Monday, November 18, 2013

Engadget is getting a whole lot bigger: profiles, forums, product database, and so much more!

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/18/engadget-is-getting-a-whole-lot-bigger-profiles-forums-produc/

Engadget is getting a whole lot bigger profiles, forums, product database, and so much more!

A few days ago we launched the best designed version of Engadget ever, and today we're about to get bigger. A lot bigger.

Back in 2008 when Peter Rojas and I departed Engadget to found gdgt, we had a hunch that the future would be driven by the intersection of social, interest, and product graphs. Today we're bringing it all home, integrating the best of gdgt into Engadget.

This means Engadget readers will have access to user profiles, forums + Q&A, and a massive, highly organized product database (among many other things). Finally.

Not only is this by far our biggest launch ever, it also marks a major turning point in our history, redefining the Engadget of today and laying the foundation for the Engadget of tomorrow.

I can't wait to tell you everything about all the new stuff Engadget can do for you, read on!

User profiles and gadget lists

Engadget gets a whole lot bigger profiles, forums, product database, and so much more!

Starting today we've got a lot of new things to offer including building your gadget lists, participating in forums, writing user reviews, editing our product database, and plenty more so your first step should probably be to go register for an account!

If you previously registered for an account on gdgt, don't sweat it, that is now your Engadget account, and your data has been fully ported over just log in! If you didn't ever register for gdgt, well, go register now, there are still a ton of great usernames available!

Once you've got a profile, keeping track of (and showing off) your products has never been easier. See something you want? With one click, you can get relevant updates (like new reviews and price alerts). And for those products you already own or have owned, we can also keep track of your purchase date, serial number, and lots of other information. Build your Engadget profile and show off your collection!

One small thing to note: our commenting tool (Livefyre) doesn't in any way plug into your Engadget account. Not ideal, we know, but stay tuned.

Forums + Q&A

Engadget gets a whole lot bigger profiles, forums, product database, and so much more!

There's so much more to be said about the entire universe of technology than can be said in comment threads, and finally you've got an outlet to say it here on Engadget. We've curated some of the best, highest quality technology discussions and technology Q&A threads anywhere on the internet.

So go familiarize yourself with our Community Guidelines and go nuts. Okay, don't go that nuts our aim is and will always be to keep the commons high-brow. We're looking for the cool kids with something smart, interesting, helpful, or constructive to say which is why we can't wait to see you over there posting in the forums!

User reviews

Engadget gets a whole lot bigger profiles, forums, product database, and so much more!

Ever feel the urge to share your opinions about your devices? Well, now you've got access to the easiest, best-designed product review system anywhere. Add a product to your Engadget list, pull the criteria sliders, maybe drop in a few comments, and you're ready to share it with the world. This is how reviews were meant to be written and read.

Product database

Engadget gets a whole lot bigger profiles, forums, product database, and so much more!

Engadget's universe got a lot bigger with the addition of our massive new hand-crafted, fully-editable product database, containing some of the highest-quality entries on tens of thousands of devices across the entire spectrum of consumer electronics. We aren't kidding when we say we have tens of thousands of reviews, and millions of spec data points to pore over. For a taste, go check out our pages on the Xbox One and PS4, or the iPad mini and Nexus 5.

See a missing product? Go add it to the database! See something wrong with some product specs already in the system? Submit an edit to the page! Your contributions are what makes our database so great, and we need the help of experts like you to keep it ship-shape.

The Engadget Global Score

Engadget gets a whole lot bigger profiles, forums, product database, and so much more!

One of the things you're sure to see around the site is our new Engadget Global Score, a unique ranking of products based on extensive independent research and analysis by our expert editorial and research teams.

We arrive at our Global Scores only after curating hundreds, sometimes thousands of weighted data points (such as critic and user reviews), and in the next few weeks we'll fully launch our new scoring strategy, including the Global Score's fully-editorial counterpart: the Engadget Score.

Together, the Engadget Score + Global Score will represent the only product rating system you'll ever need. More on this soon.

Price alerts

Engadget gets a whole lot bigger profiles, forums, product database, and so much more!

Looking for a deal, but waiting for the right moment to strike? Sign up for a price alert, and we'll drop you an email the moment a device dips in price. But be sure to act fast, sometimes those prices jump right back up!

Product comparisons

Engadget gets a whole lot bigger profiles, forums, product database, and so much more!

If you've ever wanted a better quantitative view of multiple products at once, meet your new best friend. Our product comparisons draw from an enormous number of spec data points across tens of thousands of products to help you get the best possible birds-eye view of the devices you're interested in. We also save your comparisons for later (like this one)!

