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In short order, Google will launch its tablet. And in doing so it will start down the path of abandoning Android. As I explained in my article on how to think about Android fragmentation, fragmentation is not the end of android, but means Google has lost control of Android. Google has lost control of both the Android platform and the Android brand. Google is desperate to compete in the phone and tablet spaces (not to mention social networking). Android is a perfectly suitable technical platform to build on, but as a brand it is atrocious.

t’s not every day that you start a business and quickly decide to say “no” to 70 percent of your potential customers. In retrospect, this turned out to be 4ormat’s secret weapon. At 4ormat, our goal is to provide an easy way for creative professionals to create and manage an online portfolio website. Although the portfolio itself looks great in all browsers, to this day, the portfolio building interface does not support Internet Explorer. And we don’t just mean IE6 or even IE7. We mean every version of Internet Explorer.

                 

Using facial recognition to process surveillance footage isn't a new concept — Scotland Yard began using the technique in the wake of last year's London riots — but a new system developed by Hitachi Kokusai Electric could make the process quicker and more flexible than ever before. Shown off at this year's Security Show expo in Japan, the system processes footage from both still images and live footage, recognizing faces in real-time, and can search through up to 36 million different faces for a comparison in one second. Recognized faces are displayed as thumbnails and grouped with matching footage,...

The recovery of objects obscured by scattering is an important goal in imaging and has been approached by exploiting, for example, coherence properties, ballistic photons or penetrating wavelengths. Common methods use scattered light transmitted through an occluding material, although these fail if the occluder is opaque. Light is scattered not only by transmission through objects, but also by multiple reflection from diffuse surfaces in a scene. This reflected light contains information about the scene that becomes mixed by the diffuse reflections before reaching the image sensor. This mixing is difficult to decode using traditional cameras. Here we report the combination...

The public radio show This American Life has retracted an entire storyline told by comedian and self-described Apple fanboy Mike Daisey that aired in early January after Daisey's translator said he made up significant details of the tale. In a press release, the show says the episode was the most popular in its history and was downloaded 888,000 times. The episode also sparked a petition for Apple to improve its working conditions that was signed by a quarter of a million people.

Raspberry Pi is the name given to an ultra-low-cost computer that went on sale recently for just $35. The bare-bones PC, which is built to run a few different flavors of Linux, is capable of hooking up to a mouse, keyboard, HDTV and Ethernet. Initial interest has been strong -- the first batch quickly sold out. Frantic buyers cleaned out the shelves of two UK retailers offering a small US$35 Linux computer from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

A start-up called Chamtech Enteprises has an answer to the problems of poor cellphone reception and other shortcomings of traditional antennas. The company has developed a spray-on antenna that it says is more lightweight, energy-efficient and effective than the old-school version. (Where was this stuff when the iPhone 4 came out?) The Sandy, Utah-based start-up’s nanotechnology, unveiled last week at Google’s inaugural Solve For X gathering, can be painted onto a tree, a wall, the ground or even the back of a soldier, enabling a more portable, lightweight way to get reception for a variety of uses. The company has...

It appears that while we were busy over the past month spreading the Greek pre- and post-bankruptcy balance sheet, and otherwise torturing Excel (something we urge other financial journalists to try once in a while - go ahead, it doesn't bite. In fact, it is almost as friendly as your favorite Powerpoint) our peer at such reputable financial publications as Forbes, and many others, were laying of carbon-based reporters and replacing them with... robots. As Mediabistro reports, "Forbes has joined a group of 30 publishers using Narrative Science software to write computer-generated stories. Here’s more about the program, used in...

National Journal calls it "a colossal fall from grace", but it comes only as a political surprise that the FCC acted yesterday to kill off the LightSquared proposal. After an extraordinary one-year grace period to resolve the interference issues of its network with existing GPS systems, the FCC reluctantly admitted that “no practical way” to fix the basic problem of high-powered terrestrial broadcasts on a spectrum slice intended for low-power satellite communications (via Instapundit): The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) moved to reject LightSquared’s planned wireless network on Tuesday after the president’s top adviser on telecom issues said there is “no...

