Items tagged with Time
Pebble is launching a new Kickstarter campaign, and the star this time around is its new Pebble Time smartwatch. In a nascent market that is seeing the rise of LCD and OLED-powered smartwatches running the Android Wear operating system (the much-hyped Apple Watch is still two months away), the Pebble Time forgoes those power-hungry displays (well, power-hungry when we’re talking about the tiny batteries included on smartwatches) in favor of a color e-paper display. The use of the e-paper allows for the use of [relatively] vibrant colors while retaining the seven-day battery life that Pebble users have grown accustomed to. For comparison, Android Wear smartwatches last anywhere from one to two...
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There's absolutely no shame in finishing second, especially when you're going up against the President of the United States. To wit, Time Magazine named Tim Cook the runner-up to its Person of the Year, giving the ultimate prize to President Barack Obama. According to Time, Cook is the first CEO of Apple to come to power "without blood on his hands." Prior to his stepping into Steve Jobs' former role, a CEO would be named when somebody got fired, Cook explained to Time. Cook, however, was handpicked by Jobs to replace him, and it appears Apple is in good hands moving forward. Since Cook took over, Apple has grown into the largest company ever and is worth than Google and Microsoft combined. He's...
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The Internet has been said to be just one big series of tubes. Accurate? In fact, yes, it is. But data doesn't just flow around the globe without a medium to travel through, and most users take the undersea cabling necessary to make it happen for granted. Now, thanks to a little company called Facebook, we're hearing a bit more about it. This week, TIME dotCom (out of Malaysia) has entered into a construction and maintenance agreement of the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) submarine cable system connecting Malaysia to Korea and Japan. The APG is a 10,000 km international fibre optic cable system that will link Malaysia to Korea and Japan with seven branches to other Asian countries. The cable system...
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The news magazine Time and Apple announced a deal today that will give print subscribers full access to the iPad versions of its magazines for free, including publications like Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Time itself. The deal is a potent demonstration of how disappointed most publications have been over the growth of iPad subscriptions. Apple's announcement of the feature last year sparked a great deal of initial interest, but the majority of companies are unhappy with the 70/30 revenue split Apple demands. Subscriber data has proved to be another flash point. Under the terms Apple offers, companies are not allowed to independently sell access to iPad versions of their content through their...
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There's a lot more to history and archeology than just uncovering the past. Sometimes recreating the past in our present time is the best way to understand how people lived thousands of years ago. One such project, the Rome Reborn project of the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, seeks to digitally rebuild the city of Rome "as it might have appeared at the height of its urban development in the time of Constantine the Great in A.D. 320."The first version of the Rome Reborn project was ten years in the making and was completed only last year. It included digital models of the terrain and over 7,000 structures--250 of which were highly detailed. The source...
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It's no secret that most radio talk shows have a slight delay before a caller's audio reaches the air. The obvious reason: to make sure no "f-bombs" reach the sensitive ears of the public --- or the FCC. Well, Microsoft has been awarded a patent that might eliminate the need for that delay. The patent, 7437290, is for "Automatic censorship of audio data for broadcast" was first filed in 2004. Here's how it's described: An input audio data stream comprising speech is processed by an automatic censoring filter in either a real-time mode, or a batch mode, producing censored speech that has been altered so that undesired words or phrases are either unintelligible or inaudible. The automatic censoring...
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How do you roll out computer access to 1.8 million students at $70 per seat? The answer: Virtualization. The Indian state of Andhra Pradesh is undertaking a "massive 5,000-school educational computing initiative" to build computer labs and give computer access to almost two million Indian children. But instead of requiring one computer per user, the system being put in place, supplied by NComputing, will allow up to seven users simultaneous access to a single computer. Credit: NComputingGet those images of a bunch of kids crowded around a single keyboard and display out of your heads--that's not how this system works. The system will utilize NComputing's X300 kit that essentially...