The future

Our goal is nothing short of making Engadget the most useful, advanced, and thoughtfully designed place on the internet to learn about personal technology, and that doesn't just end with our world-class news and editorial.

Engadget's come a long way, but we're only getting started in building a new, brighter future where finding the right product to buy, and sharing your passion for technology is as easy as getting the day's news and opinions.

Join us in the future, won't you? Engadget will be there.

P.S. -I'd be remiss not to thank everyone who made this launch possible, including our tireless product teams (Logan Bailey, Cass Chin, Michael Cosentino, Evan Fribourg, Rick Garner, Paul Heuts, Lydia Katsamberis, Mitchell McKenna, Conrad Muan, Erik Sagen, Brett Terpstra, and Jon Ursenbach), our world-class ops team (Chris Stolfi, Ameir Abdeldayem, and Kevin Pettit), and our incredibly supportive executive team (Susan Lyne, Jay Kirsch, and Ned Desmond).

I also have to give a big thanks to Marc Perton, Dana Wollman, Chris Trout, Kris Naudus, Frank Spinillo, Dave Schumaker, and, of course, the entire Engadget editorial and product research staffs. And last but absolutely not least, my friend, co-founder, and creator of Engadget, Peter Rojas. This moment has been almost ten years in the making, and I'm insanely proud to share it with everyone involved.

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Google Has To Pay $17 Million For Dropping Cookies In Apple's Safari Browser For iPhone

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-17-million-cookie-settlement-2013-11

google Larry Page and Sergey BrinGoogle and Apple are at it again. On Monday, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced that Google had reached a settlement with 37 states including Washington D.C., Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Maryland, New Jersey, Texas and California over placing unauthorized cookies in the Safari Web browser found on various Apple devices. 

The case began in 2011 and 2012 when the states discovered tracking of Safari users after visits to Google's DoubleClick ad network. Cookies are small files embedded in a computer that contain trace amounts of data based on visitor history. Based on the information they have, cookies offer its clients the ability to make tailored Web pages. In the statement given by Schneiderman, he said that Google directly violated customers privacy who deserve the right to know if someone is following them while they browse the Web. He continued by asserting that Google had violated several privacy laws as well.

Google will have to pay $17 million to the 37 states in the lawsuit.

Google changed the coding for DoubleClick in 2011 to bypass the privacy settings found in Safari despite the fact that the browser blocks third party programs like this.

Google seemed happy to reach the settlement. The company wanted to ensure it respected customers privacy so it removed these ad cookies from Apple's servers. Google promised it would give consumers more information about their b! rowsing history. Google acknowledged in the settlement that it would only override cookie blocking settings for urgent situations such as fraud or identity theft.

 


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Bitcoin mining motherboards promise huge profits (for your energy provider)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/18/asrock-bitcoin-motherboards/

Motherboard manufacturer exploit lust for Bitcoin

As Bitcoins have become more valuable, they've also become much harder to accumulate using the mathematical process known as "mining." This air of futility hasn't fazed ASRock, however, as the company has revealed two new motherboards that promise to help DIY-ers to "join the gold rush now!" The H61 Pro BTC and H81 Pro BTC are both Intel socket boards, with the latter being Haswell compatible, and their main party trick is to carry extra PCIe slots and power connectors so you can exploit the compute power of up to six graphics cards simultaneously.

What ASRock doesn't specify, however, is how much profit one of its fully-loaded mining motherboards might deliver. So, although we're quite deliberately not experts at this stuff (aside from a bit of armchair interest), we plugged some numbers into the Bitcoin Profitability Calculator, based on six Radeon HD 7990 cards running in parallel, and discovered that this monster of a system might never actually break even, due to its ridiculously high energy costs. This could well explain why all the big boys use dedicated ASIC boards for mining these days, instead of consumer-grade hardware.

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Via: Bit-tech

Source: ASRock [1], [2]

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NVIDIA unveils Tesla K40 accelerator, teams with IBM on GPU-based supercomputing

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/18/nvidia-unveils-tesla-k40-and-ibm-deal/

NVIDIA unveils Tesla K40, teams with IBM on supercomputing in the data center

NVIDIA's Tesla GPUs are already mainstays in supercomputers that need specialized processing power, and they're becoming even more important now that the company is launching its first Tesla built for large-scale projects. The new K40 accelerator only has 192 more processing cores than its K20x ancestor (2,880, like the GeForce GTX 780 Ti), but it crunches analytics and science numbers up to 40 percent faster. A jump to 12GB of RAM, meanwhile, helps it handle data sets that are twice as big as before. The K40 is already available in servers from NVIDIA's partners, and the University of Texas at Austin plans to use it in Maverick, a remote visualization supercomputer that should be up and running by January.

