new york times

The 404 1,243: Where clouds are for the weak (podcast)

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- A headphone "club" meeting in Babylon on April 20.

- Amazon extends AutoRip to vinyl records.

- Happy Audiophiliac April! To celebrate, here's what the Head-fi crew did to Steve.

- Follow Steve Guttenberg on Twitter.… Read more

All the New York Times news that's fit to print -- in haiku

Not long ago, The New York Times published an article exploring the likelihood of a solar storm hitting Earth. I didn't get around to reading it, but I probably don't need to now that I've discovered Times Haiku.

The site recasts Times stories in the traditional short poetry form of three phrases containing 5, 7, and 5 syllables. It offers this poetic summary of the solar-storm article: Only rarely does/a giant solar blast fly/directly at Earth. Well, phew.

Jacob Harris, a Times senior software architect, created the site between his more serious endeavors -- building news-driven sites for events like the November election. His original algorithm checks the paper's home page every few minutes for new articles, then scans each sentence looking for complete sentences that fit the haiku pattern. The software does this using a list of words and their syllable counts; if it spots a word it doesn't know, it skips to the next sentence and logs the unknown words to a database. … Read more

Washington Post to start charging frequent site users

The Washington Post won't be completely free online much longer.

The publication this summer plans to start charging users who access more than 20 articles or multimedia features a month. The Washington Post hasn't yet decided how much it will charge, according to an article on the newspaper's Web site.

Large portions of The Washington Post's audience will be exempt from fees, though, including home-delivery subscribers. Students, teachers, school administrators, government employees, and military personnel will have unlimited access to the Web site while in their schools and workplaces, the article said. And access to The … Read more

Google Glass shows off its apps at SXSW

Google is showing off its wearable tech again, this time with an app-filled presentation at South by Southwest Interactive.

The presentation, which Engadget captured in Austin today, showed apps from The New York Times, Evernote, Skitch, and Path.

Of course, there was also a Gmail app. When an e-mail arrives, Google Glass wearers can use voice command to prompt Google's e-mail service to deliver the sender's image and subject line to the glasses' screen. Users can then tell the app what to write back.

The New York Times application will deliver an article in the form of an … Read more

Elon Musk at SXSW: 'I'd like to die on Mars, just not on impact'

AUSTIN, Texas -- SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk wowed a capacity SXSW crowd here today with the first public showing of a video of a rocket capable of blasting off and then returning safely and gently to the ground. And he later added he hopes to one day travel (perhaps one-way) to Mars.

The video of the company's Grasshopper rocket, filmed just about a day-and-a-half ago, demonstrates one of SpaceX's key propositions: That it can develop reusable rockets at a fraction of the cost of a traditional NASA mission, and that it can bring them back down … Read more

Tesla CEO: NYT review cost us $100M in value -- Bloomberg

The New York Times/Tesla debacle may have cost the car maker $100 million in value, Tesla's CEO told Bloomberg.

Elon Musk, speaking on Bloomberg TV, said "a lot" of people canceled orders for Tesla's Model S following a scathing New York Times review.

"It probably affected us to the tune of tens of millions, to the order of $100 million, so it's not trivial," Musk said. "I would say that refers more to the valuation of the company. It wasn't as though there were 1,000 cancellations just due to … Read more

Apple, Facebook, Twitter hacks said to hail from Eastern Europe

While many security experts have been pointing the blame at China for the recent wave of cyberattacks on U.S. companies and newspapers, Bloomberg reports that some of the malware attacks actually may be coming from Eastern Europe.

Investigators familiar with the matter told Bloomberg they believe a cybercriminal group based in either Russia or Eastern Europe is carrying out the high-level attacks to steal company secrets, research, and intellectual property, which could then be sold on the black market.

Evidence that the attacks may be coming from Eastern Europe is the type of malware being used by the hackers, … Read more

Tesla, the Times, and how to drive an electric car

This week's Tesla versus The New York Times flap came to a climax yesterday when Tesla released the logs it promised on its Web site, and the newspaper responded with a point-by-point refutation.

Tesla's post says that New York Times environmental reporter John Broder misrepresented the Model S' performance. Broder argues that he was simply following advice from Tesla personnel during the drive.

The original New York Times story painted the Model S with a negative brush, but as I wrote Wednesday, a close reading of the article shows that the Model S operated exactly as you'd … Read more

Behind the bloodsport: Tesla vs. NY Times

Where's Don King when you need him?

It seems that everybody and their mother-in-law are buzzing about the tussle between a New York Times car reviewer and Tesla Motors. It's a good example of the kind of public dialog that can happen in the age of the Internet and instrumented devices, such as a super-fast car that is basically a computer on wheels.

To briefly catch you up, a fierce debate broke out not long after New York Times writer John Broder wrote a review reporting shortcomings in the range of Tesla's Model S electric car during … Read more