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submitted by memop3 to worldnews [link] [35 comments]
#gmail Google's new Priority Inbox feature not only sorts your inbox, but it also figures out what's important based on what messages you reply to and read. More
Despite Motorola's best intentions to the contrary, the Droid X has been making steady progress toward viable custom ROMs, first with root access, then with a recovery method... and now, at long last, we're starting to get the first few glimpses at legit cooked firmware. The two options we're seeing so far are Sapphire -- originally designed for the Droid of old -- and a so-called "FlyX" ROM from longtime contributor Birdman. In both cases, the benefits of eschewing Motorola's standard builds are pretty obvious: you get Froyo, root, and a host of apps and capabilities preferred by the superuser crowd like surcharge-free mobile hotspot access. The process is a little involved to get these bad boys installed at this point, but with time, we're willing to bet it becomes a pretty painless endeavor. Follow the break for a quick video of Sapphire booting into stock Froyo on the X -- a tantalizing sight, indeed. [Thanks, Clift]Continue reading Custom Droid X ROMs starting to break loose, eFuse be damnedCustom Droid X ROMs starting to break loose, eFuse be damned originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.PermalinkBGR, Droid Life | Android Central, Steven Bird |Email this|Comments
Facebook is dominating social media in almost every country where it hasn't been banned, and the six-year old site shows no signs of slowing down. It's creeping across generations, replacing things like the phone book and introducing tools the masses had no idea they needed. It's also indoctrinating the world into adopting the Mark Zuckerberg Values of "openness," "sharing" and "living your whole life on the Internet." Those values have lead to a cultural movement. But here comes the resistance: a wave of social networking sites that define themselves in opposition to Facebook. Sponsor Privacy Fiends The most prominent example is Diaspora, the distributed, open-source social network all about privacy and control of your data. Diaspora doesn't cite Facebook by name on its Kickstarter page, where its four founders raised 20 times more money than they asked for. But its founders do refer to "large corporate networks who want to tell you that sharing and privacy are mutually exclusive." Diaspora's Kickstarter funding page reflects the demand for a Facebook alternative. The site will launch September 15. Diaspora's founders are followers of Eben Moglen, a professor at Columbia and fierce privacy advocate. Facebook is teaching us to sacrifice privacy for convenience, they argue, giving up our information to advertisers who can then "spy on us for free." They resent Facebook's "flipping of switches" that in the past has made user data public without asking permission. Another site, folkdirect.com, launched in January with a similarly lofty view of privacy: "Your details will never become fodder for targeted advertising campaigns and there are no third party apps to phish your data." Exclusiveness Facebook started as a social networking site for college students. Then high schoolers joined, then our parents and our bosses, then our grandparents. Many of its collegiate members were not pleased. CollegeOnly founder Josh Weinstein remembers how he and his friends were just as anxious to join Facebook as they were for freshman orientation. CollegeOnly launched a social network for "connecting student bodies" last week. When you graduate, you're out. In the promo video, Weinstein turns to the camera and asks, "Don't you wish your social network were college only?" Yet-to-launch mobile startup Scoop has a similar idea. Maybe age or school-affiliation isn't important, but exclusiveness still is. ASMALLWORLD is an invitation-only social network for "sophisticated" and "influential" people. "Trusted and loyal ASW members who meet certain criteria have the privilege of inviting a limited number of their friends to the network. If you know someone with this privilege, you can ask them to invite you. If not, please be patient and continue to ask around in your own personal and professional circles," the site says. Multiple personalities Facebook does let you target what you upload to specific friends. But Facebook doesn't want you to splinter your identity. Throughout its history, Facebook has encouraged users to use their real names, upload their real birthdays and use their real identities to log on to other sites. Hibe is a yet-to-launch social network based around controlling which personality you project to whom, a concept its creator calls "Social Web 3.0." "We are opening the way for a new social networking experience that goes beyond Facebook," the site says. Social Networking After FacebookA presentation about forthcoming social network Hibe.com, which emphasizes privacy and fractured online identities. Just last week we wrote about Facebook competitor Orkut introducing a similar feature with friend groups. The blog post announcing the feature was titled, "You're not always the same person. Why should it be any different on the Web?" And all the other things that annoy you about Facebook "Don't you wish your social network were college only?"-CollegeOnly founder Josh Weinstein Wish Facebook were simpler? Twitter. More professional? LinkedIn. None of these services has achieved a user base anywhere near the size of Facebook's alleged 500 million. But Twitter and LinkedIn each have a sizable following, and many of the just-launched or soon-to-launch anti-Facebooks are tapping into real demand. There is no single alternative to Facebook. But maybe there could be two. or three. Or hundreds. What do you think - could any of these sites (or a combination of them) ever replace Facebook? Discuss
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Days after introducing voice calling within Gmail, Google on Tuesday unveiled a "priority inbox" feature within Gmail intended to highlight important messages.
