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Found under: Vonage, VoIP, T-Mobile, AT&T, Android,

Do you happen to own a T-MobileATT Android smartphone Are you looking for a new VoIP application I need at least one positive answer to show you the Vonage VoIP application which has been brought to T-Mobile and ATT Android customers. What you need to do in order to get the new app is simply follow the link below the break and install it on your Android smartphone. After that youll be able to make all the VoIP calls you want including international calls over WiFi and 3G and dome

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Check out Jeff’’s take on the iPad which he reboxed and returned to Apple.

P.S. Thanks to Jeff mentioning about Cory’s comment. I’ve now looked up this comment by Cory Doctorow and confirmed something I tried to block subconsciously when I was simply looking at the excitement of iPad. But Cory is right in writing,

“But the company that sells you your dishwasher doesn’t get to tell you which dishes you’re allowed to use. They don’t get to sue companies that make dishes that might possibly be loaded into the dishwasher. They don’t get to sue you for figuring out how to cook salmon in your dishwasher. They don’t get to sue O’Reilly if it publishes a recipe for dishwasher salmon.

Apple’s DRM isn’t useless. It is performing its function perfectly: scaring off innovators and sources of capital for innovation that seek to work outside its monopoly. To miss this is to miss everything.” [via Cory]

Filed under: Apple, Science & Technology, Video, YouTube

It seems Star Magazine was on to something when they reported that the cast of Jersey Shore wasn’t exactly being welcomed with open arms in The Sunshine State.

The second season of the MTV breakout hit will kick things off in the tourist hotspot of South Miami before the crew heads back to their old stomping ground in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, but according to tipsters for The New York Post and RadarOnline, many local establishments are none too pleased about the arrival of “gym, tan, laundry” and have declared M.I.A. a “Fist Pump Free Zone.”

“No one wants them to tape here,” a source blabbed to The Post on Saturday. “They went to the W Hotel the other night and got rejected. They were also refused by the Delano, Shore Club and the Mondrian.”

Another spy added, “Mike Sorrentino and ‘Pauly D’ DelVecchio pulled up in a black Escalade with New York plates at 9:30 Thursday morning blasting house music and parking in a 30-minute loading space in front of David’s Cafe. Dozens of locals were standing in line for their morning coffees . . . prompting them to roll their eyes and whisper to each other, ‘When do they leave?’”

Word is a number of hot spots are denying the group entry because they don’t want to be associated with the brawls that often follow them. A insider tells RadarOnline.com: “A lot of places don’t want the cast in their clubs and restaurants because they don’t have the best reputation and they’re concerned about fights breaking out.”

A teen has sued his mother for harassment after she logged into his Facebook account and changed content. He also claims she’s made “slanderous” comments about him in Facebook as well. It’s important to note that this 16-year-old lives with his grandmother and not his mother, and that he appears to be old enough to drive in his home state of Arkansas.

His mother says,

“You’re within your legal rights to monitor your child and to have a conversation with your child on Facebook whether it’s his account, or your account or whoever’s account.”

There are a lot of unanswered questions in spite of many reports about this story. What did the teen feel was “slanderous”? Does the mother have custodial rights? Where was the grandmother in all of this hubbub — is she out of touch with technology? What are the state’s laws regarding age of independence? And what exactly did the state’s prosecutors see which encouraged them to take up the case?

I talked this morning with my own 16-year-old about this situation; how would she feel if I’d “hacked” her Facebook page and changed content or wrote on her page? She was puzzled; she said she couldn’t imagine me changing anything on her page let alone logging into her site…

But there’s a reason for this: my kid’s been coached since she was old enough to hold a mouse and bang on a keyboard that protecting one’s privacy is paramount on the internet. We didn’t allow private email accounts until she was a teen in middle school, and instant messaging was occasionally supervised. She was only allowed to open a Facebook page after a year’s worth of coaching about privacy controls and online bullying along with sharing lots of examples online; we also talked frequently about the nature of the internet. Once published, content is out there forever, and anything she said could be misconstrued and used against her. And I wouldn’t be able to protect her from the consequences once she began to use social media. She’d be taking a very big step toward her own independence without her mom holding her hand.

