Category: News

Ever thought of taking Isaac’s plasma cutter into an online match to see who’s better at Dead Space’s strategic dismemberment concept? If an Electroni…

Read translations of the President’s speech in Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese or Korean. 

For some, our relationship with the nations of Asia may not always be at the forefront of their minds.  The President’s sweeping speech at Suntory Hall in Tokyo was a powerful argument for why that should not be so.  Indeed the President noted that to the extent this attitude has been reflected in our government’s neglect of the emerging multilateral organizations in the region, this mistake would not be made again: "I know that the United States has been disengaged from many of these organizations in recent years. So let me be clear:  Those days have passed."  The rapid pace of development on virtually every front in Asia creates an environment of almost endless opportunity for collaboration and innovation through our ties.

Long gone are the days when 10GB of hard disk were more than plenty for any average user. Today’s computer user can’t get enough even with 500GB of hard disk storage, given all the free information and documentation one can find on the Internet. And if you add some more to the mix of data, one thing is for sure: you can never have a large enough hard disk.

One downside to large storage devices filled with information is that finding what you need may become a much more time consuming task than you anticipated. This is one situation when TheSearchMan may come in handy. It is a small-weight software (only 35 kb in size) designed to help you find the data you need in no time.

Moreover, the application is free to use, which is really a big plus, and doesn’t need any fancy installation. You just unzip the program in a specific location and it’s good to go. But this does not mean that it is portable and you can carry it on a portable device to use on just any computer.

TheSearchMan comes with a single requirement and that refers to the fact that you must have the .NET Framework 3.5 installed on your system. We’ve tested it on Windows 7 and it works very well thus proving itself Win 7 compatible.

The first thing that you will most probably observe when opening TheSearchMan is that its interface is ver… (read more)

Created by the design firm STORM of London, the Circuit MK2 is an LED watch integrated into a stainless steel bracelet. While it looks like it might have a bit of a learning curve, it definitely has a unique look that should stand out from your standard analog dial or digital display.

It’s a fairly basic watch, there’s no chronograph functionality (obviously) but it does display the time and date. Sure it’s not quite as bling as a Tokyoflash watch, but this one you might actually be able to read. Retail price starts at $200.

The Prime Minister has said the Government will focus on building a “stronger, fairer Britain” during the Queen’s speech next week.

• Listen to the podcast
• Transcript: PM podcast on Queen’s Speech

On Wednesday, the Queen will outline the Government’s legislative plan for the next parliamentary session which will include details of plans for health, job creation and tackling crime and terrorism.

In a podcast released today, the PM said:

“This is a difficult period for our country. But Britain has a bright future; one I’m optimistic about and which I believe can be one not of austerity, but progress, and one where all the people of Britain move forward together.”

Gordon Brown outlined plans to reduce Government borrowing and encourage growth through targeted investment that creates jobs and builds a “modern, green infrastructure” for the digital age.

He also outlined plans for a “transformation” of financial sector policing, where consumers are able to take collective action to hold banks to account.

Mr Brown added that credit card companies would be banned from encouraging people to borrow more than they can realistically afford.

On public services, the PM said:

“A better Britain means world class public services underpinned by guarantees not gambles. So we are moving to a system where patients, parents and local communities have enforceable rights over the services they receive – and front line staff have more freedom to shape the service they give.”

We will have more coverage of the Queen’s Speech on Wednesday, 18 November.

Aksys Games has announced a release window for Record of Agarest War, an SRPG developed by Compiled Heart, RED Entertainment, and Idea Factory. They a…

Why? Just because. This looks like an amazing game. Nicholas will have a review up tomorrow.

via ConsoleNintendo

When the Motorola Droid launched this month everyone was amazed that a company so down on its luck was able to put together a well-designed phone running a powerful, “brand new” OS. The whole package – hardware, software, and marketing – seemed flawless. In fact, phones running Android 1.5 now look hopelessly outdated and with 2.0’s gesture, CDMA, and search support you’d wonder why handset manufacturers like HTC, LG, Kyocera, and Samsung are using 1.5 at all.

The reasons have more to do with Google than any decision on the carriers’ part. In fact, according to a source close to the handset business, Google’s Android team directly assisted Motorola and Verizon in building the Droid’s software from the ground up and is currently assisting another, unknown, handset maker in Korea to create a finely-tuned hardware and software combination. Most important, however, is that this is sort of assistance most manufacturers do not receive and, in the end, they are dinged for running an “older” version of Android.

