• These will absolutely blow your mind. Mr.doob's Chrome experiments -- Ball Pool and Google Gravity.
• Here's a roundup of experiments from Ben Joffe, including a rudimentary 3D shooter, a 3D functions plotter, and an HTML5 color picker.
• Some of my personal favorites, KesieV's Akihabara game room. The Legend of Sadness is where it's at.
• Exploding, real-time video.
• WPilot -- a multiplayer shooter. Like Asteroids meets Quake.
• A giant, color-cycling canvas. Weirdly addictive to play with.
• 3D molecules. 'Nuff said.
• Mega Man intro. In HTML5.

HP took the top spot from IBM in global server revenue in the first quarter, as shipments from all manufacturers rose 23 percent over the previous year, according to Gartner.

The quarterly figures are a sign that businesses are starting to increase their expenditure on servers as the global economy recovers, the analyst company said. However, although the market is bouncing back, server revenue in the quarter was only around 80 percent of its peak in 2008, it noted.

Server revenue rose six percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2010, Gartner said in a report released on Tuesday. The x86 servers were the fastest growing segment, showing rises of 25.3 percent in shipments and 32.1 percent in sales. In contrast, RISC/Itanium Unix servers and mainframes declined substantially, falling 28.5 percent in shipments and 26.9 percent in revenue.

The BBC are working on a new beta version of their popular, trend-setting on-demand television service, iPlayer. With a changing online environment, the BBC - a semi-public organisation which relies heavily on the tax payer - is setting new trends by opening up ’social viewing’.

Using Javascript and client-side coding - it allows users to communicate with each other using Windows Live Messenger whilst watching on-demand programmes. n a few weeks once the site fully works and the ’social controls’ are in place, users will be able to log into their Windows Live Messenger account and speak with each other, whilst watching a synchronised programme on the site. You can invite more than one person, and ’shout out’ to everyone on your friends list who are also watching the programme - like when a particularly exciting moment happens.

The BBC are clearly weary of privacy, and with these Windows Live controls it allows users to communicate with each other directly through the Messenger service, and the BBC does not see any content you post, nor can it archive it.

Using Facebook in this method may have been considered, but as the BBC is a public body with responsibilities to the tax payer, it seems they opted to use another popular service in light with the various privacy issues highlighted with the social network. The BBC and Microsoft have worked together closely before, so this ‘partnership’ doesn’t surprise me at all.

Update (3:58pm BST): The BBC confirmed that the Facebook ‘privacy issues’ that have been in the news were not a reason to not use the service directly. Facebook chat which doesn’t have a client-side base as such is more difficult and less dynamic to integrate. With over 450 million worldwide Windows Live Messenger users, it was easier, more efficient and better suited to use the Messenger network. It isn’t to say that others won’t be used in the future, nor is it locking down to just one network - but to start off, it is a wise and justified reason.

However, Neowin report (so do take with a pinch of salt) that iPlayer videos will be able to be shared properly over Facebook and Twitter, which as of yet has not been restricted as such, just not really thought about. With this in mind, the BBC have confirmed that they will not be seeking to ‘create’ their own social network, rather build on the infrastructure already in place by harnessing third-party sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The ’social viewing’ development in my eyes is very significant. The iPlayer started the online on-demand revolution in the UK and has had a deeply positive and trend-setting impact on the rest of the web.

Some interesting iPlayer stats:

• In April 2010, one of the strongest months for the on-demand service, 123 million requests were made across all online platforms and devices.
• iPlayer is not just available on the web, but across all desktop operating systems, dozens of mobile phones and in download and streaming form - even across some 3G networks.
• “Doctor Who” is one of the most popular programmes on the entire network (pg. 13).
• A large majority of the Generation Y use the BBC on-demand service, favouring the iPlayer desktop application and streaming from the website (pg. 18), with many accessing through games consoles such as the PlayStation 3.Source: BBC iStats

But now as students being a popular user of the iPlayer and similar services - because there is no need to buy a TV licence to watch on-demand broadcasts, this engages the younger generation on a far more substantial level and is a major step towards the next evolutionary step of television, something I have doubted before.

