PATREONItems tagged with Like
We’ve been talking about Facebook’s revamp of its “Like” system for months, but the social network giant today finally performed a global launch of new “Reactions” which should better allow people to express their feelings about a post. The long-standing thumbs up is now joined by a heart (Love), and emojis signifying laughter, surprise, sadness and anger. The Reactions should go a long way towards cutting down on the awkwardness of Liking a post about a friend’s loved one dying or any number of horrific things that get posted to Facebook that we feel compelled to acknowledge with a Like. “Not every moment you want to share is happy. Sometimes you want to share something sad or frustrating,”...
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Will they or won’t they? It’s been a topic of discussion surrounding Facebook for years — will the company introduce a “Dislike” button to go alongside the inescapable “Like” button? When we last visited the topic in late December, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the idea outright, citing its negative connotation. “You know, some people have asked for a Dislike button because they want to be able to say ‘That thing isn’t good’,” said Zuckerberg in a public Q&A. “And that’s not something that we think is good for the world. So we’re not going to build that.” Well, it appears that Zuckerberg and company have had a change of heart over the past nine months. In another Facebook Q&A...
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The question of whether to add a “dislike” button just won’t go away for Facebook, in part because the company hasn’t aggressively shot the idea down. This week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg closed the book on the issue by saying outright that Facebook won’t create a “dislike” button. However, he went on to say that Facebook is considering other ways to help user express emotions other than “like.” Could that mean buttons similar to “dislike” down the road? Image Credit: Facebook In his “Q&A with Mark,” Zuckerberg noted that people sometimes read posts that are sad or cover sensitive topics and would like to acknowledge them with something other than a “like” button. He says...
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As I sit here writing this, I'm thinking, "Should I depressed that it's a newsworthy topic when Facebook changes its 'Like' button, or just accept that it's a sign of the times we live in?" I'm not sure of the answer, but as silly as it sounds, in this case, a revamped icon is kind of a big deal, and for a number of reasons. The first, of course, is that Facebook is home to more than 1.15 billion active monthly users, making it the most popular social network in the universe. All those members add up to one very large asset for Facebook, which rakes in tons of cash by advertising to all those eyeballs, plus the cut it gets from in-app purchases of casual games that flood the network. Without...
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Besides being a low-ranking Marvel Comics super-villain, Trapster is a free application that went live on the App Store last Friday, allowing users to share information real-time on speed traps.Besides the iPhone (naturally the highest-profile device in the bunch), the app runs on GPS devices like Garmin and TomTom, as well as on smartphones such including Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Nokia S60 and N95 and other Java/J2ME phones. How does it work? You click on button in the app or call a toll-free number to report a speed trap. Other user's phones will alert them as they approach the trap. Trapster learns the "credibility" of traps based on how many users agree with the report. Trapster...
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Not content to let Nintendo Wii owners have all the fun with motion-based, wireless game controllers, Asus has just announced its own Wii-like controllers for Windows PCs, called the Eee Stick. It seems that Asus is putting the "Eee" moniker on all of its new products lately, such as the Eee PC and the Eee Box. In fact, the Asus press release made it sound as though the controllers will only be available bundled with some models of the Eee PC and Eee Box, and not as a stand-alone product.Asus states that the Eee Stick "translates users' physical hand motions into corresponding movements onscreen." It will include "a collection of games developed or adapted specifically for use with it." As to...
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This smacks somewhat of those old blindfold taste tests you see on commerials. It goes a little something like this... "I hate Diet Coke." "Here, try this new soda!""Wow, it's great!""That was Diet Coke!""Ooops!" In a similar move, Microsoft took Windows XP fans and showed them a new OS, "Mojave." What's interesting is that this "new" OS wasn't really new at all... Spurred by an e-mail from someone deep in the marketing ranks, Microsoft last week traveled to San Francisco, rounding up Windows XP users who had negative impressions of Vista. The subjects were put on video, asked about their Vista impressions, and then shown a "new" operating system, code-named...