These two bits of information – that Google assists certain companies in making specialized hardware and software and that Google is now helping another manufacturer to the detriment of others – sounds like sour grapes. However, the original vision for Android (as it was understood by lay users like myself) was an open, free OS available to multiple manufacturers and carriers. This preferential treatment is an anathema to that thought. This is akin to Linus Torvalds building a special version of Linux just for a commercial partner and refusing to release it until that partner has milked its value.

While it is clear that some manufacturers like HTC are keeping a stiff upper lip and running their special special UIs over 1.5, reviewers consistently ding manufacturers for running 1.5 while the Droid is given a pass.

And 2.0 matters. We asked Ross Rubin from the NPD Group about his thoughts on 2.0 and got back a half a book:

Android 2.0 brings refinement and more integration to the operating system, Examples include support for Microsoft Exchange and Facebook, which are the digital contact centers of many people’s professional and social lives. It also brings a revamped and much faster browser, albeit one that Google isn’t yet deriving from Chrome. The other big application improvement is Google Navigation, which it has introduced as a free service on top of Maps. Many carriers, including Verizon, charge for such functionality in other devices. Google is aggressively driving a major update while Microsoft is between major revisions of Windows Mobile.

We asked him why he thought Motorola got 2.0 early. He wrote:

As to why it debuted on a Motorola device, there could be several reasons. Verizon’s subscriber strength and more direct competition with AT&T and the iPhone may have led it to push for Android 2.0 to be more competitive. Or it could be simple product development timetables. Moving forward, HTC will want to put its Sense user experience on top of Android 2.0, which requires development time. Google wants a healthy Android ecosystem and a competitive Motorola contributes to that.

While this desire is absolutely understandable on Google’s part, there is a method to this madness. Google releases major updates on one handset and one handset alone. These updates are then pushed out to other android partners. Case in point:

• 1.0 went to the HTC G1

• 1.5 went to the HTC Hero
• 2.0 went to Motorola

In short, they offer exclusivity to a certain partner in exchange to unfettered access to the design process which, in Motorola’s case, was gravely needed.

Why is there no outcry? Handset manufacturers are deathly afraid of Google. They worry that they will be cut out of the upgrade process and lose access to Google’s Android team.

What needs to be done? In the interest of fairness, all updates should roll out to the general ecosystem before heading to any one carrier. Sadly, this hippie attitude is no good for Google’s business and by creating flagship devices featuring their latest and greatest they ensure forward momentum for the platform. Fairness, it seems, stops at the grade school sandbox.

Again, you can take this as a complaint or a call to action. Android is an excellent platform but Google’s tendency towards “flagship” phones is detrimental to the general ecosystem, especially once the OS falls in along with RIM and Apple as a preeminent smartphone platform.

Have you ever wondered what would happen to your content on third-party sites if those sites ceased to exist? You may own your content on them as it stands now, but what if they went away? 

Would you be ok if your tweets or your status updates disappeared? Discuss here.

You may recall earlier this year when URL-shortening service Tr.im announced it was going to shut down and sparked a big discussion about what happens to all of these links if such a service just decides it doesn’t want to exist anymore. It is an interesting discussion, and it ultimately led to Tr.im having a change of heart and deciding to remain functional.

Now, the Internet Archive has announced the launch of 301Works.org, a service, which archives shortened URLs. The organization sums up the need for such a service pretty well:

The use of shortened URLs has grown dramatically due to the popularity of Twitter and similar micro-streaming services where posts are limited to a small number of characters.  Millions of shortened URLs are generated for users every day by a wide variety of companies.

But when a URL shortening service shuts down, the shortened URLs people put in their blogs, tweets, emails and web sites break.  Unless users have kept a record of each shortened URL and where it was supposed to redirect to, it’s not possible to fix them.

Over 20 URL shortening services have gotten involved with 301Works.org, and Bit.ly (Twitter’s service of choice) has already begun donating archives.

"Short URL providers have in the space of eighteen months become a corner stone of the real time web — 301Works.org was conceived to provide redundancy so that users and services could resolve a URL mapping regardless of availability.  The Internet Archive is a perfect host organization to run and manage this for all providers," said Bit.ly CEO John Borthwick.

"The Internet Archive is honored to play this role to help make the Web more robust," added Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive.