Today's horror: a girl throwing a bucket of puppies into the river one by one. Not for the weak of heart. See the 4chan and Reddit thread for more insight into the matter. The Best Links: The Revenge Of Bin Cat [VIDEO] Crazy Cat Bin Lady Caught on Camera [VIDEO] WatchVideo
Just as I was reading Paul Carrs latest column about quitting social media, my husband looked at his phone and broke into a huge smile. He is a graphic designer and has long been a fan of Chank Fonts. Earlier that day, hed taken a picture of a retro-looking podiatrist office, posting it on Twitter with the word Font-o-licious. It didnt go viral. It didnt become a trending topic. It didnt get him 1,000 new followers or even attract much attention at all. But it was noticed by Chank Diesel of Chank Fonts who Tweeted Im gonna dedicate my next font to that type-savvy podiatrist and started following my husband. Here in front of me was one of those serendipitous moments of social media collapsing space-and-time. These moments dont change the world, but theyre exactly what made social media so addictive in the first place. Imagine an industry hero of yours who seemed untouchable creating a product just because of a random picture you posted on an ever-moving stream of colliding information that he happened to see. Here, in the guise of my beaming husband, was the perfect articulation for why I think peopleeven my close friends who declare dramatic social media bankruptcy were just doing it wrong. What made social media a phenomenon were moments like these. Passively connecting in-and-out of a persistent conversation with people you know and see everyday, people you know but have lost touch with, and people you dont know but share interests with. People who in a more efficient world, you might have known. Its about making relationships more efficient. My parents know what Ive been up to by reading my Twitter feed, so when I call home I dont have to answer a vague question like What have you been up to? I answer a specific question like What country are you traveling to now? If a friend is looking for a job at a given company, I cant always remember who I know who works there, but with LinkedIn, I dont have to. And seeing what an old flame looks like on Facebook never gets old. If these selling points sound horribly clich its because they are commonplace reasons most everyday people use these sites, and indeed, the same reasons why the founders of most social media companies started these sites. But the sites worked too well at amassing fans, friends and followers, creating micro-economies where people sought to cash in on their would-be fame and influence. And that is when the problemsand inevitably the fatigue started. People competed for how many friends and followers they could rack up and how many RTs they could get in a day, seeing it as evidence of how cool or smart or influential they were. Thats when social media got mercenary and soulless. Heres a clue: If you find yourself saying (Fill-in-the-blank-social-media-site) used to be soooooo much better before everyone was on it you are using the site wrong. You are following too many people, you are using it too much, you are strangling the pretty, little bunny. The beauty of these sites is you control how many friends you see, and how many of them see you. So if you used to love it and now hate it, well, you know what they say about when you point a finger. Three are pointing back at you. Sometimes metrics can be a bad thing and beware of any so-called social media consultant who tells you otherwise. Whats the value of a Retweet or a Like? Its roughly the equivalent to sitting next to someone during a keynote who nods his head at a salient point. Someone hitting a button in front of them is hardly a heady endorsementnowhere near the impact of someone calling you to tell you about a story he read. That actually takes more than one-second of attention and work. Everyone touts stats showing that recommendations are the most trusted form of advertising. Thats because in the old world recommendations were inefficient. I had to be so moved by, say, the service at a restaurant, that I proactively called people to tell them about it, or it stuck in the front of my mind solidly enough that when someone asked Where should we go to dinner? it came flying out. The power of personal recommendation doesnt carry over in a world where its as easy as clicking a button because the caliber of that recommendation is necessarily lowered by taking out barriers. Of course not everyone becoming fatigued with social media whored themselves out to anyone who would follow or friend them, bartering likes and retweeting anyone who said something nice about them. Indeed, Mr. Carr locked his account and only followed a core group of friends. His biggest complaint was simply that he used it too muchupdating any thought in his head so that he didnt take time to mull and form that idea or joke until it was perfect, and that he was distracted. This is where the flood of apps may be making the problem worse, not better. After some early security glitches when Twitter desktop apps published direct messages, I decided to only use Twitter.com and update by text message to interact with the service. Thats downright luddite in my TechCrunch/iPhone world, but by going to Twitter, rather than Twitter always flooding to me, I forced myself to keep my Twitter feed as manageable to keep up with as email. Whats more, when I travel to places like China or have a big deadline, I dont log onto Twitter for weeks. When I come back its still here. Both Twitter and I continue to go about our lives without one another just fine. I dont think changing an avatar to green saves Iran. But I wouldnt say Twitter is making us all more detached and stupid either. I just like life with social media better than life without it, for silly little moments like the one my husband had with Chank Fonts. Same thing Id say about email or a mobile phone or TiVo or a Blackberry. I realize that doesnt make gripping blog copy like Twitter-democratizing-the-world or Twitter-totally-sucking, but I think for most of the average users out there, thats the Twitter they know and the Twitter that will continue to steadily grow, all this hype and backlash aside.
