way back in February of 2011. The two major specs that caught our eye is the 16.2MP sensor, 11 fps shooting, and the 102,400 native ISO. The specs came by way of several sources according to Nikonrumors and the site thinks these are 90% accurate. The camera’s ISO range is expandable to 50 and 204,800. The camera will also get some new storage capability with the CF card slot and a XQD memory card slot. There will be Ethernet connectivity integrated into the camera, and it will rock face detection and recognition supposedly working in the viewfinder. Other things the camera is said to be able to do include shooting uncompressed video out through the HDMI port. It will also rock 51 autofocus points, the ability to assign two buttons to the front of the camera to smooth apertur

Rambunctious RIM wags given the boot for mid-flight misdemeanors managed to chew through plastic restraints in order to resume their hunt for liquor, court documents have revealed, forcing the pilot into an unscheduled landing. The two execs, George Campbell and Paul Alexander Wilson, have since been fired by the BlackBerrymanufacturer, as well as being fined almost $72,000, receiving suspended sentences and being placed on parole for twelve months, CBC reports. Passengers have accused Air Canada of mishandling the situation, however. According to the court documents, and reports from other passengers on the same flight from Toronto to Beijing, the two execs appeared to be heavily intoxicated from the very start of the flight. Campbell threatened his fellow passengers, described as “rowdy and abusive” and warning them that he would “off people when they left the plane”; he also lay on his stomach in the aisle and began kicking the floor. While cabin crew eventually managed to secure bo

A photo showing multiple sides of the LG Spectrum to be known as the Revolution 2 on the Verizon network has surfaced. This phone was tipped in the Verizon computer last month with the model number VS920 reportsPocketnow. The photo shows the phone from the front, back, top, and both sides. The only angle lacking is one of the bottom of the phone. Presumably, that bottom section has nothing on it. The phone will support the Verizon 4G LTE network and has the same navigation button layout we have seen on most of the new Verizon phoned with three buttons on the bottom of the screen. A few of the details on the smartphone were tipped with the device said to be getting a 1.5GHz processor, 720p HD resolution screen, and an 8MP camera sensor. That camera sensor will record HD video. There is no word on the full details of the device, but that should be coming soon. The smartphone will run Android for the operating system, likely Gingerbread. However, we could be surprised and the phone might

Nokia has begun shipping the white N9, its fourth color variant of the niche-appeal MeeGo smartphone. Revealed back at Nokia World 2011, the white handset is functionally identical to the three existing color options of N9, but has proved surprisingly coveted by MeeGo fans. Of course, the biggest problem may be finding one actually on sale. That’s because the N9 is still a relatively rare beast across the globe, with Nokia’s Lumia 800 being the device the Finnish company has heaped its hopes upon. That means the white N9 is likely to show up in Finland, Poland and Russia, but not in the US or UK unless you can source one from independent resellers. Of course, where the N9 goes, it’s entirely possible that the Lumia 800 could follow. Nokia’s Windows Phone 7 handset has so far only been seen in black, cyan and magenta, but being all but identical to the N9 casing may very well show up in a white iPhone rivaling hue sometime soon.

The rumors about the next-generation iPad are coming quickly. Another source is claiming that the new iPad 3 will land in the next 3-4 months. We heard a very similar rumor early in December that the iPad 3 was due to launch in February. That is a bit sooner than the latest rumor claims. According to the latest rumor, the makers of components for the iPad 3 have started to ship the parts to OEM contractors for assembly. At the same time, the production and shipment of parts for the current generation tablets have been reduced according to the sources. Production of the iPad 2 is continuing at a brisk pace with 14-15 million units of the iPad 2 expected to be produced in Q4. The production will decline significantly for Q1 2012 according to the sources with only about 4-5 million units made. Foxconn will kick off iPad three production in January and ramp up production volume in February. Sources in the supply chain claim that the new-generation iPad will see production volume of 9.5 to

Samsung has revealed its latest ultrabook, the Samsung Series 5, a choice of 13- or 14-inch ultraportables packing 7s resume in a chassis as thin as 14.9mm. The new Series 5 notebooks pack a choice of up to 1TB of traditional storage (in the 14-incher; up to 500GB in the 13-incher) or a 128GB SSD, along with up to 8GB of RAM and even the option of an optical drive. Samsung has outfitted the 14-inch Series 5 with an optical drive, the first ultrabook to be so equipped. Ports on both machines include ethernet and HDMI, while the 20.9mm-thick 14-inch model also has discrete AMD graphics with a Radeon HD7550M GPU. Both use an anti-glare screen coating for improved outdoor visibility. To be fair, the 14-inch Samsung doesn’t quite fit into Intel’s ultrabook category. The chip manufacturer originally defined the segment as being under 0.8-inches thick (20.3mm), and as having solely SSD storage, and the larger-screened Series 5 is slightly too fat for that. Still, with the SSD, both Series 5 m

