Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/_MDjMvzEqD0/this-adorable-radio-will-brighten-up-any-room
Monday, January 28, 2013
This Adorable Radio Will Brighten Up Any Room
Internet Explorer 9 nears 4% share on Windows 7, IE6 extinction countdown picks up steam
It's also interesting to note that there are now more than 1,000 sites utilizing Internet Explorer 9's Windows 7 integration features -- like the new desktop notification support we showed you in Hotmail.
But perhaps the best news of all is that Microsoft's IE6countdown.com now has more than 400 partners and is generating nearly two million pageviews per month, helping to lure users away from the woefully out-of-date browser. Can the end come soon enough, DS readers?
Internet Explorer 9 nears 4% share on Windows 7, IE6 extinction countdown picks up steam originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 01 Apr 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Auslogics Disk Defrag 3.2 gets smarter, faster
Auslogics Disk Defrag has been part of my system maintenance toolkit for quite some time. With the release of version 3.2, it's now even better at tidying up and optimizing your system's hard disk drives. In addition to a cleaner, easier-to-use interface, Disk Defrag 3.2 offers improved single file and folder defragging, better processing of multiple disks, a simplified scheduling screen, and more informative tool tips. Auslogics has also fine-tuned the program's defragmentation and file consolidation algorithms.
For laptop users, there's a new option to lock the program if your system is running on battery power -- so scheduled operations don't kick in and drain your power source at an inopportune moment. If you happen to have an SSD installed in your PC, you can head to the Disk Defrag options and exclude it from scanning (many think that defragmenting an SSD is a very bad idea).
Auslogics Disk Defrag is a free download and works with most versions of Windows.
For laptop users, there's a new option to lock the program if your system is running on battery power -- so scheduled operations don't kick in and drain your power source at an inopportune moment. If you happen to have an SSD installed in your PC, you can head to the Disk Defrag options and exclude it from scanning (many think that defragmenting an SSD is a very bad idea).
Auslogics Disk Defrag is a free download and works with most versions of Windows.
Auslogics Disk Defrag 3.2 gets smarter, faster originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 11 Apr 2011 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | Email this | Comments
Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/04/11/auslogics-disk-defrag-3-2-gets-smarter-faster/
Unlocking new phones now banned under DMCA, the EFF weighs in
It was great while it lasted, but the days of users legally unlocking their own phones is over. Back in October of last year, the Library of Congress added an exemption to the DMCA to allow folks to free their new phones for 90 days. That three month window has now closed. Of course, carriers are still free to offer unlocked handsets themselves, and some will also unlock them for you as long as certain conditions are met. "Legacy" or used handsets purchased before today can still be unlocked without any finger-wagging from federal courts.
So, what does this mean exactly? Well, Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Mitch Stoltz told us, "What's happening is not that the Copyright Office is declaring unlocking to be illegal, but rather that they're taking away a shield that unlockers could use in court if they get sued." This does make lawsuits much more likely according to him, but it's still up to the courts to decide the actual legality of phone unlocking. Indeed, it's a grim day for those who want true freedom over their own devices. Stoltz said to us, "This shows just how absurd the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is: a law that was supposed to stop the breaking of digital locks on copyrighted materials has led to the Librarian of Congress trying to regulate the used cellphone market."
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
Via: Tech News Daily
Source: Library of Congress (Amazon)
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/26/unlock-phone-exemption-ends/
VERIFONE HOLDINGS VEECO INSTRUMENTS VARIAN SEMICONDUCTOR EQUIPMENT ASSOCIATES
Firefox 4 rockets to 5% global usage share, IE9 wallows at 1.5%
Interestingly, we can see IE9 dipping between March 20 and 21, just before the 'Important' Windows Update rolled out. It's hard to say whether IE9 is only growing because of the installed-by-default Windows Update, but that small dip definitely sticks out -- did excitement peter out? Did people download IE9, try it out, and summarily uninstall it? Perhaps, given their close proximity, the stats show an attention shift from Microsoft to Mozilla?
Numbers-wise, if the bottom left corner of the graph shows 2.3 million downloads for IE9, we can guesstimate that that it has now been downloaded 5 million times. Firefox is clocking in at 37 million downloads after five days of public availability.
