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Monday, May 23, 2011

ASUS gets Computex 2011 started early with a tablet teaser, asks us 'pad or phone?'

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/23/asus-gets-computex-2011-started-early-with-a-tablet-teaser/

Oh ASUS, what are you up to now? The company that brought us the wildly popular Eee Pad Transformer has another new tablet brewing in its design labs, which we're promised we'll get to witness for the first time at Computex 2011. Until then, we've been provided with a trio of images to pore over and get the guessing games going. The slate device, whose size and software remain unspecified, is said to feature a bump (above left) and a clip (above right), though there are no explanations given about the function of either. You may see both images in their full size after the break, along with a teaser image from ASUS' Facebook page with the slogan "break the rules: pad or phone?" stood in front of a tablet silhouette. That provides plenty of clues for aspiring Sherlocks out there, but little concrete knowledge. Ah well, Computex is just a week away.

Continue reading ASUS gets Computex 2011 started early with a tablet teaser, asks us 'pad or phone?'

ASUS gets Computex 2011 started early with a tablet teaser, asks us 'pad or phone?' originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 May 2011 04:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Notebook Italia | source

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Sunday, May 22, 2011

Five Best Services for Quick Image Sharing [Hive Five]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5804337/five-best-services-for-quick-image-sharing

When you want to share an image on Twitter, over IM, or in the comments of your favorite blog, full-fledged gallery webapps like Flickr or Picasa are overkill. That's where these quick sharing services come in, filling your need for quick, almost disposable image sharing. Here's a look at five of the most popular services for quickly and easily sharing images on the web.

On Thursday, we asked you which services you used when you needed to share images with friends quickly and easily. You answered, we tallied the votes, and now we're back with the five most popular apps you nominated.

Dropbox

Five Best Services for Quick Image Sharing If you're already using the popular file-syncing application Dropbox, you can simply drop any image into your public folder, grab the public link (which you can do from the right-click context menu), and share. While it's not strictly for image sharing, Dropbox certainly does the trick. Dropbox has mobile apps for iOS and Android, and easy-to-access folders on your Mac or PC.

CloudApp/FluffyApp

Five Best Services for Quick Image Sharing CloudApp was designed to be the quickest possible way to share images (and other files) with others. While CloudApp is Mac only, its Windows counterpart, FluffyApp, brings the same features to Windows. Drag and drop an image to the CloudApp icon in your menu bar, or on Windows, to FluffyApp in your system tray, and the file is instantly uploaded, and the short URL to that image gets copied to your clipboard, ready for sharing. Plus, you can make the files you share as private or as public as you choose, so it's another great app to share images but also does much more.

ImageShack/Yfrog

Five Best Services for Quick Image Sharing ImageShack is probably the quintessential image sharing site and service on the web. It started as a way to post images to the web and send links to friends in just three clicks (browse, select, and upload,) and has since grown into a service complete with user accounts, video hosting, an iOS app, and a very popular mobile image hosting service (complete with short URLs) called Yfrog. Yfrog is almost universally supported among Twitter clients, and is almost as popular as TwitPic was before its controversial ToS change.

Imgur

Five Best Services for Quick Image Sharing Imgur's star has risen in the past few years because it provides a clean, free, and open alternative to other services like ImageShack and Photobucket. Uploading from your desktop is simple as clicking browse and selecting your image. Re-sharing an image already on the web elsewhere is as easy as copy/pasting its URL. Imgur has Firefox and Chrome extensions, a Wordpress plugin, and even image uploaders for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Plus, each image tracks views and allows for comments from the community, which is a plus and a minus depending on your perspective.

Min.us

Five Best Services for Quick Image Sharing Drag and drop your images, music, or video onto your browser window at Min.us, and they'll be instantly uploaded. Sign-ups are as easy as filling in two or three fields. For a service as new as min.us is, it's taking the right approach to simple and quick image sharing. To streamline how you share your photos, Min.us has browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome, desktop uploaders for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and mobile uploaders for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 7. If you want a service with a short URL and not a lot of traffic, Min.us is worth a try.

Now that you've seen the best options, it's time to vote for a favorite.

What's the Best Service for Quick Image Sharing?online surveys

This week's honorable mentions to go PicPlz and TinyPic, two other excellent services with a lot of fans. You'll need an account to use it, but PicPlz combines social image sharing and tons of great filter effects for your photos with quick uploads and mobile apps for iOS and Android. On your phone or desktop, just select the image you want to share, apply a filter, and click upload. TinyPic is a bit more bare-bones, but it also offers two-click uploads and has mobile support in a number of services, including Twitter apps – partially because it was born from PhotoBucket.

Did we leave out your favorite? Have one that you think everyone should try? Let's hear it in the comments. Photo by Ed Castillo.