I spoke to Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC technology correspodent last night, to get his personal views on how ’social television’ could be a natural progression of the next-generation television experience:

“This step is more significant than say 3DTV. On-demand broadcasts in the wider context of the broadcasting industry allow users to build our own television schedules. And with the sharing web, there is a prominent socialisation around TV - sharing our likes and dislikes, and there’s an infrastructure already in place to allow this to happen now.

On-demand television won’t replace ordinary broadcasts. But there will be a tipping point for the younger generation where on-demand becomes more popular, but there is no time limit on when this could be.”

Instead of lounging around at a friend’s house to watch the latest Top Gear episode, for example, doesn’t have to be a thing of the past. But in this new development, it allows the very social younger generation to do exactly this in a virtual but secure setting.

Imagine waking up in a world, where you would need to use two-factor authentication/biometric based ID, in order to do anything online. The reason for this? Accountability and supposedly, prevention of cybercrime.

This may well sound like the long-term reality, but Kaspersky’s CEO Eugene Kaspersky has been pushing the idea for years. According to a recently published article, he still believes that the time has come for a mass adoption of hardware IDs affecting every Internet user.

Here are five reasons why I think this is a bad idea, if not one that is virtually impossible to implement.

“To prevent the misuse of social networking accounts, Kaspersky is pushing the idea of government IDs as a prerequisite for all computer users. “I’ve been talking about this for four years already, that we need to have a secure design for the (entire) internet,” he says. In Kaspersky’s perfect world, all digital citizens would carry some form of ID to go online, hopefully creating greater hurdles for malware creators - but creating a nightmare for privacy advocates.”

“When you buy a car, the car is registered and you have a drivers licence. If you want to have a gun, the same thing - it’s registered to the person who bought it. The question is why? Because it’s dangerous. With computers, you can make much more harm than with a gun or car.”

At first, the proposed ID scheme seems pretty logic in terms of accountability. Here are five points on what’s wrong with it.

1. Privacy vs Security for the sake of accountability - Interestingly, Kaspersky isn’t claiming that the ID scheme would somehow lead to more privacy being sacrificed on behalf of the users. Instead, he argues that privacy is already dead, and that your ISP already knows everything about you, therefore the use of hardware IDs shouldn’t really have an impact on the end user, since he’s losing nothing. If privacy is already dead, and an ISP somewhere across the globe always knows everything about the activities of its customers, then what’s the point of having a hardware based ID to authenticate something that’s (supposedly) already known? There isn’t. Which leads us to the best possible solution to the problem of tracking down the source of a cybercriminal - cross-border/cross-agency threat intelligence sharing.
2. Mass adoption of two-factor authentication is no proof that it works, exactly the opposite - Using the “success” of two-factor authentication for E-banking as an example on the usefulness of the proposed IDs is partially incorrect. How did cybercriminals manage to undermine the myth of the hardware based authentication? Not by attempting to attack it directly, but by bypassing it entirely in the sense of patiently and automatically waiting for the now authenticated victim to start interacting with the E-banking provider. Neither a SSL connection, nor a two-factor authentication device would prevent a crimeware-infected host from having its owner victimized by cybercriminal on the other side of the world. In the worst case, it would offer the user a false feeling of security.
3. Hardware IDs would not solve the problem, since a malware infected host will be used to commit the same crimes - The article claims that the ID scheme would create some sort of hurdle for malware authors, which is totally untrue. How come? Even if we assume that the end user would be unplugging himself/herself from the Internet and connectivity would be disabled unless he authenticates himself again, botnet masters would continue operating with the bots whose users are online, taking advantage of the different time zones. With or without the hardware ID, the malware-infected host would continue forwarding the responsibility for the actions of the actual cybercriminal, to the owner of the host, unless it’s proven the same has been compromised. Long gone are the days when a cybercriminal would use his own host to commit the crimes, unless we exclude the Mariposa botnet masters of course, who got caught by doing exactly the same.
4. By authenticating yourself on a PC that’s not yours, you automatically inherit its reputation - A quote from the article - “Kaspersky says that in Dubai “they are going to introduce regulations that in public places, to get access to public WiFi, you have to present your ID.” The idea is that whenever a phishing attack is launched from a particular host, using the proposed ID scheme would allow law enforcement to find out the person that’s supposedly behind the campaign based on the fact that he’s already authenticated himself. In reality though, even when you’re using a public computer, the malicious campaigns that were going on in the background would continue taking place, with numerous users identifying themselves, and none of them would theoretically have anything to do with these background processed maintained by someone on the other side of the world.
5. Budgeting the idea on an international scale is off base - In order for this ID scheme to get even close to being of any use, would be its mass adoption. Otherwise, certain countries that deny, do not have the resources, or don’t even believe in the idea, wouldn’t bother implementing this. The real problem with fighting cybercrime has never been about the lack of technologies or knowledge on how the ecosystem really works. It’s always been about the lack of mass adoption for these technologies, and the lack of active cooperation among countries. Even if we assume that in a perfect world, this scheme gets implemented, just likephotoshop-ed IDs sent to domain registrars in Russia and China in order to comply with new regulations, biometric passports have been under fire since day one. It would be totally naive to assume that the same wouldn’t happen to these IDs as well. Do you think the pros of the proposed hardware based ID scheme — if any — are worth the loss of privacy? Do you still believe privacy exists online? Are you willing to sacrifice even the left overs of it, with the idea to improve accountability over the Internet, and supposedly limit cybercrime?