We wonder whether Microsoft knew its release schedule would coincide so closely with Firefox 4. Internet Explorer 9 -- a great browser by almost every metric -- was never going to do well against anything emanating from the maws of Mozilla. The main thing, though, is that Microsoft has now shown that it's serious when it comes to the Open Web. If Internet Explorer 10 is good, and 11 and 12, then we might finally see it compete with the zealous Mozillan horde.
Firefox 4 rockets to 5% global usage share, IE9 wallows at 1.5% originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 28 Mar 2011 05:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Deal of the Day – Dell TP713 Wireless TouchPad for Windows 8
Friday’s LogicBUY Deal is the Windows 8-compatible Dell TP713 Wireless TouchPad for $53.99. This wireless touchpad with nano-sized USB receiver adds 4-finger multi-touch interactivity for Windows 8 to computers without a touchscreen.
$69.99 - $10 instant savings – 10% coupon code = $53.99 with free shipping.
This deal expires January 28, 2013 or sooner. Check the above link for more details on this deal, and check the LogicBUY home page for other deals.
Filed in categories: News
Tagged: Deal of the Day
Deal of the Day – Dell TP713 Wireless TouchPad for Windows 8 originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on January 25, 2013 at 9:15 am.
Source: http://the-gadgeteer.com/2013/01/25/deal-of-the-day-dell-tp713-wireless-touchpad-for-windows-8/
Google's Blogger platform adds five new HTML5 Dynamic Views
The five new views provide fresh and interesting ways to explore your favorite Blogger blogs. The Mosaic view, for example, creates a wall of thumbnails -- click one, and it zooms to fill the screen; click it again and it minimizes. Flipcard is similar to Mosaic, but not quite as eclectic. Sidebar, Timeslide and Snapshot round off the new views, with each one obviously targeted at different types of content, from photo blogs, to text-only philosophy blogs, and everything in between.
For now, you have to visit a Blogger blog and add /view to the URL to enable the new Dynamic Views. If you own a Blogger blog, you can disable the new views -- and really, why weren't they disabled by default?
If feedback is positive -- which we're sure it will be -- these Dynamic Views will soon be enabled by default. You'll also be able to edit the views in much the same way as current Blogger templates.
Continue reading Google's Blogger platform adds five new HTML5 Dynamic Views
Google's Blogger platform adds five new HTML5 Dynamic Views originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 31 Mar 2011 10:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Saturday, January 26, 2013
Cloud Girlfriend will use a swarm of females to satisfy men
Cloud Girlfriend, despite what it sounds like, doesn't really have anything to do with cloud computing. Rather, it uses a cloud of women to pose as your girlfriend on Facebook, or your favorite social network of choice. The service is scheduled to launch 'soon,' and there's no indication of how much it will cost.
With the tagline 'The easiest way to get a girlfriend is to already have one,' Cloud Girlfriend promises to be a very interesting startup indeed. The brains of the operation, David Fuhriman, speaking to CNET, says it's all about fulfilling Maslow's hierarchy of needs. "CloudGirlfriend.com can fulfill Maslow's higher needs, even though the users know that the interaction is virtual. They will interact with a real person and see real profile images of the girl with whom they interact. This interaction can build confidence and esteem as well as provide real training experiences in navigating a friendship and a relationship."
Our concern, of course, is that it's very nearly April 1. We're also worried by the fact that Fuhriman has a name that sounds ominously like a social subculture that we've grown strangely attracted to here in the Download Squad bunker.
Finally, just stop and think about it for a second. Because your cloud girlfriend will be entirely virtual, she could be based anywhere. She could be underage -- or overage -- or she might be someone who you know in real life. She could even be a relative of yours, and you'd never know.
Let's not forget this is the Internet we're talking about, folks. Worst case scenario, she could turn out to be a hairy, male truck driver from Texas. Such as... your dad, perhaps?
Cloud Girlfriend will use a swarm of females to satisfy men originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 30 Mar 2011 06:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Alt-week 1.26.13: quadruple DNA helixes, Byzantine mutants and battling hospital bugs
Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days.
In isolation, this week's stories are all pretty notable, but if you put them together, it begins to sound a lot like the plot of a movie. Four-stranded DNA, a database of alien planets, a new super-chemical to kill hospital bugs and a byzantine gamma-radiation blast. You can almost picture the plucky heroine trying to unpick the galactic conspiracy before someone loses an eye -- and if you've already cast weepy Clare Danes in the role, then you've already passed the entry exam to read Alt-week.
