So this afternoon, wait for it, yes Twitter suffered an outage for 2 or more hours due to a DDOS attach on it which meant it was rather a rude awakening for the techies at Twitter in the States.

While this all was happening I was driving peacefully out to Canal Walk for a meeting when I almost had an accident! And if you take a look at the pic alongside you’ll see why, surely this can’t be legal!! I wonder how many accidents there will be there while that poster is up – dam good poster though.

As while driving past I was only moving at a snails pace I had plenty of time to gasp and enjoy the view as I drove by and even fish my cellphone out and snap the picture, I then thought ‘hey, lets post it on Twitter!’ but alas the site was down and even still TwitPic is down so enjoy here on my stable blog.

Facebook experienced the same attack today which makes it a bit suspicious! Wonder if its Rupert and his News buddies trying to get back at the social stream?

Now this is stuff of the future I’ve been waiting for, wow – would def beat the crazy traffic into work in the mornings though don’t know what would happen when it storms/rains etc…

Anyway, you’ll see my point when you watch the video. This has been invented by a Kiwi and its not quite ready for market yet as they are still testing it but dam it would be fun. Image the sports you could play, the views you’d see and the Mile High Club would take a new meaning!

Here is some info from the Aussie news site:

The Martin Jetpack – literally a personal strap-on aircraft – is a two-litre jet-powered engine designed to soar across the skies at 100km/h at heights of up to 50 metres.
Inventor Glenn Martin dreams of the day commuters will hop into the contraption to fly to work, missing rush hour traffic.

But for now, the first public flight program will be limited to low and slow flying in a controlled area while the Christchurch-based company road tests the safety and limits of the engine.

“Just because we have to stay under 10 metres high and under 10km/h doesn’t mean it won’t be an incredibly exciting experience,” Martin Aircraft Company chief executive Richard Lauder said.

“It will still be flying as it’s never been done before, just in the confines of a rugby field-type space.”

More info from the Aussie news site.

At first I wasn’t too sure about how fun a game would be that has something to do with search and its a game, sounds like something you’d get when on detention at school!

But Microsoft is really been impressive with pushing the boundaries in trying to get more market reach for its search engine, Bing. And they have created this game which could actually help them give better results and this is how…

The game shows a series of web pages and asks users to guess which query would show each page in Bing’s top 5 results. Users score points based on their answers with 100 points if you guess a query that shows page #1. This is how ever time limited to just 3 minutes.

MIT has even looked at this and commented that
“The idea is to gather useful information on user search habits which could be used to fine tune search algorithms and ranking scheme … Page Hunt is a clever twist on “human computation”–using people to perform tasks that computers find difficult to do.”

Thanks to Mashable for the content and great adverts (quite large pics of a woman looking seductive)

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch has been show casing his development of the Crunchpad – the picture shows it best but basically its a touchpad 12 inch basic computer that is only built to access the internet. It looks amazing and reckon it will be very very useful!

This puppy will not have a hard drive apparently but will allow a keyboard to be plugged in, reckon it will also allow for USB Drives to be plugged plus hopefully a HDMI port? Maybe, maybe not we’ll see when there could be an announcement either this month or the next.

Apple was rumoured to supposedly be announcing a Apple Tablet or larger like iPhone but there has been no such announcement as yet so this CrunchPad will be the first of its kind – reckon it will be popular if they can keep the price to under $300 or R2,500.

Haha, talk about embarrasing… gees this reporter will definitely have a story to tell when he/she gets home. Wonder if it had anything to do with Obama’s speech on Gay Rights? Don’t think so but nice to see that President Obama is chilled enough to go with it and even asks ‘Whose duck back there?’

Listen carefully after around 18/19 seconds you’ll hear it.

Now as we go along we are starting to see the $80-$100million Microsoft put into their marketing for Bing and Internet Explorer 8, do doubt some of it will be saved for when Windows 7 launches.

Anyway, take a look at the ads below they are pretty funny and do remind me of my folks sometimes (except the vomiting one!)

A couple of years back there was talk about how everything would be connected to the internet from your microwave, kettle and fridge… this haven’t quite come to the fore front yet but one thing that is now connected and available for sale is your little bathroom scale!

Gone are the days of checking your weight and marking it off every day but keeping it from your friends, now this little bugger sends your information to the internet. This can be kept personal if you wish but there is a grouping feature for friends or family. The service willalso suggest healthy items to eat or that you should work out. The one benefit could be for weigh-less groups who can monitor each other and help each other out.

This scale will be on sale in November for $119 and $20 for a 3 month weight loss subscription. Not sure if you need the subscription or not.

Image every day on Facebook your status – “Daniel weighed in this morning at 105kg, 2kg’s heavier than yesterday!”

It could encourage people quite a bit to shed a few kilos, not sure how the girls would take to everyone knowing their weight.

A while back I wrote about this new system that was being developed in the USA called OnLive, this service would basically stream games to your web browser and allow basic PC’s extra to play decent games with proper graphics etc. All the hard processing power would be done on the servers, this could seriously threaten the likes of Microsoft and Sony.

Now there seems to be a similar service called OTOY which is also based in the USA, can’t tell yet if its part of OnLive but will check it out. Anyway they’ve been also developing the same technology and as reported on TechCrunch they can even stream games to your cellphone, check the video out that TechCrunch showed.

I remember almost 14 years back going to computer expo’s and seeing headsets for games like Heretic and thinking awesome in 5/10 years this will become the norm. Well they never really took off as from my experience the graphics wasn’t that good when looking at it so close to your eyes!

Now I came across this video from Crunchgear and it looks freakin awesome, this guy has mounted a little monitor on a keyboard turned into a gun shape with a mouse that is wireless. Not a bad idea but the awesome part is that he wants to mount these tiny little projectors onto it, 3 of them! Read more about the projectors here

Now check this video out, the capabilities seem to quite large when looking at it. Hope this video is correct and not pulling our leg!

Steve Ballmer spoke at the Executive’s Club lounge in Chicago today or yesterday now for us and spoke about quite a few things but he did make one big announcement…

In 2010 a new Xbox 360 will hit the stores and be equipped with technology that is really really close to “actually”, the console will have a built in camera and a ‘natural interface’ that will be able to recognise movement and voice. This could be linked to a demostration Microsoft did a week or two back with the new Xbox Natal they called it, see video here.

Looks very interesting and 2010 is not far away now… If you like you can see coverage from there event here from TG Daily

**Update – just been checking around and while its a ‘new’ console the Natal will work wilth current consoles it seems and just the consoles in 2010 will have it built it. At least now we know when Natal will go live. Click here to see more on Natal.