By Michael Gartenberg, Contributor, Slashgear
It didn’t come as much as a surprise, but the good folks working on the One Laptop Per Child Project announced that the that the OLPC XO-2 concept had been shelved and in what appears to be bowing to the hype of tablet form factors, they’ve announced the new XO-3. Yawn. Feels like we’ve been here before and you know why?
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Tobacco plant leaves can be used to make efficient biofuelTimes of India“Tobacco is very attractive as a biofuel because the idea is to use plants that aren't used in food production,” Dr. Andrianov said. …Tobacco could be biofuel of vehicles…
Nowadays students are not oblivious to the hazards of global warming. They are quite keen on pursuing a ‘clean energy’ career. Now the concern about climate change is stimulating more undergraduate students to show interest in science and engineering. We can watch the trend of the rising interest in renewable energy. As leaders from […]
Posted in: Economy, Future Energy, Industry
As 2009 comes to an end, our news editors are busy putting together all sorts of roundups and tops. I was curious to see how the main web browsers fared this year in terms of market share. On Softpedia, of course! We checked our 2009 web traffic analytics info and think the data is pretty interesting, so we’re going to share it with you fellow webmasters or regular readers. As a bonus, we’ve added the top 5 screen resolutions used by Softpedia visitors. Don’t forget to check out the shiny charts!
To kick things off, while the blue slice tells us that Internet Explorer is still in the lead with 44.45%, Firefox has continued its chase and has come dangerously close, at 38.75%.
With the upcoming release of Firefox 3.7 and other browsers nibbling at IE’s share, the 6% distance will probably decrease even more in 2010. The latest Internet Explorer version (IE8) does not seem to pack what’s needed to sway users back, despite Microsoft’s efforts to innovate and also provide a much more standards compliant browser.
However, there’s a new rising star on the web browser market and it’s one we definitely cannot ignore if we look at the share trends over the course of 2009. Google’s Chrome stands at 4.66% overall (3rd place), but h… (read more)
Americans love the idea of the neatly packaged product, even when it comes to clean power — biofuels, wind and nuclear all come in modular “in-a-box” sizes. In that same vein, Helios Solar, a 2-year-old startup based in Denver, Colorado, has announced that its SunCube is now on-sale, and will be ready for installation in […]
I already feel a bit silly when people ask my new cat’s name, and I’ve only had him a few hours. Yet, I think rushing to name a new pet is a mistake. I like the idea of taking a couple of days to get to know a cat before pinning him down with a name.
Yes, I do realize the cat really doesn’t care. However, it’s important to us humans.
My tips for naming a new cat:
(Image via Peggy Rowland)
Post from: Blisstree
Throughout the Coming Year may your life be filled with little celebration of Happiness…Wishes you a Bright, Happy and Prosperous New Year 2008 with God Bless.
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Before the sun sets in this year, before the memories fade, before the networks get jammed…..Wish u and ur family Happy Sparkling New Year 2008.
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New Year begins, let us pray, that it will be a year with new Peace, New Happiness, and abundance of new friends. God bless you through out the new Year.
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Wishing you Happy New Year, May u always keep in ur heart the special beauty and cheer of New Year.
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New Year is the time to unfold new horizons & realize new dreams, to rediscover the strength & faith within u, to rejoice in simple pleasures & gear up 4 a new challenges. Wishin u a truly fulfilling 2008
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When the mid-nite bell rings tonight…
Let it signify new and better things for you,
let it signify a realisation of all things you wish for,
Let it signify a year of courage and believes,
Wishing you a very…very…very prosperious 2008.
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New Year Fun SMS
New Year’s Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
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People are so worried about what they eat between Christmas and the New Year, but they really should be worried about what they eat between the New Year and Christmas. Happy New Year!!
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May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions.
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Merry Christmas, Enjoy New Year, Happy Easter, Good luck on Valentines, Spooky Halloween & Happy Birthday. Now bug off and don’t annoy me for the next 12
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HP has applied for trademark protection on two devices, one which is almost certainly not a smartphone and one that very well could be.
The HP Zeen sounds pretty tablet-like, but the HP Airlife sounds much more like a smartphone handset. Intriguingly these two devices are meant to work together, with the Airlife apparently being the “key to my Zeen”.
HP has a long history with Windows Mobile, which makes a HP future smartphone more likely to be running the OS.
Do any of our readers have have any more information about these two products (and their rather new-agey monikers)? Let us know in the comments below.
As the Web becomes more social, privacy becomes harder and harder to come by. People are over-sharing on Facebook and Twitter, broadcasting their whereabouts every ten steps on Foursquare and Gowalla, and uploading photos and videos of their most private moments to the Web for all to see. It’s easy to say that privacy is dead, we all live in public now, and just deal with it.