In spite of all the precautions and coaching, kids will still blow off parents and ignore pointed warnings. It was a mixed blessing that within 24 hours of creating her Facebook page, my kid was harassed unmercifully by a so-called friend — someone she thought was a friend in real life — to the point where she had to unfriend and block other communications from them. I couldn’t have made my case any better about the dangers of social media if I’d paid the obnoxious bully to do it for me.

Since then we’ve had no further drama with social media. There’s the occasional outburst of excessive texting by someone in her circle, or someone else becoming non-responsive, but these temporary situations generally mirror something else going on in the face-to-face world. The non-responsive person might have a new boyfriend/girlfriend, for example, and is hyper-focused on that new relationship instead of their friends. This happens in the unwired world as well as in the internet-mediated world, so not a surprise.

It still hurts to see your kid dealing with some very ugly truths, even after you’ve coached them about the ways of the world. It’s one thing to explain that some people are only fair-weather friends and what that means, but quite another to see it played out in the form of rabid bullying online. There’s only so much we can do as parents. At some point our kids are going to have to learn the hard way, just as we did. (more…)

Found under: HTC, Palm, Lenovo, Merger, ,

Just the other day we heard that Lenovo could be the company ready to save Palm. Well it turns out that the plot has thickened. Right now HTC seems to be the company ready to buy Palm but thats just a suggestion coming from Engadget at least for now but based on a couple of solid points. An HTC-Palm venture could make the difference in the current mobile environment we live in.Palm has a great proprietary OS but theyre not so good with hot handsets. The Pre and the Pixi are not the

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Yesterday, I was shocked to hear Morning Editions’ reporter talking about the current military situation in Afghanistan using the phrase “an area infested with the Taliban”. The use of the word “infested” is extremely problematic because no matter what you think about the Taliban, they are human beings and the people who live in that area are human beings. When an area is “infested” with rats, it is okay to annihilate them. But when you use the language on humans, you are using words that are unacceptable and dangerous.

When the incredible movie, Hotel Rwanda came out, one of the major points it made was how the language used on the hate radio created an atmosphere where it was acceptable to murder the Tutsis.

When I saw this movie I was moved to write:

Underlying the tension and drama of the film was the omnipresent talk radio, which effectively used demagoguery to incite the Hutus into believing that the Tutsis and moderate Hutus were the enemy. And once the slaughter began, the broadcasters coordinated the hunt for people that had escaped the initial rout. Using terminology that dehumanized their victims (“you can smell the cockroaches”) and building a case that the Tutsis deserved their fate, hate radio created an environment that inflamed the anger of the Hutus who had long felt oppressed under the colonial era.

Dehumanizing other people is wrong even when they are our enemies and even when they do horrific acts. They are still human beings and thus part of our human family and when we forget this, it reflects badly on the state of our society and the state of our individual souls.

I expect better of NPR.

As they do with any major new iPhone OS release, people have been tearing apart the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK from the very second it was available. Almost immediately, someone noticed that bits and pieces of iChat had found their way into the new software.

By itself, it didn’t really make sense. The iPhone has plenty of incredibly solid third-party IM applications — some of them being amongst the App Store’s best sellers. Why would Apple be sneaking any parts of iChat onto the iPhone? Then the first mentions of a front facing camera were unearthed, and it all started coming together in the form of two little words: video chat. Alas, there was no concrete proof that Apple was following the same train of thought.. until now.

You see, much of iPhone OS’ underpinnings can be revealed through tricks called “class dumping” and “string dumping”. Through class dumping, you can take a peek into which frameworks and APIs are being used by any given application. (Ever heard of an application using “unpublished” APIs? This is how the developers found those APIs in the first place — and how Apple caught them, for that matter.) Through string dumping, all of the various bits of text pre-programmed into an app can be ripped out and displayed.

