Thursday, April 04, 2013

LG's 5-inch Optimus G Pro launches in Japan

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/03/lg-5-inch-optimus-g-pro-launches-in-japan/

LG's 5-inch Optimus G Pro launches in Japan

South Korea gave the Optimus G Pro a reasonably warm reception after debuting, and now LG's hoping to pull off a similar victory in Japan. Those in the Land of the Rising Sun can now pick up the smartphone from NTT DoCoMo. Though the handset bears the same name as its Korean counterpart, it forgoes a 5.5-inch 1080p display for a smaller 5-inch screen with the same resolution. In case you're in need of a refresher, the hardware runs Jelly Bean 4.1.2 on a 1.7GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600 Processor and 2GB of RAM flanked by a 3,000mAh battery, 13-megapixel rear shooter, 2.1-megapixel front-facing cam, 32GB of built-in memory and a microSD slot. LG still hasn't pinned down just when in Q2 the phone will launch in North America, but with a Japanese release behind it, a US arrival shouldn't be far off.

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Source: LG Newsroom Korea (translated)

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Chrome 26 for Android gets stable release with autofill and password syncing

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/03/chrome-26-for-android-stable-with-autofill-and-password-sync/

Chrome 26 syncing

Perpetually forgetful Android users no longer have to adopt a Chrome beta to coordinate their lives. Just a month after the test version of Chrome 26 arrived with autofill and password syncing, its stable version has appeared with the same option to remember form and login details between supporting desktop and mobile Chrome builds. There's no talk of the SPDY-based proxy, however: aside from tune-ups, the syncing is the main highlight. That's still enough for us to justify swinging by Google Play for the update.

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Via: Chrome Releases

Source: Google Play

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ASUS unveils GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU Mini graphics card destined for little rigs

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/04/asus-geforce-gtx-670-directcu-mini-graphics-card/

ASUS unveils GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU Mini graphics card destined for little rigs

It's easy to chop and change components in spacious towers, but small PCs need upgrading, too. If your stunted desktop has fallen into the "minimum system requirements" category for the latest games, then maybe the newly announced ASUS GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU Mini graphics card will interest you. Quite the mouthful, we know, but its long name contrasts with its small size -- the dual-slot, 2GB card measures 6.7 inches on its longest edge, shaving almost 3 inches off the reference design. There's no reason you can't put the card in a regular case, of course, but it's intended mainly for compact rigs with mini ITX or micro ATX motherboards. We don't have pricing or release info yet, but if the cost of NVIDIA's GTX 670 is anything to go by, expect to drop at least a trio of Benjamins on the petite version. Glamor shots and all the finer specs are available at the source links below.

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Via: Fareas tgizmos

Source: ASUS (1), (2)

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Small Businesses Are Critical To The US Economic Recovery

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-small-business-is-critical-2013-4

adp small business jobs

According to the ADP National Employment Report, which came out Wednesday morning, private sector employment increased by 158,000 in March. That was substantially below the consensus estimate of 197,000 and it was also way down from the revised 237,000 gain in February.

However, the most interesting part of the report was how it highlights the importance of small businesses to an economic recovery. Small businesses are typically defined as those that employ fewer than 500 people. Of the 158,000 payroll gains in March, 111,000 came from small businesses. In fact, 74,000 jobs were created by businesses that employ fewer than 50 people. Only 47,000 jobs were due to hiring from large companies.

Yet large businesses are the ones that have the clout and resources to lobby politicians. Perhaps it is time for elected officials who are interested in putting more people to work to start paying more attention to what small business owners have to say.

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Wednesday, April 03, 2013

Google forks WebKit with Blink, a new web engine for Chromium and Chrome

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/03/google-forks-webkit-with-blink-a-new-web-engine-for-chromium/

Google forks WebKit with Blink, a new rendering engine for Chromium

You could call WebKit the glue that binds the modern web: the rendering engine powers Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, and many mobile browsers past and present. Things are about to unstick a little. Google believes that Chromium's multi-process approach has added too much complexity for both the browser and WebKit itself, so it's creating a separate, simpler fork named Blink. Although the new engine will be much the same as WebKit at the start, it's expected to differ over time as Google strips out unnecessary code and tweaks the underlying platform. We'd also expect it to spread, as the company has confirmed to us that both Chrome and Chrome OS will be using Blink in the future. We're safely distant from the Bad Old Days of wildly incompatible web engines, but the shift may prove a mixed blessing -- it could lead to more advancements on the web, but it also gives developers that much more code to support.