The issue of archiving the web of course touches a much broader spectrum than that of URL-shorteners. 301Works should go a long way for maintaining shortened URLs, but what about Facebook updates? Tweets? What if Facebook or Twitter decided to shut down one day? According to Twitter’s terms of service, you own your content, but Twitter does host it and they have control over it regardless of whether or not you own it. Jesse Stay talked about this with WebProNews in a recent interview:

The concept of Twitter or Facebook shutting down seems far-fetched, but the same thing probably could’ve been said about Geocities 12 years ago. Now Yahoo has shut it down. It’s just something to think about. Given the speed of the real-time web, it seems that archiving could become a concept of growing importance.

Do you agree that archiving is growing in importance? Share your thoughts here.

Related Articles:

>Ushering In a Whole New Era of Linking Questions

>R.I.P. GeoCities: A Community is Killed

>Who Really Owns Your Tweets?

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch claims to have heard from "a reliable source" that Google will be launching the much-anticipated Chrome OS within a week. The tech industry media has been punked on Chrome OS in the past, but as Arrington notes, Google has said to expect it in the fall, and fall is running out.

Chrome OS is Google’s attempt to "rethink what operating systems should be." It’s an open source, "lightweight" operating system to be initially targeted at netbooks.

"Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS," Google said upon the Chrome OS announcement. "We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work."

"The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform," the company continued. "All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform."

Arrington says he thinks driver support will be an issue with Chrome OS. "…Having a robust set of functioning drivers is extremely important to Chrome OS’s success. People will want to download this to whatever computer they use and have it just work," he says. "We expect Google will be careful with messaging around the launch, and endorse a small set of devices for installation. EEE PC netbooks, for example, may be one set of devices that Google will say are ready to use Chrome OS. There will likely be others as well, but don’t expect to be able to install it on whatever laptop or desktop machine you have from day one."

If Arrington’s source truly is reliable, then we should see how the launch of Chrome OS pans out very soon. It’s going to be very interesting to see how Google competes with Microsoft in the operating system space, as it is doing in both search and web browsers.

Related Articles:

> Will Google Chrome OS Challenge Windows?

> Fake Chrome OS Screenshots Punk Tech Media

> Steve Ballmer Skeptical Of Chrome OS

2009Nov14: Land development, along with warmer temperatures and rising seas that many scientists link to climate change, have greatly reduced the Pacific turtle population (New York Times).

Reference: New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/science/earth/14turtles.html

Image Description: Aerial photo of Playa Tamarindo and River mouth showing the town and beach of Tamarindo, Costa Rica, and the Pacific Ocean. Photo by Tamarindowiki, 2007. Image Location: Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Costa_Rica_Playa_Tamarindo_and_Rivermouth_2007_Aerial_Photograph_Tamarindowiki_01.JPG Image Permission: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of the file under the conditions that you appropriately attribute it, and that you distribute it only under a license identical to this one.

Ed. note: You can always keep up with Secretary Chu through his Facebook page.

Before joining President Obama in China on Monday, I am visiting India, another crucial partner for the United States as we meet the challenge of climate change and help speed the transition to a clean energy economy.

India has three times as many citizens as the United States but consumes just 15 percent as much electricity. But in the coming decades, India is likely to become the third largest energy consumer in the world, following China and the United States. In a "business as usual" future, India’s demand of coal will be 60% higher than projected its domestic production. The demand for oil could be 10 times the domestic supply.

Update 2:  Matt Cutts gave WebProNews another exclusive interview, in which he gave some more details about Caffeine (among other things. It’s only hitting one data center before the holidays, and it isn’t even live quite yet. Google will roll it out to more data centers in January.

