Archive for February, 2010.
The European Union has requested that Google make some changes to its Street View service. It wants Google to delete the images that it captures after six months, according to a letter sent to Google from the head of the EU Article 29 Data Protection Group, which is comprised of data protection officials from EU countries.
It also wants Google to alert residents when its Google Street View cars will be in their area. Google takes the photos for this service using cars that drive up and down streets and roads.
Microsoft did its best Woody Harrelson impression this week and set out to bag some zombies. The zombies we’re talking about here are PCs infected with malware. The bad guys spread the malware around and then remotely control victims’ computers as part of a botnet that can do stuff like send out spam email or carry out DDoS attacks. In the real world, of course, you have to aim for the head to kill zombies, and that’s basically the new strategy Microsoft used. In order to take down Waledac, which was one really bad botnet, it was granted a temporary restraining order.
With all the hype surrounding Bloom Energy’s newly launched Bloom Box, it may be tempting to view the new device as a cure-all for the world’s energy concerns. After all, the promise of an on-site power source that can provide homes with reliable clean energy at an affordable price seems like nothing short of a panacea. Just how affordable the devices will really be has already been questioned. In addition, given the Bloom Box’s use of natural gas and biofuels, it’s not entirely clear how clean or green it will be in the long term.
Austin, Texas, is the home of the annual South by Southwest Festival, which in 23 years has grown from a music-only celebration featuring a few Sixth Street bars, a handful of bands and lots of Shiner Bock beer, into a two-week, multi-media extravaganza featuring hundreds of Next New Thing musicians, filmmakers and technology movers/shakers — and lots of Shiner Bock beer. I was living and working in Austin in 1988, the festival’s second year, and remember having a great time sweating up a storm while dancing to some great live music at Antone’s.
Web-based applications and cloud computing have presented new challenges for software developers. Most software makers are by no means tone-deaf to user concerns about security and usability issues, but even those software writers who are receptive to these worries must contend with hard-to-plug holes that can open up in cross-platform programs such as Web browsers. For Web app developers, the problems occur on two fronts. Not only do they have to harden the application itself, but they also have to keep up with the occasional new browser release.
Call us optimistic, but we pictured February 25th rolling around with us laying on a couch and watching some Olympic ice dancing clips on the JooJoo’s 12-inch screen. Ah, but here we are about to cross off the last few days of the month and the only thing we’ve got in our hands are some tissues and hot cocoa. Promising to ship units to those who pre-ordered in December within 8-10 weeks, Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan told us just a month ago that it was on track to ship before the end of February. However, when we called them up to see what the deal was we were told they’d have a shipping update for us by the first week in March. Additionally, when asked if there were delays with production or shipping the first units to customers we got the unpleasant “no comment.” We’re going to go ahead and assume there’s been some sort of delay — perhaps JooJoo primary investor CSL has been too busy updating the BlueBerrry KIRF line with an optical pad to write out the check for the manufacturing costs. Okay, that’s unlikely, but we’d love to hear if any of those that pre-ordered have heard differently or anything at all.
It’s the end of February, where’s your JooJoo? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Feb 2010 19:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Not interested in piecing together your own hybrid SSD hard drive with something like SilverStone’s HDDBOOST kit? Then you might want to consider waiting for Raidon’s upcoming HyBrid Disk drive, which promises all the same benefits with none of the hassle (apart from actually installing it in your computer, that is). Complete details on this one are still a bit light, but you will apparently be able to remove the SSD and use it on its own if you like, and then have its contents automatically backed up when you put it back in its enclosure. No word on pricing just yet either, but Raidon says the drives will first be available in an internal, 3.5-inch version in April, with an external version following later in the year.
Raidon announces HyBrid Disk SSD / hard drive combo originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Feb 2010 19:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Looks like there won’t be a shortage of new laptops and netbooks next week at CeBIT, and if Blogeee is to be believed ASUS will be showing up with at least three new 10.1-inch Eee PCs. The most exciting of the bunch seem to be the executive-aimed 1016P and 1018P, which will both apparently have an aluminum chassis and 14 hours of battery life. The .7-inch 1018P is said to be the thinnest netbook ASUS has ever created, and sport an integrated fingerprint reader and USB 3.0. Uh, USB 3.0 in a netbook? We don’t see why not. Finally there’s the 1015P, which seems to just be an refresh of the 1005PE with a matte display and a wider touchpad. It sounds triple E exciting, but we promise to find out more on these little guys next week when we are live in Deutschland.
ASUS Eee PC 1018P, 1016P and 1015P prepping for a CeBIT debut originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Miyamoto may have been dropping hints about some new Nintendo hardware recently, but it looks like a true Wii successor isn’t among the options in the short term. That’s according to Nintendo’s Cammie Dunaway, who told GameSpot during the company’s just-concluded Media Summit that she doesn’t see a proper Wii follow-up coming “anytime soon.” She further went on to note that even though the Wii now has a larger installed based than the PS2 did at the same point in its life cycle, the Wii “still has a lot of room to grow,” adding that “we’ll have it [a successor] ready when we think the time is right.”
Nintendo’s Dunaway: no Wii successor ‘anytime soon’ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Netbooks for all! We’re convinced that’s the motivational saying plastered to the wall in the HP lab where the company births Minis for everyone but your pet fish. But of all the company’s Pine Trail offerings, we’re most excited about the $425 Mini 210, which has a 10.1-inch HD screen and a Broadcom Crystal Accelerator chip that promises decent HD video playback, even with Flash. With an attractive new thin design, improved chiclet keyboard and that promise to handle high-def content, the Mini 210 has the potential to kick the others to the curb. Given the issues we had with the Broadcom-powered Dell Mini 10 and HP’s newer touchpads, though, we had to put on the glasses and take a closer look. Join us past the break for the full review, will you?
Continue reading HP Mini 210 HD edition review
HP Mini 210 HD edition review originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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