Archive for February, 2012

Hey publishers, need more ways to breathlessly track just how well your app is doing on the Android Market ? Fear not, the store is getting a number of new observable metrics. Publishers can now track their app’s performance by unique users and unique devices and break things down by mobile carrier and app updates. The UI has been redesigned as well, making it faster and more compact, while adding a timeline that gives users a quick view of their app’s performance. For more information and other changes, click on the Source link below.

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New Android Market stats make it easier to obsess over your app’s performance

Sharp’s AQUOS SH-06D will most probably never leave the Land of The Rising Sun. That doesn’t stop us, however, from lusting after its 4.5-inch. This 720p display also manages 3D, spread across a slinky 10mm frame that houses NTT DoCoMo’s recently launched NOTTV streaming broadcast system. The device arrives in pink, white and blue options — all provided with a matching dock and built-in aerial

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Sharp AQUOS SH-06D arrives from Japan, we go hands-on (video)

Steve Moore, who identifies himself as a former FBI Special Agent and head of the Los Angeles Joint Terrorism Task Force Al Qaeda squad, says that the TSA is useless. He says that they don’t catch terrorists. He says they won’t catch terrorists. He says that they can’t catch terrorists. Oh, he also claims 35

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FBI anti-terrorism expert: TSA is useless

A redditor of Vietnamese descent discovered these giant water bugs in her/his mother’s freezer, put there “to scare me.” My Vietnamese mom had these in the freezer to scare me. It worked. (i.imgur.com) (via Neatorama)

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Delicious, ready-to-eat giant water bugs, frozen fresh to seal in the flavor

Microsoft is using its Windows 8 Consumer Preview event to show off some examples of hardware that’ll come fresh out of the box with the new OS when it ships later this year. The company has demonstrated both ARM and Intel x86 flavors of Windows 8 running on reference machines. While the traditional Intel-based version is somewhat of a known quantity thanks to the developer preview , we haven’t been able to see much of the ARM variety for ourselves — especially to what extent it’ll be able to replicate the traditional desktop experience . Microsoft wasn’t showing much new at first, with Julie Larson-Green starting out by using the Metro interface on the same Samsung preview slate we saw at BUILD last year, and Antoine Leblond…

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Microsoft shows off ARM and Intel-based Windows 8 hardware

Microsoft has removed the Start button orb from Windows 8 but its replacement is a lot more fitting for the company’s new operating system. A number of new gestures, for touch and keyboard / mouse, will activate various controls in Windows 8, but one of the new features is a preview-like task switcher. Activated from the lower left or top right of the screen, it allows Windows 8 users to switch through recently opened applications. The start button still exists and is available in the charms bar on the right hand side, providing access to the Start Screen. The button animates as it comes into view with what appears to be a flash of light over the Metro style logo.

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Windows 8: a closer look at how the new Start button works

We’re starting to see the first demos of working Metro apps for Windows 8. Amazon has created a Metro version of its Kindle app — no surprise, really, given that the company has been supporting as many platforms as possible, PC included. Microsoft also showed a dedicated WordPress app lets you share content directly with a charm. A Cookbook app got some attention as well, and Cut the Rope was shown to demonstrate how easy it was to turn HTML5 content into full apps. On a tour of the new Windows Store, we briefly saw a Metro version of Flixter as well as an icon for USA today.

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Microsoft shows off third-party Metro apps: Kindle, WordPress, and more

Microsoft is releasing the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 today, a highly anticipated software release from the company that marks the introduction of a full touch interface for Windows. The software giant has attempted to bring touch functionality to Windows over a number of years, but Windows 8 goes a huge step further by introducing a separate environment for new applications, designed with touch and Metro style in mind, to the masses of Windows users. Continue reading…

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Windows 8 Consumer Preview hands-on

The wait is finally over as Microsoft has published the highly anticipated Consumer Preview copy of Windows 8. Available as a public download, the Consumer Preview build includes access to Metro style applications and the over 100,000 changes Microsoft has made since the Windows 8 Developer Preview. You can download it here .