But things are a bit more complicated. It used to be that we lived in private and chose to make parts of our lives public. Now that is being turned on its head. We live in public, like the movie says (except via micro-signals not 24-7 video self-surveillance), and choose what parts of our lives to keep private. Public is the new default.
Stowe Boyd, along with others before him, calls this new state of exposure “publicy” (as opposed to privacy or secrecy). He writes:
The idea of publicy is no more than this: rather than concealing things, and limiting access to those explicitly invited, tools based on publicy default to things being open and with open access.
I don’t particularly care for the neologism, but the idea behind it is spot on. This change represents a major shift in the social fabric, and it is only now just getting started. If you thought there was a lot of hair-pulling over privacy in 2009, just wait until 2010. Facebook’s new privacy policies which favor more public sharing, will be a big driver of this shift, as will the continued adoption of Twitter, which by its very design makes personal utterances public. Then there are startups like Blippy that go even further by turning every single purchase into a public statement.
It takes some getting used to the idea of living in public. As I discussed several hours ago with Andrew Keen, in public on Twitter, instead of making the private public, we will make the public private.” When public is the default, you deliberately select what to keep private instead of the other way around.
It’s not that privacy disappears. But it becomes more a matter of emphasis and a conscious decision. Boyd points out:
Some people are the web equivalent of nudists: they live very open lives on the web, revealing the intimate details of their relationships, what they think of friends and co-workers, their interactions with family and authorities. But . . . even these apparently wide open web denizens may keep some things private, or secret.
Privacy and secrecy are two different things. Secrets can be shared, and thus become “social objects that link those sharing the secrets together, and excluding others,” writes Boyd. Making it easy for people to move from the public to the private, and in between, will become increasingly important for Web companies.
Getting back to the original question, privacy will still live on, but will be so transformed as to become almost unrecognizable. No doubt, many people will mistake it for dead and keep pulling out their hair. The rest of us will go on with our public lives.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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Filed under: Love & Relationships, Advice
Are you involved with a partner who is always second-guessing you or making you feel like you’re never good enough? Dr. Nina W. Brown, author of Coping with Infuriating, Mean, Critical People, explains how overly critical partners can poison a relationship and offers some tips on how to deal with it.
Q: What kind of impact does a critical personality have on their partner and on the relationship?
A: Overly critical partners do not perceive themselves as overly critical, or even sometimes as being critical. They are seeking perfection, and unconsciously assume that others also have a desire and need to be perfect. They can be convinced on a deep level that their way is the only “right” way, and that others should recognize this and comply.
Relationships can suffer when one partner is overly critical as the other partner can never be or act in a way that eliminates most of the criticism. And all criticism can never be eliminated because perfection is never achieved.
Tips for dealing with a critical partner, after the jump…
Continue reading How to Deal With An Overly Critical Partner
By Jeremy Allaire, Co-Founder and CEO, Brightcove.com
2009 brought a lot of change to the online video world. We saw the surging growth of new players like Hulu, the advent of TV Everywhere (TVE), the first steps of YouTube’s monetization, more live video and mobile video, and video starting to reach beyond media and into other sectors of society. Video advertising-based monetization also grew 50 percent year over year–the fastest growth rate for any form of advertising during the Great Recession.
From the energy of our customers to the phone calls from investment bankers, it is quite apparent that 2010 is going to be a very significant year again for online video. Here’s what’s going to happen:
TV Everywhere
TVE is a new framework that will enable participants in the established TV industry to bring more of their content online. TV networks will be enabled to put their shows on the Web with these three caveats:
2010 is going to produce a lot of first efforts in the TVE space, driven first by the large cable companies–Comcast (CMCS), Time Warner (TWC), etc.–and followed by their fellow distributors. We’ll see a decent amount of feature-length TV become available on ISP sites and via the sites of the TV programmers themselves. But 2010 won’t be a big year for TVE. There’s still way too much that needs to be worked out, from standards for authentication to business questions about revenue associated with TVE content, and to user experience issues that might be created by such a federated model of online media consumption.
For TVE, 2010 will be a great year for experiments and learning, and will largely be a setup for growth in 2011.
Connected TV
Just as the traditional TV industry makes moves to bring TV to the PC, the consumer electronics industry is making moves to bring online video to the TV. The TVE folks had better get moving quickly, because 2010 will bring a plethora of new opportunities for consumers to access video content directly from their living rooms.
Several trends are driving the industry forward:
But don’t get your hopes up too high. This is going to be a slow-moving process. The churn cycle on TV is slow, and the devices are priced at a premium. They’re also going to have user experience quirks, and initially, limited adoption by developers.
Again, just as TVE will wait until 2011, open distribution to TVs will also have to wait. And, in fact, these two worlds may not collide, they may simply converge. If I’m a cable subscriber, maybe I’ll just flip on my new LCD Vizio, authenticate against ESPN.com (which in the background checks to make sure that I’m a subscriber), then I’d access all the glory of on-demand apps and content from ESPN over the internet and onto the device.