As part of the K40 rollout, NVIDIA has also revealed a partnership with IBM that should bring GPU-boosted supercomputing to enterprise-grade data centers. The two plan on bringing Tesla GPU support to IBM's Power8-based servers, including both apps and development tools. It's not clear when the deal will bear fruit, but don't be surprised if it turbocharges a corporate mainframe near you.

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Source: NVIDIA

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Google working on RAW support and improved camera features for Android

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/18/google-camera-API-raw-support-android/

Google working on RAW photo support for Android phones

Nokia may be the first to have delivered RAW photography in a smartphone, but there's evidence to suggest that Google isn't too far behind. A month-old batch of code, recently spotted by app developer Josh Brown, reveals that work has been underway on a new Android camera API that could allow smartphones to store uncompressed images alongside JPEG ones, drastically increasing the amount of correction and manipulation that can be accomplished after an image has been captured.

A second snippet from the API suggests that Android may get some level of stock support for modular or external cameras, perhaps like Sony's QX10 and QX100, although the meaning of the words is slightly ambiguous:

The camera device is removable and has been disconnected from the Android device, or the camera service has shut down the connection due to a higher-priority access request for the camera device.

Ars Technica has pointed out some other potential changes that are buried in the documentation, and rightly suggests that any imaging-related improvements would be a good thing for Android right now. Even with Sony's Xperia Z1, which contains one of the most powerful sensors currently found in an Android phone, it's the software that holds things back more than anything else, so extra features in the underlying OS could provide manufacturers with just the nudge they need.

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Via: Ars Technica

Source: Google Git, Josh Brown (Google+)

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People Are Starting To Buy Those $35 'Raspberry Pi' Mini-Computers

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/people-are-starting-to-buy-those-35-raspberry-pi-mini-computers-2013-11

raspberry piOver 2m Raspberry Pi computers have been sold globally since going on sale for around £30 in February 2012.

It took a year to sell the first million of the card-sized barebones computers, but sales accelerated in 2013, with the 2m milestone being reached in the last week of October.

"It took us almost exactly a year to sell the first million Raspberry Pis," wrote Liz Upton from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. "Going on that basis, we calculated that we might, if we were lucky, reach the second million around January 2014, or slightly afterwards – we were confident we’d get there by the end of February 2014.

“It was a bit of a shock at the end of last week when we got the latest sales figures and discovered that the 2,000,000th Raspberry Pi was sold in the last week of October," Upton continued.

A basic computing platform for hobbyists, teachers, pupils and corporations alike

The Raspberry Pi is a credit card-sized, bare-bones computer that uses a smartphone-like ARM processor to provide a basic and extensible computing platform for hobbyists, teachers, pupils and corporations.

The small computer has USB ports for a keyboard and mouse, an Ethernet port, a SD card slot, and an HDMI port for connecting to a monitor or a TV. It runs a variant of the free open-source operating system Linux, which powers many web servers and Android smartphones.

Nearly 40,000 Raspberry Pis produced a week in Wales

In October, it was announced that 1m Raspberry Pis had been manufactured in Britain.

The initial batch of the computer were made in C! hina , but a partnership between the Raspberry Pi Foundation, RS Components and Premier Farnell saw all Raspberry Pi manufacturing moved to a Sony-owned manufacturing plant in Pencoed, Wales, in September 2012.

Since June 2012, production of Raspberry Pis at the Pencoed factory has been ramped up from just 204 a week to nearly 40,000 in April 2013.

'More work to do to ensure that schools are ready for this new wave of mini-computers'

The Raspberry Pi has often been hailed as the affordable, programmable computer for schools, and while it certainly is a step in the right direction, school IT infrastructure isn’t keeping pace.

“Since its launch last year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has been on a mission to transform the education experience for students, but is it delivering? The reality is that there is more work to do to ensure that schools are ready for this new wave of mini computers," explained Nick Williams, senior product manager at networking specialist Brocade.

“Whilst the devices on offer to schools have taken a quantum leap in affordability and accessibility, schools still exist with 20-year-old networking technology and the sums just do not add up," Williams said.

