I've been reading a lot lately about the process of bringing new products to market, and what's almost as interesting is the products that never actually make it -- though there's a lot less information about those. Jeremy Wagstaff, however, is trying to find out whatever happened to Samsonite's missing bluetooth-enabled suitcase. Apparently, the product was announced back in 2002 with promises to be on the market later that year. Wagstaff found the idea compelling, while others (and I fall into this camp) found the idea baffling. What value is there in adding Bluetooth to a suitcase that can't be accomplished better and cheaper through other means? And, apparently, that's what Samsonite itself discovered soon after announcing (but not launching) the product. In various tests, it found that Bluetooth didn't work very well, not enough people had Bluetooth phones and there simply wasn't much value in Bluetooth-enabled luggage, so it went into the dustbin of products announced, but never launched.

Cory Doctorow: Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno is a riotously illustrated history of schoolgirl fashion in Japan, starting with the thousand-strong, razor-wielding biker gangs, all the way up to the cuddly, explosion -in- a- crafter- factory world of decora girls, who cover their fuzzy one-piece character pyjamas with stuffed animals and cute crafted whatsises. The book is packed with telling little anaecdotes about the cultural conditions that gave rise to each subculture, along with fashion tips, interviews with fashion pioneers, and some of the secret histories, including the rise and fall of the mad fashion pioneer who invented gonguru -- Japanese hipster blackface. From Gothic Lolita's creation of an entirely fictional style of "historical" dress to the scandalous sex-rings of the kogals (and the hysterical media circus that followed them), Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno is an incredibly engrossing tour through lightspeed subculture. Link

eldavojohn writes "The BBC is reporting on a newly proposed type of nanomechanical computer that mimics J. H. Müller & Charles Babbage's work on mechanical computational devices — just on a much smaller scale. The paper is published today in the New Journal of Physics and cites three reasons to build a computer with nanomechanical transistors over bipolar-junction or field-effect transistors: '(i) mechanical elements are more robust to electromagnetic shocks than current dynamic random access memory based purely on complimentary metal oxide semiconductor technology, (ii) the power dissipated can be orders of magnitude below CMOS, and (iii) the operating temperature of such an NMC can be an order of magnitude above that of conventional CMOS.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Xeni Jardin:

The idea behind the recently launched "Trailers from Hell" website is simple and fun. Each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, they publish a new video segment in which a renowned filmmaker comments over one of their favorite b-movie / exploitation / grindhouse flick trailers. Lots of personal memories, inspiration sources -- it's like having a beer with a filmmaker whose work you dig, and fessing up about crappy movies you're both ashamed to admit loving.

One of this week's uploads is Mick "Masters of Horror" Garris waxing poetic about "The Vampire Lovers": Link.

What's extra cool here is the fact that each trailer is offered both with and without commentary. Great picks, and the commentaries I've watched are a lot of fun.

For instance, John Landis pointing out people he went to high school with on "The T.A.M.I. Show," the musical variety epic filmed in "Electronovision" in 1964: Link.

Or Joe Dante on the sciencesploitation monsterpiece "The Incredible Petrified World": Link. ("You gotta hand it to [Jerry Warren] -- he made Ed Wood look like Bernardo Bertolucci, but he got these things made and people paid to see 'em!")

The only criticisms I have about the project are nitpicky UI ones -- like, I can't subscribe to an RSS feed (opt-in email updates, but that's kinda lame); the website has a big-ass noisy Flash intro at the front gates; audience comments would be fun; and I wish the content were available on some of the web video networks I get most of my daily video pickins from.

Still, I'm totally bookmarking this and planning to come back in spite of those drawbacks. Here's hoping they'll make these very good goods a little easier to access as time goes on. (Thanks, Elizabeth Stanley!)

holden writes "According to a blog post, AideRSS has moved from closed to open beta. I've been using AideRSS over the past few weeks to filter my RSS feeds (including Slashdot and Reddit) and I've been quite impressed. They talk a bit about how the filtering system works, which apparently tracks a mixture of things, from pick-up in other blogs, to some clustering technology."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The tech industry's attempts to "get green" have been a mixed bag. While some companies have made legitimate moves to reduce their energy usage through greater efficiency, some efforts, like Dell's plan to plant trees in Second Life in honor of Earth Day, have been little more than publicity stunts. Now a group called the Institute for Sustainable Communications is urging digital content firms to become aware of their carbon footprint, even to the point of calculating the energy needed to run a banner ad. This is pretty silly, if for no other reason than the fact that electronic content is a substitute for other forms of media (like print), which have a much greater impact on the environment. Although the servers needed to run a website do consume electricity, an assessment that takes the bigger picture into account would likely conclude that electronic media has a positive environmental impact.

Uncov meetup in SF, Aug 3 at the Mars Bar.

Andy Ihnatko says he's not the real Fake Steve Jobs.

Thanks to Amyloo!

eldavojohn writes "Space.com brings us the top ten discoveries of the Martian rovers that landed there in 2004. They were expected to last three months but, as Slashdot has covered time and time again, they have lasted over three years. From minor discoveries about the formation of Mars to images of atmospheric phenomena, to final and definitive proof of a Mars with water, these two robots have definitely reserved themselves a place in the history books. Pending a dust storm, they may not even be done with their mission yet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lots of San Francisco-based web sites (Craigslist, Six Apart, Yelp, and Technorati, among others) have been experiencing some problems today, after power outages in the city took down 365 Main, a major hosting facility there. While the power company says it doesn't yet know what's caused the outages, we have a pretty good idea: a 365 Main press release that went out this morning, bragging about the two years of continuous uptime one of its customers has had since moving to the data center. And when these guys invoke Murphy's Law, they don't do it by half, either. The release also brags about the center's "unique billing system in which 365 Main only charges customers for the exact amount of power that is used" -- so presumably today will be free. But what really sealed their fate was this paragraph:

"To ensure uptime for key tenants such as RedEnvelope, 365 Main provides modern power and cooling infrastructure. The company's San Francisco facility includes two complete back-up systems for electrical power to protect against a power loss. In the unlikely event of a cut to a primary power feed, the state-of-the-art electrical system instantly switches to live back-up generators, avoiding costly downtime for tenants and keeping the data center continuously running."