Honda hasn’t allowed anyone to snap pictures of the coming rebirth of the legendary Acura NSX sports car. That new sports car is set to debut at the Detroit auto show next month. Honda has offered up a bit of detail on the car with all the specs and photos coming when the show kicks off in early January. This will be the first new NSX to hit the streets since the car was killed in 2005. The old NSX was a super car intended to show that a Japanese automaker could produce a super car to compete with the best from Europe. The car had legendary handling and lightweight thanks to copious use of aluminum and other materials. The new car will share some things with the old NSX, including the mid-engine two-seat layout. The car will have a V6 engine with electric hybrid power. Hybrid power is a push to make the car green and fast. The car will also be an all-wheel drive that will be able to send more power to the outside wheels in a turn to make the car handle better. We will have to wait a fe

Details of the draconian music licensing deals Spotify has been forced to agree to by record labels have leaked, amid suggestions that the streaming music service will never be profitable. The terms – which apply to other streaming media services as well, such as Rhapsody – conspire to undermine the streaming companies’ negotiating power, GigaOm reports, with such gems as huge upfront payments and payout deals based on the biggest income of either minimum subscriber fees, per-play costs or total company revenue. There’s also time-consuming and expensive data collection, made mandatory by the agreements, with little in the way of standardization for reporting to each individual label. Even the raw tracks themselves are supplied in different formats with different data tagging, and must be fettled into a consistent shape before they can be deployed. To cap it off, a “most favored nation” clause means that even if one label negotiates a more service-friendly deal, it can later insist on t

I think we all know that the lengths that some Apple fans will go to get the latest products are impressive. These folks will camp for days to get their hands on the newest gadgets like the iPhone or the iPad. Apparently, some of the people that wait for days or hours in a line for the grand opening of new Apple Stores aren’t there to buy gadgets; they are there for the free t-shirts. I didn’t know that Apple gave out limited-edition t-shirts to the folks that were first through the doors of the new Apple Stores when they open. The opening of the Grand Central Apple Store was a few days ago and many of the people there for the opening were adding to the Apple t-shirt collection with new black shirts that had “Apple Store, Grand Central” on the front with a font that looked like a train arrival board. Apple handed the shirts out to the first 4,000 people through the doors of the store. The odd part is that according to the WSJ, many of the people that get the shirts don’t actually wear

Some grunt for your morning: Bentley V8 style. The iconic car company has announced a pair of new Continental V8 models that will debut at the North American International Auto Show in January next year, and since we’re talking Bentley nothing is being done by halves. The new Continental GT and GTC V8 models each pack a 4.0 litre, twin-turbocharged engine with 500bhp and 660Nm (487 lb ft) of torque, for sub-5s 0-60mph acceleration and a top speed of in excess of 180mph. That V8 puts its power down through a new, eight-speed automatic transmission with shortened ratios, and onto the asphalt via all-wheel-drive and 20-inch alloy wheels as standard. Somewhat bizarrely, Bentley has actually managed to improve fuel efficiency and reduce CO2 emissions by 40-percent with the new powertrain, though you have to consider that’s in comparison to the existing 6.0 litre, 12-cylinder engine that will remain in the higher-range Continental GT and GTC. The “wave of torque” is coupled with distinctive

HP‘s restarted TouchPad fire sale saw eBay brought to its knees on Sunday, as desperate bargain-hunters swamped the auction site and payments provider PayPal in the hope of scooping a $99 tablet. The deal – announced last week – kicked off at 7pm EST with the 16GB TouchPad at $99 and the 32GB model at $149. Unsurprisingly, the cheaper model was gone within minutes. The TouchPad demand could well have been fueled by the news that HP is making the webOS platform open-source, allowing developers and other manufacturers to step in, adopt and modify it for their own use. However, the simple lure of a sub-$100 brand-name tablet when an iPad runs to four times that amount is more likely the motivation, just as we saw earlier in the year when HP swiftly sold out of its first TouchPad fire sale. Unfortunately for international would-be buyers, HP has still not released any new TouchPad units outside of the US in recent sales promotions. The market for a second-hand TouchPad is likely to be floo

Google has revealed a new chip-themed homepage doodle that celebrates the birthday of Robert Noyce, co-founder of Intel and widely known as one of the brains behind the microchip. Noyce – who would have turned 84 today – passed away in 1990 at the age of 62. Nicknamed “the Mayor of Silicon Valley” the physics doctor created Intel with Gordon E. Moore in 1968. Noyce had been employed at Shockley Semiconductor, but left as part of the “traitorous eight” after reportedly growing disillusioned with the company’s approach to research. Noyce and Moore, two of the eight, decided to set up their own company, Intel, with a more holistic approach to management, with scientific endeavor as the primary goal. It was at Intel, supervising Ted Hoff, where Noyce oversaw the creation of the microprocessor. One of Noyce’s final wishes was to “make sure we are preparing our next generation to flourish in a high-tech age.” The Noyce Foundation, intended to promote K-12 level physics and mathematics educat

Google‘s top three execs have offered NASA $33m to refurbish NASA’s historic Hangar One, though parking provisos for an eight-strong fleet of private jets suggests both self-interest and altruism are in play. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt made the offer via their H211 airplane operations company, run independently from Google, back in September Mercury News reports, but NASA is yet to greenlight the scheme. “We understand the interest and historic nature of the facility” NASA spokesperson Bob Jacobs conceded in a statement, suggesting though that “we have to weigh that against the reality of constrained resources and use.” If H211′s scheme goes ahead, the outer panels of Hangar One – which have been partially removed, after it was discovered they contained lead paint, asbestos and PCB – would be replaced and some of the internal structure refurbished. NASA would remain the owner of the building, and be at liberty to rent out the areas not used by the H211 scheme. As for Goog

