Test image.
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Image with sliding description panel using CSS3 transitions
This CSS example shows how to add an animated description panel to images that slides open when the mouse rolls over the image using CSS3 transitions. By wrapping the image inside a relatively positioned container alongside a newly injected description DIV to house the description itself, we can slide the later into view using CSS3's transform:translate() property. All four sliding directions are shown below (up, down, right, or left). The onset of the sliding animation is delayed by 0.5 seconds each time using the transition-delay property, so it occurs after that of the CSS3 shadow being added to the image to create the effect of a raised image. The result is a cool image with a sliding description panel that uses nothing more than HTML/ CSS to create the effect.
The following works best in a modern browser that supports CSS3 transitions, namely, IE10+, FF3.5+, Chrome/Safari, and Opera 10. Lesser browsers such as IE9 will still see the description panel onMouseover, just sans the transition:
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The following works best in a modern browser that supports CSS3 transitions, namely, IE10+, FF3.5+, Chrome/Safari, and Opera 10. Lesser browsers such as IE9 will still see the description panel onMouseover, just sans the transition:
<!-- Make sure each container contains explicit width/height attrs that reflect the dimensions of the showcased image-->look the #2
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1a-
Capable of seating 50,000 spectators, the Colosseum was used for gladiatorial contests and public spectacles such as executions.
New Mexico city working on who gets Atari games
Officials in a New Mexico city are working on a plan under which film companies, museums and the public could get Atari video games that were dug up from an old landfill last month.
Workers for a documentary film production company recovered the games from the garbage heap in Alamogordo.
According to the Alamogordo Daily News, city documents indicate Atari consoles and 1,377 games were found, including "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial."
The search for the "E.T." cartridges will be featured in an upcoming documentary about the biggest video game company of the early '80s. The game contributed to Atari's demise.
A draft plan being considered by Alamogordo officials would provide some of the games to the companies that paid for the excavation. Some would go to national, state and local museums, while hundreds could be sold to the public.
 |
An E.T. doll is seen while construction workers prepare to dig into a landfill in Alamogordo, N.M., Saturday, April 26, 2014. Producers of a documentary are digging in the landfill in search of millions of cartridges of the Atari ''E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial'' game that has been called the worst game in the history of videogaming. A New York Times article from 1983 reported that Atari cartridges of "E.T. The Extraterrestrial" were dumped in the landfill in Alamogordo. |
According to the Alamogordo Daily News, city documents indicate Atari consoles and 1,377 games were found, including "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial."
The search for the "E.T." cartridges will be featured in an upcoming documentary about the biggest video game company of the early '80s. The game contributed to Atari's demise.
A draft plan being considered by Alamogordo officials would provide some of the games to the companies that paid for the excavation. Some would go to national, state and local museums, while hundreds could be sold to the public.
How Google got states to legalize driverless cars
About four years ago, the Google team trying to develop cars driven by computers — not people — became convinced that sooner than later, the technology would be ready for the masses. There was one big problem: Driverless cars were almost certainly illegal.
The plan is possible because, by this time next year, driverless cars will be legal in the tech giant's home state.
And for that, Google can thank Google, and an unorthodox lobbying campaign to shape the road rules of the future in car-obsessed California — and maybe even the rest of the nation — that began with a game-changing conversation in Las Vegas.
The campaign was based on a principle that businesses rarely embrace: ask for regulation.
The journey to a law in California began in January 2011 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where Nevada legislator-turned-lobbyist David Goldwater began chatting up Anthony Levandowski, one of the self-driving car project's leaders. When talk drifted to the legal hurdles, Goldwater suggested that rather than entering California's potentially bruising political process, Google should start small.
Here, in neighboring Nevada, he said, where the Legislature famously has an impulse to regulate lightly.
It made sense to Google, which hired Goldwater.
"The good thing about laws is if they don't exist and you want one — or if they exist and you don't like them — you can change them," Levandowski told students at the University of California, Berkeley in December. "And so in Nevada, we did our first bill."
Up to that point, Google had quietly sent early versions of the car, with a "safety driver" behind the wheel, more than 100,000 miles in California. Eventually, government would catch up, just as stop signs began appearing well after cars rolled onto America's roads a century ago.
If the trigger to act was a bad accident, lawmakers could set the technology back years.
Feeling some urgency, Google bet it could legalize a technology that though still experimental had the potential to save thousands of lives and generate millions in profits.
The cars were their own best salesmen. Nevada's governor and other key policy makers emerged enthusiastic after test rides. The bill passed quickly enough that potential opponents — primarily automakers — were unable to influence its outcome.
