You bought your iPhone to be able to tell the time, right? Knowing that one day The Sharper Image would create an iPhone dock complete with Roman numerals and free downloadable app just for you?
True, it pumps out music like any generic iPhone dock, but you’re obviously buying this $59.99 dock for the clock function, when it’s so overbearingly in-your-face. You sad, sad person.
Oops! With all the holiday chaos I forgot to choose a winner for the awesome prize package from Anne Leuck Feldhaus! The winner selected in the random drawing is Jake Zigler (comment #18)! Keep an eye out for an email with details on how to claim your prize. Jake has a jump start on the holidays for next year!
To commemorate the launch of the HTC Nexus One Adobe published this video showing the upcoming Flash Player 10.1 for Mobile, which will be coming to Android, webOS and of course Windows Mobile, in action.
The software was intended to be released at the end of last year, but of course has not been, but does appear pretty close to production.
Hopefully we will soon see the wide release, which should allow many streaming media services that use flash to work reliably even on mobile devices.
LaCie’s popular Rugged external hard disk is now speedier than ever. Lacie is set to release the LaCie Rugged USB 3.0 with faster speeds than even firewire. We’re talking 110MB/s. The system will also come complete with a software bundle for easy formatting and backup, as well as 10GB Wuala online storage included for one year. We’ll update this post with pricing and more info when it becomes available. It’s about time USB 3.0 products came to market!
I do not post in this forum much, but I like to read and learn what others have to say .
I am hoping I can get some opinions on this meter.
I apologize if this has already been asked, but I was wondering if any of you use the Bayer Contour meter? If so, how accurate do you think it is and do you like it?
I have used several different kinds, and I am thinking of switching but not before I get some feedback. I can get one free, but "free" isn’t good if it doesn’t work well.
Thank you for your time.
The ultra-slim point and shoot camera category has evolved significantly as Sony announced during CES 2010 that they are bringing the new silver, blue and red DSC-TX7 to the market in February. This stylish $400 ultra slim camera features a 10MP “Exmor R” CMOS sensor, a large 3.5” touchscreen (921K) LCD and 4x optical zoom with wide angle 25mm lens. The added Optical Steady Shot image stabilization system prevents blur from camera shaking.
A new attractive feature this year being integrated into this Cyber-shot camera include the ability to record HD video (AVCHD) 1920 x 1080 at 60i and HDMI output capabilities. This makes it very easy to record and share HD video with your friends and family. Sony has also integrated Transfer Jet wireless technology into the camera, which allows you to send (at 560mbps) pictures and movies from your Cyber-shot camera to your Transfer Jet receiver, such as a computer. This allows for people to not worry about taking out the memory card or looking for the USB cord when they want to get the pictures off their camera.
Other thoughtful prerequisites found in the TX7 and other Sony cameras include iAuto, which detects up to eight scenes and optimizes camera settings, and Smile Shutter. It will also be compatible with the Party-shot (model IPT-DS1) automatic photographer.
Universidades Dos EUa
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The Spring Design Alex, the other dual-screen Android ereader, is what I had hoped the Nook would be: an ereader for hardware nerds.
The hardware is thin to the point that you worry it might snap—a common thread in ereader design, actually—but it feels about as sturdy as a Kindle. The screen is standard matte E Ink, which did a good enough job at blotting out the harsh lighting in the conference center. The bottom screen is a bit taller than the Nook’s, giving the whole device a gangly look. But it’s not the screens that matter, it’s what’s on them:
That is to say, whatever you want. The Nook’s screens are like content ghettos, with the top intended just for ebooks, and the bottom for navigation. On the Alex, there’s effectively no barrier. Ebook navigation is similar to the Nook’s, with the faster bottom screen serving as a touch interface for the top, non-touch screen, but it’ll also run any Android app, stock or otherwise, including the browser, email client, and music player apps. Best of all, you can push content from the bottom screen to the top whenever you want, meaning that you can navigate to a web page on the bottom screen, then once it’s rendered, send it to the top.
There’s a steep learning curve and it doesn’t feel like the interaction between the two screens is fully worked out, but it’s no less awkward then the Nook, and capable of a lot more. I wouldn’t call it the Nook on steroids, because in some ways, the Nook feels disabled. So, I guess it’s like the Nook, except without two shattered kneecaps? That’ll work.
