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Agriculture Department lifts USDA gag order after public outcry
That didn't last long. Less than a day after the US Department of Agriculture issued an internal memo dictating that its main research division "not release any public-facing documents" the agency has rescinded that order, according to emails obtained by Buzzfeed.
Friday Favorite: PollEverywhere Mac Presenter grows up
When your job (or schoolwork) involves giving presentations to rooms full of more-or-less interested parties, you know how hard it can be to maintain a constructive level of audience attention. The economical cloud audience response system (ARS) provided by the mad scientists at PollEverywhere is a great way to spice up a session with quick, engaging multiple choice and full-text questions. PollEverywhere's polls display wonderfully on the web (if you've got the Flash player) and do well in Windows versions of PowerPoint, where the appropriate ActiveX control to embed the remote Flash animation is available. For Mac presentation apps, however, the path is not so smooth. Prior versions of the company's Mac Presenter app used a QuickTime workaround to display polls, but it was somewhat clunky and did not automatically cue up when the polling slide appeared on screen. Time for an improved approach. With the December 2011 release of the all-new Mac Presenter application, the polling experience is now hands-free and incredibly simple. The Mac Presenter app connects to your PollEverywhere hosted account and lets you embed polling references into Keynote or PowerPoint slides with a single click -- the poll identifiers end up as a block of XML code in the slide notes, so you can easily move polling slides from deck to deck. The rest is easy: you just draw a solid color box on your slide where you want the poll to show up. Like magic, when you present that slide, the Mac Presenter app will scale the poll display to cover just that placeholder box. True, it's a smidge more effort than the Windows PowerPoint configuration, but it's definitely worth it. PollEverywhere offers a free plan that allows up to 40 responses per poll, and business pricing for higher service levels starts at $15 per month. K-12 and higher-ed discounts are also available. Do you have a favorite Mac app, peripheral/accessory, cloud service or iOS app that you think deserves to be featured as a Friday Favorite? Be sure to let us know.
The DS Lite is "smaller than a brick"
Arstechnica has posted a comprehensive five page review of the DS Lite, with a large portion dedicated to comparisons with the DS Phat. This isn't the first review of the DS Lite, but it could possibly be the most well thought out. Here are the key points of the review:The screens Greater viewing angle - "it's now possible to watch someone else playing the system and actually see the screen" Brighter - "the upgraded screen may be worth the price of an upgrade alone" Dead pixels - "my unit has a stuck pixel on the top screen" Flimsy? - "the bottom screen seems to be floating in the system case, not held down tight like the DS [Phat]" The feel Lighter - "the system is lighter, making it easier for me to cradle it using the tips of my fingers" Buttons - "The D-pad is a touch smaller... and a bit less satisfying in the click department" although "the buttons on both DS products are a little bit on the small side" Central microphone "makes games that use voice recognition easier to play." The battery Six hours usually, although "it's not hard to get eight hours of battery life as long as you don't continually keep the system on its brightest setting." The overall feeling from the review is that if you're a DS virgin and have been mulling a purchase, now is the time to jump in. If, however, you're a DS Phat owner and haven't decided whether it's worth trading in for the updated hardware, the suggestion from this review is go for it. "If you're a casual gamer or a hardcore fan who takes your portable everywhere, you'll like the way your games play and look on the DS Lite".
AACS still not finished: is this intentional?
That's the word according to German mag heise; apparently disagreement from within the Blu-ray Disc Association over how AACS and BD work together means no high definition DVD formats yet. Beyond just noting the delay, they also dropped a few dimes on what we can expect from managed copy: the content holder gets to decide how many copies can be made and any device they are copied to requires an Internet connection for verification. Microsoft's COPP (Certified Output Protection Protocol) makes sure you're actually watching a movie and not dumping the video to a file, after which that HDCP-compliant videocard that doesn't exist yet finally lets you play HD-quality content on your monitor.I really have to wonder, is the BDA that far apart on the DRM issue, or is there any possibility that this is intentional to delay the launch of HD-DVD, which was supposed to debut last year but can't until AACS is finished. Being the first mover was part of HD-DVD's advantage in the face of Blu-ray's greater storage capacity but that continues to shrink and may even be nonexistent by the time they launch. I'll tell you what though Toshiba, how about we just forget the whole AACS, DRM thing? We won't tell if you won't.