Next, Nevada's Department of Motor Vehicles had to write rules implementing the law.
At the DMV, Google had an enthusiastic supporter in Bruce Breslow, then the agency's leader.
Breslow had been fascinated by driverless cars since seeing an exhibit at the 1964 New York World's Fair. Seeing a career-defining opportunity, Breslow shelved other projects and shifted money so he wouldn't have to ask for the $200,000 needed to research and write the rules.
At first, DMV staff panicked — they only had several months to write unprecedented rules on a technology they didn't know. But Google knew the technology, and was eager to help.
"Very few people deeply understand" driverless car technology, said Chris Urmson, the self-driving car pioneer lured from academia who now leads Google's project. Offering policymakers information "to make informed decisions ... is really important to us."
The task fell primarily to David Estrada, at the time the legal director for Google X, the secretive part of the tech giant that houses ambitious, cutting-edge projects. Estrada would trek from San Francisco to Nevada's capital, Carson City, for meetings hosted by DMV staff.
While others attended the meetings, Google seemed to have a special seat at the table.
Bryant Walker Smith, who teaches the law of self-driving cars as a fellow at Stanford University, described one rule-drafting session where Google — not the DMV — responded to suggestions from auto industry representatives.
"It wasn't always clear who was leading," Smith said. It seemed to him that both Google and the DMV felt ownership of the rules.
By the end of 2011, Nevada welcomed the testing of driverless cars on its roads. Google, however, was focused on its home state, where its Priuses and Lexuses outfitted with radar, cameras and a spinning tower of laser sensors were a regular feature on freeways.
In many ways, Google replicated its Nevada playbook: Frame the debate. Wow potential allies with joy rides. Argue that driverless cars would make roads safer and create jobs.
In January 2012, Google met with state Sen. Alex Padilla, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineering graduate. Padilla was intrigued, and agreed to push a bill. Padilla said Nevada's law helped him sell colleagues on the need to act.
"California is home to two things. Number one is the hotbed of innovation and technology. And second, we love our cars. So it only made even more sense to say, 'OK we need to catch up and try and lead the nation,'" Padilla said.
Nevada's swift action, he said, "sent the signal to a lot of colleagues that, 'No, this is not one we want to overthink and study for five years before we take action.'" After all, who in California government wanted a flagship company moving jobs out of the state.
In March 2012, Padilla rode in the driver's seat of a Google car with Levandowski riding shotgun to the news conference announcing his legislation.
In the months that followed, various groups tried to shape Padilla's bill.
One was the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which objected that automakers would be liable for the failure of Google technology strapped onto one of their cars. Trial lawyers, a powerful constituency in the state, successfully lobbied to keep automakers on the hook.
Some inside the Capitol concluded that Padilla was most attuned to Google.
One thing that troubled Howard Posner, then the staffer on the Assembly Transportation Committee responsible for analyzing the bill and suggesting improvements, was that Padilla's legislation would let cars operate without a human present.
Posner argued that lawmakers shouldn't authorize this last step until the technology could handle it. The response, he said, was that Padilla didn't want to do that — "which in my mind meant Google was not willing to do that."
Padilla said that while Google's high profile helped the bill succeed, his office made the decisions. "We're always going to have the final say," he said.
In September 2012, Gov. Jerry Brown went to Google's headquarters and signed Padilla's bill.
Now, California's motor vehicles officials face an end-of-year deadline to write regulations that will allow driverless cars to go from testing to use by the public in June 2015.
At a DMV hearing in March, two Google representatives sat next to DMV staff at the head tables. Their message: Now that self-driving cars were legal, the state should not regulate them too strictly.
And yet this week, Google said it wants to give Californians access to a small fleet of prototypes it will make without a steering wheel or pedals.
In this photo taken Wednesday, May 14, 2014, a row of Google self-driving cars are shown outside the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Four years ago, the Google team developing cars which can drive themselves became convinced that, sooner than later, the technology would be ready for the masses. There was just one problem: Driverless cars almost certainly were illegal.
The plan is possible because, by this time next year, driverless cars will be legal in the tech giant's home state.
And for that, Google can thank Google, and an unorthodox lobbying campaign to shape the road rules of the future in car-obsessed California — and maybe even the rest of the nation — that began with a game-changing conversation in Las Vegas.
The campaign was based on a principle that businesses rarely embrace: ask for regulation.
