Sammy just hit us up with a brief statement that should make Captivate owners jump clean out of their seats and do a spit take if they’re enjoying a cup of joe:
“An update to improve the Samsung Captivate’s GPS performance is now available. Captivate customers will receive a notification on their device that an update is available and will simply need to download the file to update their phone. The updates will be pushed to customers’ devices over the next few weeks.
The update for the Captivate will also improve additional device functions, such as media scanning time, add the full version of Quickoffice and address Microsoft Exchange 2003 policy support.”
Awesome, right? Of course, the proof is in the pudding — we’ll need to wait and see how “fixed” the GPS really is after this gets installed, but it’s a start. Notably, this doesn’t seem to include Froyo, so we don’t know whether these guys are going to be going the British or Spanish routes in getting that deployed.
Update: We’ve independently confirmed with AT&T that this update does include GPS improvements.
Last night the man behind the Keep Fear Alive campaign sat down with one of tech’s luminaries — Google’s Eric Schmidt — for a frank discussion about just exactly what it is that his company does. While the focus was on Google’s precarious relationship with our personal data, it would be hard to sum up the entirety of the conversation in a quick post (that’s why Skynet invented video). It is interesting to see Schmidt dodging what are incisive and extremely sharp questions (though veiled in sarcasm they may be) from Mr. Colbert. Put aside the next five minutes or so and do yourself a favor: watch the thing.
CNET reviews the Denon AVR-1911, finding that it costs more than competitors and has fewer features, but its outstanding sound quality bests competing 7.1-channel AV receivers.
The late-John Lennon and a million bumper sticks put it best, “Happiness is a Warm Gun.” For others, however, happiness is the warm glowing lights of a properly functioning high speed router. Rarely do the two overlap. In fact, in some cases they’re downright at odds with one another.
Take the case of Google’s broadband cables, strung between poles, connected to a large datacenter in rural Oregon. Speaking at the AusNOG (Australian Network Operators Group) conference in Sydney last week, Google’s network engineering manager Vijay Gill told a crowd that its cables are “regularly” shoot down cables for fun.
“What people do for sport or because they’re bored, they try to shoot at the insulators,” Gill told conference attendees. “I have yet to see them actually hit the insulator, but they regularly shoot down the fiber.”
The fiber inevitably begins being shot down around November, when hunting season starts. Heavy snow often hampers Google from delivering a quick fix to broken cable. Repair crews, according to Gill once had to cross country ski for three days to reach the affected area.
Sure, you can just toss an external battery in your backpack to keep your gadgets powered on the go, but why stop there? Some of the “influencers” over at Quirky didn’t, and have come up with this so-called Trek Support backpack as an alternative. As you can see, it packs a removable “gadget dock,” which can itself be charged up and then in turn charge up to three different USB gadgets simultaneously. You’ll also naturally get a dedicated laptop sleeve, plenty of pockets, and a TSA-friendly design. Of course, this is a Quirky project, which means it’ll just remain a concept unless it raises the necessary funding through pre-sales. Ready to do your part to make it happen? It’ll cost you $130 at the source link below.
An artist by the name Charlie Bucket (if that’s his real name or a nom de internet ode to Roald Dahl, I’m not sure) constructed a sculpture that thrusts liquid dyes through a mesh of interwoven plastic tubes. The result is a mesmerizing piece of visual candy. It’s like if the sky from Starry Night was animated and molded into the shape of Abe Lincoln’s top-hat. It starts off somewhat slow, but the fireworks start banging around the 1:00 mark.
He’s used the same fluid construction method to create a wearable techno-colored skirt. It is ridiculously impractical, but really cool to take in. In other words: art.
Last night I received an e-mail from Virtualization firm Citrix stating that the company, “confirmed today that [it] will support the upcoming Blackberry Black Pad when it ships.” Odd, I thought to myself. I’m pretty sure RIM hasn’t actually announced the thing.