Good to see those backup systems are working!

Late-Eight writes "A key discovery at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute could help advance the role of graphene as a possible heir to copper and silicon in nanoelectronics. Researchers believe graphene's extremely efficient conductive properties can be exploited for use in nanoelectronics. Graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, eluded scientists for years but was finally made in the laboratory in 2004 with the help of everyday, store-bought transparent tape. The current research, which shows a way to control the conductivity of graphene, is an important first step towards mass producing metallic graphene that could one day replace copper as the primary interconnect material on nearly all computer chips." Researchers are now hot to pursue graphene for this purpose over the previous favorite candidate, buckytubes (which are just rolled-up graphene). Farther down the road, semiconducting graphene might take over from silicon at the heart of logic chips.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Frauenfelder: I interviewed Martha Stewart for the August issue of Wired. I don't think the article is available on Wired yet, but it's on ABC news' site.

Stewart: When the Walkman first came out, I called it the Rudeman: Everybody who's listening to those is rude to me. I think part of the reason I got divorced was because of the Rudeman.

Wired: Really?

Stewart: Oh yeah. I'd be in the garden, weeding and chatting away and no answer! [Laughs.] That was like... when was the Walkman?

Wired: The early '80s, I guess.

Stewart: Yeah, that's it. He had one. Boy, he got out of there fast.

Link

David Pescovitz: Last month, MIT researchers made headlines by demonstrating a system of wireless power. They were able to generate a field of energy in coil that lit a bulb a few meters away. Impressively, forty percent of the energy released by the coil actually reached the lightbulb when it was placed two meters away. The researchers called their invention "WiTricity." Trumpets sounded. Patent applications were filed. The current issue of Science News explains MIT's feat in lay terms while also putting it in historical context.

From the article:

In the early 1900s, long before the power grid made electricity widely available, electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla devised a grand scheme to transfer large amounts of power over long distances from a tower 20 stories tall, to be built on Long Island in New York. To this day, historians puzzle over how Tesla's system was supposed to work, or whether it could have worked at all, says Bernard Carlson, a historian of science at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville who is writing a biography of the great engineer. "We can't even begin to understand what he was doing with this power stuff," Carlson says.

The project died when Tesla's financial backers pulled the plug, possibly because Tesla seemed unclear as to how to bill customers receiving wireless power. Ironically, Tesla also invented the alternating current (AC) system of power production, transmission, and distribution that would become the standard for the modern grid.

But electromagnetic radiation can indeed carry energy through air or empty space and over large distances.

Link to Science News

Previously on BB:
• MIT students demonstrate wireless power transfer Link
• Plastic electronic sheet for wireless power Link

Mark Frauenfelder: If Peanuts had been written by Charles Bukowski, not Charles Schulz,

It began as a mistake.

The first time that Charles Branaski met Lucy Van Pelt, she was holding a football. He didn’t care for the game, baseball was his thing. Still, she held out that old football.

“Just kick the fucking thing,” she said.

“Listen, babe. You just hold that thing steady and I’ll kick the shit out of it.”

She threw her head back and laughed. She laughed long and hard and propped up the football. Charlie took a running start and he reared back his leg and kicked as hard as he could. Lucy was laughing too hard to hold the ball steady and it slipped out of her hand. Charlie missed the ball and flew straight up in the air and landed flat on his back.

Link (Thanks, HIROHITO99!)

Xeni Jardin: Scott Beale says,

6 back-to-back power outages hit the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco Tuesday afternoon causing major havoc with popular web services. 365 Main is down, along with craigslist, Netflix, Technorati and SixApart.

Link

Reader comment: Adam Glenn says,

I was poking around on 365 Main's website and found this press release ("REDENVELOPE REPORTS TWO YEARS OF CONTINUOUS UPTIME AT 365 MAIN’S SAN FRANCISCO DATA CENTER"). Take a look at the date :)

mattyohe says,

AP is reporting that it appears Netflix was not effected by the power outage.

Update: sounds like the incident was caused by some sort of weird explosion that led to a big power company outage: Link.

Xeni Jardin:

Funny how that works. When the people inside the furries costumes are underfed Eurobabes with translucent skin and beestung lips, the notion of yiffery doesn't seem so objectionable. Oh, wait, though -- (reads credits) okay, that's real fox fur. Nevermind, buzzkill again. Link to furry-themed photo spread in this month's W Magazine. (thanks, Susannah!)

The RIAA has consistently complained that there should be laws forcing colleges and universities to stop students sharing unauthorized music on their computer networks, and its extensive lobbying efforts have seen legislators in the past to "drop the hammer" on schools that don't comply to the RIAA's wishes. That hammer came a step closer to being dropped, as reader Blake writes in to let us know: an amendment to the Higher Education Reauthorization Act, which funds colleges and universities and the students who attend them, was introduced this week, and it would cut funding from schools that didn't install technology to try and block P2P file-sharing on their networks. It looks like the amendment got yanked following university complaints, but its introduction highlights the ridiculous amount of clout the RIAA carries in Washington (an amount it seeks to further increase). The RIAA's attempts to abuse the legal system roll on, and now it's attempting to pervert the legislative process and American higher education as well. It isn't the job of colleges and universities to do the RIAA's dirty work, and the government shouldn't be forcing them to do it, either.