Hasta La Gadget!

If you fancy yourself a codec nerd then you’ll love a tongue-in-cheek piece penned by Tim Sneath, Senior Director of Windows and Web Evangelism at Microsoft. Sneath, posing as the President of the United States of Google, calls for Esperanto (aka, WebM) to replace English (aka, H.264) in order to foster global peace and understanding.

Though English plays an important role in speech today, as our goal is to enable open innovation, its further use as a form of communication in this country will be prohibited and our resources directed towards languages that are untainted by real-world usage.

Brilliantly played following Google’s announcement to drop H.264 from Chrome. Esperanto, as you might recall, was the universal second language designed in 1887 to facilitate international communication. Something that never quite worked out judging by the preponderance of English spoken by humans everywhere except Parisian cafes and taxi cabs.

Microsoft mocks Google, likens WebM to failed Esperanto language originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Jan 2011 05:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Atrix is a pretty great phone by itself—two 1GHz cores and 1GB of RAM makes things speedy—but it’s even more useful when you dock it into their laptop for heavy duty computering. More »

Did you join in Chrome for a Cause? The $1 million tab-heavy campaign has come and gone (with a 250 tab per day maximum, much to our click-frenzied dismay), and Google’s tallied up the final scores. Of the nearly 60.6 million tabs “donated”, 16.2m went for vaccinations, 14.8m tabs for trees, 14.1m for water… 8.6m for books and 6.8m for shelter. Bit of an interesting disparity, there. Were those two not as well presented in the contribution menu? Did the return (0.4 square feet per day at most) not seem as great as the number of trees you could plant? Google eBooks? It’s all still a good chunk of change for each of the five partnering charities. Full breakdown at the Chrome blog — and don’t deactivate that extension if you want to maximize your Reddit addiction for the next charitable go-around.

Chrome for a Cause results tabulated: good will all around (but mostly for vaccinations) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 15:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Internet Explorer 9 may block ’em in 2011, and the US government’s on the case too, but you don’t have to wait for Microsoft or bureaucracy to keep your privacy paramount if you browse with Rockmelt or Chrome. That’s because former Google developer Brian Kennish just released Disconnect, an extension for either one, that banishes Digg, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Yahoo tracking requests (more companies are on the way) as you make your merry way across the web. Install and you’ll find a nice little “d” icon on your browser’s status bar, with a drop-down menu exposing exactly how many requests you’ve blocked from each service, and the option to manually disable blocking at will. Why bother? Don’t you want to keep that secret love of Thanko products all to yourself?

Disconnect browser extension keeps pesky cookies in check, blocks third-party tracking requests originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Dec 2010 06:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Paul Buchheit created and served as the lead developer for Gmail. He also developed AdSense and is the guy who coined the company’s “Don’t be evil” motto. Bucheit left the company to found FriendFriend, which was later acquired by Facebook.

Since Google doesn’t sign his checks anymore, Buchheit can feel free to talk a bit of smack about the company’s current projects–projects like Chrome. Buchheit used his Twitter account this week to suggest the upcoming death of Google’s latest baby, “Prediction: ChromeOS will be killed next year (or ‘merged’ with Android).”

Buckheit went deeper in a FriendFeed post, writing,

ChromeOS has no purpose that isn’t better served by Android (perhaps with a few mods to support a non-touch display). I was thinking, “is this too obvious to even state?”, but then I see people taking ChromeOS seriously, and Google is even shipping devices for some reason.

Google has largely insisted that the two operating systems serve different markets. But, as TechCrunch points out, Sergey Brin himself has suggested that the company will someday focus on a single OS.