The journey to a law in California began in January 2011 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where Nevada legislator-turned-lobbyist David Goldwater began chatting up Anthony Levandowski, one of the self-driving car project's leaders. When talk drifted to the legal hurdles, Goldwater suggested that rather than entering California's potentially bruising political process, Google should start small.
Here, in neighboring Nevada, he said, where the Legislature famously has an impulse to regulate lightly.
It made sense to Google, which hired Goldwater.
"The good thing about laws is if they don't exist and you want one — or if they exist and you don't like them — you can change them," Levandowski told students at the University of California, Berkeley in December. "And so in Nevada, we did our first bill."
Up to that point, Google had quietly sent early versions of the car, with a "safety driver" behind the wheel, more than 100,000 miles in California. Eventually, government would catch up, just as stop signs began appearing well after cars rolled onto America's roads a century ago.
If the trigger to act was a bad accident, lawmakers could set the technology back years.
Feeling some urgency, Google bet it could legalize a technology that though still experimental had the potential to save thousands of lives and generate millions in profits.
The cars were their own best salesmen. Nevada's governor and other key policy makers emerged enthusiastic after test rides. The bill passed quickly enough that potential opponents — primarily automakers — were unable to influence its outcome.
Next, Nevada's Department of Motor Vehicles had to write rules implementing the law.
At the DMV, Google had an enthusiastic supporter in Bruce Breslow, then the agency's leader.
Breslow had been fascinated by driverless cars since seeing an exhibit at the 1964 New York World's Fair. Seeing a career-defining opportunity, Breslow shelved other projects and shifted money so he wouldn't have to ask for the $200,000 needed to research and write the rules.
At first, DMV staff panicked — they only had several months to write unprecedented rules on a technology they didn't know. But Google knew the technology, and was eager to help.
"Very few people deeply understand" driverless car technology, said Chris Urmson, the self-driving car pioneer lured from academia who now leads Google's project. Offering policymakers information "to make informed decisions ... is really important to us."
The task fell primarily to David Estrada, at the time the legal director for Google X, the secretive part of the tech giant that houses ambitious, cutting-edge projects. Estrada would trek from San Francisco to Nevada's capital, Carson City, for meetings hosted by DMV staff.
Breslow credited Estrada with making suggestions that made the regulations far shorter, and less onerous, than they would have been. "We quickly jumped in ... to help figure out what the regulation should look like," recalled Estrada.In this photo taken Wednesday, May 14, 2014, a Google self-driving car goes on a test drive near the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Four years ago, the Google team developing cars which can drive themselves became convinced that, sooner than later, the technology would be ready for the masses. There was just one problem: Driverless cars almost certainly were illegal.
While others attended the meetings, Google seemed to have a special seat at the table.
Bryant Walker Smith, who teaches the law of self-driving cars as a fellow at Stanford University, described one rule-drafting session where Google — not the DMV — responded to suggestions from auto industry representatives.
"It wasn't always clear who was leading," Smith said. It seemed to him that both Google and the DMV felt ownership of the rules.
By the end of 2011, Nevada welcomed the testing of driverless cars on its roads. Google, however, was focused on its home state, where its Priuses and Lexuses outfitted with radar, cameras and a spinning tower of laser sensors were a regular feature on freeways.
In many ways, Google replicated its Nevada playbook: Frame the debate. Wow potential allies with joy rides. Argue that driverless cars would make roads safer and create jobs.
In January 2012, Google met with state Sen. Alex Padilla, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineering graduate. Padilla was intrigued, and agreed to push a bill. Padilla said Nevada's law helped him sell colleagues on the need to act.
"California is home to two things. Number one is the hotbed of innovation and technology. And second, we love our cars. So it only made even more sense to say, 'OK we need to catch up and try and lead the nation,'" Padilla said.
Nevada's swift action, he said, "sent the signal to a lot of colleagues that, 'No, this is not one we want to overthink and study for five years before we take action.'" After all, who in California government wanted a flagship company moving jobs out of the state.
In March 2012, Padilla rode in the driver's seat of a Google car with Levandowski riding shotgun to the news conference announcing his legislation.
In the months that followed, various groups tried to shape Padilla's bill.
One was the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which objected that automakers would be liable for the failure of Google technology strapped onto one of their cars. Trial lawyers, a powerful constituency in the state, successfully lobbied to keep automakers on the hook.
Some inside the Capitol concluded that Padilla was most attuned to Google.
One thing that troubled Howard Posner, then the staffer on the Assembly Transportation Committee responsible for analyzing the bill and suggesting improvements, was that Padilla's legislation would let cars operate without a human present.