You can follow Alan Henry, the author of this post, on Twitter.

NC governor will let cable-backed bill restricting municipal broadband become law

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/22/nc-governor-will-let-cable-backed-bill-restricting-municipal-bro/

We've repeatedly hammered Time Warner Cable (and its big-cable cronies) for crying to the North Carolina legislature about municipal broadband. TWC claims it can't compete with taxpayer-backed ISPs such as Wilson, NC's Greenlight -- and that it shouldn't have to. In fact, Greenlight and four other municipal providers came about specifically because corporate players refused to provide inexpensive, fast broadband. And now that local governments have proven they can provide it, the cable companies have cried foul, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into select political pockets all the while. That's the drama so far, and now a bill restricting municipal broadband -- mandating that providers pay taxes similar to private companies, for example -- has landed on the desk of Governor Bev Perdue. She won't veto the bill, meaning it will soon become a law; for whatever it's worth (read: not much), she also refuses to sign it. The reason? Here it is from the horse's mouth:

I will neither sign nor veto this bill. Instead, I call on the General Assembly to revisit this issue and adopt rules that not only promote fairness but also allow for the greatest number of high quality and affordable broadband options for consumers.

The legislation strikes a blow against public ISPs in a country that ranks ninth in the world for broadband adoption and download speeds. And that, apparently, is what "fair competition" looks like in the US.

[Image courtesy of IndyWeek]

NC governor will let cable-backed bill restricting municipal broadband become law originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 22 May 2011 02:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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TMS RamSan-70 SSD packs 2GB-per-second throughput, up to 900GB capacity

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/22/tms-ramsan-70-ssd-packs-2gb-per-second-throughput-up-to-900gb-c/

There are SSDs and then there are SSDs -- the Texas Memory Systems (TMS) RamSan-70 is definitely the latter, packing 900GB of high-speed SLC NAND flash onto a single half-length PCIe card. Boasting an incredible 2GB-per-second sustained external throughput, this near-terabyte solid state drive is clearly overkill for most of us, considering that it's guaranteed to have a sky-high price (once details are released). Instead, the "900GB Gorilla," as it's come to be known around TMS HQ, is destined for high-end servers -- though we certainly wouldn't object to clearing out a slot in our desktop, if by some miracle we can afford this monster when it starts shipping in four to eight weeks.

Continue reading TMS RamSan-70 SSD packs 2GB-per-second throughput, up to 900GB capacity

TMS RamSan-70 SSD packs 2GB-per-second throughput, up to 900GB capacity originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 22 May 2011 08:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Computerworld | source

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The Protect IP Act: Google's Eric Schmidt squares off against RIAA and MPAA

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/22/the-protect-ip-act-googles-eric-schmidt-squares-off-against-ri/

Protecting intellectual property sounds like such a noble cause that you'd have to be a anarchistic free-market extremist to be against the idea, right? Actually, we don't think Google CEO Eric Schmidt is particularly extreme in any definable way, yet this past week he spoke with gusto, railing against the proposed Protect IP Act, which is was designed to "prevent online threats to economic creativity and theft of intellectual property." If passed into law, it would give the government the right to shut down any "Internet site dedicated to infringing activities" -- "infringing activities" largely being of the sort that allows dude A to download copyrighted item B from dude C when it's unclear whether dude C has legal rights to be distributing B in the first place.

So, you know, it's targeting the Pirate Bay and its ilk, giving government officials greater power to sweep in and snag the domains of such sites. Schmidt calls this approach a set of "arbitrarily simple solutions to complex problems" that "sets a very bad precedent." The precedent? That it's okay for democratic governments to go and kill any site they don't like, something Schmidt says would only encourage restrictive policies in countries like China. While we don't think China really needs any sort of encouragement at all to keep on building up its Great Firewall, we tend to agree that this is a much more complicated problem than the Act makes it out to be. That said, one must admit that Schmidt's opinions are necessarily somewhat swayed by the knowledge that any such law would also have a negative impact on the business of search engines in general.

But of course no such volley of words could go unanswered from the two shining knights of copyright protection, the MPAA and RIAA, which mounted up their corporate blogs, rode down from twin castles full of lawyers, and collectively told Schmidt he's full of it. The MPAA spun Schmidt's comments into some sort of act of civil disobedience, saying that "Google seems to think it's above America's laws." Meanwhile, the RIAA called the statement "a confusing step backwards by one of the most influential internet companies." Obviously it's only going to get nastier from here, so buckle your seatbelts, place your bets, and hang on to your BitTorrent clients.

The Protect IP Act: Google's Eric Schmidt squares off against RIAA and MPAA originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 22 May 2011 12:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Techdirt | source

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