March 2012 – My Blog

Google to allow people to change their weather on April 1

Another sighting of Google’s yearly April Fool’s Day jokes is live. If you search for “weather” you will have the standard forecast available, but you’ll have the new option of using the “Google Weather Control” interface to make changes if you’d like. You’ll see in the image above I set it to snow in Beverly… Continue reading Google to allow people to change their weather on April 1

Conan O’Brien ousts Pete Cashmore at Mashable for $3500

Talk show host Conan O’Brien posted a viral video and accompanied it with a blog post on Mashable declaring that he had bought out Pete Cashmore for $3500. The spoof did what it was supposed to do; it took a pair of popular social media and pop icons and combined them for some pre-April Fool’s… Continue reading Conan O’Brien ousts Pete Cashmore at Mashable for $3500

Understanding relativity in 4 minutes or less

For over a century, people have tried to cope with understanding Einstein’s special theory of relativity and his famous equation, E=MC2. There have been long videos and visualizations that attempted to dumb down both the process that Einstein used to come up with the theories and the way that our minds can wrap themselves around… Continue reading Understanding relativity in 4 minutes or less

The best of Google’s 8-bit April Fool’s Day maps

Google has become one of the biggest pranksters every year for April Fool’s Day. Over the years they’ve put out several clever and enjoyable pranks. This year’s first one is also an Easter Egg with plenty of Google Maps searching for people to do. They went 8-bit, NES-style. It’ll make you want to pull out… Continue reading The best of Google’s 8-bit April Fool’s Day maps

Piracy cut in half in France, yet music and movie revenues fell

France made waves in the P2P industry by implementing a controversial graduated response program in 2010 that was designed to reduce the amount of illegal downloads by establishing progressively-harsher penalties on file sharers. The results were strong, as shown in Hadopi’s report, with file-sharing activities traffic slashed by two-thirds in 2011. However, the goal of… Continue reading Piracy cut in half in France, yet music and movie revenues fell

Should Facebook buy Bing?

It’s all about timing. Bing’s inability to take market share from Google in the search industry and Facebook’s focus on improving their internal and external search abilities has made it seem to be a perfect match since the NY Times suggested the possibility last year. The timing simply hasn’t been right and the discussion hasn’t… Continue reading Should Facebook buy Bing?

Google’s driverless car comes with (satirical) consequences

With California having major financial woes, the Google Driverless Car may be enough to tank the entire state since ID cards cost $6 less than driver’s licenses. This and many other satirical consequences of the looming possibility of having driverless cars on the road fill this clever graphic. If Google is seeing this, they need… Continue reading Google’s driverless car comes with (satirical) consequences

Is internet infrastructure improving quickly enough to meet demands?

While browsing tech posts on Google Plus (yes, I’m the guy who’s still using G+) I came across an advertorial infographic by Intel discussing the growing needs of the world when it comes to storage and connectivity. The graphic was more of a pitch to use Intel cloud services, but the data portion (image above)… Continue reading Is internet infrastructure improving quickly enough to meet demands?