Posner argued that lawmakers shouldn't authorize this last step until the technology could handle it. The response, he said, was that Padilla didn't want to do that — "which in my mind meant Google was not willing to do that."
Padilla said that while Google's high profile helped the bill succeed, his office made the decisions. "We're always going to have the final say," he said.
In September 2012, Gov. Jerry Brown went to Google's headquarters and signed Padilla's bill.
Now, California's motor vehicles officials face an end-of-year deadline to write regulations that will allow driverless cars to go from testing to use by the public in June 2015.
At a DMV hearing in March, two Google representatives sat next to DMV staff at the head tables. Their message: Now that self-driving cars were legal, the state should not regulate them too strictly.
In this photo taken Wednesday, May 14, 2014, Google team members pose by a Google self-driving car at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. From left is project direct Chris Urmson, Brian Torcellini, Dimitri Dolgov, Andrew Chatham and Ron Medford, the director of safety for the project. Four years ago, the Google team developing cars which can drive themselves became convinced that, sooner than later, the technology would be ready for the masses. There was just one problem: Driverless cars almost certainly were illegal.
Google taking requests to censor results in Europe
Google is accepting requests from Europeans who want to erase unflattering information from the results produced by the world's dominant search engine.
The demands can be submitted on a Web page that Google opened late Thursday in response to a landmark ruling issued two weeks ago by Europe's highest court.
More than 12,000 requests to remove personal data were submitted within the first 24 hours after Google posted the forms, according to the company. At one point Friday, Google was getting 20 requests per minute.
Under the recent court decision, Europeans can now polish their online reputations by petitioning Google and other search engines to remove potentially damaging links to newspaper articles and other websites with embarrassing information about their past activities.
Google now finds itself in the prickly position of having to balance privacy concerns and "the right to be forgotten" against the principles of free expression and "the right to know."
It will also create a divide between how Google generates search results about some people in Europe and the rest of the world. For now at least, Google will only scrub personal information spanning a 32-nation swath in Europe. That means Googling the same person in the United States and dozens of other countries could look much different than it does from Europe.
Although the court ruling only applied to 28 countries in the European Union, Google is extending the "right to be forgotten" to four other countries — Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. More than 500 million people live in the area affected by Google's potential purge of personal information from its European search results.
It's unclear when the whitewashing will begin. So far, Google has only said it will happen soon.
First, though, the Mountain View, California, company is trying to establish some guidelines to steer its censorship decisions.
To do that, Google is setting up a seven-person advisory committee to navigate through the ethical shoals. The group includes Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and David Drummond, the company's chief legal officer, as well as five outsiders. They are: Luciano Floridi, an information ethics philosopher at the Oxford Internet Institute; Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder; Jose Luis Piñar, former director of Spain's Data Protection Authority; Peggy Valck, a privacy rights activist and director of the University of Leuven law school; and Frank La Rue, a special United Nations representative specializing in free speech.
Google will designate another team of its employees to sift through the requests to remove personal information from search results and decide which have grievances that should be honored under the European court ruling. The company won't decide how many employees will be assigned to this task until it gets a better sense of how many removal requests are likely to pour in from Europe.
Depending on the volume, it could turn into a monumental headache, even for a company with the financial and technological resources of Google.
Investors so far haven't given any sign of being worried about the new realities facing Google in Europe. The company's most widely traded class of stock has climbed 6 percent since the European court issued its game-changing decision. The shares closed at $571.65 Friday, leaving Google with a market value of about $385 billion.
Europe is one of the biggest markets for the online ads that generate most of Google's revenue. But implementing the "right to be forgotten" isn't expected to drive traffic away from Google because its major rivals must also abide by the new rules in Europe.
Imposing more limitations on what kind of personal information Google and other search engines can show in Europe has raised fears about the censorship affecting everything from elections to the safety of children. For instance, politicians might be able to block damaging information from showing up in search results. Other critics of the ruling have warned that even pedophiles might be able to delete past convictions from their results.
Supporters of the European court ruling, though, argue that people should be able to remove some information about youthful indiscretions, financial missteps and arrests that never resulted in convictions.
Google says that whenever it scrubs personal information from its European search results it will include a notice about some links being omitted, just as it has previously done when laws in countries such as China have required the company to censor data.
 |
| In this April 17, 2007 file photo, exhibitors of the Google company work on laptop computers in front of an illuminated sign of the Google logo at an industrial fair in Hanover, Germany. |
More than 12,000 requests to remove personal data were submitted within the first 24 hours after Google posted the forms, according to the company. At one point Friday, Google was getting 20 requests per minute.