You know the feeling: opening up your e-mail to find hundreds of messages of varying importance. Some are automated reminders from your favorite sites, some are newsletters you have subscribed to, some are actually from real people trying to contact you, and so on. Separating the wheat from the chaff can be overwhelming much of the time, and even the most carefully crafted filters don't keep up with the ever-changing nature of what's important to you. Google is hoping to address that problem with a new feature in Gmail called Priority Inbox. Aimed at providing users a way to get through their inboxes as efficiently as possible, Priority Inbox tries to learn your e-mail habits in order to decide which messages are important to you, and move them up to the top where you can see them first. Read the comments on this post
Twitter is killing support for basic user authentication in third-party apps on Tuesday morning. Instead, Twitter will now require all third-party app developers to use OAuth for user authentication.
Can't say this is a surprise, but Motorola posted a note on its support forums today warning users Droid X users against upgrading to that leaked Android 2.2 build or any of those custom ROMS that're out there -- they'll be cut off from the official upgrade when it hits in early September and potentially "stuck on the leaked version." Ouch. Of course, that's the risk you take when you start flashing your phone with unofficial firmware, but between this, eFUSE, and those cease and desist letters, it certainly feels like Motorola is decidedly unhappy that anyone would have the gall to hack or tweak one of its handsets, even if the phone in question is the size of a small tank and marketed by aggressive murderous robot hands insisting that it "does" everything one can think of with no restrictions. Contrast that with HTC, which is not only at peace with the hacking community, but even takes the initiative to resolve similar problems. Of course, no one would care about any of this if Motorola would just release stock Android builds for its devices as soon as they're ready, but why learn that lesson when it's possible to waste money developing Blur and adopting painfully annoying staggered OTA rollout schedules at the behest of carriers? That would just be silly. [Thanks, Matthew]Motorola says leaked Droid X Android 2.2 build won't be updated to the official release originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Aug 2010 21:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.PermalinkDroid-Life | Motorola Support |Email this|Comments
Roku announced today that it is dropping the prices of its line-up of set-top boxes. The pricing changes come just days before Apple is rumored to be unveiling a major revision to its Apple TV set-top box based on streaming content. Roku currently sells three models of its digital video player: the basic Roku SD, the mid-range Roku HD, and the top-end Roku XR. The Roku SD is now priced $20 less at $59.99, and the Roku HD and Roku XR are priced $30 less at $69.99 and $99.99 respectively. The Roku SD only streams in standard definition and is limited to analog output. The Roku HD is the original device, and includes both analog as well as HDMI and digital audio output for streaming up to 720p content. The Roku XR adds 802.11n WiFi and a USB port, and will be able to output 1080p with a firmware update scheduled for later this year. The company noted that most content providers will still be streaming at 720p, but the increased resolution should come in handy for a new USB streaming "channel" currently in testing. Apple is holding its annual music-related media event this Wednesday (don't miss our live coverage of the announcements), and persistent rumors have suggested that Apple will announcealong with new iPodsa major update to the Apple TV. The device is said to be built around Apple's A4 processor and will run a variation of iOS. The new device also expected to ditch the included hard drive in favor of sufficient flash storage to stream video directly from iTunes. Apple may change the name to "iTV" (the original name before the product launched in 2007), and rumors have pegged the price of the new device at $99. Read the comments on this post
Google's Chrome web browser will soon gain hardware-accelerated graphicsthe latest trend for web browsers that has already shown up in early builds of Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4. Hardware acceleration allows the browser to offload intensive tasks like image scaling, rendering complex text or displaying scripted animations to your PC's graphics card. It has the benefit of freeing up the PC's main processor and speeding up page load times. Read the comments on this post
We get jet packs, Digg gets punked, and your house is in a movie. Download or subscribe to this show at http://twit.tv/tnt. We invite you to read, add to, and amend our show notes at wiki.twit.tv. Thanks to Cachefly for the bandwidth for this show. Hosts: Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Darren Kitchen, and Erik Lanigan Running time: 41:23