Mobile Video
With the surge in smartphone sales, mobile video adoption will become more than just a blip on the radar. Mobile advertising is becoming mature; in-app payment models for content is emerging; online video platforms such as Brightcove are making it easy-to-publish mobile video. Most importantly, however, are the scale and usage numbers–there are now more iPhone 3G subscribers than there are Comcast Digital Cable subscribers.
Video Monetization
In 2009, online video advertising grew faster than any other category in the global advertising market (50 percent). It’s forecast to grow 3-5X over the next several years.
Right now, the primary ad format for online video is the short video commercials that happen before and during programs. This is about one-fourth of the advertising load that television bears. There are also those clever little overlay ads that users can click on to watch a video commercial, but neither of these approaches comes close to generating the amount of revenue per viewer hour that broadcast television delivers.
We know that online users will not accept more of an ad load, so what is it going to take to drive the value of the advertising higher? In 2010 the industry will crack the code for higher-value video advertising. In order to be more valuable it needs to be a win-win-win situation (e.g. viewers enjoy more relevant ads, publishers generate more revenue, and advertisers get more targeted ads with more engaged viewers who drive direct action).
Here’s what will shake out:
Video Commerce and Marketing
In 2009 we began to see the broad adoption of online video by all kinds of marketers and retailers. Why is this a big deal?
First, the two largest engines of growth in the Internet economy are digital marketing and online commerce, accounting for the vast majority of dollars flowing through the Web.
Second, every organization on the planet uses the Web as a marketing platform for their products, services, causes and agendas. The primary investment they make are in their own Web sites, the secondary investment is in online advertising to drive users to their Web site. The growth in online video in marketing and e-commerce is very significant. Marketers are using video on their sites because it is driving better metrics–longer visits and higher conversion rates. In e-commerce, video is driving a double-digit lift in sales and lowering customer service costs. 2010 will be a record year for marketers and for e-commerce site adoption of online video.
Online Video Platforms
In 2009, our industry finally emerged as a category: Online Video Platforms (OVPs), a cloud-based approach to video publishing and distribution. Just as Web hosting, ad servers, Web analytics and search have all moved to the cloud, so too has online video.
In 2009, some of these really became platforms, for which hundreds of third-party companies began building plug-ins and integrations.
Several things will happen in the OVP market:
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Fair Chase will be ridden by Joe Talamo and is trained by John Sadler. Todays 6th race at Santa Anita is for maiden 2-year-old fillies going 6 furlongs on the main synthetic surface with a claiming tag of $75,000. This filly is coming into her second race off a layoff. She produced a second place finish with a Brisnet speed figure of 87 back in straight maiden company on October 4th in a 6-furlong event at Santa Anita on the synthetics. Fair Chase is a $190,000 purchase by Tale of the Cat and bred in Kentucky. With the drop in class and backed by good pedigree and connections she will break her maiden this afternoon.
Play #4 Fair Chase to win race 6 at Santa Anita 5-2 on the Morning Line.
Post Time at 6:36PM Eastern Time televised by TVG
Courtesy of Tonys Picks
Mister kitten doesn’t have a name yet. We’ll cover that in the next post. In future posts, I’ll also share my experiences in introducing this new kitten to the resident feline, Choco, who has been the only cat for six years!
It’s difficult to explain how you know when you’ve met a cat that’s supposed to be your pet. I’ve been thinking of getting a second cat for a while, but my husband has talked me out of it because we don’t have much spare housing space at the moment. Plus, we’re both concerned that Choco won’t get along with a new cat.
I’ve adored several felines up for adoption through the months, but none of them tugged hard enough at my 
heart to close the deal. Yet, today, when visiting family a few hours away, I was introduced to a kitten that had been living outside since it was born around five months ago.
New kitty adopted me from the moment I held him. He was just the cat I’d been looking for – a super sweet, yet kind of exotic-looking brown tabby. A regular ole domestic shorthair with love to give.
Most kittens would run around more, but mine was very content to sit lovingly in my lap until I just couldn’t stand the thought of not taking him home.
The little guy was seemingly healthy, yet a bit smelly! Since he had not been to the vet yet, I swung by a vet’s office quickly just before they closed to get a leukemia and FIV test. Both were negative! My regular vet is off this week, but my new addition has an appointment on Monday to get vaccines and arrange for neutering.
I must brag a bit too. My new kitten didn’t cry at all the whole two-hour ride home. He’s not complaining right now as he rests in his crate in the bathroom (away from Choco). Nope, he doesn’t appear sick, just laid back. Fingers are crossed he uses his litter box for the first time. Right now, I think he’s so very grateful to be inside where it’s warm.