Under the recent court decision, Europeans can now polish their online reputations by petitioning Google and other search engines to remove potentially damaging links to newspaper articles and other websites with embarrassing information about their past activities.
Google now finds itself in the prickly position of having to balance privacy concerns and "the right to be forgotten" against the principles of free expression and "the right to know."
It will also create a divide between how Google generates search results about some people in Europe and the rest of the world. For now at least, Google will only scrub personal information spanning a 32-nation swath in Europe. That means Googling the same person in the United States and dozens of other countries could look much different than it does from Europe.
Although the court ruling only applied to 28 countries in the European Union, Google is extending the "right to be forgotten" to four other countries — Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. More than 500 million people live in the area affected by Google's potential purge of personal information from its European search results.
It's unclear when the whitewashing will begin. So far, Google has only said it will happen soon.
First, though, the Mountain View, California, company is trying to establish some guidelines to steer its censorship decisions.
To do that, Google is setting up a seven-person advisory committee to navigate through the ethical shoals. The group includes Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and David Drummond, the company's chief legal officer, as well as five outsiders. They are: Luciano Floridi, an information ethics philosopher at the Oxford Internet Institute; Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder; Jose Luis Piñar, former director of Spain's Data Protection Authority; Peggy Valck, a privacy rights activist and director of the University of Leuven law school; and Frank La Rue, a special United Nations representative specializing in free speech.
Google will designate another team of its employees to sift through the requests to remove personal information from search results and decide which have grievances that should be honored under the European court ruling. The company won't decide how many employees will be assigned to this task until it gets a better sense of how many removal requests are likely to pour in from Europe.
Depending on the volume, it could turn into a monumental headache, even for a company with the financial and technological resources of Google.
Investors so far haven't given any sign of being worried about the new realities facing Google in Europe. The company's most widely traded class of stock has climbed 6 percent since the European court issued its game-changing decision. The shares closed at $571.65 Friday, leaving Google with a market value of about $385 billion.
Europe is one of the biggest markets for the online ads that generate most of Google's revenue. But implementing the "right to be forgotten" isn't expected to drive traffic away from Google because its major rivals must also abide by the new rules in Europe.
Imposing more limitations on what kind of personal information Google and other search engines can show in Europe has raised fears about the censorship affecting everything from elections to the safety of children. For instance, politicians might be able to block damaging information from showing up in search results. Other critics of the ruling have warned that even pedophiles might be able to delete past convictions from their results.
Supporters of the European court ruling, though, argue that people should be able to remove some information about youthful indiscretions, financial missteps and arrests that never resulted in convictions.
Google says that whenever it scrubs personal information from its European search results it will include a notice about some links being omitted, just as it has previously done when laws in countries such as China have required the company to censor data.
Decades-old photos emerge of Apollo training
Before Apollo astronauts went to the moon, they went to Hawaii to train on the Big Island's lunar landscapes.
Now, decades-old photos are surfacing of astronauts scooping up Hawaii's soil and riding across volcanic fields in a "moon buggy" vehicle.
The Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems, a Hawaii state agency, is displaying the photos at its Hilo headquarters. Rob Kelso, the agency's executive director, found the images at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Astronauts from Apollo missions 13 through 17 trained in Hawaii as did some back up crews, Kelso said.
Some training was on Mauna Kea volcano, where glacial runoff crushed and refined rock into power. Astronauts also trained on recent lava flows.
Today, robots are tested on the Big Island for moon and Mars missions.
In recent years, engineers have tested technology to pull oxygen out of the island's dirt, which is volcanic basalt like the Martian and lunar soil. Future missions could use this technology to extract oxygen from the land instead of taking it along. The oxygen could be used for breathing, to make fuel or for other purposes.
Kelso said scientists are also interested in testing robots at the Big Island's lava tubes and lava tube skylight holes, which resemble similar formations recently spotted in high-definition images taken by satellites orbiting the moon, Mercury, Venus and Mars.
Lava tubes are tunnels made when lava forms a solid roof after flowing steadily in a confined area for hours. Skylight holes are formed when part of the tube breaks.
 |
This 1970 image provided by NASA shows Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell and Stuart Roost and an unidentified man training with a Modularized Equipment Transporter on the Big Island of Hawaii. Before many Apollo astronauts went to the moon, they came to Hawaii to train on the Big Island’s lunar landscapes. Now, decades-old photos are surfacing of astronauts scooping up Hawaii’s soil and riding across volcanic fields in a “moon buggy” vehicle. |
The Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems, a Hawaii state agency, is displaying the photos at its Hilo headquarters. Rob Kelso, the agency's executive director, found the images at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Astronauts from Apollo missions 13 through 17 trained in Hawaii as did some back up crews, Kelso said.
