Monday, February 28, 2011
The Story of the Lonely Whale Will Break Your Heart [Video]
Windows Phone 7 Update Damage Control: Fail
Microsoft has shifted into hardcore damage-control mode over the Windows Phone 7 updates, claiming that "only" 10 percent of users' smartphones have stalled on the new software. 
The update, originally described to media as a "smaller infrastructure update that will help future updates," began to enter the Windows Phone 7 ecosystem Feb. 21. Soon afterward, users took to the Windows Phone 7 help forum (among other Websites) to post comments about the update stalling their smartphones, if not bricking them entirely.
In the wake of that, Microsoft decided to pull the update for Samsung smartphones. "We have identified a technical issue with the Windows Phone update process that impacts a small number of phones," a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in a Feb. 23 e-mail to me. "In response to this emerging issue, we have temporarily taken down the latest software update for Samsung phones in order to correct the issue."
But that didn't stop the "gloomy headlines," according to a new corporate blog posting, compelling Microsoft to break out some figures: 90 percent of Windows Phone 7 updates apparently went fine, leaving that aforementioned 10 percent to wrestle with the issue.
"Of the 10 percent who did experience a problem, nearly half failed for two basic reasons--a bad Internet connection or insufficient computer storage space," Michael Stroh, a writer for Microsoft's Windows team, posted Feb. 23 on the Windows Phone Blog. "Luckily, both are easy to fix."
I don't know about you, but a 10-percent failure rate is pretty bad. If Ford or Toyota released a new vehicle, and 10 percent of those vehicles exploded into a gaudy ball of flame when driven faster than 50 mph, the company would probably execute a recall. If Apple released a new tablet with a 10 percent failure rate, you'd have every pundit from New York to San Francisco braying that the company had lost its magic. It's not an insignificant number, or the sort of thing that can be easily dismissed as a statistical aberration.
The rest of the answer ("a bad Internet connection or insufficient computer storage space") sort of boggles my mind, too. I understand that Windows Phone Update needs space to create a backup image on one's PC, on top of actually downloading the update. I also know, from sad personal experience, that sometimes one's Internet connection isn't exactly the speediest or consistent. But I have a hard time believing that either of those two "culprits" could take such a substantial share of the blame for so many Windows Phone 7 devices suddenly deciding to become a paperweight.
And what about the rest of the affected smartphones? What sort of technical issue affected those? Why only Samsung devices? When are those Samsung devices receiving their update?
"Has the update process gone perfectly? No--but few large scale software updates ever do, and the engineering team here was prepared," Stroh wrote. "Of course, when it's your phone that's having a problem--or you're the one waiting--it's still aggravating."
Um, yeah.
As I mentioned yesterday, this is exactly the sort of problem that Microsoft needed to avoid in the early stages of the Windows Phone 7 rollout. I still believe the platform has a lot to like, but its position of relative newness in the smartphone marketplace means every systemic error, if not fatal, certainly has the potential for far greater damage than for a more established platform. Moreover, Stroh's posting--blaming the press for "gloomy headlines," implicitly blaming a subset of users for insufficient hard drive space--comes off as excessively defensive.
Farragomate is a social fridge magnet game where you make up sentences
You get to play with a bunch of random strangers in real-time, and make up sentences out of a pre-set collection of words, including some fairly naughty ones, and all players' nicknames. As you can imagine, some of the results are not child-friendly.
There are ten rounds to a game. Once a round is done, players get to vote for their favorite sentence from that round. You can't vote for your own creation, of course. There's in-game chat, too.
I think the vocabulary could be made a bit more eclectic, but even as it is, it's a nice way to spend a few minutes and meet random strangers on the Internet (always a thrilling experience).