How long before cybercriminals undermine the ID scheme as well, and wouldn’t a potential flaw in it lead us the same situation we’re into today - millions of end users still susceptible to outdated 3rd party application flaws and vulnerable browser plugins, given the fact that only a small number of the hardware ID users would even know they’re susceptible to impersonation based on the flaw?

A few days ago I hada little fun at Dell’s expense.

Today I want to praise them, not just for a technology, but for what that technology tells us about health IT.

It’s called Proximity Printing Technology, and it essentially uses a wire and network connections to get data where it needs to go.

In health IT this is a very big deal. I like the idea of my doctor being able to print my prescription while I’m sitting in front of them, have it waiting at the desk when I check-out.

But there is more to this than that. Dell has done its homework in this market. There is a “scan to EMR” function that places what’s on the screen into a patient’s electronic chart. There’s a card copy function for getting insurance data into the system quickly.

One of the biggest complaints doctors have about today’s health IT is that it actually saps productivity. Putting a form on the screen means you have to complete the form. Whether that form gets you paid or is supposedly turned into data for managing your practice, it’s still a time bite that doesn’t get the immediate job done.

These kinds of innovations are different. Hospitals and clinics have become among our largest, and most innovative, users of WiFi technology. Wireless is a platform built for medicine, so why should printers need wires? If the network can be accessed without wires, work should automatically route over that network to a needed device.

That’s the kind of thing that increases productivity. A prescription that’s automatically printed and filed from the doctor’s terminal is cool. Once tablets become commonplace you have system that’s much more paper-like than anything being sold today, and that’s good, because it means less retraining, and training is also a productivity sink.

It’s a lesson more vendors need to take to heart. Give clinics anything that increases productivity, that brings back the feel of what they understand, and you will have won their heart.

Such out of the box thinking could make even the Dell Streak (above, from CNET) look good.

Sources said several large media companies, including Time Warner and NBC Universal, told Apple they won't retool their extensive video libraries to accommodate the iPad, arguing that such a reformatting would be expensive and not worth it because Flash dominates the Web.

Just like we did with other codecs like MPEG2, H.264 & VC1, if VP8 establishes itself in the Smart TV space, we will add it to our [hardware] decoders.