Some training was on Mauna Kea volcano, where glacial runoff crushed and refined rock into power. Astronauts also trained on recent lava flows.
 |
| This Dec. 1970 image provided by NASA shows Apollo 15 astronauts training on the Big Island of Hawaii. Before many Apollo astronauts went to the moon, they came to Hawaii to train on the Big Island’s lunar landscapes. Now, decades-old photos are surfacing of astronauts scooping up Hawaii’s soil and riding across volcanic fields in a “moon buggy” vehicle. |
In recent years, engineers have tested technology to pull oxygen out of the island's dirt, which is volcanic basalt like the Martian and lunar soil. Future missions could use this technology to extract oxygen from the land instead of taking it along. The oxygen could be used for breathing, to make fuel or for other purposes.
Kelso said scientists are also interested in testing robots at the Big Island's lava tubes and lava tube skylight holes, which resemble similar formations recently spotted in high-definition images taken by satellites orbiting the moon, Mercury, Venus and Mars.
Lava tubes are tunnels made when lava forms a solid roof after flowing steadily in a confined area for hours. Skylight holes are formed when part of the tube breaks.
 |
This 1971 image provided by NASA shows Apollo 17 astronauts, Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, left, and an unidentified man, training with the lunar roving vehicle on the Big Island of Hawaii. Before many Apollo astronauts went to the moon, they came to Hawaii to train on the Big Island’s lunar landscapes. Now, decades-old photos are surfacing of astronauts scooping up Hawaii’s soil and riding across volcanic fields in a “moon buggy” vehicle. |
CSS 3D Flip -Y-
A desert is a landscape or region that receives an extremely low amount of precipitation, less than enough to support growth of most plants.
Dashed Vertical Menu
A simple yet elegant list based vertical menu. Move the mouse over a link, and the link area changes color. A thin dashed border follows each menu item.
==========================
The CSS:
==============================
<style type="text/css">
#vertmenu {
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 100%;
width: 160px;
padding: 0px;
margin: 0px;
}
#vertmenu h1 {
display: block;
background-color:#FF9900;
font-size: 90%;
padding: 3px 0 5px 3px;
border: 1px solid #000000;
color: #333333;
margin: 0px;
width:159px;
}
#vertmenu ul {
list-style: none;
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
border: none;
}
#vertmenu ul li {
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
}
#vertmenu ul li a {
font-size: 80%;
display: block;
border-bottom: 1px dashed #C39C4E;
padding: 5px 0px 2px 4px;
text-decoration: none;
color: #666666;
width:160px;
}
#vertmenu ul li a:hover, #vertmenu ul li a:focus {
color: #000000;
background-color: #eeeeee;
}
</style>
=======================
The HTML:
=======================
<div id="vertmenu">
<h1>Navigation</h1>
<ul>
<li><a href="#" tabindex="1">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="#" tabindex="2">About Us</a></li>
<li><a href="#" tabindex="3">Computing</a></li>
<li><a href="#" tabindex="4">Web Sites</a></li>
<li><a href="#" tabindex="5">Games</a></li>
<li><a href="#" tabindex="6">Links</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
========================
A simple yet elegant list based vertical menu. Move the mouse over a link, and the link area changes color. A thin dashed border follows each menu item.
Apple adds hip-hop flair with $3 billion purchase of headphone maker, music streamer Beats
Apple is striking a new chord with a $3 billion acquisition of Beats Electronics, a headphone and music streaming specialist that also brings the swagger of rapper Dr. Dre and recording impresario Jimmy Iovine.
Wednesday's announcement comes nearly three weeks after deal negotiations were leaked to the media. It's by far the most expensive acquisition in Apple's 38-year history, a price that the company is paying to counter a threat posed to its iTunes store.
The price consists of $2.6 billion in cash and $400 million in Apple stock that will vest over an unspecified time period. The deal is expected to close before October.
With $1.1 billion in revenue last year, Beats is already making money and will boost Apple's earnings once the new fiscal year begins in October, Apple CEO Tim Cook said in an interview.
"We have known these guys forever," Cook said of Iovine and Dre. "We've dated, we've gone steady and now we are getting married. This relationship started a decade ago, so we know there is an incredible cultural fit. These two guys have a very rare set of skills. It's like finding a particular grain of sand on the beach. It's that rare."
