Netizen

Saturday, December 22, 2012

The X Phone

Finally Google is getting into hardware. The Nexus line was warm up.

Google Designing 'X Phone' to Rival Apple, Samsung

Seven months after being acquired by Google for $12.5 billion, Motorola is designing its marquee handset with cutting-edge features to stand apart from existing phones when it is released next year ..... using a bendable screen .... Motorola is also expected to work on an "X" tablet after the phone .... only one billion of the world's seven billion people use smartphones, calling that "an incredible opportunity." .... Motorola wanted top-notch features for the phone's camera and photo software, such as better color saturation and the ability to take panoramic shots .... materials such as ceramics that would allow the company to make the X Phone more stress resistant, use more colors and mold into different shapes .... Motorola plans to enhance the X Phone with its recent acquisition of Viewdle, an imaging and gesture-recognition software developer .... The South Korean company shipped 40.3% of all Android-based phones in the third quarter .... Google could begin adopting an integrated approach of having its Motorola and Android units work more closely together, like Apple does with its hardware and software teams .... Google has filled Motorola's top ranks with several dozen Google executives and product managers, many of whom didn't have previous experience with hardware ..... Google sees that relative inexperience as an advantage if it wants to revolutionize smartphone design

Sugarcoating

Venezuelan sugar cane (Saccharum) harvested for processing. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Bioengineering has much to offer. Energy can be bioengineered. And there might not be green house gases.

Bacteria Use Photosynthesis to Make Sugar for Biofuels

ultra-cheap sugar at high yields using photosynthetic microörganisms ..... 10 times more sugar per acre than sugarcane. It expects it can further engineer the bacteria to increase this yield, to as high as 30 times more sugar per acre than sugarcane.

Chromebook Glory Days

The glory days are ahead, but the Samsung Chromebook already looks like a Macbook Air, at a quarter the price.

New Chromebook: Getting Better, but Its Internet Dependence Is Limiting

a bare-bones version of the Linux operating system capable of running only one application: a Web browser ..... Chrome OS has at last matured from a quirky experiment to something that make sense for consumers. .... 11.6-inch screen .... woke up in less than five seconds. .... If you don’t pause to ponder the difference between an “app” and a bookmark (often there is none at all), it works surprisingly well. .... Chrome OS has the same minimal feel as a smartphone. The constrained space of a mobile screen often forces designers to display fewer options, and less information, at once making for a less cluttered experience. ..... The speakers are also impressive for a small, cheap device. .... Offline photo editing is impossible, which is a shame because a Chromebook would be a good companion on a vacation, when you might take a lot of photos. ...... even the company’s own lineup of offline apps is weak..... There’s a version of Gmail that works offline, and it’s possible to create and edit word-processing documents offline using Google Docs, and read other documents offline.

The Chromebook happened before HTML5 happened. This book is ahead of the times.

"I Am The Motherfucker Who Found The House. Sir."

I saw Zero Dark Thirty last night at a movie theater near Times Square. The inside CIA work was intriguing to watch, although I had already read about it. The actual operation I had sucked the details out of in the 2-3 days right after it happened. That is the power of Open Intel. It is a technical term. Publicly available information counts for a lot these days. I predicted this movie. They are going to make a movie out of this, I said. They did. And a good one too.

So I did not come out having learned details about the operation I did not know. I came out feeling the movie was a statement on gender. Islamists are the most rabidly sexist people on earth today, perhaps. It is poetic justice then that Osama Bin Laden, the ultimate Islamist, was felled by a woman. The CIA can go on and on about teamwork, but this work was out of the box thinking, and the woman does get immense credit. She found the needle in a haystack.

The CIA is a man's world. DC is a man's world. Still. The movie shows.

That is not to discount the role of the guys who actually carried out the operation. Job well done. The action beats action movies. Actually the guys who carried out the job came across as the least sexist of all guys in the movie. Excellent analyst meet excellent operatives. Good match.

I am on record at this blog - in 2007, also earlier - saying Bin Laden is not in a cave, he is in some big city. I was thinking Karachi. I was wrong. But he was not in a cave.

You also come out really admiring the people who run the US government. And by that I mean bureaucrats, faceless bureaucrats who run the machinery, people who get demonized by small government ideologues. There are a lot of very qualified professionals doing very good work in there.

But it has been wrong of the CIA to refuse this woman her well deserved promotion. Some day she should be CIA Director.

The Bin Laden Operation
Bin Laden: Dead
Bin Laden Was In A Huge House
Did Pakistan Know Where Bin Laden Was?
Where Is Bin Laden?
Barack Said In 2007 He Would Do This
What Obama Said On Pakistan

Acting C.I.A. Director Criticizes ‘Zero Dark Thirty’
Review: 'Zero Dark Thirty' is utterly gripping
Review: 'Zero Dark Thirty' is massive, meticulous
'Zero Dark Thirty' review: Jessica Chastain shines in nail-biting thriller

Thursday, December 20, 2012

The Email Quagmire

What would a perfect email program be like? Right now that is anyone's guess. A good program would allow you to ignore all emails you don't mind ignoring.

Just like Craig's List is not one service, it is many services, email is the same way. Facebook is an email offshoot. You don't need to share photos over email anymore.

Asana doing task management takes a lot of load off email. Calendaring is another key function.

Character Limits In Email
Outlook.com: Microsoft's New Attempt At Email
Asana's Inbox: Work Email
Email Solutions

Startups Aim to Bring E-Mail Back to the Future

There hasn’t been a big shakeup since the release of Gmail in 2004, which brought threaded messages and a gigabyte of free message storage (an eye-popping amount at the time). By now, many of us are encountering so-called e-mail overload on PCs, smartphones, and tablets. And e-mail shows no sign of disappearing. ...... unlikely that we’ll see another large, independent e-mail service emerge anytime soon ... toting our Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail addresses around with us like cell-phone numbers. .... we’re trying to use it in ways that were never intended—as an organizer, for example, or to facilitate collaboration on group projects. .... Mailbox is trying to reimagine the in-box as a workflow tool ..... E-mail is based on two protocols, IMAP and POP, which are decades old and have never changed much. .... his service aims to bring context to communication—telling you what’s happening around you, who’s e-mailing you, how you’re connected, why they’re important. ..... small in-boxes, poor search, and a preponderance of spam. ...... Flow control: e-mail is always coming in, and we’re expected to be checking and responding to it at all times. ...... “Unfortunately, that’s not something you can fix with technology”