CONFIRMED! Xbox 360 Will Sell for $100 on Amazon next Week

Xbox 360 Will Sell for $100 on Amazon next Week

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Finally, a New Spiderman 3 Trailer

Initially, there existed only a "teaser" trailer for the upcoming Spiderman 3 movie. Later, for a short while, an unofficial and incomplete Spiderman 3 trailer was floating around the web. Now, the latest Spiderman 3 trailer has been released. This looks like it will be a great one.

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Nice Collection of Optical Illusion

Have you ever entered a movie theater on a sunny afternoon? The room probably appeared completely dark but as your visual system adjusted to the reduced level of light you were able to see better after a few moments.

Over forty examples of the illusion, viewable as static images (with mouse rollover) or Flash video.

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Scary Evil Priest - Optical Illusion from StareClips.com

This optical illusion relies on a principle called "Chromatic Adaptation". An object may be viewed under various conditions. For example, it may be illuminated by the sunlight, the light of a fire, or a harsh electric light. In all of these situations, the visual system indicates that the object has the same color: an apple always appears red, whether viewed at night or during the day. This feature of the visual system is called chromatic adaptation. Have you ever entered a movie theater on a sunny afternoon? The room probably appeared completely dark but as your visual system adjusted to the reduced level of light you were able to see better after a few moments. This "adaptation mechanism" allows our eyes to recover from an oversensitivity to a particular stimuli. "Chromatic adaptation" occurs when our eyes adjust to certain color stimuli. Chromatic adaptation is one of the more easily fooled aspects of vision, and is prone to some of the most spectacular optical illusions. Original at: http://www.StareClips.com/Scary_Evil_Priest.asp More at: http://www.StareClips.com

Why did the fool cross the road? To get hit on the other side.

Sperm Cells.

Firefox "Whee"

Funny fan-made commercial for the FireFox web browser.

I think the founder of Wikipedia didn't get the memo. Google.com is not censored in China. Google created an alternative version, Google.cn, which merely removes the links from results that are blocked by China's Great Firewall. In other words, they merely created a less buggy version of Google.com and host it at Google.cn. Google.com is still uncensored and still available in China. For those in China who just want to be able to use a search engine and not get surprised by constant errors every other time they click a link, Google has made the alternative version available.

In fact, if the founder of Wikipedia just continues to fight, China is likely to keep ALL of Wikipedia blocked. In other words, the founder of Wikipedia is essentially censoring ALL of Wikipedia's information from the Chinese citizens by deciding to battle with the government of China in order to have some good PR in other countries that don't quite fully get the situation at hand.

So, it looks like Google has officially changed their links. The link to Google Video now appears (with the usual NEW flag). It seems it may have replaced the Froogle link. Also, the "more>>" link now displays a quick pop-up featuring Books, Froogle, and Groups... then displays an "even more>>" link which takes the user to the usual listing of all Google products and services.

It would be nice if they could allow users to customize which links appear in which order, or if the most used services could appear first, etc... It might also be nice to see the Google Blog Search service be integrated with the rest of the search types.

Developer Contest: Google Desktop Gadgets: "The Google Desktop Team just announced a Google Desktop Gadget Contest! The Desktop blog has the details, but here are a few highlights:



The contest runs through July 31 (winners will be announced August 21)
Everyone who submits a published Gadget will get a limited edition Google Desktop Developer T-shirt (there are other Google-y prizes too)
Top prizes: $5,000 for 1st place, $2,000 for 2nd place, and $1,000 for 3rd place
Primary judging criteria: popularity, visual appeal, use of new features (such as transparency/animation, Google Talk API integration, personalization, etc.) And be sure to check out the Google Desktop Gadget Designer, a new IDE and WYSIWYG UI creator for making Google Desktop Gadgets."

I love the smoke and mirrors that Google manages to pull off every time. Remember Google Purchases? Remember when everyone was drooling about the possibilities, passing along secretly acquired screen shots? Well, Google recently released the feature but nobody was paying attention. Instead, they were paying more attention to the fact that the Google Video Store was released. Why is nobody interested in Google Purchases anymore? Because Google told everyone that it wasn't a PayPal killer. It was only a way for customers to pay Google, they said. No worries, PayPal. No worries.

Take a look at the Google Purchases Terms of Service page. "The Service facilitates the processing of Payment Transactions to complete a payment for a purchase between a Buyer and a Seller." Also, "GPC shall not be responsible for, and does not control, the quality, safety or legality of the Products advertised, the truth or accuracy of the description of the Products, the ability of Buyers to buy Products, or the ability of Sellers to deliver Products. GPC shall not be responsible for, and does not control, whether or not a Seller will complete the sale of Products to Buyer." Gosh. Sounds much closer to a PayPal system every day, doesn't it? A PayPal system specifically between buyers and sellers.

Google also said that Google Base wasn't an eBay killer. Sure, maybe they won't institute a bidding system. However, if they allow individuals to post products and services for free via Google Base, then later allow individuals to make transactions via Google Purchases, this is everything that eBay/PayPal is, minus the bidding system. "But, eBay is ONLY a bidding system," you say? Have you not seen the "Buy It Now" feature? This will all directly compete with eBay's "Buy It Now" feature, with Yahoo Stores, and so on and so forth.

So, while the media is complaining that Google Video only has 5 episodes of MacGyver for sale, they managed to slip another service right beneath everyone's noses. Pretty soon, Google Calendar will seem like just a minor Gmail service update. I suppose, then, that Internet Explorer was just a "patch" in Windows systems when it was first released.

Don't get me wrong. I am not complaining. Not one bit. I think that Google is kick-starting the world of technology into the marketplace is was always meant to be. This is a wonderful thing, and a long time coming. I just find it funny that for all of those avid Google Watchers out there, Google still has more tricks up their sleeves. Maybe the next trick will be to get people to install an auto-updater for third-party applications from Microsoft competitors. They will disguise this as a bundle of useful software. It will be called, innocently, Google Pack. Ah, yes, Google. Keep those hands in the finger pyramid of clever contemplation.

Perhaps this is a sign that Google Base is close to becoming a reality? Here is a link to Google Base's Help Center. Lots of information here. Shares a lot in common with the Help Center for Froogle Merchants. Upon visiting some answers, then hitting refresh repeatedly, a 404 error such as "The requested URL /support/bin/answer.py?answer=25290&topic=2904 was not found on this server." is given. Perhaps this is simply because it is not ready yet? Or, perhaps it is actually being replicated throughout their massive server farm as I type this. Close? Let's hope. In the meantime, at least there are positive signs of real progress here.

*** UPDATE: Looks like I was discovering Google Base while it was being pushed live. Just moments ago, I stumbled onto the fact that the Google Base website is now live. http://base.google.com.

It may be worth mentioning (or not) that there is a new entry to Google's robots.txt file.

/chart?

Although this may have something to do with the release of Google Analytics (for free,) so far there is nothing that resolves to "/chart". In other words, even if this is going to be nothing more than something tied to Google Analytics, this seems to be something new in the works and likely to be released soon.

There seems to be a lot of buzz today about "Google Base". Has nobody else noticed the "Video Blog" link at the bottom of the search results page of the Google Video website? Above are some screenshots. As you can see, the video blogger needs special access. Perhaps this is yet another upcoming release? Let's see... Google Calendar... Google Purchases... Google Base... Google Video Blog... It looks like Google has been pretty busy these days. Just for kicks, on the standard Google Search website, enter the name of any two cities as your search. For instance, search for San Jose to Denver in Google Search. Ok, look... it seems to be a relatively new feature not yet documented anywhere on Google's website.