virtualization

Dome tweeters, cone woofers, metal ribbons, planar magnetic and electrostatic panels all do the same thing: They vibrate air to make sound. Those technologies have all been around for decades, but the goal of making a perfect-sounding speaker has yet to materialize, so it's pretty easy to tell the difference between a real piano and the sound of a piano reproduced over speakers. Same for drums, acoustic guitars, basses, violins, flutes, horns and voices.

Electric instruments and synthesizers should be easier to reproduce in part because they don't make sound on their own; we always hear them over amplifiers and speakers. Even so, it's next to impossible to make your home hi-fi sound like a big Fender guitar amp. … Read more

An iOS developer is working on a new keyboard that takes some cues from RIM's virtual keyboard in BlackBerry 10.

Dubbed Octopus Keyboard, the solution is designed for owners of jailbroken iPhones who want to get more functionality out of the virtual keyboard built into iOS. According to iDownloadBlog, which first reported on the keyboard, the software should enhance a user's ability to quickly type out a message, and can work with a host of languages.

However, the key feature is a learning function that runs in the background and determines what the user typically types out. Based on that information, words are displayed above a letter. If the user wants to add the word to the message, they can just hold their finger on the word and swipe up to make it happen.… Read more

NEW ORLEANS--You know all that typing on your phone's virtual keyboard? Snapkeys says that so long as you're using a QWERTY layout, you're doing it wrong.

The company believes that there's little logic to the traditional way a keyboard's arranged, and instead offers up an onscreen virtual keyboard that uses only four buttons.

The buttons are organized by letter types: one for letters that touch the bottom of a ruled line once (like T and I); one for letters with two touch points (like K and H); one for letters with straight lines at the … Read more

The tablecloth was fresh, the juice was chilled. Francina Richardson and her family were ready for company. But instead of waiting for the doorbell to ring, this Sonoma, Calif., grandmother was listening for the distinctive trill of a Skype phone call. And her guests were joining her as part of a pioneering new initiative called the Virtual Dinner Guest Project.

Right on time, a group of youth in Cairo took a "seat" at the breakfast table. Introductions were made on both sides of the computer screen, and then, a natural conversation began. The young Egyptians, most of them … Read more

Google Drive's shortcut in Windows 7/Vista shows up in your Favorites folder, while in Windows XP, it shows up in your My Documents folder. The shortcuts are easy enough to use, but if you find using a specific drive letter to be more convenient, there's an easy way to map one to your Google Drive account.

If you're comfortable using the command prompt, you can use the DOS command: subst. A better and easier way to create the drive association is using a small program called Visual Subst. It's basically a GUI front-end to the … Read more

Once upon a time, people saw primary care physicians -- and often in the comfort of their own homes. These "house calls" are rare enough today to conjure Rockwellian images of doctors with stethoscopes leaning over little Junior's sweaty brow.

While these intimate visits are largely a relic, the ability to reach a caregiver quickly is getting easier and more sophisticated thanks to video chat technology. And now, online care provider American Well is joining a burgeoning number of providers (TelaDoc, Hello Health, and 3G Doctor, to name a few) that are bringing their online services to mobile devices.… Read more

Today, pathologists and researchers must cut super-thin slices of tissue samples to view them on a microscope -- a labor-intensive process that renders 3D images created from hundreds of 2D sections prohibitively expensive.

Not to mention tedious to construct. Imagine if a single scene in Halo was presented as a series of 2D images one must perfectly align before getting the lay of, say, a single battleground.

Now, computer scientists and medical researchers at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom say they've devised a novel workaround in the form of a digital scanning system that produces 3D views of tissue samples … Read more

My wife works for our local school department as an IT support specialist assigned to the town's largest elementary school. Like many U.S. elementary schools, kids and teachers use a variety of personal computing devices, including PCs, notebooks, and now tablets. (Everyone wants to use these 'cause they're way cool.)

Keeping this veritable Noah's ark full of computing animals happy is more than a full-time job. There are more than 400 of them and they have quirks that give most of them unique personalities. If she comes home and tells me she had time for lunch, … Read more

ButtonBeats Virtual Piano Black is a cool Flash app that simulates a piano keyboard on your desktop. You can play it with your mouse or with optional keyboard controls. By tapping out notes in a numbered sequence, even total beginners can play simple tunes like "Happy Birthday" and "Jingle Bells" to more complex melodies such as those by Mozart, Bach, and the Beatles.

Virtual Piano's interface does indeed look like a real piano keyboard, albeit a reduced one, with attractive highlights on the black keys, which are functional. That was a good sign since we'… Read more