• In November, an affordable 9in high-definition screen for use with the Raspberry Pi smashed its funding goal in just 50.5 hours

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

SEE ALSO: Here's What People Are Actually Using That $35 'Raspberry Pi' Computer For

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Hands-on with Tablo, a DVR that streams over-the-air TV nearly anywhere

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/16/tablo-hands-on/

Handson with Tablo, a DVR that streams overtheair TV nearly anywhere

Many streaming-savvy DVRs either lean heavily on cloud services or are linked to traditional TV -- neither of which is ideal for cord cutters trying to lower their long-term costs. Nuvyyo is promising what could be a more affordable option with its upcoming Tablo DVR. The upcoming, partly crowdfunded set-top box streams both live and locally recorded over-the-air broadcasts to seemingly any internet-capable platform, including Android, iOS, Roku players and web browsers. In theory, it's as cheap and convenient as internet-only video while delivering the wider content selection of traditional TV. We've had hands-on time with a Tablo prototype that suggests the company has at least latched on to a good (if imperfect) idea -- read on to see what we mean.

For a start, the Tablo device and its apps are flexible in both the way you record media and where you send it. There should be dual-tuner ($200 estimated street price) and quad-tuner ($250) DVR models shipping around late January, both of which will have dual-band WiFi, Ethernet and two USB ports for external hard drives. The mobile clients will send video to nearby TVs through AirPlay and Chromecast adapters. While there's no current plans to release native apps for Windows Phone or other platforms, they may not be necessary when the web app is mobile-optimized and streams over HTML5. The company is exploring DLNA support that would make it easy to send video to consoles and smart TVs.

Handson with Tablo, a DVR that streams overtheair TV nearly anywhere

We had the opportunity to try early versions of Tablo's iOS and web apps (the Android version is a month behind, Nuvyyo founder Grant Hall says), and they suggest that viewers will have quite a lot of control. The client not only divides movies and TV shows in its programming guide by channel and genre, but breaks out special content like sports; you'll know when to expect a big game. You can even keep an eye out for show premieres. It's possible to limit whole-series recording to truly new episodes, too. Video quality is good even on the 2-3Mbps internet stream, and the apps are generally polished and responsive despite their unreleased states.

What catches exist with Tablo rest more in the costs than anything else. You'll need to bring your own storage; while Nuvyyo may offer a model with a built-in drive based on feedback, the existing design doesn't include anything. Downloads also won't be available on launch, but they should be coming within a few months of the initial release. You'll likely want to pay for a programming guide subscription after the first year, too, unless you're content with manually scheduling recordings by channel and time. However, Nuvyyo hopes to undercut the pricing of DVR and streaming services that rely solely on the cloud. While subscription pricing isn't final, Hall hopes that it will be around $5 per month or $50 per year -- roughly half of what you'd pay for some streaming-only solutions.

Some will likely be frustrated by the lack of cable TV support (something Hall would like to change), but Nuvyyo is really more of a hardware-based competitor to cord-cutting tools like Aereo and Hulu Plus. It's expensive up front, but may cost less in the long run. It also works in-home without an internet connection, and it avoids the arbitrary waiting time for content that you see through some providers. At the least, Tablo could be a tempting alternative to Simple.TV given its more powerful hardware and a feature set that's less dependent on remotely located services. If you like the concept, you can make a pledge at the source links today.

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Source: Indiegogo, Tablo

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Report: Apple buys PrimeSense, co-creators of the original Kinect

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/17/apple-primesense-2/

Remember that Apple / PrimeSense deal that was rumored to be going down in July? It may have just gone through: according to Israeli news source Calcalist, Cupertino acquired the motion sensing technology firm for $345 million this weekend. If true, it could hint at future Apple products with natural, motion controlled interfaces, integrating the same kind of technology that PrimeSense used to help Microsoft build the first Kinect. In a statement to the TheNextWeb, PrimeSense refers to the report as a "recycled rumor," saying only that it "does not comment on what any of our partners, customers or potential customers are doing." According to the report, Apple is hounding after the motion sensing tech to improve Apple TV, noting that the original deal was delayed due to legal issues. Hungry for more? Brush up on your Hebrew and check out the source link below - but keep your salt shaker handy.

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Source: Calcalist, TheNextWeb

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Eric Schmidt Has Unveiled Plans For Google's Crackdown On Child Porn

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/eric-schmidt-unveiled-plans-for-googles-crack-down-on-child-porn-2013-11

Google Eric Schmidt

Google's Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt wrote an op-ed in the Daily Mail this weekend, outlining changes being made to Google's search function in order to block child pornography.

Google has lots of plans to help fix this problem, notably, using humans to review each image to confirm the difference between abuse and what Schmidt called "innocent pictures of kids at bath time."

Schmidt writes:

We've fine tuned Google Search to prevent links to child sexual abuse material from appearing in our results. 

While no algorithm is perfect – and Google cannot prevent pedophiles adding new images to the web – these changes have cleaned up the results for over 100,000 queries that might be related to the sexual abuse of kids. 

Google will roll out changes on a global level in 150 different languages.

You can read Schmidt's entire op-ed here.

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