.::REALITYRECALL::.

U.S. President Barack Obama says the struggle to stop the flow of oil from a blown-out well into the Gulf of Mexico is finally nearing an end.

Alex Rodriguez hit the 600th home run of his career Wednesday, drilling a pitch from Toronto’s Shaun Marcum over the centre-field fence at Yankee Stadium.

We have always pursued innovative projects because we want to drive breakthroughs in computer science that dramatically improve our users’ lives. Last year at Google I/O, when we launched our developer preview of Google Wave, a web app for real time communication and collaboration, it set a high bar for what was possible in a web browser. We showed character-by-character live typing, and the ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop, even “playback” the history of changes—all within a browser. Developers in the audience stood and cheered. Some even waved their laptops.

We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.

Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow

Damage claims from Saskatchewan’s flooding, hailstorms and tornadoes have reached $77 million.

Damage claims from Saskatchewan’s flooding, hailstorms and tornadoes have reached $77 million.

Tariq Krim’s app-based cloud OS has been a long time coming, but it’s finally freely available for download — just grab a 16MB installer and you too can join the Jolicloud. We’ve been impressed more than once by the responsive netbook operating system which can boot in seconds flat, and now that it’s got touchscreen support and a streamlined Windows dual-boot installer all for the bargain price of free, it’s definitely worth a try. Give it a spin at our more coverage link, and let us know if it improves your life in any meaningful fashion. If your keyboard is inexorably intertwined with Windows, however, don’t fret; a little penguin tells us a tablet PC version is also on the way.

Jolicloud 1.0 now ready for your downloading delight on Windows or bootable USB originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tariq Krim’s app-based cloud OS has been a long time coming, but it’s finally freely available for download — just grab a 16MB installer and you too can join the Jolicloud. We’ve been impressed more than once by the responsive netbook operating system which can boot in seconds flat, and now that it’s got touchscreen support and a streamlined Windows dual-boot installer all for the bargain price of free, it’s definitely worth a try. Give it a spin at our more coverage link, and let us know if it improves your life in any meaningful fashion. If your keyboard is inexorably intertwined with Windows, however, don’t fret; a little penguin tells us a tablet PC version is also on the way.

Jolicloud 1.0 now ready for your downloading delight on Windows or bootable USB originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Our favorite charity-worker Bill Gates has successfully signed up 38 billionaires to give away half of their wealth to those less fortunate, in what could be the largest-scale philanthropic work ever. More »

Our favorite charity-worker Bill Gates has successfully signed up 38 billionaires to give away half of their wealth to those less fortunate, in what could be the largest-scale philanthropic work ever. More »

Whether you finally decided to shed sassyhacker957@gmail.com for a more professional handle or you want to swap Google accounts for less embarrassing reasons, Google doesn’t have a built-in system for migrating your data to a new account. So we figured it out. More »

Step aside, BlackBerrys and iPhones, the American consumer has voted with his wallet and picked Android as his favorite flavor in the quarter just gone. NPD’s number crunchers have just announced their findings for Q2 2010, concluding that 33 percent of phones sold during the period had Android on board. This marks the first time in eons (Q4 2007, to be more precise) that RIM has not held the crown of most purchased smartphone OS on US soil, with its BlackBerrys accounting for 28% of the market and Apple’s iPhone occupying third spot with 22%. Motorola and HTC are the key suspects fingered for Android’s continuing ascent, with the “large screen allure” of their handsets playing well with the buying public. Skip after the break for a more detailed breakdown.

Disclaimer: NPD’s Ross Rubin is a contributor to Engadget.

Continue reading NPD: Android is now top-selling OS in American smartphones

NPD: Android is now top-selling OS in American smartphones originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 Aug 2010 10:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft has today confirmed that the rollout of the latest edition of their free email messaging platform, Hotmail, is now complete.

The upgrade, which began on the 15th of June, was progressively rolled out across the world as Microsoft began “upgrading server clusters, building the new indexes for conversation threading, and…

Posted by Adam de Boor, Software Engineer

Dragging and dropping files is an easy way to save time in Gmail. We’ve previously blogged about dragging files to upload as attachments and dragging images into new messages. Now, if you’re using Google Chrome, you can also drag attachments out of messages you receive to save them to your computer.

Let’s say you have an email open containing an attachment. Hover your mouse over the attachment’s “Download” link or its file icon and a tooltip appears that says: “Click to view OR drag to your desktop to save.”

Simply click and hold, then drag your cursor to anywhere in your file system that you want to save the file. Release the mouse button, and voilà! Your attachment is saved (for large files, you may see a progress dialog).

Chrome only: Google Chrome extension Foxish Live RSS mimics Firefox’s Live Bookmarks feature by creating folders on your bookmarks bar that update automatically from your favorite RSS feeds. More »

The Blackberry Torch 9800, a sleek slider with both a touch screen and a full keyboard, is the first device to come loaded with RIM’s revamped BlackBerry 6 OS. But one interesting bit from the press release suggests that BlackBerry’s older touch screen devices won’t get the update: More »

During the lead-up to launch, one of the more talked about Windows 7 features was the new Device Stage. The idea behind the Device Stage was to allow Microsoft’s partners to build unique and branded ‘stages’ for their devices, and to improve the end-users’ experiences with those devices by providing…

Nielsen has its own angle on the smartphone numbers game out today, and the results vaguely resemble the numbers from Canalys. Perhaps more interesting than the ever present market share tug-of-war (Nielsen pegs Google, RIM, and Apple at 27 percent, 33 percent, and 23 percent in sales to new smartphone subscribers, respectively) a note on brand loyalty turns out ugly for BlackBerry: while 89 percent of iPhone owners plan on getting another iPhone, and 71 percent of Android buyers plan to re-up, only 42 percent of BlackBerry owners plan to stick around. The defectors are pretty evenly split, with 29 percent planning to go iPhone, and 21 percent to go Android. That compares to 2 and 3 percent in the iPhone and Android camps planning a move to BlackBerry. We’ll see if BlackBerry 6 can solve this little problem for RIM, but the few tweaks we’ve seen so far seem hardly capable of stemming the flow.

BlackBerry users running out of loyalty: 50 percent plan to defect to iPhone or Android originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Aug 2010 15:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’ve been thinking of picking up a unibody Mac mini to use as an HTPC, you may want to hold off. Leaked specs of the upcoming Dell Inspiron Zino HD 410 have surfaced that shows it’s quite the capable device. Highlights: Quad-core AMD processor (dual-core Intel processor on the Mac mini), up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM, […]