Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

A large addressable audience is no longer necessary (push) when every individual can search for what they want, when they want it (pull).

Samsung Barges Into Flip Territory With HMX-U10 1080p Pocket Camcorder [Camcorders]

Samsung has finally joined the illustrious, bulging ranks of Flip-imitating manufacturers, announcing the HMX-U10, a 1080p-recording, 10-megapixel-shooting compact camcorder set to land in September.

It's a form-factor that doesn't leave much room for creativity, but Samsung's managed to put together a distinctive product with the HMX-U10. The slightly swept design allows for more comfortable gripping than the flat bricks we've all grown accustomed to, and the compact profile—56mm x 103mm x 15.5mm—belies its solid specs, and most notably its ability to record 1080p H.264 video, as opposed to the industry standard 720p. Otherwise, we're in familiar territory here: there's a one-touch YouTube upload button, fixed-focus lens, expandable SD storage and a two-inch LED screen.

Also, with the emphasis on still shooting, I'm noticing a conceptual problem: point-and-shoot cameras have been getting more and more video savvy in the last few years, and now, mini-camcorders are aspiring to be pocket cameras. They're roughly the same size, and assuming a tag of around $200—suspected, but not certain—for the HMX-U10, fall into the same price range. The future won't be pretty for one category or the other, and that's not even considering the increasingly capable imaging capabilities of modern smartphones. Exactly what will kill what (and what we'll be left with) is still up in the air, but you can rest assured the slaughter will be well-recorded. [InfoSyncWorld, Crave]

Fonera 2 Router Upgraded With 802.11n, Support for YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Others [Routers]

FON has done some elective surgery on their Fonera 2 router, released just a few months ago with NAS, 3G and BitTorrent support. On top of those previous upgrades, the newest version includes 802.11n connectivity, web app upload support and reduced power usage. But first: What the hell is Fonera?

A re-refresher, from last time they dropped new hardware:

All Fonera routers are open to all Fonera users, meaning that in exchange for providing Wi-Fi to the occasional Fonera-owning passerby, you get to tap into other Fonera users' connections whenever you're away from home. It's a pretty cool idea, but it's not clear that there are enough Foneras in existence for the concept to work in practice, at least in the US.

The company also has telco partners (albeit mostly overseas), who essentially subcontract hotspots to Fonera users. It's an interesting concept even if it's a little cultlike, and for the price—about $70—the Fonera 2n is a solid deal in strict hardware terms.

The company says the product is now out in "major retailers" in the US, though perhaps tellingly doesn't name any. A full feature list below: [Fonera via Ryan Block's Twitter]

Caters to Web 2.0 with Faster WiFi, Home Network Access, and Manages File Uploads/Downloads - Even With Your PC Off

MADRID, July 14 /PRNewswire/ — FON today introduced the Fonera 2.0n WiFi router in the US market, combining FON's revolutionary WiFi sharing and money making features with seamless integration and management of popular Web 2.0 services such as YouTube, Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, BitTorrent, RapidShare, and other content — even while users' PCs are off. The Fonera 2.0n is on sale now at major retailers. This announcement is significant because anyone can now upload, download and synch ALL of their web apps while away from home, without getting stuck for hours waiting for something to load.

"If there's one annoying aspect of the otherwise great internet, it's the time it takes to upload videos, pictures, or download movies, tv series, games, and software from the internet," said Martin Varsavsky, FON CEO. "The Fonera 2.0n is the first WiFi router that frees up your computer from those tasks. Close your computer, continue uploading and downloading!"

Built around the faster 802.11n standard, Fonera 2.0n has a greater WiFi reach and faster throughput than 802.11g routers, and its more powerful processors and sophisticated software enable it to run parallel applications and simultaneous uploads and downloads. A built-in USB hub and Fonera 2.0 management software allows users to connect external hard drives and other USB devices. This enables users to share data wirelessly, upload videos or photos automatically to YouTube, Flickr, Picasa and Facebook, or download* torrents or files directly from BitTorrent, RapidShare, and Megaupload without a computer running at the same time. Additional features include the ability to backup files to a hard drive, print, or access a remote webcam via WiFi, and convert an HSDPA or 3G dongle to WiFi.

Fonera 2! .0n can also help users save money on energy and reduce their CO2 output. A Fonera 2.0n router consumes less than four watts while downloading, instead of a PC that averages 100 watts, so users can reduce their CO2 emissions by 273Kg a year — equivalent to driving an SUV more than 1,500km per year. **

"The deep integration of online file sharing, social networks, and other Web 2.0 content into our already busy daily lives translates into more hours spent at the computer, greater energy use and more greenhouse emissions," said Varsavsky. "By enabling users to handle basic computing tasks from the router instead of the PC, we're taking a small step towards reducing power consumption without limiting functionality."

