Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/30/six-android-browsers-enter-the-ring-only-one-reigns-supreme/
Six Android browsers enter the ring, only one reigns supreme originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Sep 2010 02:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/30/qnap-intros-1080p-capable-nmp-1000p-network-multimedia-player/
Continue reading QNAP intros 1080p-capable NMP-1000P network multimedia player
QNAP intros 1080p-capable NMP-1000P network multimedia player originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Sep 2010 06:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-market-cap-apple-exxon-2010-9
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Apple could become the most valuable company in the world, but first it will have to gain $47 billion in market cap value versus Exxon.
Sounds daunting, but last November Apple's market cap was $79 billion less than Microsoft. Today it's $52 billion greater.
Of course, the growth of Apple's value can contribute to the decline in Microsoft's value. The two are rivals. What's good for Apple is bad for Microsoft.
Exxon, on the other hand, does not get hurt if Apple is doing well. For Apple to beat Exxon then, Exxon will have to tank on its own, and Apple will have to grow on its own.
What are the odds of it happening? Pretty good, actually.
For the year Exxon's stock is down approximately 10%, and famed hedge fund trader Jim Chanos is short Exxon's stock, thinking its due for a collapse. Meanwhile, analysts can't raise their price targets on Apple high enough.
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Not only are ads not useful, they may be harmful for advertisers: Commercials Have Confused 3 in 4 Americans (Harris) - http://bit.ly/aMydti
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5650806/ciscos-telepresence-video-chat-is-expected-for-homes-next-week
When we say cheap, we mean it won't cost much more than one of their Flip camcorders, at around $200 subsidized. AllThingsD is hearing that at a press event next Wednesday Cisco will launch the service with either Comcast or Verizon, and that the unsubsidized price might be around the $500 mark.
For years now Cisco has been demo-ing its telepresence technology, which has been available to businesses keen to video conference around the world.
There's an obvious desire for Cisco to get this technology into homes, but when Skype is already on many computers and TVs—for free—it will be a struggle to convince Mums and Dads they need to shell out a couple hundred notes for something that only really offers greater HD resolution.
Sitting in front of a TV and video-chatting sadly isn't that much of a unique angle for Cisco. [AllThingsD]
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/29/chromium-os-infiltrates-ipad-makes-itself-comfortable/
Chromium OS infiltrates iPad, makes itself comfortable originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Sep 2010 02:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/29/dell-launching-7-inch-tablet-in-next-few-weeks-10-incher-to-f/
Dell launching 7-inch Android tablet in 'next few weeks,' 10-incher to follow a few months later originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Sep 2010 04:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/29/cisco-to-announce-high-def-consumer-telepresence-device-next-wee/
Cisco to announce high-def consumer telepresence device next week? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Sep 2010 07:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/29/ocz-ibis-touts-2gbps-high-speed-data-link-vanquishes-ssd-compet/
OCZ Ibis touts 2GBps High Speed Data Link, vanquishes SSD competition originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Sep 2010 08:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://gizmodo.com/5650034/if-a-city-disappears-from-google-maps-does-it-still-exist
Shockingly, this is the 3rd time that Sunrise, FL has disappeared from Google Maps. For a small, unknown city like Sunrise, that's no good. The local businesses in Sunrise, FL have felt the aftereffects of not being searchable on Google saying that business was down during the month because quite simply, no one could find them. If you searched for a plumber in Sunrise, none existed. If you searched for a florist, you'd be directed to drive 200 miles to Sarasota.
It's an odd problem that, though fixed now, speaks to our heavy reliance on the Google. What's the first thing that people do to find local shops these days? Google 'em. How do we get there? Google will tell us. And it's so easy! I'm just as guilty, I blindly follow whatever it is that the G tells me to do. I mean, I'm certainly not leafing through yellow pages and thomas guides to figure it out, that takes time.
So as funny (and scary) as it may sound, if you (as in your city, business, store, etc.) don't exist on Google, you pretty much don't exist to the general population. [BBC]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5649389/giz-explains-brightness
The first thing to know about brightness is that, most of the time, it's not brightness. This is a semantic point, but also an important one. We (meaning basically everybody) use "brightness" to describe two distinct concepts: Brightness and luminance. One is subjective, and the other is objective. One is measured by our brains, and the other by instruments. One is the term we use, and the other is the term we mean.