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In our continuing coverage of technologies that are enabling convergence and mobility, we have news from Motorola that they're serious in their commitment to capitalizing on convergence and connectivity in the multimedia living room of tomorrow. Dubbed the au BOX (case sensitive, please...), Motorola plans to enable customers to take their multimedia content with them on their cell phone. KDDI, a major mobile carrier in Japan plans to offer the au BOX service first which will allow subscribers to tap into their personal music, video and image libraries, while on the road. And with the help of a setup box? You are correct, sir. Unfortunately the roll-out is only...
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Pundits argue that the computer is quickly on its way to becoming the primary source of delivering audio-visual entertainment. Others will argue that it's already happened. With over 12 billion videos watched online in the U.S. during the month of May, its hard to argue against the ubiquity of the PC as the king of media. To further this claim, market research company, Integrated Media Measurement Inc. (IMMI), has released a study that claims that almost 20 percent of primetime "episodic" television shows are watched online.This number is an average representing IMMI's measurement of "3,000 teens and adults'" viewing habits of "fourteen primetime shows on two major networks during the fall of...
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Federal regulators continue to come down on hard on corporate executives they believe are involved with misrepresenting investors and analysts. The latest group to get collared were 8 executives from AOL Time Warner who are being charged with inflating the company’s online advertising revenue by more than $1 billion between 2000 and 2002.“Four of the executives have agreed to settle the civil charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission by paying a total of roughly $8 million in fines and returning allegedly ill-gotten gains. They are David Colburn, Eric Keller, Jay Rappaport and James MacGuidwin, who was controller of the media company. The other three were in its business affairs...
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Your Digital Video Recorder might not have found Sarah Conner yet, but it seems to be responsible for the disappearance of six million primetime TV viewers since last May. Some of the miserable ratings of this year's crop of primetime shows could be laid at the feet of the writer's strike, but that really can't explain the whole number. It's starting to dawn on the TV industry that there's no such thing as primetime anymore. ...the more significant shift can’t be blamed on the strike. In the past television season, there has been a sharp increase in time-shifting. Some of the six million are still watching, but on their own terms, thanks to TiVos and other digital video recorders, streaming video...
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Here's a way to peruse the globe while getting regional updates.New York Times "placemarks" will appear on maps where there's relevant news, and showing the New York Times layer in the software will show a window with a month's worth of headlines, Google's LatLong blog said.Google spokeswoman Kate Hurowitz said the company is open to partnerships with other media outlets and that extending such a feature to Google Maps--a much more widely used service than the Google Earth software--"would be a logical progression," though the company has nothing to announce right now. Google's interest in extending this to Google Maps is not only natural, it's a lot more exciting. Naturally if you want...
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Apple patched QuickTime not once, but an amazing eleven times on Wednesday. Some of the patches were to improve stability and compatibility, but there were also some exploits which were found and patched.“It's at least the sixth time Apple has patched QuickTime since October, as researchers and hackers have been closely examining media players for vulnerabilities. As operating systems have become more secure, vulnerabilities in applications have become a favored route to break into a PC.”Apple is notoriously coy with information regarding the specific exploits, but the running rumor is that most of the exploits patched were actually found by Apple themselves....
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We're getting to be nags here at HotHardware news about this facet of computer upgrades, but once again, it's proven to be true: Bigger monitors make people more productive. Researchers at the University of Utah tested how quickly people performed tasks like editing a document and copying numbers between spreadsheets while using different computer configurations: one with an 18-inch monitor, one with a 24-inch monitor and with two 20-inch monitors. Their finding: People using the 24-inch screen completed the tasks 52% faster than people who used the 18-inch monitor; people who used the two 20-inch monitors were 44% faster than those with the 18-inch ones. There is an upper limit, however:...
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Some retailers have been offering credits or trade-ins for returns of HD-DVD players, but you always need to buy a new Blu-ray player in exchange. Circuit City is going them one better, extending its 30-day return policy to 90 days for HD-DVD players.Circuit City Stores Inc. is getting on the Blu-ray digital video format bandwagon by tripling the period in which customers who purchased a rival HD DVD player can return them.The nation's No. 2 electronics retailer has instructed its stores to "take care of our customers" and accept returns of HD DVD players within 90 days of purchase, spokesman Jim Babb said."Take care of our customers," now that's a great sentiment. Nice move, Circuit City....
