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.

Filed under:

Comments

Read More...

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.

 


Join the conversation about this story »


    






Read More...

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.

Filed under:

Comments

Via: Bit-tech

Source: ASRock [1], [2]

Read More...

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.

Filed under: , ,

Comments

Source: NVIDIA

Read More...

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.

Filed under: , , ,

Comments

Via: Ars Technica

Source: Google Git, Josh Brown (Google+)

Read More...