Fonera 2.0 also maintains all the features of previous FON WiFi routers. Once connected, it creates two WiFi signals, one private and one public, that allow for a secure, wireless Internet connection at home and free access at FON Spots worldwide. Fonera owners can also choose to make money*** by selling FON WiFi access passes or letting guests roam at their FON Spot.

Fonera 2.0n is based on open source and developers are encouraged to create and share additional applications.

For further information about the Fonera 2.0, visit www.fon.com.

About FON:

FON started the free WiFi revolution in 2006 with the first Fonera WiFi router and the goal of free, ubiquitous WiFi for everyone. Today, FON has more than 350,000 FON Spots, over 1.3 million registered foneros, and a growing list of Telco partners who add FON functionality to their ADSL modems. Google, eBay, British Telecom, Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital are investors in FON.

Blockbuster OnDemand en route to Samsung HDTVs, Blu-ray players, and home theater systems

Questionable longevity or no, Blockbuster's taking some strides to get itself firmly into the video on demand business, and this latest announcement will go a long way with that. The company announced that it's integrating its OnDemand service into Samsung HDTVs, home theater systems, and Blu-ray players starting Fall 2009. Better still, those with LED HDTVs series 7000 or above, LCD / Plasmas series 650 or above, and select 2009 Blu-ray players / theater systems can get the service later via firmware update. It's still got a ways to go if it wants to catch up to Netflix, but every little bit helps, right?

Filed under: Displays, Home Entertainment

Blockbuster OnDemand en route to Samsung HDTVs, Blu-ray players, and home theater systems originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Jul 2009 01:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung's SyncMaster 80 series LCD monitor stands above the rest

It's a simple idea, sure, and it's far from new, but putting an LCD on a telescoping mount offers incredible convenience. As such, this Samsung SyncMaster 80 series professional LCD monitor allows for a more natural secondary display perched directly above your open netbook or can be spun into a portrait orientation for those looking to go vertical. The 80's are available in either 20- (F2080) or 23-inch (F2380) configurations offering a 3000:1 contrast ratio, 178-degree viewing angle, narrow 15-mm bezel, and cover nearly 100% of the RGB color space. Priced in Korea at ₩378,000 (about $287) and ₩457,000 (about $347) when released later this month. See the Sammy pulled into a frontside vert after the break.

Continue reading Samsung's SyncMaster 80 series LCD monitor stands above the rest

Filed under: Displays

Samsung's SyncMaster 80 series LCD monitor stands above the rest originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Jul 2009 03:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Cowon S9 pales in white

It's hard to beat the chrome and titanium black versions of the Cowon S9 players in terms of aesthetic design. And black is always the best choice to frame its high-contrasting, 3.3-inch AMOLED if you're the type who likes to see the display fade into the device during particularly dark video sequences. Still, choice is good, and white DAPs are trending (again) so why not ceramic white? It's not like the S9's viewable display actually stretches end-to-end like you might assume.

[Via Pocketables]

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Cowon S9 pales in white originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Jul 2009 03:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Are memristors the future of Artifical Intelligence? DARPA thinks so

New Scientist has recently published an article that discusses the memristor, the long theorized basic circuit element that can generate voltage from a current (like a resistor), but in a more complex, dynamic manner -- with the ability to "remember" previous currents. As we've seen, HP has already made progress developing hybrid memristor-transistor chips, but now the hubbub is the technology's applications for artificial intelligence. Apparently, synapses have complex electrical responses "maddeningly similar" to those of memristors, a realization that led Leon Chua (who first discovered the memristor in 1971) to say that synapses are memristors, "the missing circuit element I was looking for" was with us all along, it seems. And of course, it didn't take long for DARPA to jump into the fray, with our fave DoD outfit recently announcing its Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics Program (SyNAPSE -- cute, huh?) with the goal of developing "biological neural systems" that can "autonomously process information in complex environments by automatically learning relevant and probabilistically stable features and associations." In other words, they see this as a way to make their killer robots a helluva lot smarter -- and you know what that means, don't you?

Read - New Scientist: "Memristor minds: The future of artificial intelligence"
Read - DARPA: "Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics"

Filed under: Science

Are memristors the future of Artifical Intelligence? DARPA thinks so originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Jul 2009 05:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung HMX-U10 Full HD camcorder with 1-button YouTube uploads out Ultras the Flip

Step aside Flip, Samsung's aiming its massive consumer-electronics guns directly at your point-shoot-n-upload to YouTube base. Samsung's new HMX-U10 fixed-focus, ultra-compact camcorder takes 10 megapixel stills or 1920x1080 Full HD H.264 video to SDHC cards courtesy of a 1/2.3-inch CMOS sensor. There's also a 2-inch LCD so you can playback, edit, or upload your videos with help from Samsung's built-in Intelli-studio software and USB cable, naturally. Unfortunately, Samsung makes no mention of image stabilization typically missing from these pocket camcorders. We do know, however, that'll ship in September for $200 with a footprint measuring 56 x 103 x 15.5-mm / 95g and that peculiarly angled lens first seen on Sammy's HMX-R10 and SMX-C10 camcorders. So for the same price as the UltraHD you get a bigger sensor with higher resolution from a better-looking camera that's also smaller and lighter than the Flip UltraHD. Care to respond ~~PureDigital~~ Cisco?