NASA's Kepler observatory is designed to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and civilizations traces of exoplanets and has clocked up around two thousand unconfirmed sightings. The team behind the program have decided to lessen the workload by opening up its findings and letting armchair astronomers worldwide participate. As well as being able to chip in with opinions about what constitutes a planet, the team are letting students develop data mining experiments, looking for patterns that could assist in the discovery of alien life -- or just look neat when graphed visually.
Scientists think that a blast of Gamma radiation might have hit our planet in the halcyon days of the year 775. Fusa Miyake discovered Carbon-14 and Beryllium-10 traces in tree rings from the era, which point to a gamma ray burst from a celestial body other than the Sun. Of course, the natural question is why we have no recorded instances of Dr. Brvce Banner turning green and smashing up Byzantine Constantinople? Well, it seems that astrophysicist Ralph Neuhauser has the unexciting answer -- most of the radiation would have been caught by the atmosphere, meaning that it's highly unlikely anyone succumbed to an accidental overdose.
Hospital bugs like MRSA are easy to kill when they're outside your body, just as long as you've got some alcohol nearby. If they get inside you, then there's always the option of taking an antibiotic or two to kill 'em off. If, however, they've hitched a ride on a catheter that's implanted into your body, then the bugs can grow a biofilm -- in short, a biological beachhead that will constantly reinfect you and is impenetrable to antibiotics. IBM, in partnership with the Singapore Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, has developed a hydrogel that can be smeared all over such implants, greatly reducing the risk of infection. Safe enough to go into the human body, the hydrogel prevents biofilms from growing and, thanks to its positive charge, attracts negatively charged microorganisms, which it then pops like water balloons. There's no word on if Big Blue plans to share the discovery with chemical corporations, but it certainly sounds better than downing a shot of Purell every time we venture in for a check-up.
DNA can only be found in a double helix, right? That fact seems destined for the biology section of Snopes after scientists found a quadruple helix. A team at Cambridge University used structure-specific markers to tag the G-Quadruplex, proving that these structures can exist in the human body as well as in petri dishes and in simple organisms. It transpires that they can form during cell division at the point where DNA is being replicated, and may have a hand in the development of some cancers -- meaning they're of great interest to oncologists.
Seen any other far-out articles that you'd like considered for Alt-week? Working on a project or research that's too cool to keep to yourself? Drop us a line at alt [at] engadget [dot] com.
[Image Credit: NASA / IBM / JP Rodriguez / G.Biffi]
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/WlioyIzjAWs/
APPLE COMPUTER APPLIED MATERIALS ARIAN SEMICONDUCTOR EQUIPMENT
Macmillan tests selling e-books to libraries in two-year stretches
Major publishers are taking wildly different approaches to resolving the woes surrounding e-book lending at libraries: they're experimenting with both the short-yet-cheap subscription as well as an expensive option to pay only once for perpetual use. Sure enough, we're now seeing the middle road. Macmillan plans to run a pilot project in the first quarter of the year that will charge libraries $25 per copy for a selection of 1,200 back catalog Minotaur Books titles, but give buyers better than usual lending rights for either two years or 52 loans, depending on the popularity. They'll only have permission to lend to one person at a time for each copy, although Macmillan's comments to LibraryJournal leave the door open to changing terms should the pilot struggle to gain traction. As it stands, the strategy could be expensive for libraries if they have to pay over and over again for a perennial favorite. It might, however, be palatable for those book lending outfits already planning to go all-digital.
Via: Ars Technica
Source: LibraryJournal
VERIFONE HOLDINGS VEECO INSTRUMENTS VARIAN SEMICONDUCTOR EQUIPMENT ASSOCIATES
Unlocking new phones now banned under DMCA, but carriers are in the clear
It was great while it lasted, but the days of users legally unlocking their own phones is over. Back in October of last year, the Library of Congress added an exemption to the DMCA to allow folks to free their new phones for 90 days. That three month window has now closed. Of course, carriers are still free to offer unlocked handsets themselves, and some will also unlock them for you as long as certain conditions are met. "Legacy" or used handsets purchased before today can still be unlocked without any finger-wagging from federal courts.