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Windows 8 Consumer Preview now available to download

ZTE’s been making some slow, but steady progress as it transitions from no name, white label manufacturer to more of a well-known brand. Aiding the company in that exact mission is one of its latest tablets, the PF 100, shown off by NVIDIA at this year’s Mobile World Congress. The apparently stock Android 4.0.3 slate packs a Tegra 3 CPU inside and 10.1-inch 1280 x 800 display.

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ZTE PF 100 hands-on at Mobile World Congress 2012 (video)

The Disaster Preparedness Plan prepared by the local DHS for Union County NC explains what steps you should take if you have to evacuate and take your pet fish: “Your name and where you will be located should be on an ID tag and taped to the fish bowl. This should include your description of

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DHS explains how to protect your pet fish in a disaster

The early days of Windows were inauspicious ones. Sitting on top of DOS, it was hardly a revolution in personal computing — instead it felt like a disjointed platform perched uncomfortably atop a command prompt, ready to come crashing down at any moment. That’s what it was, and often that’s what it did. The early days of Windows required constant jumps from GUI to shell as users ran a wide assortment of apps, only some of which played nice inside a window. It was over a decade later, after Windows 95, that the operating system would truly ditch its DOS underpinnings and feel like a totally integrated system

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Microsoft Windows 8 Consumer Preview detailed impressions

Sprint TV, a long-time stalwart of mobile video in the US, has finally reached the iPhone with both its free and premium channels. The service offers ESPN, the Disney Channel, the Weather Channel, NBC, CBS, ABC Mobile, USA, Bravo, Syfy, and SPEED on the go for free. If that’s not enough, you can also subscribe to additional channels including Comedy Central, Fox News, and MTV in packages ranging from $4.99 to $9.99 a month.

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Sprint TV comes to the iPhone

Don’t say we didn’t warn you . As anticipated, Leap Day is all about Microsoft in Barcelona, and Microsoft is all about you, the consumer. Redmond today officially unveiled the Consumer Preview of its forthcoming desktop operating system.

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Windows 8 Consumer Preview now available for download

At Penny Arcade Report, Ben Kuchera reports on Cross Assault. A “fighting game” reality show sponsored by Capcom, creator of the classic Street Fighter game series, it was a disaster of sexual harassment, casual racism and adolescent nastiness. Aris Bakhtanians, the coach of the Tekken team … stated that sexual harassment and the fighting game

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Meet the sexist, racist pigs of Capcom’s fighting-game reality show

First it was the AT200 , then the Excite X10 , and now it’s the Excite 10 LE. But behind the onion-like layering of names sits a singular and rather beautiful slate, with a 10.1-inch LED backlit display, a 7.7mm (0.3-inch) chassis and a righteous 1280 x 800 resolution. Toshiba says it’ll arrive at select US retailers on March 6th, which happens to coincide pretty closely with another possible technology incident . And since there could well be some tough buying dilemmas on the horizon, let’s recount just a few more specs: The $530 version of the 10 LE has 16GB of storage, while 32GB can be had for $600.

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Toshiba Excite 10 LE gets March 6th launch date, confirmed $530 price, yet another name

Today is the big day — popular BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay is no longer hosting .torrent files, and moving entirely to magnet links . At least, sort of. According to TorrentFreak , the Bay is planning to keep torrents with 10 peers or less on the site for the time being, “in case someone who created a torrent has an outdated client that doesn’t support magnets.” With magnet links, users share not only bits and pieces of a file with their peers, but the actual torrent file that points new downloaders in the right direction.