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One of the great appeals of Apple products is their elegant design. (Elegant enough to entice long-time Segway CTO Doug Field to leave Dean Kamen's brain trust at Segway and move over to Steve Jobs lair as VP for product design at Apple.) Apple's designs have such a unique appeal to them that they frequently invite competing manufacturers to imitate Apple's designs. By now, we've lost count how many iPhone knockoffs are on the market already. But if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Apple should be blushing proud at Averatec's just-announced All-In-One PC. (Although we doubt it if Apple is happy about how much the All-In-One looks like an iMac.) Upon first glance, the All-In-One...
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Apple is certainly litigious over the use of the word "pod," and on Wednesday it received a taste of its own medicine, as it was sued over its "Mighty Mouse." No, it's not for the reason you might think, as its already licensed the name "Mighty Mouse" from CBS.Apple is facing a new lawsuit over its Mighty Mouse peripheral, reports say. The case was filed in Greenbelt, Maryland by a company called Man & Machine, which is accusing Apple of violating a trademark associated with its own Mighty Mouse device, an optical mouse designed to be waterproof and chemical-resistant for use in environments such as labs and hospitals. Crucially, M&M began selling its product in 2004, over a year...
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While AMD is frantically trying to ramp up the speeds of their existing Phenom designs, we’re starting to get a slightly clearer picture of what the company plans on offering next. AMD’s technical director of sales and marketing for EMEA, Giuseppe Amato, told Custom PC that ‘if I look at the next generation architecture of our CPU, then it will definitely not be, how can I say, comparable with the Phenom. It will look completely different.’ Amato was unable to give us any specific details of the new architecture, but did add that it would ‘solve problems that today we think can never be addressed by hardware.’ We’re waiting with baited breath to discover what kinds of problems AMD is planning...
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Over the last year, there has been an influx of ultra small form factor PCs, from companies like Asus and Acer. But Everex has also gotten in on some of the action and have just unveiled yet another new mini-PC at their on-line store. In the post, Everex says the new MyMiniPC, as it is called, is exclusively created for the +100,000,000 MySpace users of the world. But the system is essentially a standard, albeit tiny, PC with a custom Linux-based operating system with a few MySpace related applications integrated. According to Everex, the MyMiniPC is "...what happens when you combine an award winning design* with the power of Open Source. The limited edition gPC mini...
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Korea's MIU is out with a new UMPC, which they call a "HDPC," for Hybrid Dual Portable Computer. It's so very, very hybrid -- it looks like a hunchbacked fax machine mated with a tricorder. Equipped with a dual OS -- Windows XP or a Linux distro -- it tries to do everything. Qwerty keyboard, 800x480 resolution on a 4 inch display, and they take a run at wireless internet, navigation, mobile phone, media player, electronic dictionary, VoIP, PSP type gameplay, camera... it would be shorter to list what it can't do: Look good. It's hideous. You'd think the battery life would suffer running all that, plus its Via processor (500MHz or 1GHz), but the reported life is 7 hours at "high power" or an impressive...
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Promises, promises. Can it deliver?The technical trick of Skyfire is that it's a proxy browser. The Skyfire app itself isn't a full browser. Instead, big Skyfire servers elsewhere process Web pages, including all the media and browser formats -- like Flash, Java, and Ajax -- that a normal desktop browser would handle but that most phones can't. Then it streams data to phones, which the mobile half of Skyfire displays. To the end user, it looks like a browser, but the mobile app is just one part of the product.This means that Skyfire can do things on mobile phones that mobile browsers, including Safari and Opera, cannot, at least not without bogging down the phone. The danger is that the...
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Turning over the calendar means lots and lots of lists. The lists cataloging the year gone by get boring fast. We like crazy stabs at the future much better. Here's a list of ten things that could change the next ten years of your future, chosen despite --and because -- they seem so unlikely. But as the author points out, pretty much all of today's must haves seemed like harebrained schemes the first time you heard of them, didn't they? Here's my fave:THE CHUMBY The creators of this bizarre little device have generated a huge buzz over the past few months - and it's not even due to be launched until early in the year. The Chumby is a wireless internet device about the size of a rugby ball....