Farragomate is a social fridge magnet game where you make up sentences originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 25 Feb 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
PlayStation 3 shipments to Europe now being seized after LG wins injunction against Sony
Sony and LG have been going toe to toe with allegations of patent infringement for over a year now, but Sony's now been dealt what's surely its biggest setback to date in Europe. The civil court of justice in the Hague has just granted LG a preliminary injunction that will see all new PlayStation 3s imported into Europe confiscated by customs for at least ten days. Those are apparently now already being stockpiled in Dutch warehouses while the drama plays out, and there remains a possibility that the injunction will be extended even further, which would almost certainly lead to a shortage of PS3s on store shelves -- as the Guardian notes, retailers generally have two to three weeks worth of stock on hand across the continent. Not surprisingly, Sony is said to be "frantically" trying to get the ban lifted, but it isn't making any public comments on the matter at the moment.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
PlayStation 3 shipments to Europe now being seized after LG wins injunction against Sony originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The Guardian | Email this | Comments
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/MS7Ka-B5y14/
Farragomate is a social fridge magnet game where you make up sentences
You get to play with a bunch of random strangers in real-time, and make up sentences out of a pre-set collection of words, including some fairly naughty ones, and all players' nicknames. As you can imagine, some of the results are not child-friendly.
There are ten rounds to a game. Once a round is done, players get to vote for their favorite sentence from that round. You can't vote for your own creation, of course. There's in-game chat, too.
I think the vocabulary could be made a bit more eclectic, but even as it is, it's a nice way to spend a few minutes and meet random strangers on the Internet (always a thrilling experience).
Farragomate is a social fridge magnet game where you make up sentences originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 25 Feb 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
The Worst Commercial Apple's Ever Made [Video]
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/3YzVmcYaIpI/the-worst-commercial-apples-ever-made
3D-Print Yourself With Kinect
“Fabricate Yourself” is like a 3-D photo-booth. Using a Microsoft Kinect, anyone can hit a button and have a 3-D model of themselves printed right then. The project, headed by Karl Willis, removes the arcane intricacies of CAD software and replaces them with something anybody can pick up and play with.
Presented at the Tangible, Embedded [...]
Presented at the Tangible, Embedded [...]
Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/02/3d-print-yourself-with-kinect/
INTERNATIONAL RECTIFIER INTERNATIONAL GAME TECHNOLOGY INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES (IBM)
Researchers debut one-cubic-millimeter computer, want to stick it in your eye
Researchers debut one-cubic-millimeter computer, want to stick it in your eye originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 26 Feb 2011 17:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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CNET | University of Michigan | Email this | Comments
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/8e9NRH8Vy3I/
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Daily Tip: How to move your iTunes library to another hard drive
Hard drive coming dangerously close to being overrun with data and wondering how to move your iTunes library to another location? If you have a ton of stuff on your computer and your iTunes library isn’t helping the situation out have no fear we are here to help! Find out how, after the break! [Apple iTunes [...]Daily Tip: How to move your iTunes library to another hard drive is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.
TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/tiqc5SlGisA/
Nexus S 2.3.3 update adjusts screen's color temperature, we go eyes-on
So while this display tweak is well-intentioned, it looks like many commenters on both the forum and XDA-Developers aren't too happy with this. Being curious geeks that we are, we went ahead and manually updated our own Nexus S (and by the way, be sure to match your build number with the appropriate patch). As you can see in our comparison photos (shot with the same manual camera settings and medium screen brightness), the new overall color temperature is no doubt subtly warmer, although the dimmer brightness settings no longer suffer from the aforementioned red tone. Interestingly, we actually approve this change, and the Super AMOLED display certainly doesn't look washed out to us, nor do we see any noisy dithering that some have reported. Surely we can't be alone. Well, there's only one way to help solve this mystery: if you happen to be a fellow Nexus S owner who's applied this update, why not chime in below?"With your new OTA complete, you may notice a slight difference in the way colors are displayed on your Nexus S. For Nexus S, we have adjusted the color temperature settings to more accurately reflect darker colors at all brightness levels. The Gingerbread UI being darker, we found that the colors were not as accurate when the device was being used at lower brightness levels. For example, some users reported that the initial color temperature was too high leading to some darker greys having a reddish tone; with the new color temperature this is no longer the case."
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Nexus S 2.3.3 update adjusts screen's color temperature, we go eyes-on originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Feb 2011 05:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
PermalinkAndroid Community | Google, XDA-Developers | Email this | Comments
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/1YjodVDV1Sw/
VERIFONE HOLDINGS VEECO INSTRUMENTS VARIAN SEMICONDUCTOR EQUIPMENT ASSOCIATES