The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘more-or-less’

Some more Psystar news for y’all. You’ll recall that the renegade company was more or less shut down last week, slapped with an injunction and expected to pay Apple an awful lot of money

Read the original:
Psystar, Apple reach settlement: No more PCs pre-loaded with Mac OS X (but Rebel EFI may be safe)

The Android robot that graces Google’s front lawn got a new dessert friend today: a giant Eclair, drizzled with some chocolate syrup. The Eclair now sits alongside two other over-sized confections: an enormous cupcake and an intimidatingly large donut. You can see a video of the upwrapping of the new treat below, taken by Android engineer Dan Morrill according to Androidandme.

The dessert trio is, of course, a product of Google’s quirky sense of humor: each Google Android release has a dessert codename (Cupcake was 1.5 and Donut was 1.6, and Eclair is 2.0), and the Android team puts out a new giant sculpture to coincide more or less with the software’s release.

What that means is that we’re likely very close to seeing Android 2.0, codename Eclair, for the first time. Nothing’s for certain yet (Google hasn’t made any announcements), but when a Donut was spotted in front of Google back in September the developer release was out within a few days.

There have also been persistent rumors that Motorola’s Sholes phone (AKA Droid and Tao) will be making its debut by the end of the month, and that it will be the first phone to feature Eclair, so the timing lines up.

Also worth noting: the video below was taken by an Android phone, and given that this is the Android team we’re talking about it’s reasonable to think they’re testing out the latest-and-greatest. Looking good.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

This is utterly insane. A research team from several universities has put together a system whereby you can draw a terrible stick picture sketch, label your blobby objects what they’re supposed to be, and it will essentially photoshop something together for you that meets your criteria. I kid you not.

See original here: 
Now your MS Paint sketches can be rendered into full-blown photochops

In the never-ending battle to protect our freedoms, detecting chemical agents and illegal drugs remains a top priority. Luckily, the smart people at Queen’s University in Belfast have just come up with a new way that will provide instant results, and won’t be something that can be tricked by covering scents or other materials. There’s an obvious problem with the current technology

See the original post:
New technology will detect chemical weapons in seconds

It’s possible that this escaped my attention in 1997, because at the time, I would have been listening to Smashing Pumpkins and playing Riven most of the time. Meanwhile, Apple was slapping its name on a Fuji camera and trying to pioneer a new industry — and failing. It was a noble effort (like the Newton), but ultimately the Quicktake 200 was too early and probably too expensive.

More: 
Remember this thing? The Apple Quicktake 200

Unless it’s expensive or otherwise unique , it’s tough to get people pumped about Bluetooth headsets.

Here is the original post: 
Jabra wants you to be excited about their Stone headset

Choosing a wireless e-book reader is getting tougher all the time! Well, maybe not all that tough but here’s a chart comparing the offerings from Amazon, Sony, and IREX.

Read more from the original source:
Compare Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader Daily Edition, and IREX DR800SG wireless e-book readers with this handy chart

We’re shocked (shocked!) that yes, Twitter is broken again. Once again, rather than the Fail Whale, it’s been getting the annoyingly bland 503 error on and off all night. And while the service may appear to be up for you, it may be an illusion. Despite the frontend fading in and out of existence, new tweets aren’t being reliably passed through as of right now. And third-party services getting data through the APIs are seeing delays.

But while a lot of these Twitter issues are old hat, and far from shocking, today brought about a couple new annoying issue from the service.

The winner: Because Twitter is now tracking all outbound links, and having these 503 errors, a huge number of links that would normally have been working today were caught up in the 503 errors, and seemed to be broken. They weren’t, Twitter is.

The runner-up: Twitter’s @reply sidebar button was more or less broken the entire day. Sometimes it would work, but more often then not it would just keep on spinning, without serving up any results.

Fun times, especially when you’re trying to test Twitter-based services to write up. That new datacenter is supposedly up and running, but for some reason Twitter is not. Let’s see how she does during the Apple keynote tomorrow.

[thanks Josh and Wally]

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

We’ll probably have some more details on this later today, but we’re able to spill some of it now seeing as much of it just went live on Samsung’s own site.

If you haven’t been keeping up with all the latest in Samsung news, here’s what you need to know: Samsung’s got a widget interface called TouchWiz, which they’ve been rolling out across their touchscreen phones since around June of last year. You’ve got a drawer containing some widgets, and four flickable pages to toss these widgets onto. So far, they’ve got it up and running on Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Samsung’s own proprietary OS. TouchWiz looks and behaves more or less identically on all of these platforms, providing some degree of uniform user experience across vastly different interfaces.

We haven’t been huge fans of TouchWiz thus far, largely because of its lack of expandability. Each TouchWiz-enabled device came with 10-15 widgets, and that was that. If you wanted to download more, you were out of luck. If you wanted to make your own, that was just too bad. That’s all about to change.

We first broke the news about Dell releasing a smartphone exclusively for the Chinese market eight days ago. Some pieces of information on the so-called Mini 3i leaked a few days after, and today the Android device finally saw the light of day during a China Mobile event in Beijing (China Mobile is the world’s biggest phone carrier and distributes the phone in that country).