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Western Digital is a big fan of text files, and assumes you are too. It has disabled the ability of its 1TB network-ready drive to share MP3, AVI, MPEGs... well, pretty much any audio or video file you could name. The "My Book World Edition" drive assumes the world is full of typists, I guess.Access to multimedia files is allowed only by the primary user registered on WD Anywhere Access, the remote desktop client embedded on the NAS device, said Brian Miller, director of marketing at Western Digital.Anywhere Access is based on the MioNet remote desktop client, which allows users to access, read, edit and share files on remote desktops. The Anywhere Access client allows remote users access...
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The Romantics had a hit. What I Like About You. It was one and done for them, hit-wise, but they've certainly managed to milk that old cow for three decades now. They figure there might be a few drops of 2% in the old holstein yet, as they're suing Activision, makers of the Guitar Hero game. They claim that even though Activision paid for the rights to have a cover band re-record it for the game, the new version sounds too much like the old version. This argument is a cousin of the trademark claim that the Supreme Court killed off in Dastar v. Twentieth Century Fox. The band apparently reframes its argument in the language of publicity rights (Guitar Hero has mis-appropriated...
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The digital grassy knoll set's collective head is about to explode. Apple is collecting iPhone usage data, linked to the user's specific personal information. Apple gathers that personal information when you sign up for an iPhone, and may be doing something or nothing with it after associating it with your usage data. People's opinions on this seem to depend on the ratio of Apple fanboy to paranoid privacy nut you are. If you're 100% both, this is bad news:From this information, Apple could build a profile on users. Where they travel, where they spend their free time, where they work, where they invest their money, what they browse, etc etc. Obviously most users would like to...
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We love YouTube. It's got a lot of competition for your postage stamp size viewing pleasure, but it's still the default setting for looking for video clips on the Net. Speaking at a conference yesterday, co-founder Steve Chen has confirmed that YouTube is going to make high-quality video streams available soon.Chen told [c/net reporter Rafe Needleman] that he expects that high-quality YouTube vids will be available to everyone within three months.Chen also confirmed that in YouTube's internal archive, all video is stored at the native resolution in which it was sent in. However, he said, a large portion of YouTube videos are pretty poor quality to begin with -- 320 x 240. Streaming them in high-quality...
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It wasn't all that long ago that online music vendors starting selling DRM-free tracks, often at a small premium and/or small loss of audio fidelity. At the time it was viewed by some as a marketing experiment to see if people would pay more to avoid headaches related to Digital Rights Management, and now it appears that there is a definitive answer to that question:“DRM-free music sells at a much higher rate online than protected music, according to UK-based digital music store 7 Digital. In fact, customers buy it four times as often as they do DRMed music. As a result, almost 80 percent of the store's sales are of DRM-free content. 7 Digital may not sound familiar to some, but it...
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Solar arrays in space, delivering power to the Earth. Something seen frequently in science fiction movies and books. It's always been seen as financially unviable, but if someone with really deep pockets like the military were interested ...A new Pentagon study lays out the roadmap for a multibillion-dollar push to the final frontier of energy: a satellite system that collects gigawatts’ worth of solar power and beams it down to Earth.The military itself could become the “anchor tenant” for such a power source, due to the current high cost of fueling combat operations abroad, the study says.Even for the military, the cost would be tremendous, and it would still not be financially...
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Unfortunately, MHz makes a difference. Changes to the system requirements for the next Apple operating system could exclude those systems with 800 MHz CPUs.The increase in system requirements would exclude a number of Mac systems from running Leopard, such as the 800MHz PowerBook G4 (Titanium), 800MHz PowerMac G4 (Quicksilver), 800MHz iMac G4, 800MHz iBook G4 and 800MHz eMac. All the systems affected are at least four years old. Four years old? Shoot, those systems are archaic ... not. But seriously, you wouldn't expect a four year old system to run Vista? Or would you?...
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For years the defense department and even some large corporations have utilized games as a method of teaching people various trade tasks. It appears that miners are perhaps the newest recipients of 'video game' based training.Considering the staggering cost of serious mining equipment (think 7 and 8 figures each), the idea of training and even employment pre-qualification on a virtual platform might make sense. It certainly seems that it makes sense to Caterpillar, who brought their video game 'simulation' to Peru this week for a mining convention. Apparently the new training method earned some new fans:“Giant video games with throaty diesel engines powering monster-sized earth movers, excavators...
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