Running on what looks to be a Microsoft Surface the Reactable, Infractor is a piece of software that represents all of the NYTimes as a streaming beam of light, with individual stories floating through the stream like fireflies. Placing an interactive prism on the table splits this beam, allowing you to assign filters like "Obama" to make the stream more relevant. (A jog wheel, placed next to the prism, can alter the prism's specific sensitivity.)

Eventually, you'll tailor the beam to only hold topics you're interested in. Well, that, or you'll remember why the printing press doesn't use prisms to convey information. [Infractor via notcot]

It could easily just be that Bill Keller reads rumors, too. But what if that was a whoopsie letting loose a secret that Bill knows with first hand knowledge? So what? We already know it's coming, having talked to people who have seen and heard things first hand. And we do know the NYTimes is involved with the project. So that's just more of what we already know, but in a way that's not really more proof.

Silly. [gawker]

Seriously, how hard can it be to make this app work? It's so ridiculously simple. It needs to download and organize text and some small photos. That's it. No video, no animations, nothing that reacts to you shaking or tilting the phone. It's clearly very doable on the iPhone, yet it freezes up and crashes almost every single time I use it.

I'll be scrolling down an article and all of the sudden the phone stops responding to either the touchscreen or the buttons. After a minute or two of tapping and hitting the home button and the sleep button with no response, the screen will turn off, the app having shut down. When I turn the app back on, I need to then find the article I was reading again.

In effect, it pushes me to just surf over to NYTimes.com in Safari, as that never crashes and, once I pull up an article, is just as easy to read. But finding articles is much nicer on the app, as it's designed for the iPhone rather than a computer.

And this version is a fix to a previous version that would hang forever when updating, making the app even less usable. And while I appreciate the fact that it updates without locking up, being able to read the articles without locking up would be a great next step.

And the fact is, this has the potential to be one of the best apps out there. Apple showed it off on stage! And since the New York Times is the biggest newspaper out there, this should be a flagship news app. If it worked properly it would certainly be the app I used the most.

I know you guys have bigger things to worry about, like not going out of business due to the impending death of the newspaper industry, but seriously, put a programmer on this for a day. That's all it will take, because in case you didn't notice, this is an insanely simple program, and it shouldn't take much to get it working right. It's been long enough.

—Cher Wang is a former Oakland, CA, resident and UC Berkeley Alum. She started as a music major and finished in economics.
—HTC made 1 out of every 6 phones sold in the US this year, most of them branded by other companies
—Two years ago, they started branding their devices.
—Cher got the idea for HTC when working at computer part maker FIC. As she hauled parts she hoped to sell, she wondered what it would be like when computers were not as heavy.

[NYTimes]

Stephen Chao — who was fired from a top position at the News Corporation after, in separate incidents, hiring a male stripper to disrobe at a company meeting and nearly drowning Rupert Murdoch’s dog at a party — plans to announce on Wednesday the formation of a Web video company that he hopes to build into an educational alternative to YouTube. [www.nytimes.com]

It seems that NTT, the biggest fiber provider in Japan, has a lot of the same issues Verizon does here: they need to get permission from landlords to hook buildings up with fiber, and once they do they still need to convince people to sign up for it. And after all the big apartment and condo buildings are hooked up, they're stuck doing individual houses.

Overall, setting up a fiber optic network is a very expensive prospect with no real guarantees to making all that money back. Without a lot of current applications that utilize such crazy speeds, there just isn't a big enough demand to justify the expense. So why does Japan throw caution to the wind and spend all sorts of cash to set up this speedy network even though it might not be the most fiscally responsible thing to do in the world?

Well, one of the big reasons is that the Japanese government provides tax incentives for companies to do so, while our government has done basically nothing to encourage a nationwide fiber network. Despite the fact that setting up a completely new wired infrastructure is an incredibly expensive undertaking (just ask Verizon), companies in America are supposed to do it all themselves and make it profitable, something that might not make sense with this situation.

Matteo Bortesi, a technology consultant at Accenture in Tokyo, said that "the Japanese think long-term. If they think they will benefit in 100 years, they will invest for their grandkids. There's a bit of national pride we don't see in the West." I'm pretty sure there's more to it than just national pride and wanting to be first, but there's certainly something to be said for setting up a network now that we'll need in a few years. Chances are, eventually we'll have a nice, fast, cheap, nationwide fiber network that will allow us to download porn faster than we could ever have imagined before, but at the rate we're going, it's going to be a while. [New York Times]

Maybe I'm just taking it personally, because it was a damn good idea. Oh, right, the iPhone music video was an idea we came up with together. I totally goaded him into it by telling him that its the thing that would set his work apart from Mossberg and the rest of the mainstream journalists. He was a former Broadway arranger, you know. There's no reason why he shouldn't flaunt that. If I could do every review on Gizmodo in musical form I would.

What is he supposed to do, hate it just because everyone is sick of hearing how awesome it is? Even the iPhone's hardest critics have to admit its amazing in some ways. (Have you seen our review?) Pogue just feels its worth crowing over, literally. His video still covers the flaws. He's just having a good time. It's gadgets. It's a phone. Relax Pogue critics. There's no nefarious plot to sell more books. There's just a guy who likes gadgets and did a music video about it.