discussed the rolling out of the Caffeine update further with popular search enthusiast Barry Schwartz:     What are your thoughts on Google’s Caffeine update? Discuss here. If you are unfamiliar with Caffeine, it is an algorithm update that Google announced in the summer. Upon the announcement, Google’s Matt Cutts said, "The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there.  Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all.  This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure." Cutts told WebProNews about Caffeine in the following interview:   When Caffeine was introduced, so was a sandbox, where people could play around with Caffeine based search results, and get a look at how rankings were altered (if at all), and try to get a feel for how it was going to go. Now that sandbox has closed up shop, it looks like the Caffeine update will be live in Google search before too long. It will start after the holidays at least though. "I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays," says Cutts on his blog. "Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays." The announcement at what used to be the Caffeine sandbox reads: We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox. Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given. Of course as people tested Caffeine via the sandbox, many of them blogged about their results and findings. The general consensus seemed to be that Caffeine is fast and utilizes real-time search a great deal. Given Google’s frequent announcements related to speed, and a recently announced deal with Twitter, speed and real-time search seem like logical updates to Google search results. When SEOBook’s Aaron Wall tested Caffeine, he said he thought there was: – an increased weighting on domain authority & some authoritative tag type pages ranking (like Technorati tag pages + Facebook tag pages), as well as pages on sites like Scribd ranking for some long tail queries based mostly on domain authority and sorta spammy on page text – perhaps slightly more weight on exact match domain names – perhaps a bit better understanding of related words / synonyms – tuning down some of the exposure for video & some universal search results This stuff should not necessarily be taken as gospel. These are just the results and speculations of individuals from tests of a product that was only introduced (for testing purposes), let alone finalized. It is what it is. As the Caffeine update rolls out, there will no doubt be more and more mystery unraveled as search industry professionals scramble to stay ahead of the game, and Google drops subtle hints from time to time. It’s going to be interesting to see where Caffeine takes the world’s most popular search engine. Have you tested Caffeine? What do you think about the update? Share your findings here. Related Articles: > Matt Cutts Talks Google Caffeine Update > Where’s Bing’s Real-Time Search? > Facebook/Twitter Use May Now Mean More for Google/Bing Rankings November 14, 2009 Daily Crunch: Water Pixi Edition Palm Pixi Review: Not for everyone, but it fits a niche NASA: We found water on the Moon Japan to operate solar energy station in outer space Review: Alesis DM6 Drum Kit Google Chrome OS To Launch Within A Week November 14, 2009 Indian Happy Meal The past week I’ve been in Bangalore, India visiting my team. The picture to the right was of my breakfast plate as it arrived one morning and it simply looked like a happy face, so, I’m christening it the “Indian Happy Meal.” The food experience this trip was pretty interesting. Three people on the team (not me) were afflicted with food poisoning from two different hotels, we had a friendly roach at a non-hotel restaurant, and one person had a lively experience for breakfast speaking of happy meals…….. One of my colleagues decided to eat some bran cereal from the breakfast buffet of a five star hotel this week. He poured in the milk and saw in addition to the bran cereal, substance that looked like flax seeds. The thought was, people who like fiber will also like flax. But then he thought about the fact that things like raisins were separate and started looking a little more closely at the “flax.” Now, it’s important to say that he’s been eating the cereal at this point of the story…….upon further examination, the flax seemed to be moving. He consulted another colleague at the table “What does this look like?” and a “flax” was spooned on to a plate – it started crawling away. It wasn’t one, it was a whole colony. The person in question handled the situation calmly and coolly informing the manager and asking them to remove the cereal from the buffet to prevent further “flax” mistakes from occurring. Later that day, the hotel called the colleague to inquire about his stay and he took the opportunity to share his experiences. The next morning when I arrived for breakfast met by the manager of the hotel asking what he could do to make things right (it seems someone mentioned that I was the “boss” and they ought to make me happy too……) The long and the short of it is, the hotel took the matter seriously and addressed the situation promising it would never happen again and offered us a dinner, which we accepted and enjoyed at one of the nice restaurants on the property. Now, will we stay there again? I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure the people at the original breakfast table will not! I should say for clarity’s sake, the food I’ve had in Bangalore has been very, very good over my trips, this was just an anomaly I think. Ah the joys of business travel……… November 14, 2009 OWASP Publishes Top 10 Web App Security Risks for 2010 Last night the OWASP project published the 2010 issue of their Top 10 Web Application Security Risks. The list is still in Release Candidate status, so it may change. The difference from the previous lists according to the statement by OWASP A significant change for this update will be that the OWASP Top 10 will be focused on the Top 10 Risks to Web Applications, not just the most common vulnerabilities. At the conference will be the debut of the release candidate of the new Top 10, which will open up a 60 day comment period. As a summary, the top 10 risks to your Web Apps are: Injection flaws Cross Site Scripting (XSS) Broken Authentication and Session Management Insecure Direct Object References Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Security Misconfiguration Failure to Restrict URL Access Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards Insecure Cryptographic Storage Insufficient Transport Layer Protection It is evident that OWASP hasn’t invented the wheel all over again, and that this list has already been discussed for years. Yet it still falls on deaf ear for many developers – even large development companies. You can download the full list document here, with detailed explanation of each risk. Talkback and comments are most welcome Related posts SANS Announced Top 25 Programming Errors November 14, 2009 The Biggest Loser interactive game now out  The Biggest Loser for the DS and Wii is now out, thanks to Blitz Games and THQ. The famous TV show that advocates a healthier lifestyle in both … November 14, 2009