Hasta La Gadget!

It’s Thanksgiving for us here in the U.S. of Gorging On Turkey and we wanted to give thanks for you, our dear audience. It’s your constant readership and semi-trollish comments that keep us waking up in the morning and keep us from going to sleep at night. To thank you, we want to give you a $100 and a $50 ThinkGeek gift card to two lucky winners.

What will you buy with your winnings? Star Trek underwear? A Dr. Who T-shirt? Something that will amuse your co-workers for a few minutes and then collect dust on your cubicle shelf? The choice, as they say, is yours.

To win, please comment below describing the dark carnival of familial pain you’re currently attending with or without your loved ones this holiday. Non-US readers please describe how much fun you’re having in your own milieu, whether you’re going to work tomorrow or hoisting a tankard of your local ale in the warm companionship of your local meadery.

We’ll close the contest on Saturday and pick two winners then. Thanks to ThinkGeek for the cards and happy Thanksgiving!

JERUSALEM — After eight days of the fiercest fighting in years, a cease-fire agreement between Israel and the Gaza Strip’s Hamas rulers could usher in a new era of relations between the bitter foes. The renewed quiet on both home fronts raises questions about what those involved gained, and lost, from the fighting and its aftermath.

Captions courtesy the Associated Press.

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The Acer C7 Chromebook is the most recent addition to the Chromebook universe and one of Google’s chosen few to be featured on their very own Chomebook portal. This device sits aside the Samsung Series 3 Chromebook as one of three (the other being a slightly higher-powered Samsung Chromebook 550.) This device reduces the baseline price of a Chromebook in general down to $199 and brings with it a slightly thicker and less MacBook Air-looking solution than Samsung’s Series 3 – but where does that extra $50 USD go?

Hardware

Like each of the three hero Chromebooks being shown by Google right this minute, you get 100GB of Google Drive storage for free for 2 years – once it runs out, you simply cannot add any more files to that extra space, but if you want, you can certainly keep your files up there forever (so they say.) Other than this, it’s a whole different ballgame. This machine has an 11.6-inch display that has generally OK viewing angles, but don’t expect to sit anywhere other than directly in front of or to the left or right of it, or you’ll start to see the light.

You’ve got a boot time that’s “under 20 seconds”, so Google says and quotes correctly, leading us to note that yes, indeed, it is a fast machine. It’s quickness should be assumed, of course, due to the very lightweight nature of Chrome OS. It’s essentially a small storage space on your device tied with the Google Chrome web browser – that’s what Chrome OS is, and that’s what it remains here with the Acer solution.

The 4 hours of battery life you’re quoted exists when you’re actively using the device for 4 hours straight, on the web. If you leave the device open and asleep, you’ll easily get several days of uptime. The processor inside this beast is extremely good at battery conservation, that’s for certain. We’ve literally had the device on for three days at a time with no more than 20 percent battery drain – fully asleep, mind you, with no power cord, either.

You can connect this device to a larger monitor via VGA or HDMI if you like, with the second monitor offering you a mirror of what your Chromebook is showing off. This is good for showing webpages to your colleagues as well as YouTube videos – or your Google Play movie collection. You can also connect to other devices with the three USB ports on this device quite easily, and the whole machine works with a dual wi-fi chip that’s able to connect anywhere in your house – with plastic being the main material used here, this machine has no trouble sending or receiving signals of any kind.

You can connect with the Ethernet port on the left side of this device as well if you’re going for ultra-quick web connectivity. This works great to upload or download media to and from your 320 GB of build-in hard drive disk space as well as your full-sized SD/MMC card port that sits just under your keyboard down and to the left. The camera that sits above the monitor on this device is called “HD” but delivers just a generally acceptable web chat experience for Google+ Hangouts – and/or wherever else you plan on chatting via video.

User Experience

This device, much like the Samsung Series 3 solution, is made for web browsing and web browsing alone. If you want the most full-featured computing experience you’ve ever laid your hands on, look elsewhere. What we’ve got here is $199 worth of hardware from top to bottom. It’s not aiming to be the most fantastically simple notebook on the planet, and as its made of primarily plastic, you wont be winning any “wow this notebook feels amazing” awards.

What you will get is a perfectly legitimate web browsing device – and if your primary reasoning behind purchasing a notebook is to browse the web, you’ve got yourself a winner right here. Google has successfully created a user experience here with Chrome OS in its current state that cuts down on everything not necessary to browse the web and have a good time doing it.

The only deterrent you should have here as far as usability goes is the touchpad. It’s not a MacBook, that’s for certain, but it’s just as high quality as the Samsung model. If you’re used to a standard netbook or a low-end notebook running Windows or Linux (with some exceptions), you’ll be perfectly satisfied with this experience tapping and scrolling.

Wrap-up

Acer has succeeded in boiling out all the high-end features that make a notebook cost more than $400 and took Google’s Chrome OS to just about as standard and basically acceptable place as they possibly could, tagging it with a very suitable $199 pricetag. If you only want to browse the web with your notebook, and that’s it, this machine will serve you well.

Be sure to head to your local large-arena showroom store to check how this machine feels in your hands before you pick it up, then be glad you kept the other $300 you’d have otherwise spent on a notebook full of features you might never have used. Use it to buy a Google Nexus 7 and take your best pal out for a nice supper on top.

Acer C7 Chromebook Review is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The Muslim-Jewish Feeding the Hungry events taking place across North America this week are the centerpiece of the Weekend of Twinning, an annual event designed to strengthen ties of communication and cooperation between Muslims and Jews.
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When Katie Holmes left New York’s LaGuardia airport early Thursday, heading to Ohio to spend Thanksgiving with her parents, daughter Suri was already in England, spending the holiday with her dad, Tom Cruise.

“Suri left Tuesday and will return Sunday to return to school on Monday,” a source close to Holmes tells The Huffington Post. “Tom and Katie agreed to this weeks ago.”

Six-year-old Suri will join her dad, who is currently shooting a film in the UK, and Tom’s two other children, Conner and Isabella Cruise. Suri is currently living with her mom in NYC, where she is in previews for her return to Broadway in the new play “Dead Accounts,” which opens November 29.

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