When the guys over at 9to5Mac started using the above techniques to explore the innards of the new SDK, it all came spilling out. There they were, in good ol’ plain English: references to video chatting, ranging from inviting users to terminating calls. More digging unveiled that Apple appears to be testing video chat on four servers: three privately located on Apple’s own intranet, and one which is (currently) open to the world (albeit mostly useless).

We spoke to our own sources, many of whom were tight-lipped on the matter. Of those who did pipe up, they were able to confirm 9to5’s findings, along with at least 30 other references to video chat support that went unmentioned. All of them — and us, for that matter — seem to be wondering the same thing: why the heck did Apple leave this in (semi-private) public view? Apple’s known for shrouding even the most minute details in secrecy; here, it’s seems as if they’re almost intentionally throwing many dozens of hints about an unannounced feature in a place where tinkerers were almost guaranteed to find it. Is Apple learning to love the rumor mill?

My current educated guess based on everything that has been whispered to me so far: I don’t think iChat, as an IM client that would compete with the third party apps, is coming to the iPhone — but that Apple will be using bits and pieces of the iChat core to power their video chat service. I’ll keep my ear to the ground for more.

I was going through security at the airport the other day, and tossed my beeper into one of those gray bins — along with the device that should make the beeper superfluous, a cell phone.

“I didn’t know anyone used beepers anymore,” said the 30-something guy behind me.

What could I say?  That doctors also use typewriters, buggy whips, and ice boxes?

But those are really the wrong comparisons — better is something more early-90s, like this “mobile phone.”  For a while back then, beepers were a quite the status symbol among the junior high school set — especially if they were made of clear, teal-colored plastic.

And while teenagers have long ago moved on, virtually every doctor I know still carries a beeper.  One of my un-named colleagues (at and un-named hospital in an un-named city) became so frustrated by having to carry two devices that he hacked into his hospital’s paging system so that now he gets his pages on his cell phone as a text messages.

(He says texts over cell phones are sent via the same technology as pages.  Who knew?)

This article discusses some reasons why beepers have some advantages over other wireless systems.  But that was two years ago, and given advances in cell technology, I find it hard to believe those advantages wouldn’t be quickly be overshadowed by all the obvious benefits of a cell phone, particularly a modern smart device.

I, for one, would be happy to trade mine in.  Just say the word.

Found under: Microsoft, Turtle, Pure, Project Pink, Verizon,

The Project Pink phones are not new as weve seen them appear a bunch of times around the web. We know they should be coming at some point this month and Verizon seems to be the carrier thats going to launch them. We dont have release dates or actual prices yet and were still waiting for the official press release to come out. But whats seems to be already true is the fact that the Microsoft Turtle has been spotted in the wild. If its not the Turtle in the picture here th

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Aguardado pra chegar nos próximos anos, o novo sedã de luxo Audi A6 ainda não foi flagrado na sua rotina de testes. Enquanto isso não acontece, novas projeções revelam o que podemos esperar do novo Audi A6, além de conferir as ultimas noticias e especulações a seu respeito.

Visualmente, com exceção de sua grade dianteira, não existe tenta diferença dessa projeção com a publicada anteriormente do futuro Audi A6. Deixando seu visualmente de lado, as maiores novidades ficam por conta de sua estrutura ASF, que é baseada em quadros de chassis e composto de materiais de baixo peso e de ultima geração proporcionando um rigidez torcional 1,5 vezes maior que os de estrutura tradicional de aço.

Ainda no campo das especulações, e expectativa é que o novo Audi A6 receba uma variedade de motores que inclui um V6 de 2.8 litros e/ou um V8 de 4.2 litros/TFSI de 3.0 litros contando com a ajuda de um compressor ou turbo. Aprofundando ainda mais no campo das especulações, ainda é cogitado a inclusão do modelo no mundo dos veículos híbridos.

Fonte: TheMotorReport

After Orange County’s sheriff was indicted on corruption charges on
2007, supervisors made a point of looking beyond the county limits to
find a replacement who was free of the cronyism and scandal that had
tainted the office.