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As I was writing this, news of the HP / Dell bidding war for 3PAR broke on the front page of Yahoo. This made me laugh, as it typified just how crazy this story has becomefew things outside of a bidding war will make a storage acquisition sexy enough to make mainstream news. At $30, HPs current offer is the sixth bid, a 200 percent premium over 3PARs previous $10 share price. Not only is this insane, but its also nearly unprecedented in M&A history. And since 3PAR is trading above $32 the market thinks Dell will bid even higher. First Off, Is 3PAR Really THAT Unique? Yes and no. 3PAR is a classic disruption play, its value proposition based on the premise that unused storage is wastefuloften times just 10% to 25% of allocated disk space is actually used. 3PARs thin provisioning technology enables disk space to be allocated only when applications need capacity, greatly reducing IT management costs. Think of it as storage on a just-enough and just-in-time basis. In the cloud era, pre-allocation of storage is especially wasteful, because on-demand storage and computing services delivered via the internet have wide variability and less deterministic usage patterns. This makes 3PAR a great fit for data centers, and its partly why the technology is suddenly perceived as very valuable. Not surprisingly large storage vendors have been slow to adopt technologies like 3PARs for a simple reason: making storage more efficient ultimately means selling less gear and is essentially akin to committing commercial suicide. EMC CEO Joe Tucci actually once went on record admitting as much saying If I only have hardware and I just keep helping to make you more and more efficient at less and less cost, eventually Im going to hit a wall and its going to be tough for me to make money. HPs Vanishing R&D Budget and The Mark Hurd Effect This classic Innovators dilemma definitely applies to HP. But something else has hamstrung its ability to innovate in high-end storage, a market HP has been a leader in for many years. And its correlated to former CEO Mark Hurds recent firing. Word on the street is Hurd wasnt let go for his affair or even for his embellishment of trivial expense reports. Instead the board kicked him out because his employee approval rating was absolutely atrocious. And the reason employees hated him is because he traded short-run profits for long-term innovation by laying off entire design teams and killing HPs R&D budgettake a look at this chart and compare HP to Cisco and IBM, both storage leaders. In this way, I believe acquiring 3PAR is actually the beginning of a secular trend for HP in using M&A to make good on the companys lack of organic innovation. Yes thats right, believe it or not, the real reason why HPs board is obsessed with 3PAR is closely correlated to Hurds departuredivisions like HPs storage group simply havent kept pace with peers. I used to sell to HPs storage groups (as well as Dell and 3PAR) and have plenty of friends who tell me that projects have been canned and innovation has languished. Dell is Desperate for Similar Reasons Innovation within Dell is even more of an oxymoron. If you thought HPs R&D allotment was low, compare it to Dells. Dell is not an engineering driven company. They are a system integrator desperate for growth outside of the personal computing market. And storage consolidation threatens Dell for another reason. Storage has traditionally been like a cross selling catalog, with vendors filling in their product portfolios by OEMing equipment from othersDell actually resells EMCs high-end storage gear today. But these cross-sell deals are becoming more tenuous to defend as vendors build out more complete portfolios. This is because cloud computing requires complex virtualized resource allocation, management and provisioning. Vendors are increasingly moving up the stack in providing services beyond hardware, which is all but a commodity. Owning 3PAR would give Dell a chance to stay in the game and complement the low end storage solutions it acquired from EqualLogic in 2007. And the Dell board is prepared to break the bank since there is a scarcity of other good high end storage virtualization plays (Pillar Data and Compellent are two of the largest, but dont have 3PARs traction). Why HP Will Probably End Up with 3PAR So there you have it. With its DNA as a system integrator, Dell doesnt have a hope in hell of organically growing complex ASICs and software like 3PAR has, and is desperate to move up the food chain and stop reselling EMCs portfolio. And the HP board is tacitly admitting it needs to rectify the fact that Mark Hurd sort of killed the HP. Invent culture. 3PAR would give HP several hundred R&D focused engineers and a talented ASIC team. The interesting thing about this bidding war is that it conveys a larger lesson about why M&A often fails. Its easy to listen to investment bankers and overpay on acquisitions. But its much harder to actually handle post-merger integration. Dell is the perfect example. They have essentially no precedent for running an ASIC team, and would take a company like 3PAR that spent 25% of its revenue on R&D and eventually starve it. 3PAR is a better fit for HP, and in the end its likely that they will prevail. It sure seems that way anyway. HPs board is set out to make up for lost time and right its innovation ship regardless of cost to shareholders. But the synergy premium for 3PAR will be enormous, and history suggests that deals with such a massive allocation of acquisition goodwill generally fail to pay for themselves.