Iovine, 61, and Dre, 49, will both become key executives in Apple's music divisions, though Cook said their roles haven't been determined yet. Cook indicated Beats' music streaming service was the main selling point in the deal, though the headphone line also is expected to continue growing, too.
Although he believes most technology companies are "culturally inept," Iovine said he believes Apple will empower Beats to realize its goals of improving the sound of digital music and creating playlists tailored for each subscriber.
"To complete our dream, we needed a company like (Apple)," Iovine said in an interview. "We couldn't finish this on our own."
The growing popularity of music streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify has been reducing sales of songs and albums, a business that iTunes has dominated for the past decade. U.S. sales of downloaded songs slipped 1 per cent last year to $2.8 billion while streaming music revenue surged 39 per cent to $1.4 billion, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.
Although Apple broke into streaming with the launch of iTunes Radio last September, the service has not been as popular or as lucrative as the company expected, according to two people familiar with the matter. The people were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity.
ITunes Radio has 40 million listeners will continue as a free service with ads while Beats Music will try to tap into the more than 800 million accounts to sell more subscriptions to its customized service. Beats Music currently has more than 250,000 subscribers, Cook said. That's well below the more than 10 million paying customers that Spotify's streaming service boasts.
Apple is counting on the Beats acquisition to boost its cachet with teenagers and younger adults as it tries to remain a leader in digital music — an industry that looks much different than when Apple reshaped the scene with the 2001 debut of the iPod.
"Apple suddenly has regained its cool," said Sony Music CEO Doug Morris, who was one of the first recording executives to embrace iTunes at Iovine's urging more than a decade ago.
Beats was founded in 2008 by Dr. Dre, whose real name is Andre Young, and Iovine, a longtime recording industry executive who is stepping down as chairman of Universal Music Group's Interscope Geffen A&M Records to join Apple. It now dominates the luxury headphone market. Its equipment is also a big seller in Apple's stores.
Operating from its Culver City, California, headquarters, Beats commands 62 per cent of the $1 billion U.S. market for headphones priced above $100, according to NPD Group.
The purchase marks Apple CEO Tim Cook's biggest strategic break from the way the Cupertino, California, company was led under co-founder Steve Jobs, who died in October 2011. Jobs favoured smaller acquisitions and didn't believe subscription music plans would be popular. Before Beats, Apple's biggest acquisition had been its $400 million purchase of NeXt Computer, a company that Jobs founded after being ousted from Apple in the 1980s.
Cook said he never considered what Jobs would have thought about the Beats' acquisition during the negotiations. Jobs "told me to do what was right," Cook said. "And I am 100 per cent certain this is what is right. This is one of those things that we will look back upon and say it was meant to be."
Morris, who considers Iovine to be his best friend, believes Cook is making a smart move that will give Apple even more credibility in the music industry.
"It's a game changer because Jimmy is that kind of guy who can change a game," Morris said. "I am not saying he is Steve Jobs, but he is a guy with new ideas and he really knows how to build the bridge between music and technology."
But some analysts question whether Beats will be a good fit for Apple, which makes most of its money selling hardware such as iPhones and iPads.
Forrester Research analyst Frank Gillett says Apple would have been better off developing its own headphones in-house and expanding into music subscriptions through iTunes.
"It's hard to understand why Apple would have to spend $3 billion on a nascent streaming service and a line of bass-heavy headphones," Gillett says.
Yukari Iwatani Kane, the author of "Haunted Empire," an inside look at Apple since co-founder Jobs' death, also sees a disconnect.
"Culturally, Beats is the complete opposite of Apple," Kane says. "It's known for being loud and bold and in your face. It doesn't fit with Apple's understated, discerning brand."
Having visited Apple on a regular basis since he first met Jobs more than a decade ago, Iovine said he has no qualms about joining Apple.
"This is not a big company to us," Iovine said. "We can roller skate in the halls here. Dre and I have been working together for 22 years. We are not about to go somewhere where we are going to fall."
Dre was more sedate Wednesday than he was in a celebratory video posted online declaring him as hip-hop's first billionaire after news of the Apple talks leaked earlier this month. "To be able to do something that could potentially change the world, I'm thrilled."
The price consists of $2.6 billion in cash and $400 million in Apple stock that will vest over an unspecified time period. The deal is expected to close before October.
With $1.1 billion in revenue last year, Beats is already making money and will boost Apple's earnings once the new fiscal year begins in October, Apple CEO Tim Cook said in an interview.