SpaceX will become the first commercial spaceflight company to dock a vehicle with the International Space Station, with NASA giving the green light for the Dragon capsule to begin its mission on February 7 2012. The journey will see the Dragon cargo transporter blast off to the ISS, where a robotic arm will grab the capsule and guide it in to dock, MSNBC reports. A successful trip “will open up a new era in commercial cargo delivery for this international orbiting laboratory” William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, said in a statement. A huge list of checks will be required before Dragon is permitted to even approach the ISS, let alone dock with the orbiting space station. A fly-by at two miles distance, testing the sensors and other hardware, along with a practice of the abort process will all be carried out; at the end of the mission, the capsule and its crew will splash down in the Pacific. SpaceX is one of

Windows Phone 7 already supports NFC technology, Microsoft has confirmed, but it remains the decision of handset manufacturers whether to activate the short-range wireless or, indeed, if there’s a use-case for it. “As far as I’m aware, NFC is supported by [Windows Phone], but needs to be enabled by the OEM” Will Coleman developer evangelist and product manager at Microsoft UK, told TechRadar. “So, if any OEM wants to enable it, that can be done by all means.” So far, no Windows Phone device offers NFC support. That’s likely to change, as broader users for NFC are rolled out, however. ”It’s about just about timing,” Coleman concluded, “in the not too distant future there are some exciting things that will be coming through with NFC from Microsoft.” NFC, or near-field communications, is a short-range wireless technology that enables smartphones, mobile devices, credit cards and other portable gadgets to communicate between each other – or with another piece of hardware, such as a payment

Microsoft is looking to create its own original content for its Xbox LIVE TV service, insiders claims, with the software giant seeking to recruit a television executive to turn its gaming system into a true cable challenger. A head-hunting firm has been employed to dig up the best candidate, Bloomberg‘s tipsters reckon, with Microsoft hoping to replicate the success of its homegrown Xbox games franchises with specially created TV content. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that the Xbox 360 dashboard update would also bring with it a comprehensive package of streaming media options spread across global markets. In the US, the rollout – set to go through into 2012 – would include Hulu Plus, EPIX and ESPN, while the UK will receive BBC iPlayer and 4oD. Full details on the roadmap here. Microsoft also released a Windows Phone Xbox controller app, turning the smartphone platform into a remote for the Xbox 360. According to the sources, who are said to have knowledge of the Microsoft p

HP could return to webOS to make new tablets in 2013, using the freshly open-sourced platform for larger mobile devices though smartphones are still off the menu. Having announced that webOS will be an open-source platform moving forward, and then confirmed that there are no immediate plans for new webOS devices, HP CEO Meg Whitman conceded in an interview with TechCrunch that tablets could still be on the cards, albeit after the company’s Windows 8 push. 2012 will see HPs Windows 8 based tablets reach the market, the company has previously suggested, using Microsoft’s freshly updated platform with its finger-friendly Metro UI. The OS has obvious advantages for HP, being directly compatible with its laptop and desktop hardware, and thus applicable both to a consumer market looking for iPad/Android tablet alternatives, and enterprise/vertical markets needing something that can integrate with an established ecosystem of Microsoft-based PC hardware. Beyond that, however, HP seems keen to

Logitech pushed out the Google TV 2.0 update to its Logitech Revue set-top box this week, upgrading the smart TV adapter with Android Market access, a revised UI and more. The update, based now on Android 3.1, arrived on the SlashGear Revue – which we reviewed, in first-gen form, all the way back in November 2010 - this weekend; has your Revue been revised yet? In addition to third-party app support, with select titles in the Android Market being updated to suit display on an HDTV screen, Google TV 2.0 updates the smart TV interface to make it less confusing. Streaming TV & Movies are gathered up into their own section of the UI, and there’s improved search to make it more straightforward to find content – whether that comes through your cable box, from YouTube or another source. Google’s hope is to turn around the somewhat underwhelming reception of the first-gen Google TV software the Revue launched with, and pave the way for an altogether more enthusiastic market when the second

Late last night rumors hit the street that the ASUS Transformer Prime had been delayed and I’m sure a few were saddened by such news. After almost every online retails has sold out of the new quad-core slate we were quick to reach out to ASUS for an official response and have good news to report. According to our sources everything is on track and as planned. Apparently online retailer NCIX sold out of the Prime and after canceling multiple orders a few rumors came out that their response was ASUS had delayed the hotly anticipated tablet due to WiFi issues. Here at SlashGear we’ve already had extensive time with the Prime and you can see our in-depth review here. At no point did our unit experience any WiFi issues. After reaching out to our sources from ASUS here is what they had to say in response: We are trying to confirm who released this statement and for what purpose right now. At this point, we still show to be on schedule to start shipments the week of 12/19. I will provide an u