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Source: Chromium Blog

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10 Of The World's Best Places To See Stunning Sunrise Views

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/most-stunning-sunrise-views-in-the-world-2013-3

 Angkor WatLet’s face it: Winter has left us chilled, pallid and perhaps a little less than energized. But the arrival of the vernal equinox on March 20—the first day of spring for the Northern Hemisphere—brought the promise of warmer temperatures and brighter days.

Skip ahead to see the most stunning sunrise views >

Historically, pagans aligned this turn in season with the theme of rebirth, both spiritually and agriculturally. Likewise, many pagan deities were associated with renewal and rejuvenation. Egyptians looked to Hathor, daughter of the sun god Ra, who bore a golden solar disk between her horns. Greeks turned to Aphrodite of Cyprus, who is associated with love and fertility. And the Saxons honored Ostara, the goddess of springtime and the namesake of Easter.

Perhaps our ancestors were on to something. (Who doesn’t link the spring and summer months with growth and positive energy?) So take a cue from nature and begin the season of renewal with a visit to a place that celebrates and accentuates the beauty of the morning horizon. Soak in the silhouettes of Cambodian temples in Angkor Wat or peer out at the waters over the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Take a walk by India’s Ganges River and see one of the world’s greatest tributes to romance, the Taj Mahal, or travel to the South Pacific archipelago of Tonga, where islanders are among the world’s first to see the sun rise each day. Each of our 11 favorites is bound to be enlightening. 

Skip ahead to see the most stunning sunrise views >

 
More from Departures:

Angkor Wat, Cambodia

It’s only fitting that the Hindu deity Angkor Wat was erected for—Vishnu—would have a connection to the sun. Although he is known as “the Protector” today, Vishnu is referred to as the Sun God in ancient Hindu scriptures. And although Angkor Wat has since become a Buddhist site, it remains one of the world’s best vantage points for a sunrise.

Book a room at La Résidence d’Angkor, a lavish riverside resort located near both the majestic temples and Siem Reap’s vibrant markets. The hotel offers a daybreak tour of Angkor Wat, with an optional breakfast picnic or an early-morning water blessing, in which a monk bestows fragrant flowers on guests and blesses them against the backdrop of ancient temples. For the full experience, schedule a meditation session with a Cambodian monk.Rooms start at $280; River Rd.; 855-63/963-390;



Bali, Indonesia

Bali’s gorgeous seascape is perfect for the romantically inclined. Book a room at the Amankila, a cliffside resort perched high in the hills overlooking the Lombok Strait and the volcanic eastern coastline.

The resort’s 35 thatched-roof suites embody refuge and relaxation; each suite is elevated and connected to the main hotel by tiny walkways. Start the day with a combination of light cardio and yoga, or opt for a sunrise cruise up the coastline for radiant views of Mount Rinjani, a volcano on the island of Lombok. Eat breakfast onboard and try your hand at fishing on the tranquil ride back. Another reason to set your alarm? A cooking class at dawn includes a guided market tour during which guests can handpick ingredients to cook an authentic Indonesian feast. Rooms start at $950; Manggis; 62-363/41333; amanresorts.com.



Great Barrier Reef, Bedarra Island, Australia

Located just off the coast of Mission Beach, Bedarra Island is a secluded alternative to Cairns, the city where most tourists end up when seeking out Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. With a maximum capacity of 14 guests, Bedarra Island has all the amenities of a large resort combined with the intimacy of a bed-and-breakfast.

Soak up the sun on a nearby deserted island, book a private deep-sea fishing charter or explore the lush rainforest surrounding the hotel. The privately owned island has seven villas, each nestled away with private beaches and commanding views of the reef. Sustainability is important here, so expect fresh produce from the island’s garden, water-saving d! evices a nd a new off-grid hybrid solar system. Rooms start at $990; Bedarra Island; 61-7/4047-4747; bedarra.com.au.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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Draft Is a Writing App with Serious Version and Draft Control

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5993339/draft-is-a-writing-app-with-serious-version-and-draft-control

Draft Is a Writing App with Serious Version and Draft Control

Google Drive/Docs is great at working everywhere and offering instantaneous collaboration. Drive is not so great at letting you review changes and track specific versions of your document. Enter Draft, a writing webapp that works with Drive—and Dropbox, and Evernote, and Markdown.

On its own, Draft is a very nice and minimalist place to write. What sets Draft apart is its collaborative editing powers. You can invite people to pick at your words, but Draft tracks the changes they make and asks you to accept or reject them, individually, while showing the two different versions of the document in side-by-side columns. This way, you can invite more than one person to review your work and keep track of who made which suggestion. You also mark drafts as you write, making it easy to get back to ideas you may have discarded as you went along. That is, suffice to say, nicer than running through Drive's color-coded overwriting and immense list of revisions by username.