The only hitch: it might be tough to convince a wireless provider to agree to unlimited, free, no-contract data like the Nook’s or Kindle’s, because this thing is primed to use a lot of bandwidth. Not coincidentally, you can’t buy this thing yet. That said, an official announcement of some sort is due this Thursday, so don’t give up hope.
Via Romenesko we learn of local Illinois news site Pantagraph.com that has suspended comments on local news stories as a “cooling off period” after it felt that the comments had become too uncivil. I’m wondering how this will actually help. This is the internet that we’re talking about here, and once the comments are turned back on, I would imagine that they’ll quickly return to the same level of civility (or lack thereof) pretty quickly. If you want to create more civil commenting policies, a “time out” doesn’t do that. Putting in place better incentives does.
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Erik Marcus of Vegan.com has just posted his latest writing, The Year in Meat: 2009. No one bashes the meat industry more eloquently than Erik!
Em 2010, revela a colunista Flávia Oliveira, de Negócios & Cia, no Globo, o Banco do Estado do Espírito Santo (Banestes) quer aportar no Estado do Rio de Janeiro. Já pediu autorização ao Banco Central para abrir agências em Bom Jesus do Itabapoana e Itaperuna, no Norte Fluminense. A ida para cidades vizinhas é estratégia para ganhar escala. O banco já tem agências em Teixeira de Freitas (BA), Matena e Nanuque (ambas em Minas Gerais).
How do you cool down a hot drink? Do you toss in an ice cube? Blow across the top? Leave a spoon in it? Stir? There are many ideas on what cools a hot beverage down the fastest, but not to worry, we can always count on Science to tell us which one is best!
I had written off CES as a collection of wasteful products I neither wanted nor needed. Then I beheld the full glory of this $299, 720P, 17-inch Hannspree polar bear television, and my life began anew. Available this March.
A new consumer Web site Credit Card Connection has debuted just in time to provide American consumers alternative credit card options in retaliation against the unfair and unethical practices recently implemented by major bank card issuers.
Ondine Irving, owner of Card Analysis Solutions, a national credit union consultancy firm, is the driving force in creating this website. Her foresight and consumer advocacy has garnered attention from national personal financial expert, Suze Orman.
Ms. Orman has most recently placed creditcardconnection.org on her popular Web site, suzeorman.com.
This new consumer site was also recently featured on an episode of Larry King Live.
“This is a tremendous time for consumers to move their credit cards away from banks. Bank issuers have clearly mistreated their credit card holders in 2009 and have blamed it on everything from the economy to the Credit Card Act of 2009,” Irving said.
“When card programs falter, there is a balance between managing expenses and income. Banks have chosen to maximize the income side of the equation by increasing fees and rates to the consumer, rather than reducing their own expenses.
Credit Unions have always treated their cardholders with fairness and maintained an equal balance of card program income and expenses, without having the cardholder be the scapegoat”.
Consumers enter their ZIP code and a listing of credit unions with fair and ethical credit card programs will appear.
Each credit union’s credit card program is rated on a five star rating system: interest rates not to exceed 18%, no balance transfer fees, no penalty pricing, no annual fees and late fees which will never exceed $25.
Consumers can choose the credit union and card program which best suits their own card usage needs. Credit Unions must sign up to be listed and do not pay a fee for inclusion on the site.
About Card Analysis Solutions
Card Analysis Solutions was created in 2003 to assist credit unions in understanding the perceived complexities of card-program management.
Owner/founder Ondine Irving provides credit unions with objective and independent information about the financial, operational, and marketing aspects of credit card portfolio performance. It is Card Analysis Solutions’ mission to help credit unions in developing fair and ethical credit card programs for their members.
For more information, please visit cardanalysissolutions.org.
MEDIA CONTACT:
Kay Kearney, + 1 847.295.2051
Card Analysis Solutions/Credit Card Connection
[email protected]
While it used to be that the term “open source” conjured up socially lost Linux cave-dwellers, in recent years, open source has gone decidedly mainstream. Even if you don’t partake in dedicated offerings such as Firefox, Chrome, Adium or Android, there are probably open-source components in much of the software that you do use. But while the number of open source-focused startups is on the rise, proprietary software players are also increasingly acquiring open-source companies, and in the process, altering the courses of important platforms and applications. These aren’t necessarily good trends.
