Hasta La Gadget!

In 2013, we are going to see a lot more detachable tablet designs, since the weight, battery life and size requirements are all the object of noticeable progress. While the first generation of devices had prices going well into the $900 or $1000 territory, 2013 will be the year where that form factor reaches a mass market pricing.

And that’s really where the HP Pavilion 11 X2 comes in: with a $599 starting price, it uses an Intel Bay Trail processor which does not require a fan for cooling. It also consumes less power, and outperforms its predecessor, Clove Trail. The net result is an 11” tablet/laptop combo that should work well for basic office and computing tasks and an affordable tablet/laptop combo form. (more…)

HP Pavilion 13 x2 and Pavilion 11 x2: Hands-On original content from Ubergizmo.

When it comes to the world of advertisements, there are some lines that you just do not cross, although at times, some of the more “creative” minds out there tend to blur the lines. Facebook, one of the world’s big names when it comes to social networks, recently issued an apology after they realized that a dating company actually made use of images of a girl who ended her life after allegedly being raped. Not only that, to make a stand so that nothing of this sort will happen in the future, the offending company has also been banned by Facebook.

The advertisements did see photos of Rehtaeh Parsons appear, where she happened to be a teen from Canada who committed suicide in April after an image of her rape made its way online. Rehtaeh’s death made international headlines after police did not take any immediate legal action against her alleged rapists as well as cyber bullies, even after the photo did allegedly depict a quartet of boys raping her. The company that placed the ad in Facebook ran under the headline “Find Love in Canada,” and no longer is the website that the ad is linked to online.

Facebook said via a spokesman, “This is an extremely unfortunate example of an advertiser scraping an image from the internet and using it in their ad campaign. This is a gross violation of our ad policies and we have removed the ad and permanently deleted the advertiser’s account.”

Facebook Bans Company For Using Dead Rape Victim In Dating Ad original content from Ubergizmo.

“My name is Edward Thorp.”

“My name is Edward Thorp.”

“My name is Edward Thorp.”

It’s 1964 and Edward Thorp is on the television game show To Tell The Truth, sitting alongside two other well-dressed men also claiming to be Edward Thorp, a man so adept at card counting that he’d been barred from Las Vegas casinos. Thorp, the quiet man on the right, every bit the mathematics professor with black-rimmed glasses and close-cropped hair, is the real deal.

Two years earlier, Thorp’s book, Beat the Dealer, was published, explaining the system for winning at blackjack he developed based on the mathematical theory of probability. The system worked so well that Las Vegas casinos actually changed the rules of blackjack to give the dealer an added advantage. Those changes would prove to be short-lived, but Thorp’s book would go on to become a massive bestseller, and remains a key guide to the game of blackjack to this day.

That all this happened as the computer age was flourishing in the 1960s isn’t coincidental. While working to beat the house, Thorp was also working at one of the hotbeds of that revolution: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, he had access to two things that would prove invaluable to his research. One was the room-filling IBM 704 computer, without which, he writes in Beat the Dealer, “the analysis on which this book is based would have been impossible.”

Filed under: Misc, Wearables, Science, Software

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All good things must come to an end, and so too, does Google think that cookies might not be relevant any more in the future. Google’s latest attempt and making cookies redundant happens to come in the form of AdID, which is an anonymous identifier that could be used for advertising purposes. Cookies in the past (and present) pretty much worked along this manner – one accepts the cookie, delete the cookie, empty the cookie bin, and the process repeats itself.

USA Today has reported that Google intends to work on an “anonymous identifier for advertising”, or AdID for short, which might spell the end of third-party cookies as the method of choice for advertisers to keep track of people’s Internet browsing activity when it comes to marketing and such. It is then rather heartening to hear that this particular project could eventually benefit not only the advertisers, but consumers as well. How does that work for the latter? Well, it gets the job done by shielding true identities. Do you think that the top dog in online advertising having control over technology which can track one’s movements on the web to be too close for comfort? Only time will be able to tell.

Google AdID Might See The Cookie Off original content from Ubergizmo.

Mozilla has recently introduced yet another version of their hugely popular Firefox browser for the Android mobile operating system as well as the desktop browser, and you can bet your bottom dollar that there are plenty of interesting changes to look forward to in this latest version. In fact, one of the major features of the Firefox 24 release would be support for WebRTC. WebRTC happens to be a real-time-communication protocol which enables you to perform various actions such as making video calls in a web browser, and other browsers that have already supported WebRTC include Google Chrome, and Firefox for Windows Mac, and Linux. With this, you can now make use of web apps that play nice with WebRTC in order to make video calls from a handset to a desktop or notebook, and alternatively, from Firefox to Chrome.

As for Firefox 24 for Android, some of the changes include the ability to share open tabs between mobile devices using NFC, a night mode that paves the way for a better reading experience in Reader, a Quick Share pop-up that will appear with icons for your most frequently used sharing methods, among others. Have you given Firefox 24 a go already, and how do you find it so far?

Mozilla Rolls Out Firefox 24 original content from Ubergizmo.