(Images via Peggy Rowland)
Post from: Blisstree
Up until now, Ferrari’s team principal Stefano Domenicali did not have the reputation of a call them like I see them kind of person. On the contrary, he was mostly known for his calm and quite diplomatic statements regarding stuff that happens inside the Great Circle. However, when hearing about Nelsinho Piquet, the situation changes to 180 degrees.
Asked by the reporters of the Italian newspaper Le Stampa how he feels about a potential return of former Renault driver Nelson Pique… (read more)
Article Tags: Climate Protest, Leon Ashby, Peter Spencer
Call to Climate Sceptics & others – Protest March in Canberra this Monday – Urgent
Hi Everyone
This is a plea to assist Peter Spencer on his hunger strike to get Kevin Rudd to take notice of the fact he has offered to pay millions of dollars to other countries for locking up their forests, but he will not look at paying Australian farmers for the trees locked up by force in Australia as part of our Kyoto agreement. This issue is linked with the fact CO2 is being called a pollutant, fraudulent climate science has occurred and just processes are being suppressed. They are all organised behind the scenes to assist the Green religion.
To bring Peter Spencers case to court would assist Australians everywhere and severely dent the Green religion`s hold over politics – and not just in Australia either.
when the suspected heart attack struck him. As of this writing Rush Limbaugh is in the hospital and no words about his present condition is officially released. He is not dead as of the writing of this article. Let’s pray for his immediate recovery.
Limbaugh was seen golfing at Waialae Country Club earlier this week, KITV said. The country club is next to the Kahala hotel.
For privacy reasons, hotel spokeswoman Sheila Donnelly Theroux said she was unable to acknowledge that Limbaugh is a guest.
In 2001, Limbaugh reported he had lost most of his hearing due to an autoimmune inner-ear disease. He had surgery to have an electronic device placed in his skull to restore his hearing.
Two years later Limbaugh acknowledged he was addicted to pain medicine. He blamed the addiction on severe back pain, and took a five-week leave from his radio show to enter rehab.
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Article Tags: ClimateGate, John P. Costella
Analysis, including excerpts from and links to the key emails.
Welcome to my analysis of Climategate, the climate science scandal that has already eclipsed Watergate in terms of its global political ramifications.
Climategate began on November 19, 2009, when it is believed that a whistle-blower leaked thousands of emails and documents central to a Freedom of Information request placed with the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. This institution had played a central role in the “climate change” debate: its scientists, together with their international colleagues, quite literally put the “warming” into Global Warming: they were responsible for analysing and collating the various measurements of temperature from around the globe and going back into the depths of time, that collectively underpinned the entire scientific argument that mankind’s liberation of “greenhouse” gases—such as carbon dioxide—was leading to a relentless, unprecedented, and ultimately catastrophic warming of the entire planet.
Click source to read an excellent (ongoing) analysis of the climategate emails; stripped the jargon and listed those most relevant in chronological order.
Source: assassinationscience.com
Article Tags: Pat Michaels, Reply To Article, You could not make it up
In his Dec. 18 op-ed “How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus,” Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato Institute falsely claims that work by him (and other fossil-fuel-funded climate change contrarians) has been unfairly blocked by me and others from appearing in mainstream science journals because the peer review process is supposedly biased against climate science deniers.
In truth, the only bias that exists at such publications is for well-reasoned writing that is buttressed by facts.
That is why climate skeptics such as Richard Lindzen of MIT or John Christy of the University of Alabama—who are widely regarded as credible and whose work contributes meaningfully to the scientific discourse—have no problem publishing their work in mainstream scientific journals.
And what about those who are not being published? Every scientist dealing with a major public issue must decide if he or she is going to be a scientist or a de facto politician.
Source: online.wsj.com
Honestly, at what point do entertainment execs finally figure out that by purposely not making content available in the format people want it in, they’re only encouraging them to get that content through unauthorized means? We already knew that the big movie studios were annoyed with Netflix and trying to get Netflix to delay movie rentals until at least a month after the DVD comes out. Now we have an explanation why. As JJ was the first (of a few) to send in, the studios apparently are quite annoyed that, in order to jumpstart its movie streaming offering, Netflix routed around the movie studios, and signed a deal with Starz that allowed it to stream the same movies without a direct deal with the studios. It’s not clear how or why Starz had the right to also stream movies through Netflix, but I’m guessing it was a loophole in Starz’ deals with the studios — a loophole that’s now closed. So, Netflix is saying it needs to convince Hollywood it’s not the enemy, but Hollywood isn’t quite buying it yet.
This really shouldn’t be a huge surprise. After all, this is Hollywood, where reports that actually show that the movie industry will grow quite a bit in the next decade are also used to claim that rental services like Redbox and Netflix are killing off jobs. It’s also the world where Hollywood execs still think that the answer to their problems (problems like its best box office year ever) is to just add more release windows. It’s as if they still think that keeping content away from people makes them more likely to buy.
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