Dec 15
CNET Car Tech kicks off its 2009 Car Tech Awards with voting for the 2009 Tech Car of the Year. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-10415309-48.html” class=”origPostedBlog”The Car Tech blog/a/p
Dec 15
It’s not every day a major new aircraft takes the skies for the first time, but today’s special: Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner is currently taking its very first test flight over the skies of Everett, Washington. Over 55 airlines including Continental and Northwest / Delta have already purchased some 840 of the next-gen planes, with All Nippon Airways scheduled to take the first delivery. The test flight is scheduled to land in a couple hours — we’re assuming work to mount Boeing’s airborne laser system on the nose in order to defeat hackers will begin shortly thereafter.
Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner takes flight for the first time originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Dec 15
Windows Mobile 7 Delayed Until Late 2010
Posted in: Microsoft, Phones, Smartphones, Today's Chili, Windows Mobile
What does Microsoft have up its sleeve to reverse Windows Mobile’s declining market share? We won’t find out until late next year.
Windows Mobile 7 has “been put back until late next year but it is definitely coming,” according to Phil Moore, UK head of mobility of Microsoft.
“You’re going to see a lot more on Windows Mobile 7,” Moore was quoted in an article by NetworkWorld. “Giving the enterprise users and consumers what they want will be part of Windows Mobile 7. You’ll get flexibility on a much easier touch UI.”
Little is known about Windows Mobile 7, although previous leaks indicate the OS will incorporate iPhone-like touch gestures. The OS was originally slated for a 2009 release, but it was delayed, and Windows Mobile 6.5, a minor upgrade, was released as a placeholder.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has been surprisingly honest when speaking about Windows Mobile. Ballmer admitted Windows Mobile 6.5 was “not the full release [Microsoft] wanted.” Ballmer has also said Windows Mobile 7 must do much better than its predecessor.
And so we wait.
See Also:
- How Microsoft Blew It With Windows Mobile
- Kinoma Play Cleans Up Windows Mobile Smartphones
- BTW: Microsoft See Windows Mobile Sales up 50% This and Next Year …
Dec 15
40 Gadgets Changed Irrevocably By One Letter
Posted in: feature, Gadgets, photoshop, Today's Chili, top
It’s amazing what one letter will do. The Segway becomes the Kegway, Nikon becomes Nixon and Gatorade becomes, uh, Gatorape. I know that last one isn’t gadgety, but I let it slide.
First Place — JPS
Second Place — Jeff Forde
Third Place — Harm Veenstra
Dec 15
Free, painless way to geotag photos
Posted in: Today's ChiliTagging photos with longitude and latitude data is a snap. Here are the steps to get you there.
Dec 15
If you’re looking at a netbook whose motto is “small, slow, sufficient,” you pretty much know what to expect. CherryPal’s latest, named Africa (in honor of the nation of Ghana or something), has everything you’d want in a $99 computer: a 7-inch display, 400MHz processor, 256MB memory, 2GB flash storage, and either Linux or Windows CE under the hood. According to the company, you can expect about four hours use on the included Lithium battery. If that weren’t enough, the company has introduced its online store — no longer do you have to pick up your CherryPal PCs on the streets, like we did when we were your age. Hit the source link to get started — but not before you check out the PR after the break. It’s a real page-turner.
Continue reading CherryPal debuts $99 netbook, names it Africa
CherryPal debuts $99 netbook, names it Africa originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Dec 2009 13:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Dec 15
MIT unveils new ‘smart’ bike wheel
Posted in: Today's ChiliThe institute’s new Copenhagen wheel can store energy to make riding easier and can also talk to an iPhone to monitor its rider and keep tabs on traffic. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10415648-76.html” class=”origPostedBlog”News – Cutting Edge/a/p
Dec 15
(Credit:
WB)
While today’s Golden Globe announcements were a bit underwhelming, we were thrilled to see The Hangover get a nomination in the Best Picture: Comedy or Musical category. To coincide with the film’s release on Blu-ray and DVD today we’re giving away copies of the movie! Just send us an email at the404 [at] cnet [dot] com telling us your best (or worst) hangover story. Everyone’s got at least one, so send us yours for a chance to win!
In Justin and Wilson’s absence, Natali Del Conte and Mark “MTI” Licea rush to fill their spots and discuss all the day’s news. Should your company be able to check text messages you send out on work cell phones? Actually, don’t answer that question–we debate the pros and cons and decide.
Most guys can’t remember what shirt they wore yesterday, but apparently most women can recall the first pair of shoes they ever bought–more so than the first boy they ever kissed! What is it about the female obsession with shoes? We ask Natali to clear the air–and because, well, she’s the only woman who’ll talk to us.
All this plus the location of 22 million missing emails from the Bush Administration on today’s episode!
EPISODE 487
Listen now:
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Video coming soon, check back later today!
…
Originally posted at The 404 Podcast
Dec 15
Broadcom announces 1080p camera phone chip, single-chip Blu-ray decoder
Posted in: 1080p, blu-ray, camcorder, Today's Chili
Broadcom’s busting out some big muscle on the video chip front today, launching both a 1080p smartphone camera chip and a single-chip Blu-ray player chip. The BCM2763 mobile phone chip supports full 1080p video recording and playback, as well as 20 megapixel stills with face / smile detection and image stabilization. There’s also support for 3D gaming at 1080p, and HDMI support is included so you can plug into a TV and actually see all those pixels — and a 20-to-50 percent reduction in power usage means you’ll be able to play video over HDMI for “up to 16 hours,” although we’d like to see that claim tested in a real handset before we totally buy it. Broadcom’s also hyping its new BCM7630 single-chip Blu-ray solution, which offers BD decoding and support for streaming apps like Netflix, Pandora, Vudu and CinemaNow all on a single chip — and manufacturers can combine it with the new BCM7632 for 3d-Blu-ray support. Single-chip means cheaper Blu-ray decks — so sure, we’ll take it. No word on when any of these chippies are going to end up in production hardware, but we’re hoping to hear more about that at CES.