So, what does this mean exactly? Well, Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Mitch Stoltz told us, "What's happening is not that the Copyright Office is declaring unlocking to be illegal, but rather that they're taking away a shield that unlockers could use in court if they get sued." This does make lawsuits much more likely according to him, but it's still up to the courts to decide the actual legality of phone unlocking. Indeed, it's a grim day for those who want true freedom over their own devices. Stoltz said to us, "This shows just how absurd the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is: a law that was supposed to stop the breaking of digital locks on copyrighted materials has led to the Librarian of Congress trying to regulate the used cellphone market."
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
Via: Tech News Daily
Source: Library of Congress (Amazon)
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/26/unlock-phone-exemption-ends/
Lenovo, Linux, and the Coming of the Chromebooks
However great the strides made by user-friendly distros such as Ubuntu and Mint in recent years, it seems fair to say that Linux has not yet enjoyed any sweeping successes on the desktop the way it has on the mobile side with Android. That, however, may be changing. Thanks once again to none other than Google, Linux is now appearing with increasing frequency in the PC lineups of hardware makers including not just Acer and Samsung -- whose Chromebook is no less than Amazon's top-selling laptop -- but now Lenovo as well. 
Friday, January 25, 2013
The Daily Roundup for 01.25.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Pebble smartwatch review
After $10 million in funding from Kickstarter, Pebble finally ships to backers, and us...
The Engadget Interview
Don't ask, don't get. That's why we rang up Canonical and requested an early build of Ubuntu for the Galaxy Nexus. (Politely declined.) Next, we asked if maybe the company could speed up development...
Apple drops supplier over underage labor
Apple's latest Supplier Responsibility Report has just been published...
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/M1Eyo9ZssvI/
Instructbles, H&M, and More
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/SFqqzIPQRSs/instructbles-hm-and-more
TweetDeck to launch as HTML5 Web app, now accepting beta testers
It's a natural progression for TweetDeck, especially since its originally Adobe Air app is practically all Web code. TweetDeck Web will sport a feature set which is nearly identical to the Chrome app, with the notable exception of Twitter streaming.
Initially, TweetDeck is targeting Firefox 4 and 3.6, Google Chrome, and Safari. Opera and Internet Explorer 9 won't be invited to the dance until a bit later on.
If you'd like to get in on the TweetDeck Web beta, head on over and register -- or sign up using your existing TweetDeck account.
TweetDeck to launch as HTML5 Web app, now accepting beta testers originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 06 Apr 2011 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Deal of the Day – 15.6″ Dell Inspiron 15R (5521) Core i5 laptop
- Core i5-3210M 2.5GHz CPU,
- 6GB RAM
- 500GB hard drive, 8-in-1 card reader, and DVD burner
- 15.6″ 1366 x 768 LED-backlit LCD screen with integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics
- 4 USB 3.0 ports and HDMI v1.4a output
- Waves MaxxAudio4
- Integrated 1MP webcam with mic
- Windows 8
- 15-months McAfee SecurityCenter subscription
- 90-day Premium phone support
$688.99 – $139 instant savings = $549.99 with free shipping.
This deal expires January 24, 2013 or sooner. Check the above link for more details on this deal, and check the LogicBUY home page for other deals.
Filed in categories: News
Tagged: Deal of the Day
Deal of the Day – 15.6″ Dell Inspiron 15R (5521) Core i5 laptop originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on January 21, 2013 at 10:45 am.
Source: http://the-gadgeteer.com/2013/01/21/deal-of-the-day-15-6-dell-inspiron-15r-5521-core-i5-laptop/
ADOBE SYSTEMS ADVANCED SEMICONDUCTOR ENGINEERING ALLIANCE DATA SYSTEMS
G Cloud Backup isn't made by Google, but does a pretty good job at backing up your Android device
Don't let the name confuse you, this isn't another app from Google. Despite the tenuous naming link, G Cloud Backup is made by a developer known as Genie9, and sets out to backup all your personal particulars on your Android device. We're not just talking about files and folders, or simply being a cloud locker in which to dump things either. SMS messages, contacts, external SD cards, call logs, all in addition to such items as photos, videos and music. And, root access isn't required for anything, so this one's for everyone. The cloud part is Amazon's S3 cloud storage.
There's no shortage of options when it comes to backing up, or indeed cloud services, on Android. But the cliché still applies -- choice is a good thing. No doubt at first glance, some of the offered services Google already takes care of, but does G Cloud Backup have enough to make it worth a look? Stick around and we'll find out.
 |  |
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/hCgxqD9M6Ao/story01.htm
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)