lisa

Attention early adopters: That first-edition Google Glass hardware is likely to be gathering dust a few years from now as the technology gets seriously revved (or falls victim to paranoid lawmakers and pub owners), but don't toss it out!

If an auction later this month of computing and other technological blasts from the past is any indication, it could pay off to hold on to those obsolete gadgets that were once on the cutting edge, even just briefly.

The highlight of the sale, planned for May 25 by German auction house Breker, is an original, working Apple-1, one of only 200 that were produced and 50 that are believed to still exist. Last year, Sotheby's auctioned off just an original Apple-1 motherboard for $374,500.… Read more

Somewhere under Aspen, Colo., a time capsule containing Steve Jobs' mouse has been sitting and waiting to be unearthed. Since 1983. And no one knows where it is.

That's what blogger Marcel Brown wrote this morning, explaining that the time capsule, known as the Aspen Time Tube and buried in conjunction with the 1983 International Design Conference there, is lost and those looking for it are facing considerable odds against success.

According to a 2010 article in the Glenwood Springs (Colo.) Post Independent, the Aspen Time Tube was buried in June, 1983, and contained a number of items, ranging … Read more

For the last week, attorneys for Apple and Samsung have been arguing over rounded corners, icons, bezels, ornamental designs and horizontal lozenge-shaped slots.

After hearing testimony -- first from Apple's witnesses and then from Samsung -- a jury at the U.S District Court in the heart of Silicon Valley will decide whether Samsung's broad array of mobile products infringed on patents and designs associated with the iPad and iPhone. 

Samsung is contending that its devices are not illegally derivative of Apple's products, and that Apple looked to Sony in developing designs for the iPhone. … Read more

Ripples in the fabric of spacetime regularly zip across the universe from titanic cosmic events, such as the mergers of supermassive black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the sun.

These so-called gravitational waves ought to be ubiquitous but faint, and no experiment has yet registered the disturbance caused by a passing wave. The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna was supposed to do just that. The spaceborne observatory, also known as LISA, was to be a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to detect gravitational waves and give scientists a whole new window through … Read more

CNET's Bridget Carey does double duty on Loaded and The 404 Podcast today with all your latest tech headlines. Even without Wilson around, we can't escape Apple news, so today we're running down some of the best features from iOS 5 and giving you the real reason why Steve Jobs wore a black turtleneck.

It's not all Apple flavored, though- Samuel L. Jackson finally joined twitter, a costumed vigilante was apprehended by the Seattle police department, HP thinks you should spend more money on printer ink to save the print industry, and it's been a rough year for Sony, compounded by yet another PSN account breach and a Bravia television recall.

Enjoy the show!… Read more

Last week, Google unveiled a Street View-esque project that brings viewers face to face with some of the greatest art on earth.

Known as Google Art Project, the initiative will give users remote access to the priceless paintings, sculptures, and other artifacts from 17 of the world's most famous museums, including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, London's National Gallery and Tate Britain, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and others.

In a blog post announcing the effort, Amit Sood, head … Read more

Toronto artist Lisa J. Murphy believes we live in a highly sexualized world that often leaves the visually impaired behind. So she decided awhile ago to do something about it.

Last year, Murphy's book "Tactile Mind," which featured several nude, 3D pictures of men and women along with braille descriptions, gained new life in the media, two years after its release. Last week, the artist released four new images, including one featuring a woman's legs in stiletto shoes, as well as "a photograph of a woman's behind...wearing soft pink" panties.

The original book comes with the hefty price of $225, and the new set of images, titled "Tactile Atelier Bookmark," cost $100, according to Murphy's Web site. In an interview with AOL News, she says the process of creating the images takes up to 50 hours for each, and therefore the high price tag for the unusual art--or porn, depending on your point of view--is justifiable.

"I took photographs of my friends in lingerie, blew up the images, and hand-sculpted them into clay," Murphy told AOL News. "Then I made thermoform copies. I ran the plastic myself through my thermoform machine at home, so each one took awhile to make."

The hardest of the four images in her latest batch of creations, Murphy said, was the female behind. … Read more

J'adore France and the French people. But I'm pretty disappointed with Musee du Louvre, a free but painfully brief virtual tour of the famous museum.

The app consists of four main sections. In Louvre: The Visit, you get a video tour of seven well-known areas of the museum, including The Venus de Milo and Mona Lisa.

However, each "tour" lasts less than 20 seconds, and the default language is French. If you tap the screen to bring up the controls and then tap the language icon, you can select English (or German or Japanese), but there'… Read more

This story was updated at 3:45 p.m. PST with an official statement from Microsoft.

Amid a wave of criticism, Microsoft is backtracking on a decision to require laid off workers to pay back money that the software maker said was in excess of its planned severance, CNET News has learned.

Over the weekend, Microsoft confirmed it had overpaid severance to some workers and underpaid others. At the time, the company did not say how much money was involved, but sent the workers who were overpaid a letter saying they would be required to pay back the money in … Read more