Nearly everything we refer to as brightness is in fact luminance. The measurements companies use to sell the brightness of a screen, the power of a projector or the strength of a flashlight—those numbers above, the nits and the lumens—refer to objective measurements of light from a screen or a bulb, as taken by specific instruments.
So what is brightness? Let's crack a dictionary:
The effect or sensation by means of which an observer is able to distinguish differences in luminance.
In other words, brightness describes the experience of a phenomenon (luminance), not the phenomenon itself. A slightly more helpful crack at a definition, by Charles P. Halsted, engineer and fellow at the Society for Information Display:
Brightness is a subjective attribute of light to which humans assign a label between very dim and very bright (brilliant). Brightness is perceived, not measured.
The term is entirely subjective. You are never incorrect to refer to an item as bright or not bright, in the same way that you can't be wrong about the deliciousness of a piece of cake—at its most scientific, it's a measurement of a personal experience, made by the person having it. Even more jarring is that without humans, eyes, optical nerves, brains and judgment, brightness ceases to exist. If an HDTV flips on in the forest...
Thankfully, there is a coherent way to talk about the amount of light that comes out of our gadgets. We talk about nits in our gadgets' screens, and lumens in our projectors, both of which refer to luminance, albeit indirectly. And they're intuitive! Higher is brighter; more is better. This is why manufacturers even bother to talk about them.
You've probably heard the term "candlepower" before, and you may hear it again. Like the candela, it's a measure of light intensity. Its definition is exactly what it sounds like: The measure of the "power" of a candle. In particular, according to the British Government circa 1860, one candlepower is the intensity of light produced by a spermaceti (whale oil) candle burning at a specific rate. Other countries defined it slightly differently.
The units has since fallen out of use. Well, sort of. The candela, which replaced the various different candlepowers as the standard unit for luminous intensity, is deliberately close to the British Candlepower. The way the sperm whale's brain-juice burns has in no small way determined how we talk about light to this day.
If you see someone advertising candlepower today, they're actually just talking about the candela, the accepted standard unit for luminous intensity. In common usage, the two have become one and the same.
Talking about luminance isn't exactly straightforward. Watts, a measure of power, are often used as shorthand for a light's brightness. A 40 watt bulb uses twice as much power as a 20 watt. It's simple! But it also isn't very helpful. Chuck Halsted again:
The response [of human eyes to light] is non-linear and complex. The sensitivity of the eye decreases as the magnitude of the light increases.
So even though 40 watts is about twice as radiant as 20 watts, it won't seem that way to you and me.
This is where candelas come in. A two-candela light will seem half as bright as a four-candela light, and twice as bright as a one-candela bulb. That's because the candela doesn't strictly measure intensity—it's a combined measure of light emitted, and its (approximated) significance to us, the humans, according to average sensitivity of our eyeballs to specific wavelengths of light.
This sounds sort of like what most people mean by "brightness!" Actually, it sounds a lot like that. The candela gives us a way to say, in broad terms, how bright, how glow-y, or how intense a single light is. What it doesn't do is speak to the size of our screens, or the way our projectors spray light. For this, we need nits and lumens.
To use the candela to talk about gadgets and screens and bulbs, it's got to be wrapped up inside new terms. These terms take into account where the light is coming from, and where it's going.
The term nit is actually slang for the standard measurement for luminance, the candela per square meter. Put simply, a nit, is a measurement of light emissions and surface area. Think of it this way: The candela basically tells us how much light energy is coming from a source. (Or more specifically, how this light energy is likely to be perceived by people.) Nits tell us how this energy is distributed over an area, or to put it (too) crudely, how dense the light of a certain screen is. That's why 400 nit smarpthone screen will seem as bright as a 400 nit laptop screen, even though the laptop screen is emitting more light in total.
Lumens measure something similar, but they do it differently. A lumen is essentially a measure of light intensity that includes a consideration of the area the light is hitting—the cone of the projection, basically. Imagine a light source emitting light in all directions. Now imagine surrounding that light source with a sphere that absorbs all light. Cut a little circle out, and you'll get a beam of light. A smaller opening will mean fewer lumens, assuming the light doesn't change intensity. A larger opening, more lumens. See how this works?
The lumen is helpful in describing projectors, because it measures both light intensity in a way that has practical advantages: Knowing how many lumens a projector emits, and how far away from a projection surface you are, you can figure out how bright a projection will be, more or less. It's... nit-like.