[Via InfoSync]

Continue reading Samsung HMX-U10 Full HD camcorder with 1-button YouTube uploads out Ultras the Flip

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Samsung HMX-U10 Full HD camcorder with 1-button YouTube uploads out Ultras the Flip originally appeared on En gadget on Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Monday, July 13, 2009

RT @bmorrissey - good social ads (lets users vote up or bury)- http://bit.ly/3LNcdc; bad social ads - http://bit.ly/yUAfy (fake content)

Five Best Content Filtering Tools [Hive Five]

Whether you want to keep your kids' eyes away from inappropriate content or your employees from wasting time online, you'll find a variety of great tools available for filtering internet access in today's Hive Five.

Photo by Zach Klein.

Last week we asked you to share your favorite method of filtering internet content. While we originally intended to approach the topic from a software angle, it quickly became apparent that software didn't cut it for most people and that the majority of you are using either a combination of desktop software and a proxy server/firewall or just the latter by itself. The following solutions range, in difficultly of installation, from as simple as requiring five minutes to install to as complex as setting up a physical computer as a Linux-based content filter.

DansGuardian (Cross Platform, Free)

One way to measure whether or not Dansguardian is the right filtering tool for you is your willingness to install and tinker with an operating system like Linux. If OpenDNS (below) is the Mac-like "It just works!" one click solution, DansGuardian falls into a much more Linux-like "I can change every setting and experience real, ultimate power!" category. Dansguardian runs on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS X, HP-UX, and Solaris. DansGuardian is extremely configurable and allows you to do all sorts ! of thing s, like block all images, filter ads out across your entire home network, block files from being downloaded by extension type, and control the effects of the filters, whitelists, and more based on which computer on your network is doing the accessing. You can deploy different filters for different computers based on domain, user, and source IP so your high school student doesn't get the same ultra-filtered content your elementary student does. DansGuardian needs to be paired with a proxy as it doesn't serve the web pages itself but only acts as a filter—many users use Squid, also mentioned in the entry for SquidGuard.

K9 (Windows/Mac, Free)

Many of us have had experiences with K9's internet filtering, if for no other reason than it's used in thousands of schools across the country. One of K9's strong points is the division of filtered content into 60+ categories which allows you to easily block and unblock large chunks of their blacklist without having to get your hands too dirty. K9 is a desktop solution; you install the software and it checks all the internet requests you make against the filters you have specified. In an effort to overcome the limitations of working from a static database, K9 introduced Dynamic Real-Time Rating to actively access the content of websites and ban them if they fall into the filter categories you've selected.

OpenDNS (Cross Platform, Free)

OpenDNS is a perfect solution for people who either lack the time or expertise to set up and administer a full-out content-filtering server. OpenDNS replaces your current DNS server and allows you to filter every connection coming out of your ho! use if y ou change the DNS settings at the router level. No matter if someone is on your main desktop or connecting into your wireless via laptop, everything will be filtered by OpenDNS. You can set custom filters to white list and black list specific sites and customize the range of filters they provide for you. If you're considering using OpenDNS as your household filter, check out our previous article on the topic.

SquidGuard/Squid (Linux, Free)

SquidGuard is similar to Dansguard in that it is a stand alone filtering tool you connect into with a proxy—in this case the popular Squid proxy. Also like Dansguard, you have a high degree of flexibility—dream up a combination of filtering parameters and there's a good chance you can make it happen with SquidGuard. No Hello Kitty between the hours of 9AM and 10PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Not a problem with the highly customizable SquidGuard. SquidGuard is natively a UNIX-environment only tool, and you can install it onto Linux, FreeBSD, and so forth.

Hosts File (Cross Platform, Free)

Many of you like to get your hands dirty—as evidenced by the popularity of Dansguard and SquidGuard—and tinkering with the hosts file is a great way to do that while setting up a filter in the process. The hosts file is essentially a mini-directory on your computer of IP addresses and what they should be resolved to. If you go into your hosts file, for instance, and make an entry for 127.0.0.1 pointing at www.google.com, every time someone goes to visit google on that computer th! e web br owser will direct them right back to the machine they are sitting at. You can manually edit your hosts file, but many of you use applications like Hostsman to make editing and configuring easier. Editing your hosts file is easy, but its effectiveness is largely limited to how strong the blacklist you've downloaded or created is. If your blacklist doesn't include a site or a string that catches part of the site's name, it will fail to block it at all.