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The Magnet Bay: file sharing site does away with .torrent files today

YouTube has added a pile of improvements to the closed captioning service it launched in 2006. Automatic captions use speech recognition to build captions from the audio track, and they’re now available in Japanese and Korean in addition to English. To test the feature, we let YouTube listen to a Japanese video on sign language (below), and while we thought we were hearing a discussion about Kawaji Sensei’s teaching methods, the subtitles we got had something to do with low air pressure, a 7500 yen debt, and a Japan-Korea war. That said, the player reminds us that the feature is in beta, and we expect it to get better with time

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YouTube improves closed captioning, adds new languages and formats

Skype’s big news this week is the release of a beta Windows Phone client — the first fruit of its collaboration with new owner Microsoft — and we circled back with the company today to get some more clarity on the product and its plans for the future. The most surprising thing we learned in our testing is that the app simply doesn’t work in the background — you can’t receive calls or stay on them when the app isn’t displayed, reminiscent of the iPhone app’s behavior prior to the background support added in iOS 4. Though Windows Phone 7.5 added some backgrounding capability, Skype says that this is a limitation of Mango (and Tango) and that there’s nothing that it can do to fix it; this isn’t something that you’ll see changed when… Continue reading…

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Skype for Windows Phone can’t run in background due to platform limitation

Today’s the day! It’s been months since we tested the Windows 8 Developer Preview , and now Microsoft is finally ready to let the general PC-using public give it a whirl. While we already have a feel for the overarching interface, which mashes together the traditional desktop and Metro-inspired tiles, we haven’t yet had a glimpse of the native apps that will ship as part of the OS. And think of the untold number of tweaks Redmond must have made since the Developer Preview dropped! Will we get to poke around the Windows Store? Will switching between apps be any less jarring this go ’round?

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Live from Microsoft’s Windows 8 press event at Mobile World Congress 2012!

The French government has requested that Google delay the launch of its new privacy policy just two days before it’s scheduled to take effect. After being selected to head the European Union’s investigation into the legality of the new privacy policy, France’s National Commission for Computing and Civil Liberties (CNIL) has sent an open letter to Google CEO Larry Page outlining the EU’s concerns. In it, the CNIL wrote that the new policy “does not meet the requirements of the European Directive on Data Protection, especially regarding the information provided to data subjects.” The French authority is particularly concerned with two points: Google’s lack of transparency when it comes to what information is being collected and why, and… Continue reading…

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Google’s new privacy policy under fire from EU investigators

Raspberry Pi, an innovative $35 GNU/Linux box in a tiny package, launched yesterday — sort of. Demand was so hot that all the company’s retail partners collapsed under load. From Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul: The product is a bare board with a 700MHz ARM11 CPU and 256MB of RAM. It’s roughly the size of a

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Raspberry Pi launch so popular that retail partners collapse under load

Here’s a little secret Whole Foods doesn’t like to advertise: they want, nay, demand , that a rather large percentage of residents near its highfalutin grocery stores have a college degree. Apparently you’ve gotta be smart to navigate its aisles crowded with over-priced organic wares and exotic condiments. Perhaps, though, the company has realized the error of its ways and wants to move in to new markets. That doesn’t mean it trusts you and your high school diploma to decipher all those labels with difficult to pronounce words on them.

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Whole Foods experimenting with Kinect-powered shopping carts that are smarter than you (video)

Boasting about in-game achievements is all but common at this point — but what about boasting about the use of your gaming peripheral itself? That’s what Roccat Studios has in mind with Savu , a new optical mid-size gaming mouse with an achievements system that turns button clicks and mouse drags into trackable accomplishments. The mouse features a sensor capable of 400, 800, 1600, or 4000dpi operation, Omron switches, and a rear lighting bar that allows users to chose between 16.8 million different colors to set the mood. It also incorporates Roccat’s “Easy-Shift” system, allowing players to assign multiple functions to the peripheral’s two buttons and scroll wheel

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Roccat’s Savu gaming mouse turns scrolling into a competitive sport

It’s hard not to get excited whenever we come across a story about print media finding new, unique ways to thrive. That’s why we love the what Lim Cheng Soon is doing. He’s the creator of Hacker Monthly : a print and digital-edition magazine that curates the best articles from Hacker News . Soon wanted a way to keep up-to-date with the best articles from the site while offline, so he started compiling them into a print magazine. Twenty-two issues and 4,700 subscribers later, he’s now working on Hacker Monthly full-time

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‘Hacker Monthly’ embraces print media