"We have known these guys forever," Cook said of Iovine and Dre. "We've dated, we've gone steady and now we are getting married. This relationship started a decade ago, so we know there is an incredible cultural fit. These two guys have a very rare set of skills. It's like finding a particular grain of sand on the beach. It's that rare."
Iovine, 61, and Dre, 49, will both become key executives in Apple's music divisions, though Cook said their roles haven't been determined yet. Cook indicated Beats' music streaming service was the main selling point in the deal, though the headphone line also is expected to continue growing, too.
Although he believes most technology companies are "culturally inept," Iovine said he believes Apple will empower Beats to realize its goals of improving the sound of digital music and creating playlists tailored for each subscriber.
"To complete our dream, we needed a company like (Apple)," Iovine said in an interview. "We couldn't finish this on our own."
The growing popularity of music streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify has been reducing sales of songs and albums, a business that iTunes has dominated for the past decade. U.S. sales of downloaded songs slipped 1 per cent last year to $2.8 billion while streaming music revenue surged 39 per cent to $1.4 billion, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.
Although Apple broke into streaming with the launch of iTunes Radio last September, the service has not been as popular or as lucrative as the company expected, according to two people familiar with the matter. The people were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity.
ITunes Radio has 40 million listeners will continue as a free service with ads while Beats Music will try to tap into the more than 800 million accounts to sell more subscriptions to its customized service. Beats Music currently has more than 250,000 subscribers, Cook said. That's well below the more than 10 million paying customers that Spotify's streaming service boasts.
Apple is counting on the Beats acquisition to boost its cachet with teenagers and younger adults as it tries to remain a leader in digital music — an industry that looks much different than when Apple reshaped the scene with the 2001 debut of the iPod.
"Apple suddenly has regained its cool," said Sony Music CEO Doug Morris, who was one of the first recording executives to embrace iTunes at Iovine's urging more than a decade ago.
Beats was founded in 2008 by Dr. Dre, whose real name is Andre Young, and Iovine, a longtime recording industry executive who is stepping down as chairman of Universal Music Group's Interscope Geffen A&M Records to join Apple. It now dominates the luxury headphone market. Its equipment is also a big seller in Apple's stores.
Operating from its Culver City, California, headquarters, Beats commands 62 per cent of the $1 billion U.S. market for headphones priced above $100, according to NPD Group.
The purchase marks Apple CEO Tim Cook's biggest strategic break from the way the Cupertino, California, company was led under co-founder Steve Jobs, who died in October 2011. Jobs favoured smaller acquisitions and didn't believe subscription music plans would be popular. Before Beats, Apple's biggest acquisition had been its $400 million purchase of NeXt Computer, a company that Jobs founded after being ousted from Apple in the 1980s.
Cook said he never considered what Jobs would have thought about the Beats' acquisition during the negotiations. Jobs "told me to do what was right," Cook said. "And I am 100 per cent certain this is what is right. This is one of those things that we will look back upon and say it was meant to be."
Morris, who considers Iovine to be his best friend, believes Cook is making a smart move that will give Apple even more credibility in the music industry.
"It's a game changer because Jimmy is that kind of guy who can change a game," Morris said. "I am not saying he is Steve Jobs, but he is a guy with new ideas and he really knows how to build the bridge between music and technology."
But some analysts question whether Beats will be a good fit for Apple, which makes most of its money selling hardware such as iPhones and iPads.
Forrester Research analyst Frank Gillett says Apple would have been better off developing its own headphones in-house and expanding into music subscriptions through iTunes.
"It's hard to understand why Apple would have to spend $3 billion on a nascent streaming service and a line of bass-heavy headphones," Gillett says.
Yukari Iwatani Kane, the author of "Haunted Empire," an inside look at Apple since co-founder Jobs' death, also sees a disconnect.
"Culturally, Beats is the complete opposite of Apple," Kane says. "It's known for being loud and bold and in your face. It doesn't fit with Apple's understated, discerning brand."
Having visited Apple on a regular basis since he first met Jobs more than a decade ago, Iovine said he has no qualms about joining Apple.
"This is not a big company to us," Iovine said. "We can roller skate in the halls here. Dre and I have been working together for 22 years. We are not about to go somewhere where we are going to fall."
Dre was more sedate Wednesday than he was in a celebratory video posted online declaring him as hip-hop's first billionaire after news of the Apple talks leaked earlier this month. "To be able to do something that could potentially change the world, I'm thrilled."
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Apple has finally confirmed the worst kept secret in tech news -- it is buying Beats. |