Draft packs in a lot of other features without intruding on the writing-focused interface. You can bring in professional copyeditors for important work, write and convert from Markdown, and import and export documents from all the popular cloud services. But my favorite feature involves installing a Draft Chrome extension that lets you click in any text field on the web to open a new Draft, then click again to paste your work back into that field, in HTML or Markdown or regular text again. In fact, that's how I wrote this Lifehacker post.

Draft is free to use, and you can sign in using your Google account.

Slight disclosure: Draft's creator is a friend-of-a-friend, and I had access to a test version of the Chrome extension for a short period before Draft promoted it.

Draft

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Twitter Cards for apps, products and photo galleries unveiled

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/02/twitter-cards-apps-products-photo-galleries/

Twitter Cards for apps, products and photo galleries unveiled

Twitter just wrapped up a developer shindig at its San Francisco HQ and trotted out three new content preview cards. When a user links to a page with Twitter-specific markup, a tweet will feature an application's name, icon, description, rating and price within the freshly unveiled App Card and link to its Google Play or App Store page, to boot. Product Cards on the other hand, highlight merchandise with an image, price and even ratings. When tweets link to a photo gallery on the web, the social network will use a Gallery Card to display a collection of four photos, indicating that it points to an image set, and not just a lone picture. The firm rounded off the updates with "mobile app deep-linking," which means that tweets can sport a download link for the app which was used to publish them. Flickr, Foursquare, Path, Vine and others will make use of the new features when they launch, which should be tomorrow according to word from the coder get-together.

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Via: TechCrunch

Source: Twitter Dev Blog

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Hybrid Memory Cube receives its finished spec, promises up to 320GB per second

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/03/hybrid-memory-cube-receives-its-finished-spec/

Hybrid Memory Cube receives its final spec, promises 15X the RAM bandwidth

The Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium has been almost too patient in developing a standard for for its eponymous technology -- efforts began 17 months ago -- but it at last has more than good intentions to show for its work. Its just-published HMC Specification 1.0 lets companies build platforms and RAM with 2GB, 4GB and 8GB chips incorporating the stacked, power-efficient technology, all without compatibility jitters from other supporters. The completed spec is a scorcher when living up to its full potential, too. With eight links, a memory cube can reach a peak 320GB/s (yes, that's gigabytes) of aggregate bandwidth -- more than a hair faster than the 11GB/s we often get from existing DDR3 memory.

The Consortium is teasing us with more. Although we'll have to wait until the second half of the year before HMC 1.0 products appear in earnest, the Consortium already has a next-gen blueprint due in early 2014 that should nearly double individual data link speeds (from 15Gbps to 28Gbps). While we'd like to see the group walk the walk with real products before it talks more talk, there's still a chance that some memory performance bottlenecks could vanish for a good, long while.

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Via:< /strong> Computerworld

Source: Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium

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Google and ASUS to release second-generation Nexus 7 tablet in July, says Reuters

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/03/reuters-google-and-asustek-to-release-second-generation-nexus-7/

Reuters Google and Asustek to release nextgen Nexus 7 tablet in July

Google's next generation of Nexus 7 tablets from ASUS will be Qualcomm-powered and arrive this July, according to Reuters. If its sources are to be believed, Mountain View is aiming to ship eight million units by the end of the year, showing it has a lot of confidence in the upcoming model. Other leaked info claims more screen resolution, a thinner bezel and an unspecified Qualcomm CPU instead of the current model's NVIDIA Tegra 3, possibly to save power. There's no info on pricing or other specs and Google's not speaking at this point, of course -- but if it proves accurate, hopefully the two companies have learned their lesson from the current model's runaway success and will ramp production accordingly.

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Source: Reuters

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Tuesday, April 02, 2013

On your mark, get set, benchmark! 3DMark Android Edition now on Google Play

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/02/3dmark-android-benchmark-now-on-google-play/

On your mark, set, benchmark! 3DMark Android Edition now on Google Play

Android just gained another go-to for benchmarking. After failing to hit the 2012 mark for its Android-specific performance software, Futuremark's finally delivering on its promise and making 3DMark available today on Google Play. Typically used as a PC benchmarking tool, the free-to-download app now lets users catalog and compare performance across Windows and Android devices -- iOS and WinRT versions are still listed as "coming soon." There are a few caveats to use, though, as the application requires a smartphone or tablet running Android 3.1 or higher, with 300MB of storage space, a minimum of 1GB RAM and the ability to play nice with OpenGL ES 2.0 (which is about 90 percent of all Android devices, according to Google). Who knows? It could even find a permanent place in our own Android reviews soon. Only time and testing will tell -- check after the break for a video preview of what's in store.