Drinking buddies. Wing men. Boozin' brothers. We've all got them -- those guys whose entire friendship is entirely based on a shared passion for the pub. We at Asylum have given plenty of thought to drinking buddies in the past, taking the time to consider who'd make the best animal and the pro-wrestling drinking buddies. The next logical step, of course, was to compile a list of the ultimate fighting-game drinking buddies. Game: "Street Fighter II Turbo" Character: Zangief Role in the group: The lovable Russian Drink of choice: Vodka neat "Street Fighter" is full of awesome characters. Everymen Ken, Guile and Ryu are a bit dull; Blanka is liable to electrocute you; and the less said about M. Bison and Dhalsim the better. In our eyes, we'd choose between Chun-Li, E. Honda and Zangief. Well, Chun-Li isn't old enough to get into a pub and E. Honda is just too fat to sit on a bar stool. We had to go for the massive Russian. Keep reading for six more characters we'd like to do shots with. ... Game: "Tekken" Character: King Role in the group: The one with the animal head Drink of choice: Rum and Diet Coke Geeks among you will point out that King is in fact dead, and therefore won't reply to our Facebook invite to join us down at the bar. Well, this is all hypothetical, so just let us fantasize about drinking with an orphaned Mexican street fighter who becomes a monk and fights to get the cash to build an orphanage. Game: "Killer Instinct" Character: Chief Thunder Role in the group: The wise one Drink of choice: A Corona with lime? We've never met a Native American chief before, let alone a Native American chief who's fought in the "Killer Instinct" tournament, let alone a Native American chief who's fought in the "Killer Instinct" tournament and can do a reverse triplax. This was an easy decision. The thing is, would he want us to call him "Chief Thunder" all the time, or would just "Chief" be okay? Game: "Super Smash Bros." Character: Fox McCloud Role in the group: The one with military service Drink of choice: Erdinger, for some reason Fox McCloud is one of every young boy's childhood heroes, and thankfully his appearance in the fantastic "Super Smash Bros" made him eligible for our next bender. A consummate professional, Fox would make a great drinking buddy, telling his tales of intergalactic warfare. Game: "Mortal Kombat" Character: Sonya Blade Role in the group: The female friend Drink of choice: Scotch on the rocks Up to now our table is surrounded by an anthropomorphic fox, a Native American chief, a man with a leopard head and a massive Russian in a Speedo. Suffice it to say, we could use a woman's touch. That's where Sonya comes in. The original fighting-game hottie, Sonya is a special-forces agent who we reckon would be delightful company. Game: "Star Wars: Masters of Teras Karsi" Character: Chewbacca Role in the group: The hairy one Drink of choice: Chewie is a beer guy, surely OK, so "Masters of Teras Karsi" isn't exactly a classic. In fact, it was a much-maligned part of Lucasfilm's continuing merchandise onslaught, but that doesn't matter. It was a fighting game and Chewie was in it, so he's here in the pub with us. Game: "Double Dragon V: The Shadow Fall" Character: Billy Lee Role in the group: The normal(ish) guy Drink of choice: Lager We're talking about the cult-classic fighting game on the SNES. Billy seems like an average kind of guy, and every group of buddies needs a level-headed one. Who did we leave off our list? Let us know in the comments.
Are you financially-savvy or utterly hopeless? Take a look at this Venn Diagram to find out which category you fall into: Financial nerd, geek, dweeb or dork.