Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 30, 2011 by CyberNet.

Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about. Don’t forget to send in your own tips, or just leave a comment on this page if you think you’ve got something we should include.

–News–

Google Wallet Coming to Your Phone
Google will be turning your NFC-equipped phone into a digital wallet that is packed with coupons, membership cards, and credit cards.

Amazon Launches Mac Download Store
Amazon is now selling Mac software downloads with some titles that even Apple’s own Mac App Store doesn’t have, such as Microsoft Office.

Gmail Will Display Related Contact Information
A new feature that Google is rolling out in Gmail will show information (off to the right of an email) about the contact(s) in the message you’re reading.

YouTube Streams 3 Billion Videos Each Day
As YouTube rolls by their 6-year anniversary they announced that over 3 billion videos are watched every day, and 48-hours of footage is uploaded every minute.

Yahoo! Mail Redesign Leaves Beta
Yahoo! Mail has over 277 million users, and they will all get to experience the new interface that marks the first major update in over 5-years.

WolframAlpha Adds Medical Information
I am constantly amazed at the amount of information pouring out of WolframAlpha, and last week they announced that medical data has also been added. Now you’ll be able to find out interesting medical stats, such as how many patients suffer from a particular illness each year.

Microsoft Shows Off Features in Windows Phone Mango Update
According to Microsoft there will be “hundreds of new features” coming in the new Windows Phone Mango update due out later this Fall. Some of the features include IE9, multitasking, threaded conversations, and speech-to-text support.

Dropbox Crosses 100 Billion File Mark
Dropbox hit a huge milestone with over 100 billion files having been saved by their service, and another 300 million being added every day.

Square Launches iPad App
Square’s new iPad app gives users the ability to accept credit card payments using a powerful register-like application.

–Tips, Tutorials, and Reviews–

iOS Style Scrollbar in Google Chrome
This awesome extension will shrink the size of the scrollbar in Chrome, and does it for both the main reading area as well as any scrollable areas inside the page.

Submit Forms to New Tabs in Firefox
With the TabSubmit Firefox extension you can submit forms in a way that a new page is opened up. When is this useful? I’d use it when doing searches on a site or in a forum so that the search results page opens up in a new tab.

Evernote Extension for Chrome Updated
The new Evernote Chrome extension has added the ability to auto-detect the body of an article making it easier to clip only the content.

AirPlay for Windows Media Center
With the help of this free addon users can actually stream video directly from their iOS device to any Windows Media Center PC.

Bulk Convert Audio Files on a Mac
xACT is a free utility that will let you bulk convert over a dozen different types of audio files to the MP3 or AAC format on your Mac.

Compare the Cost of Driving vs. Flying
The Fly or Drive Calculator is a great way to determine whether it is more cost effective for you to drive or fly to your destination.

–Downloads–

• CDBurnerXP 4.3.8.2568 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Dexpot 1.5.10 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Dropbox 1.1.35 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Fedora Linux 15 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• FileZilla 3.5.0 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Firefox 5.0 ^{Beta 2} [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Foobar2000 1.1.7 ^{Beta 5} [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Foxit Reader 5.0.1.0523 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Google Chrome 13.0.772.0 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Miro 4.0 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Opera 11.50.1016 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Skype 5.3.0.113 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Sumatra PDF 1.6.3834 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• uTorrent 3.0 ^RC2 [Homepage] [Mirror]

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

What Wolfram has accomplished with Alpha is nothing short of stunning. Sure, it can’t help you find videos of cats dressed as sharks riding Roombas, but the company’s goals were always much loftier. Using the technological foundation it built with Alpha and Mathematica, it’s now working on bring its natural language, knowledge-based computational prowess to programming languages. Many of the details are still quite vague but, according to founder Stephen Wolfram, it will be a general purpose programming language, like C++, except it will be largely self contained. That means no (or at least less) pointing to external libraries to accomplish complex tasks. Those other languages focus mostly on structure and leave the difficult task of graphing or processing images to extensions, while Wolfram Language will have at its heart a “giant web of algorithms” to perform many operations. As you’d expect, it integrates quite tightly with Wolfram Alpha, so stock prices, tide times or images of adorable pit bull puppies are easily pulled up in whatever app you’re building.

Perhaps most importantly, though, because it uses the natural language approach pioneered with Alpha, even the least tech savvy among you should be able to start programming in no time. While we’ll clearly have to reserve final judgement for when Wolfram language is available to the public, it sounds like an ideal tool for a child to learn programming on. With its forgiving syntax and deep database, students could quickly and easily whip up simple, but surprisingly functional programs while still leaning the necessary procedure and structure for more advanced languages like Python or Dart. If you’re itching for more details, hit up the source for Stephen Wolfram very, very long post on its development.

Filed under: Misc

Comments

Via: The Verge

Source: Stephen Wolfram

As you may recall, Wolfram Research signed a deal with Microsoft a few years back that saw some Wolfram Alpha functionality integrated into Bing. As it turns out, it very nearly found its way into a certain other search engine as well. In an interview at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam today, Stephen Wolfram revealed that his company had tried to work with Google and “almost had a deal,” but it “blew up.” Unfortunately, he didn’t provide any further details about when those talks took place or exactly what the potential deal entailed, and it doesn’t sound like we can expect that deal to be revived anytime soon — especially considering Google’s own efforts that are increasingly overlapping with Wolfram Alpha. As Wolfram himself notes, though, the two companies do have something of a longstanding connection: Google co-founder Sergey Brin was actually an intern at Wolfram way back in 1993.

Filed under: Internet

Comments

Source: The Next Web

Have you ever wanted to know if you’re the most popular amongst your group of friends? Or which of your pals lives the furthest from you? These are questions that can’t be answered by Facebook’s latest Graph Search, but they’re perfect for the stats geeks over at Wolfram Alpha. The group started mining Facebook for data last year, but have recently expanded its analytics to include a closer look at your social relationships. Namely, they’ve identified five “network roles:” social insiders, outsiders, neighbors, gateways and connectors. Insiders share the same friends while outsiders don’t, neighbors don’t have a lot of buddies outside of your network while gateways do, and connectors are those that bridge two networks together, like a college buddy who went to the same high school. Combined with location, age and other info, this data unlocks an array of potential visualizations color-coded by different categories, letting you see patterns you might not have noticed before. If you think the analysis ends there, think again; by enabling a “Historical Analytics” feature, you’ll be allowing Wolfram Alpha to continually collect your info so you can see how your Facebook profile changes over time. If you’re not creeped out by that notion, jump on over to the rightmost source link and fill in the appropriate details to see just how well you know your “friends.”

Note: It seems that Facebook has limited Wolfram’s API calls, so you might get an error when accessing the tool for now.

Filed under: Internet

Comments

Source: Wolfram Alpha Blog, Wolfram Alpha