Now that you've had a chance to look over the—rather varied—list of tools for filtering your internet connection, it's time to cast your vote for which tool you think is best:

Which Content Filtering Tool is Best?(trends)

If you've got your own tips, tricks, or even unmentioned tools for filtering internet access, we'd love to hear them in the comments.

Lottay Makes Online Gift-Giving Easy [Gift Giving]

Whether you're looking to give or receive, web site Lottay makes the whole gift process much easier by combining the use of PayPal and wish lists.

Once registered on the site (it's required to send and receive), you can start a wish list, send a gift to a friend, or even just send them a suggested gift.

Wishing for a gift allows you to start a running tab of the items that you want. Enter the item's name, a short description, images (some are pre-loaded, but you have the option of uploading your own), and price and then you're all set. Once potential gift-givers are aware of your wish list, they can then choose to send you the full amount or a small chunk of the asking price. Lottay will then keep track how much you've earned toward the item. (Seems like a good way to ask for something big for your birthday, for example, that you'd never expect just one person to pony up for.)

Giving a gift requires you to fill out the recipients information—first name, last name, and email address. After setting up your gift, the same way as a wish list item, you're then able to add an ecard with a personalized message. The confirmation screen is where you decide how you're going to send the "gift." Online options include PayPal or credit card while two snail mail options are offered—cash or personal check.

Lottay

RT@lizapost - http://bit.ly/L9LBu - 1 pers focus group. Well, at least MS had a credible src (15 yo intern) write the report, for a change.

Power Supply Calculator Figures Out What Size PSU to Buy [Hardware]

When building your own desktop computer from scratch, how do you know what size power supply to get? The Newegg Power Supply Calculator figures it out for you with ease.

Simply enter your CPU, motherboard, video card, and the rest of your components into the form, click the Calculate button, and you'll see an estimated wattage for the power supply you need to buy. As somebody who not only builds his own PCs, but wrote a whole series on how to build your own computer, I can tell you that when it comes to power supplies, you want to buy quality—don't cheap out or it will die very quickly.

For more, check out our beginner's guide to building a PC from scratch, or learn how to replace a dead power supply, install a motherboard and CPU, install a PCI card, or install RAM in your Mac and save a ton of cash.

Power Supply Calculator [Newegg via gHacks]

AMD six-core Opterons get new 'Highly Efficient' and 'Special Edition' siblings

We can beat about the bush or we can just admit that Intel has AMD beat on pretty much all fronts right now. Cognizant of this, AMD sprung the Istanbul server chips months ahead of schedule, and is now seeking to maintain momentum by adding meat to the bone. Three new chips are being added to the server-focused HE (Highly Efficient) Opteron line -- all clocked between 2GHz and 2.1GHz and dissipating 55 watts of heat -- while pure performance considerations are addressed with the SE 2439 and SE 8439, both running at 2.8GHz with 6MB of L3 cache. If we were paranoid, we might think today's leak of Intel's mobile CPU schedule was a coordinated attempt by the market leader to steal some of the limelight from this announcement by Advanced Micro Devices. Those of you who actually need to buy processors in batches of 1,000 or more should hit the read link for a full price breakdown.

[Via Daily Tech]

Filed under: Desktops

AMD six-core Opterons get new 'Highly Efficient' and 'Special Edition' siblings originally appeared on Engadge! t on Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Samsung Barges Into Flip Territory With HMX-U10 1080p Pocket Camcorder [Camcorders]

Samsung Barges Into Flip Territory With HMX-U10 1080p Pocket Camcorder [Camcorders]

Top Posts from go-Digital Marketing Blog

Fonera 2 Router Upgraded With 802.11n, Support for YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Others [Routers]

Fonera 2 Router Upgraded With 802.11n, Support for YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Others [Routers]

Blockbuster OnDemand en route to Samsung HDTVs, Blu-ray players, and home theater systems

Blockbuster OnDemand en route to Samsung HDTVs, Blu-ray players, and home theater systems

Samsung's SyncMaster 80 series LCD monitor stands above the rest

Samsung's SyncMaster 80 series LCD monitor stands above the rest

Cowon S9 pales in white

Cowon S9 pales in white

Are memristors the future of Artifical Intelligence? DARPA thinks so

Are memristors the future of Artifical Intelligence? DARPA thinks so

Samsung HMX-U10 Full HD camcorder with 1-button YouTube uploads out Ultras the Flip

Samsung HMX-U10 Full HD camcorder with 1-button YouTube uploads out Ultras the Flip

Monday, July 13, 2009

Five Best Content Filtering Tools [Hive Five]