Broadcom announces 1080p camera phone chip, single-chip Blu-ray decoder originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Dec 2009 13:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Dec 15
Facebook’s privacy rollback is especially terrible because it’s so hard to reverse. Settings are so bewildering that even CEO Mark Zuckeberg has fiddled his two-to-three times this month. So here’s a guide to re-privatizing your profile.
Ideally, we’d all be allowed to just accept Facebook’s recommended settings. But the social network is defaulting most people to share their private content widely with strangers, in an obvious bid to grow traffic and to compete more directly with Twitter. Then there’s the content the company is trying to take from you and make entirely public.
And, to borrow a phrase, what can’t be attributed to Facebook’s greed can be chalked up to ineptitude. Highly complex privacy schemes are bound to fail, as others have written, because most users don’t have the patience to sit and learn intricate details of various options. That would seemingly include Facebook co-founder Zuckerberg, who initially accepted the default options, according to published reports. But he soon altered these defaults to make them more private, hiding his photos from friends of friends.
And now it’s emerged in True/Slant that the CEO has also roped off his friends list and events calendar from strangers he has no friends in common with. (At least, he’s removed them from his profile page; Facebook’s official Privacy Policy still states that all friends lists are irrevocably public, and it’s not clear whether that’s been changed.)
If the CEO of Facebook is changing his default privacy settings, shouldn’t you? Here are some things you can do (click any image to enlarge):
Hide your photos (as much as possible).
Most people don’t seem to realize their old profile photos and albums are available to strangers The profile photos usually default to being shared widely, e.g. to “Everyone,” while the photo albums are often only slightly more restricted, e.g. “Friends of Friends.”
You can’t hide your current profile photos, but you can hide the others that you’ve uploaded. (UPDATE 1: The wording of this part was updated to make it clear that you can’t ever hide your main profile pic. So do, like, a picture of your cat or something. Or a building!)
From your Facebook home page, go to the Settings menu in the upper right corner, and select “Privacy Settings.” Then select “Profile Information.” Then scroll down to Photo Albums and click “Edit Settings”…
…and adjust to the level of privacy you are comfortable with (“Only Friends” was probably your setup before):
Hide other people’s photos of you (partly)
If someone “tags” one of their Facebook photos with your profile, it can show up on your profile. If you don’t want strangers (including “Friends of friends”) to get to conveniently peruse these often candid shots from your profile, go to Settings/Privacy Settings, then “Profile Information” and adjust “Photos and Videos of me.” We’d recommend “Only friends:”
UPDATE 1: To clarify, you can never remove pictures in which you are tagged from other people’s accounts, as we implied before. But by removing them from your profile, you make it a lot harder for strangers to find pictures of you that you might not want them to see.
Hide your birthday
It’s insane that Facebook recommended that many people share their birthday with “Friends of friends” in its defaults for the new “privacy” scheme. This personal information can be used by financial fraudsters to help impersonate you to your bank, credit card company, email provider and others. We’d recommend showing it to as few people as possible. Or, even better, set it to a false date.
Under Settings/Privacy Settings/Profile Information:
Hide your posts
Facebook is defaulting people to share their posts with “friends of friends,” i.e. strangers. You may want to revert this to share only with your friends. Under Settings/Privacy Settings/Profile Information:
Remove your friends list from your profile page
Facebook has updated its privacy policy to say that you can never permanently hide your friends list, and last week it was impossible to hide the list from friends of friends (see Felix Salmon’s second update here). This might be changing; on Monday, we couldn’t find a way to view the friends list of certain “friends of friends.”
In any case, it’s definitely possible to make your friends list harder for strangers to view, by removing it from your profile. Go to your Facebook home page, then click on “Profile” in the top right corner to view your profile.
Then scroll down to the section of the profile that shows your friends (titled “Friends”), and click the pencil symbol in the upper left corner. This will reveal a checkbox to hide your friend list from some strangers, at least on your profile page:
UPDATE: We’re getting “corrections” on this telling us exactly what we already said above, so we’ll repeat it in bold: this does not completely shield your friends list. Friends of friends can reportedly still see it, for example, and as we said above Facebook considers it public information.
Hide your profile from search engines
Facebook is touchy about this one, because it’s always displayed some data for search engines, by default, and suddenly people are noticing. That’s why when you go to change your settings under Settings/Privacy Settings/Search, Facebook now pops up this ultra-defensive dialog:
What Facebook doesn’t tell you is that it now offers a link to “View Such and Such’s Friends” from the public, search-engine-indexable profile page. At least, that’s what ours does. At the very least, you should look at your search engine page using the preview link under “Public Search Results” and see if you want to continue to make it available:
Hide your info from friends’ apps (UPDATE 1)
This is a big one we missed the first time around — by default, your friends can share huge amounts of your personal information with applications they authorize, like quizzes and games. It would be a good idea to restrict this even if Facebook weren’t sloppy about policing its apps and partners; as things stand, we’d recommend unsharing most if not all types of data from your friends’ apps. (Thanks to the commenter and tipsters who sent this in.)
Go to Settings/Privacy Settings, then “Applications and Websites,” then “What your friends can share about you – Edit Settings:”
Did we forget or mis-state something?
Email us and let us know; tips@gakwer.com.
(Top pic: Zuckerberg, via Getty Images.)
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