A retired Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department
division chief, Sandra Hutchens was lauded by one county supervisor for
being "removed from the political machinations in the county" and was
seen as a welcome breath of fresh air in a department that had been led
for decades by politically connected lawmen.



But now, facing
her first election bid, Hutchens is fighting criticism that she’s too
much of an outsider, a career cop from Los Angeles who just doesn’t
understand Orange County.



As sheriff, Hutchens shook up her
command staff, threatened to rescind concealed weapons permits handed
out by former Sheriff Michael S. Carona and struck an independent tone
that rubbed some county supervisors the wrong way, at times leaving
them out of the loop or having to ask questions after decisions had
been made.

Critics called it her L.A. style, a derisive term
in Orange County’s political sphere, where Los Angeles is seen as being
too liberal, a place where headstrong and overly autonomous leaders
reign.

Hutchens’ opponents in the June election have made political ammunition out of her L.A. roots, hoping to end her tenure.

In
deriding Hutchens’ proposal to house federal immigration detainees in
two county jails, one of her opponents, Anaheim Deputy Chief Craig
Hunter, wrote, "That is how they balance budgets and fight crime in Los
Angeles County, from where our current sheriff arrived."

Read the full story here.

–Raja Abdulrahim in Santa Ana

Photo: L.A. Times file

Have you heard of a government, any government in the world that actively discouraged citizens from voting? In fact, the Hong Kong top Duck has indicated he will NOT vote in the upcoming May 16th by-election. And it is optional for his senior executives to decide to vote or not (trust me, if any of them dare to show their faces to vote, it will be news that night and they will likely be finding a new job soon).

Under this kind of political climate, it is exciting to see the youth of HK interested enough about their political future to run in the upcoming by-election.

Their website is t12hk.org which redirects to their blog. In this English blog entry, they have an introduction about what they want to achieve. Note that they’ve raised the HK$250,000 in about 2 weeks time as the election deposit required by law but they are still raising funds for other election expenses like advertising to get their message out.

There are two news clips (both in Cantonese) about their efforts.

Filed under: Democracy, Hong Kong, Law, people, politics

Filed under: Etc., Videos

The man on the right is a Turk named Fevzi. He hails from the city of Gaziantep which, according to Wikipedia, is the sixth-largest in Turkey. So it isn’t because there’s nothing else to do that Fevzi has developed a full-featured repertoire of automotive sounds that he can bust out at a moment’s notice.

As you’ll see in the videos after the jump, these include a diesel Ford Transit and diesel Mitsubishi Canter; a tractor; Suzuki and Yamaha literbikes; a Yamaha 115cc bike; a boat; and a hometown favorite in the form of a Tofas Sahin car. Follow the jump to rock the noise – the first video is the original, the second is from Fevzi’s leap to Turkish television. Hat tip to Ozcan!

[Source: YouTube, YouTube]

Continue reading Video: Turkish ‘sound effects’ guy takes on bikes, cars, tractors

Video: Turkish ‘sound effects’ guy takes on bikes, cars, tractors originally appeared on Autoblog on Sat, 10 Apr 2010 20:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Steve Jobs, personal email replier he is these days, responded to a message from a developer regarding this week’s SDK kerfuffle. His (characteristically brief) take: “intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps.” More »

David Brooks has become Deputy Dawg, protecting us from change. His metaphor for why change today should be slow, steady and restrained is “Humble Hound”. Naturally for Bobo, Humble Hound is a woman, protecting us, as it were, from her “opposite”, the boardroom lions:

They are superconfident, forceful and charismatic. They call for relentless transformational change.

Bobo uses that false choice in order to have us step away from a leader, a Democrat, of course, who might be too comfortable with risk, who sees the great things that need to be done and who swings for the centerfield wall in order to get them. Such leaders are too fond of acquisitions (of power or companies), of shifts in direction and changes in strategy.

Bobo fails to tell us that it was a Republican president and his usurping vice president who gave us eight years of high risk policies that have failed miserably. Impliedly, he tells us that it is Mr. Obama who is too fond of risk, who believes his own campaign rhetoric – all evidence to the contrary – and that he really means to impose noble changes.