Matt Asay recently predicted that this year would usher in lots of acquisitions of small cloud computing players by big software companies, specifically citing open-source players such as Cloudera (which supports the ever more popular Hadoop, an open-source query platform) as potential targets. Meanwhile big-ticket acquisitions of open source-focused companies have proliferated, as evidenced by Oracle’s (stalled) acquisition of Sun Microsystems, VMware’s SpringSource buy and its rumored purchase of Zimbra, among others. (The Zimbra acquisition may be confirmed this week, according to numerous reliable sources.)
One has to ask, though, how healthy it is for increasingly important open-source platforms and applications to come under the wing of huge, proprietary software companies. Probably the best example to cite on that topic is the ongoing car crash that is Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Sun, of course, is an almost entirely open source-focused company, and the European Commission has spent nearly a year considering whether to allow Oracle to acquire it. In the meantime, Sun customers have flocked to competitors.
There are concerns that Oracle may shut down Sun’s MySQL open-source database division, as it competes with some of Oracle’s proprietary products. MySQL founder Monty Widenius has been aggressively echoing such concerns, and has a blog at HelpMySQL.org petitioning for support. In light of some of Sun’s other open-source offerings, and overlap with Oracle’s products, Oracle may in fact likely let several projects linger.
Even Google’s involvement with its own open-source Android operating system could inhibit free development around it going forward. For Google, one of the big benefits that all Android phones bring is steering users into the company’s lucrative search-and-ad ecosystem. With the release of today’s Nexus One Android-based phone — which takes the company’s commercial stake in Android handsets to two (Droid being the first) — could Android itself be increasingly influenced by Google’s proprietary interests? Just as Microsoft leverages Windows for the benefit of its own applications, Google could do the same with Android. The Open Android Alliance is already developing versions of Android devoid of Google applications due to these types of concerns.
Sun Micrososytems is one of only three big, U.S. public companies focused almost entirely on open source. If it gets swallowed up, that will leave just Red Hat and Novell. Open-source pundits are predicting that small, promising open-source players will be snapped up by bigger fish this year. And Google’s relationship to Android gets ever murkier as it sinks its commercial hooks deeper into the platform, billing its own offerings as superphones relative to other Android phones.
In his post “What Rankles in Open Source Buyouts,” Dana Blankenhorn takes the position of an enthusiastic open-source community member woefully witnessing the sale of an open-source project to a big software company when he addresses the project’s leaders, imploring: “There is such a thing as moral equity. What was us is now you, and you sold out — why shouldn’t I be offended, and why should I trust anyone like you again?” Indeed, for many of the suddenly flourishing open-source platforms and applications out there, independence and the unbeaten path may lead to the brightest possible community-driven future.
In-post image courtesy of Flickr user me and the sysop.
Popular wisdom would hold that about the only people willing to show up in sub-zero, slate-gray Detroit for a last-minute rally to advocate for Saab’s sale would be stereotypical brand diehards – grizzled old-timers with air-cooled two-strokes and elderly three-doors, not folks piloting General Motors-era models. Interestingly, those in attendance at today’s “Sell Saab/Save Saab” demonstration ranged broadly in age from their early twenties on through retirement age, and with the exception of a couple of 1980s 900 models, most of the Saabs were remarkably contemporary (although a good portion of those who showed up professed to owning numerous classic examples at home).
To be fair, we turned up to the meeting point in the shadow of GM’s Renaissance Center headquarters this afternoon not expecting a big turnout of either cars or press, as the event was organized just a couple of days earlier by Ryan Enge of SaabHistory.com – and the weather wasn’t exactly hospitable, either. As it turns out, we were pleasantly surprised to see a rather small but vibrant group of both. Over a couple of hours, we counted around 50 demonstrators in about 30 Saabs (full disclosure: one of which was AB’s own 2001 9-3 Viggen convertible), with devotees venturing in from as far away as Maine, Iowa and Wisconsin, along with plenty of print, radio and television media – both local and international – in attendance. As a demonstration for a brand, the atmosphere was more one of conviviality than consternation and bitterness, a gathering of first-time friends more than an acrimonious protest.
Make the jump for more of the story and check out our high-res gallery below.
Gallery: Sell Saab Rally in Detroit
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Photos by Chris Paukert/Copyright (C)2009 Weblogs, Inc.