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Yahoo's rejection of Microsoft's $44.6 billion buyout offer has stirred up a lot of controversy and even more lawsuits than we reported earlier this week.Yahoo's board of directors claim that the offer isn't sufficient, while Microsoft is of the opinion that anything above and beyond $44.6 billion is too much and it'd be more efficient to start buying stock in preparation for a hostile takeover. Neither company has budged publicly, but Yahoo shareholders are up in arms according to a recent filing Yahoo provided the Securities and Exchange. “The impasse has triggered four shareholder suits in California's Santa Clara County Superior Court. Three other complaints have been filed in...
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As with all rumors, please take the following news item with a grain of salt until we can receive official confirmation or denial from AMD.For those of you who've been hoping for a more competitive high-end CPU landscape, it seems that your wishes might be met as early as the end of this year:“...the inputs from trusted Far Eastern friends about the 45 nm desktop parts say that, if AMD does its job right, we're gonna have a quad-core 6MB cache part running at 3.2 GHz with DDR2-1066 memory a few months before year's end.”It makes a lot of sense for AMD to be throwing their effort into getting 45nm parts shipping as quickly as they can. At this point their 65nm technology is producing...
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Mark Zuckerberg is 23 years old. He founded the social networking site Facebook while he was still in college. He's made the mistake most bright people make when one of their notions becomes wildly popular overnight: He's thinks it has nothing to do with luck, or being in the right place at the right time. Unchastened by his foolhardy foray into Big Brother spying on his customers with the Beacon widget, he continues to behave like what he is: an inexperienced businessman in charge of a suddenly prominent business.Want to know about how privately held Facebook is doing from a financial point of view? Well, just ask Mark Zuckerberg!This afternoon, at an all-hands meeting held in a...
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Do you ever get that feeling that all day you're just taking one step forward, two steps back? How about that uncanny sort of chill that goes down your spine when you're skulking in late from a night out with the boys, only to realize that your wife or significant other really isn't asleep, she's faking it and your dog-breath, over-indulged, wretchedness won't slide past her, even if you paid her handsomely. Well, it could just be that you haven't yet mastered all time, space and dimension yet, young Jedi. Grand Poo-Baa of all the smart guys in history, Albert Einstein had a theory (well, relatively speaking anyway) that maybe we were all living here on Earth...
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Google Inc.'s $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick Inc. has been cleared by the Federal Trade Commission despite heavy opposition from Microsoft and AT&T.The next step of the deal is to be cleared by the powers that be in other regions of the world that Google operates in.“The deal, announced in April, will combine Google's leading position in online text ads with DoubleClick's ad-serving tools that help publishers place and track display ads.”This acquisition could very well put Google into a very dominant position in the online advertising arena for the foreseeable future....
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Google's plan to acquire DoubleClick Inc. has run into a snag. That snag's name is the European Commission, which acts as the EU's anti-competition watchdog. Despite the Federal Trade Commission approving the takeover, the EC feels that the merger will have a detrimental effect to European consumers:"The Google/DoubleClick merger would harm consumer welfare by creating a structure that almost certainly will be less respectful of user privacy," the BEUC said Thursday in a letter to the European Commission this week.There is also concern that Google would control major portions of advertising from both sides of the fence: those that search for products and thus view ads, and the advertising...
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We're wondering when Microsoft is going to release a series of advertisements that poke fun at Apple's latest OS, much like Apple's anti-Vista media blitz that started almost a year ago.The problem is that Apple was comparing an OS that had over a year of post-release patches/updates and bug-fixes and was trying to compare it to an ambitious release from Microsoft. Let's not lose sight of the fact that OS 10.4 (a.k.a. Tiger) was the subject of many complaints and compatibility issues upon launch itself. Now the tables have turned, and Vista is nearing the 1 year mark and Apple's Leopard is taking flak for many of its features not working or not working properly.Key amongst these features...
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