In Bobo’s mind, the most likely place that would lead us is not into a better future for Middle America, a goal he could not seriously claim to advocate, but into the land of excessive tax burdens on the wealthy and excessive regulation on the businesses they control. Those are actions he does oppose with consistency and fervor.

What sort of leadership ought we to have instead? A cautious, plodding Humble Hound, who can’t chew her gum and walk at the same time without constantly going off balance and correcting herself.

She spends more time seeing than analyzing. Analytic skills differ modestly from person to person, but perceptual skills vary enormously. Anybody can analyze, but the valuable people can pick out the impermanent but crucial elements of a moment or effectively grasp a context. This sort of perception takes modesty; strong personalities distort the information field around them. This sort of understanding also takes patience. As the Japanese say, don’t just study a topic. Get used to it. Live in it for a while.

Throughout, Bobo uses the feminine pronoun for his preferred Democratic leadership style. He might claim he did it for “balance” (an abused Beltway fetish), or because his source used it. What seems more likely is that he is playing a Freudian gender game and slamming the female stereotype, an act his patrons’ base seems to enjoy, while poking a stick at Mrs. Clinton (who lost her bid to be president) and Mr. Obama (who won it, but doesn’t know what to do with it).

The absurdity of Mr. Brooks’ arguments is usually plain. It is especially so here, along with his not so tongue-in-cheek slam at women.

The caution we should avoid is proposing too timid solutions to our long term economic woes and too timid responses to an opposing political party that no longer wants to govern America wisely, only to dominate it exclusively. The change we should fear is not adequately changing our health care and insurance industries, which are bankrupting Americans emotionally, morally and financially. The risk takers we should fear are those who govern Wall Street, and those who would throw out the Constitution because they have convinced themselves that they can wear the Ring and use it wisely. The only thing we need fear from from Mr. Brooks is that someone listens to him.

 

Subscribers to our email Grant Alert Newsletter will see a link to the Community Resilience and Recovery Initiative (CRRI), which is a program designed to provide “Grants to strength families, communities, and the workforce through appropriate, evidence-based interventions.” What does that mean applicants should actually propose to do?

You won’t really find out based on SAMHSA’s grant announcement, which says that you’re supposed to do things like “Reduce depression and anxiety” and “Reduce excessive drinking (and other substance use if the community chooses)” without saying how that is to be done. In other words, whoever wrote the announcement page forgot to answer the 5Ws and H.

From SAMHSA’s page you can download the application kit file, which has lots and lots of stuff about how important evidence is (“The CRRI will use a place-based strategy to implement multiple evidence-based interventions targeted to four levels in the community”), and how important strengthening communities are (“The intent of the program is to help communities mobilize to better manage behavioral health issues despite budgetary cuts in existing services and to promote a sense of renewal and resilience”), and so on, but no definitions of what it means to “promote a sense of renewal and resilience.” Grants are for $1.4 million—maybe you should use that for 20 giant potlucks.

In reading through the RFP, you’ll find several references to “Section I-2.2.” If you search for “2.2,” you’ll finally find what SAMHSA actually wants you to implement:

• Triple P – Positive Parenting Program
• Strengthening Families Program
• Families and Schools Together
• The JOBS Program
• Coping with Work and Family Stress
• Coping and Support Training (CAST)

In other words, it wants a mix of supportive family and jobs services. Even then, the RFP doesn’t tell you what these various programs entail—instead, it tells you go visit yet another website. If you want to figure out what SAMHSA actually wants you to do, you’ll have to drill through at least three levels of cruft: the announcement itself, the RFP, and then the highly intuitive “National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices (NREPP) Web site.”

Alas, the National Registry website isn’t easily reduced to a description appropriate for the newsletter. That’s why you’ll find our somewhat vague description in our newsletter, which mirrors the vagueness of the RFP itself. It seems to me that CRRI is really just Walking Around Money to do “something about substance abuse” for the big cities and counties that are eligible for this odd program.