All this said, simply knowing what nits and lumens are won't give you an intuitive sense of how many of either your display or projector needs. The fellas over at ProjectorPeople have put together a chart to determine how many lumens you should aim for in a new projector, depending on setting and display size:
In most conditions, a 250 nit screen will appear plenty bright. Many cheaper or older display will dip below that, and a some new ones—particularly LED-backlit screens—measure in at over 400 nits. That said, choosing a monitor or smartphone shouldn't necessarily be a calculation. Sometimes, you're best off just trusting your eyes.
Still something you wanna know? Send questions about That Thing That Doesn't Make Sense here, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.
Bulb/exit image by Flickr user hryckowian
Source: http://lifehacker.com/5650392/ip-webcam-turns-your-android-phone-into-a-remote-camera
Install the app, tweak the settings (login/pass, resolution, image quality), and then simply load up the URL it gives you in a web browser (I used Chrome for testing) or a client that accepts streaming video (I used VLC).
Below is the setup I used to stream a view from my dwarf Cichlid tank to my desktop. I used two suction cups and a black hair tie to secure the phone against the glass. The same setup could be used to peek out your window at your parked car or out your front door.
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5650371/apple-tv-review-roundup
Fox News' Clayton Morris had plenty of good things to say about the Apple TV's features, but he also had a big concern:
The new Apple TV is small — hockey-puck small. That's impressive, but we all know size doesn't matter, whereas speed does. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly it connected to the iTunes library on my desktop computer. The Apple TV does this noticeably faster than its ancestor using a 'home sharing' option, which connects with any iTunes account in your household — Mac or PC.
The biggest new thing about the Apple TV is the feature my mom will like the most: If you're a Netflix subscriber you can watch movies instantly on it. Every web-enabled TV component can do that these days, including game consoles like the Xbox 360 and Sony PS3 and dedicated boxes from Roku and Boxee, so it's an expected feature. But on the new Apple TV it's fast, easy to set up, and easier for consumers like my mom to appreciate.
[...]
The new Apple TV is very promising, but it won't amount to hill of beans if Apple markets it the same way they did the last one — basically not at all. Apple can jokingly call it a 'hobby,' but if the company wants it to be a successful hobby they need to educate consumers the same way they did with the iPad.
PC Mag's Tim Gideon had both praises and hesitations when it came to the gadget's features, but he went as far as to name it PC Mag's new Editors' Choice media hub anyway:
Pros:
Compact design. Intuitive user interface. Streams video, music, and photos from your computer, iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. 99-cent TV-show rentals. Streams Netflix Watch Instantly content, YouTube, and content from iOS devices to Apple TV.Cons:
No hard drive. Can't purchase content-streaming only. Can't rent a show on Apple TV and watch it on other devices or your computer. Limited rental content available. Connects via HDMI-not compatible with older televisions without purchasing adapter. Doesn't ship with an HDMI cable.Bottom Line:
A lower price, a more compact design, and the ability to stream content from iOS devices and rent 99-cent TV shows makes Apple's latest Apple TV set-top box an excellent option for iTunes and Netflix users.
Those are the earliest reviews to hit the web. We'll update as more become available.
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5650665/stop-underestimating-your-printer
The New York Times has an article remarking on all the things we forget—or don't realize—our printers can do and it caught our attention. From printing on fabric to creating papercraft models to designing decals—there's a lot we can do with those dust collecting gadgets.
The article is certainly worth a read and provides a great deal of project ideas, but I'll be honest: I'll probably continue to use my printer as little more than a place to set down the mail for quite some time. [NY Times]
Image by photographer2222/ShutterStock
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/28/apple-tv-jailbreak-confirmed-done-via-same-exploit-as-other-ios/
The Shatter exploit that was discovered for iOS 4.1 devices has, predictably enough, been found to function on the latest Apple TV as well. Though a jailbreak fit for distribution is still brewing for all of Apple's iOS wares, this will be welcome news to folks interested in trying to add a little extra functionality to Apple's hockey puck of a media streamer. Then again, even the best of apps might not make up for it being a 720p media device in a 1080p world.Apple TV jailbreak confirmed, done via same exploit as other iOS 4.1 devices originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Sep 2010 05:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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