Continue reading Saab owners gather in wintery Detroit, urge GM to sell brand
Saab owners gather in wintery Detroit, urge GM to sell brand originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 05 Jan 2010 19:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
The Oregon Scientific Wireless Appliance Manager consists of two devices: a wireless transmitter that sits between an appliances plug and an outlet, and a display unit that then tells you just how much juice it’s using.
The simple device comes in two flavors: the basic Wireless Appliance Manager, which handles one appliance, and the Advanced Wireless Appliance Manager, for the truly obsessive, which can handle up to 8 transmitters at once.
The single-appliance version will run you $60, while the fancy version will run you $80 (plus more for extra transmitters, one assumes). [Oregon Scientific]
Durante a administraçao de Carlos Sampaio, concretizou-se um ideal antigo de reforma urbana do Distrito Federal: o desmonte do Morro do Castelo.
Tal morro tratava-se de uma das colinas históricas, a partir de onde a cidade havia sido colonizada durante o século XVI — enchentes sempre foram comuns no Rio devido a clima e topografia, o que fazia dos morros locais perfeitos para estabelecimento de habitações e órgãos públicos.
Desde a época de D. João VI, no entanto, já se cogitava demolir o berço da cidade, por justificativas que iam do higienismo a teorias como a que dizia que a circulação do ar era primordial para a erradicação de doenças (daí a suposta necessidade dos bulevares). E o Morro do Castelo era considerado uma barreira natural aos ventos.
(ABREU, Maurício de A. "Evolução Urbana do Rio de Janeiro")
Além disso, com os movimentos de expansão da cidade, o morro foi cada vez mais perdendo status, e sendo ocupado por cortiços e habitações e negócios populares diversos. Por isso, o plano de Pereira Passos para aquele obstáculo, não realizado em seu tempo, cumpriu seu fim para a realização das comemorações do centenário da Independência, e a exposição internacional correspondente.
(ABREU, Maurício de A. "Evolução Urbana do Rio de Janeiro")
Foram construídos pavilhões, alguns dos quais ainda podem ser vistos (Museu da Imagem e do Som, Academia Brasileira de Letras e parte do Museu Histórico Nacional). Posteriormente, o Plano Agache criava uma solução monumental para os aterros resultantes do desmonte, o que foi realizado em parte. Os antigos bairros do Castelo e da Misericórdia, extintos sob o morro, dariam lugar a uma esplanada que deveria ser o centro de negócios do Distrito Federal.
Getúlio Vargas deu prosseguimento à ocupação da chamada Esplanada do Castelo, com o Ministério da Fazenda, o Ministério do Trabalho, monumentais, e o Ministério da Educação e Saúde, próximo a eles.
A questão toda é: o desmonte foi lamentável, e hoje seria criminoso. Apesar da decadência conjuntural, o patrimônio histórico ali contido era incalculável (e isso sem nem se falar do lendário tesouro do jesuítas, supostamente enterrado sob o morro), e a cidade perdeu seu coração, sua origem.
Entretanto, daquela ruína arrasadora surgiu uma das partes mais fascinantes do Rio de Janeiro, um dos meus lugares preferidos aqui. Talvez junto a Copacabana e Flamengo, o Castelo contenha a maior parte do art déco da cidade. Um art déco tropical, com venezianas Copacabana e linhas suaves.
Além disso, há ainda excelentes exemplares do início do Modernismo, e (corrijam-me os arquitetos) alguns exemplares híbridos, entre as duas escolas — prédios escalonados com portões de ferro, mas também pilotis. Além, claro, dos coloniais.
Enfim, se você chegou até aqui, eu fico lisonjeado. Caso queira saber mais do Morro do Castelo, sugiro o seguinte link, que emula um roteiro turístico pelo Rio Antigo: http://www.hcgallery.com.br/cidade20.htm
Enfim, o paradoxo é: arrasaram o Castelo. Mas o resultado é fantástico.
Não segui exatamente as especificações do antigo Morro ou da Esplanada do Castelo (atual Avenida Presidente Antônio Carlos), mas um conjunto delimitado pela Rua São José, Rua México, Avenida Beira-Mar, Avenida General Justo e Perimetral.
Espero que gostem, sobretudo aqueles que ainda não conhecem o Castelo.