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Via: Xperia blog

Source: Google Play, Futuremark

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Google changes Android dashboard numbers to count active users, not just pings

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/02/google-changes-android-dashboard-numbers-to-count-active-users/

Google changes Android dashboard numbers to count active users, not just pings

The Android device dashboard has been providing a picture of OS version distribution since before Froyo pushed aside Eclair, but now it's seeing some changes. A post on the Android Developers Google+ page indicates that starting this month, numbers are based on devices whose users actively checked Google Play during the reporting period. Previously, it counted all devices that pinged Google servers. The latest stats updated today, show a jump in the amount of actives (previously devices, now users) on Jelly Bean (Android 4.1 or higher), up to 25 percent from 16.5 percent last month when it counted the old way. The number of devices recorded running Froyo and Gingerbread have taken the biggest hit, down 3.6 and 4 percent, respectively.

There are a few ways to react to this, particularly remembering that these numbers are meant to help developers figure out how many users are available to target on the various versions of Android and types of hardware. It may give a clearer picture of what the active users that developers may have some hope of reaching without being muddied by little-used zombie devices. On the other hand, it could be seen as a way to juke stats which have been used against it by its competitors like Apple. Whichever side of the line one finds themselves on, more data is available by clicking on the source link below.

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Source: Android Developers (Google+), Android Dashboard

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First ARM Cortex-A57 processor taped out by TSMC, ready for fab

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/02/tsmc-arm-cortex-a57-tape-out/

ARM CortexA57 processor taped out, ready for fab

Your current smartphone just took another spin backwards on the obsolescence cycle thanks to a new landmark from ARM and TSMC: the first Cortex-A57 has reached the "tape out" stage, meaning it's ready for mass production. The new chip will use TSMC's 16nm FinFET technology (though the transistors will be 20nm for the A57) and will bring up to three times the CPU power of current chips for the same battery life -- or a maximum of five times the battery life at the same speed. The companies said they ramped the chip from design to tape out in a mere six months, though there's no timetable for its arrival in specific devices. When it does start hitting next gen phones and slates though, expect the performance charts to get singed.

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Monday, April 01, 2013

Macy's Accidentally Puts $1,500 Necklace On Sale For $47

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/macys-puts-1500-item-on-sale-for-47-2013-4

Macy's had a costly typo in one of its recent ads. 

Because of a copy writing error, the department store accidentally put a $1,500 silver and gold necklace on sale for $47 and listed it as a "Super Buy," Dallas-based station WFAA reported

That's a 97 percent discount. 

The necklace quickly sold out at the local Macy's, the station reported. 

A Dallas man, Robert Bernard, couldn't get his hands on a necklace in stores. But associates let him pay $47 for two necklaces and had them shipped to his house. 

Bernard said he got a call a couple days later that the order had been cancelled.

When the station reached out to Macy's, a spokeswoman apologized to Bernard. 

"For those customers who bought the necklace at the $47 price, they were fortunate," Macy's said. "For the gentleman you spoke with, he was not so fortunate."

The spokeswoman said she wasn't sure how many necklaces the retailer sold at the wrong price. 

Here's the ad:

Macy's ad

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NVIDIA outs GeForce 700M GPUs for notebooks, boasts inclusion by 'every leading manufacturer'

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/01/nvidia-geforce-gt700m-series/

NVIDIA outs new mobile GPU line, boasts 'every leading notebook manufacturer' support

In NVIDIA's ongoing efforts to monopolize the technical-sounding graphics card market, the California-based components manufacturer today announced a fresh mobile line of GPUs aimed at notebook computing. That's five new GPUs in total, with the GeForce GT 720M and 735M making up the "mainstream" segment, while the GT 740M, 745M, and 750M make up the "performance" portion of the lineup. All five cards include NVIDIA's "GPU Boost 2.0" tech, which allows the GPU to alter its clock speed on-the-fly for the sake of efficiency -- although this is mainly a software-level upgrade over the first iteration of Boost, and it's still the same familiar Kepler architecture under the hood. It won't be too long before we start seeing the newest NVIDIA mobile GPUs in notebooks at retail, as the PR says they'll be in notebooks from "every leading manufacturer" in the coming months.

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