There has been a rumor floating around for several months now, that Research in Motion is set to reveal a BlackBerry OS-based business tablet to break into the consumer tablet space currently dominated by Apple’s iPad. The product has yet to come out of the rumor stage, however. I wondered if it was possible that I had missed a major news cycle somewhere along the way–or perhaps I was simply losing my mind.
I contacted a Citrix spokesperson, who told me,
The product has not yet been announced. However, I wanted to give you a head’s up that Citrix is committed to support the device when it is released (Citrix already supports the iPad, iPhone and other mobile devices). Let me know if you’re interested in learning more or speaking with Citrix on this topic.
The question, then, was whether Citrix was simply trying to drum up some press based around a product that, for all intents and purposes, might as well be vaporware (the spokesperson did, after all, manage to get that little plug for the company’s other products)–or whether the company knew something the rest of us didn’t. After all, it’s not unusual for a company to give a third-party the head’s up on a product before it’s official announced. What’s a bit more unusual, however is when that third-party lets that information slip first.
The best things in life, it turns out, aren’t actually free. Toshiba’s decided to freshen up its X500 gaming station with NVIDIA’s new high-end GTX 460M discrete graphics and slapped a handsome $1,300 MSRP on the resulting beast. And a beast it shall be, with an 18.4-inch screen, Core i5 or i7 CPU choices, SSD storage options, up to 8GB of RAM, a backlit keyboard, and simulated 5.1 audio pumping out of Harman Kardon speakers. We had a chance to check out its X505 brother recently and came away impressed by the deep blacks the screen was able to produce. For a bit more visual detail, visit the gallery of product shots below.
This article was written on May 28, 2007 by CyberNet.
I read an article by Mary Jo Foley the other day that talked about enthusiasts bringing the Windows Longhorn project back to life. Microsoft eventually transformed the Longhorn project into what we now know as Windows Vista, but a small group of people are looking to revive the original operating system with a project called Longhorn Reloaded! If you don’t remember what Longhorn was supposed to be, here is a small reminder:
Longhorn Reloaded is a modified version of Windows 4074 which was handed out at WinHEC in May 2004. While it featured a lot of improvements, there was still a long ways that Microsoft had to go on it. In the end, Microsoft had put too much work on their plate so they decided to modify their original plans so that they were more feasible. Windows Vista was the result of the new plans.
The Longhorn Reloaded project has released their first milestone which includes some nice touches to the operating system, and is still based strongly on the Windows XP foundation. You’ll notice on the download page that they provide the serial number required for installation, which puts the legality of this project in question.
I decided to try out Longhorn Reloaded myself, and the first thing that I had to do was download the 780MB ISO image from their site. This was done via a Torrent file and took me about 6 hours to complete.
I then created a small partition (16GB) on my hard drive to install the operating system. It is still based on XP so it uses only a small amount of hard drive space initially. Then I stuck the CD in and let it go!
The setup process is fairly straightforward for anyone that has done a fresh install of XP before:
Then the fun begins…
Before playing with Longhorn Reloaded, I had forgotten about what the project really was. The sidebar is meant to replace the Quick Launch Bar and System Tray, which I think is a cool idea. The transparency isn’t quite like what Vista now has, but there is some of it in this release.
Instead of giving you a bunch of screenshots to checkout, I put together a quick video that demonstrates the current state of the Longhorn Reloaded project:
There is still a lot of work needed, and one thing that you need to keep in mind while using the operating system is that there are no Windows Updates. You can see this in the video when I open the Automatic Updates tab, where everything there is grayed out. So you get no updates from Microsoft, which also means that there could be open vulnerabilities.
A big downfall of this project is that it still requires activation through Microsoft. Well, I’m sure there is a way to patch the 60–day activation limitation, but that would definitely take the project over-the-edge in terms of legality.
Playing with Longhorn Reloaded was kinda fun, but the operating system was still in the very early stages when it was dropped by Microsoft which makes me weary to use it on a regular basis. It’s not really something that I can compare to Vista either, because they are very different concepts and have very different features. If you have a spare partition on your hard drive it might be fun for you to give it a shot though, and make sure to let us know what you think of it!
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
