Google Wave drips with ambition. Yesterday, during the Google I/O keynote, Google’s VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, laid out a grand vision for the direction Google sees the web heading towards with the move to the HTML 5 standard.
While we’re not there yet, all the major browser players besides Microsoft are aligned and ready for the next phase, which will include such things as the ability to run 3D games and movies in the browser without additional plug-ins. But Google wants to take it one step further with a brand new method of communication for this new era. It’s called Google Wave. Everyone uses email and instant messaging on the web now, but imagine if you could tie those two forms of communication together and add a load of functionality on top of it. At its most fundamental form, that’s essentially what Wave is. Having seen a lengthy demonstration, as ridiculous as it may sound, I have to agree. Features Maybe you want to add another friend to the wave.
And from here we go much deeper. A New Web. Scientists Make Blackest Material Ever. Scientists have fashioned what may be the blackest material in the universe: a sheet of carbon nanotubes that captures nearly every last photon of every wavelength of light.
The substance absorbs between 97 percent and 99 percent of wavelengths that can be directly measured or extrapolated. It’s the closest that scientists have yet come to a black body, a theorized state of perfect absorption whose closest analogue is believed to be the opening of a deep hole. The material, described Monday by Japanese nanotechnologists in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is made from a flat array of vertically-aligned, single-walled carbon nanotubes.
Photons that aren’t immediately absorbed by a single nanotube deflect off and are absorbed by its neighbors. "This interaction," write the researchers, "repeats until the attenuated light is completely absorbed by the forest. " By comparison, the blackest paints and coatings absorb between 84 and 95 percent of all light. Mystery House. Plot[edit] Screenshot from the opening scene of Mystery House The game starts near an abandoned Victorian mansion.
The player is soon locked inside the house with no other option than to explore. The mansion contains many interesting rooms and seven other people: Tom, a plumber; Sam, a mechanic; Sally, a seamstress; Dr. Green, a surgeon; Joe, a gravedigger; Bill, a butcher; and Daisy, a cook. Initially, the player has to search the house in order to find a hidden cache of jewels. Development[edit] At the end of the 1970s, Ken Williams sought to set up a company for enterprise software for the market-dominating Apple II computer. Having finished Colossal Cave Adventure, they began to search for something similar, but found the market underdeveloped. Ken spent a few nights developing the game on his Apple II using 70 simple two-dimensional drawings done by Roberta. Mystery House was re-released in 1982 through the SierraVenture line, which produced a number of early Sierra games until 1983.