Anybody having a problem with ad.doubleclick redirecting to an error page. I was having this problem on Hotair and now it is on the Daily Caller. Ran spybot and malewarebytes to no avail. I can get to the home page but when I click on article it redirects to a error page saying internet explorer cannot display the webpage. Any ideas out there? Thanks

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been under fire from world leaders to step down this week. He’s also under fire from hacktivist group Anonymous, who leaked hundreds of his office’s emails on Monday. While Anonymous is infamous for its hacking know-how, it doesn’t take a genius computer programmer to guess one of the passwords commonly used by Assad’s office accounts: 12345. The string of consecutive numbers is the second-weakest password according to a 2011 study.

Bouncing back from a rare earnings miss, Apple (AAPL: 420.41, -7.00, -1.64%) revealed first-quarter results late Tuesday that crushed Wall Street’s expectations, as the consumer-electronics heavyweight continues to capitalize on huge demand for its blockbuster products. Aside from announcing gigantic beats, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company reported all-time record sales for its iPhone, iPad and Mac devices as well as surprisingly upbeat guidance for the current quarter. Wall Street cheered Apple's impressive quarter, bidding the company's stock 8.69% higher to $457.05 in extended trading.

Version 1.2 of Cinnamon, the Linux Mint project's fork of the GNOME Shell, has been released and the APIs and desktop interface have been declared fully stable by Mint Founder Clement Lefebvre. Created last year to streamline the Mint developers' changes to the GNOME 3 environment, the Cinnamon fork brings familiar GNOME 2 design elements to the GNOME 3 shell. Among the enhancements in the stable version is easier customisation through a "Cinnamon Settings" tool which includes, for example, the ability to set the date format for the calendar applet and change panel launchers' icons. The Settings tool is also...

As advances in computer technology make gadgets ever smaller and more portable the idea of carrying a screen of any kind could soon be outdated. Consumer products with screens have dropped in size from computer to laptop to tablet via phone. But one company specialising in cutting edge visual technology waIsraeli company Lumus has shown off the PD-18-2, which may look like a cumbersome pair of shades but allow the user to see high-quality images while they walk.nts to beam information directly into your field of vision.

If you’re looking for a New Year’s resolution, let me suggest an idea that you might not have considered: You should learn computer programming. Specifically, you should sign up for Code Year, a new project that aims to teach neophytes the basics of programming over the course of 2012. Code Year was put together by Codecademy,* a startup that designs clever, interactive online tutorials. Codecademy’s founders, Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski, argue that everyone should know how to program—that learning to code is becoming as important as knowing how to read and write. I concur. So if you don’t know...

A security researcher, Trevor Eckhart, recently made a startling discovery. Hidden inside every Android and iPhone is a program called Carrier IQ (CIQ), which is capable of monitoring virtually everything you do on a SmartPhone. And then it has the ability to send all that data back to your wireless carrier and then who knows where it will wind up and how it will be used. Perhaps these phones have become too Smart for our own good. This is our worst nightmare potentially being realized. With our freedoms being eroded at a rapid rate, this is a biggie. A cellphone...

When Project Utopia was unveiled by Yacht Island Design and naval architects BMT Nigel Gee, there was a certain healthy scepticism about the floating 11-storey lair. But gadget site Firebox is now offering it for sale as a Christmas gift. Price is 'on application' but the company says you should expect to pay several hundred million 'minimum'. The site also offers other surreal and very expensive gifts, such as a flying Back To The Future DeLorean car (yours for £70,000) - an idea familiar from ultra-luxury American catalogues such as Neiman Marcus, which in the past has offered gifts like...

FR is usually full of smart guys unlike liberals. Had to ask this question, anyone who owns a website probably heard on Filezilla or just heading to your host cpanel to change or update info on your site. Our IT guy is on vacation and we wanted to add some stuff (specifically images) to sub sections say, departments section A or go SECTION B. Like ESPN with basketball as 1 section to NFL to section 2. We opened up Filezilla and all we could find is folder DOCS, CGI BIN, DISTRIBUTOR and IMAGES. The actual sections are missing so we...

The U.S. Army recently awarded a contracting firm a nearly half a million dollar contract to support its “Power Dreaming Project.” Wired Danger Room reports the following scenario that the Army hopes to begin testing next here to help soldiers suffering with PSTD: A soldier tries to sleep. But he is not safe in his dreams. Jolted awake by a nightmare, the combat veteran fumbles in the dark for his 3-D glasses. He puts them on. Around him are the faces of people whom he trusts. They fight the darkness with him. The soldier’s re-lived this scene in his head...