A man died Wednesday morning after the car he was in crashed, rolled and burst into flames on Highway 10, near Melville, Sask., RCMP say.
Nvidia’s Android Tablet: Okay, I Could Want This [Nvidia]
A rounded, plasticky take on the iPad. That’s how Nvidia’s latest Android tablet prototype struck me. It’s pretty nice. But not as nice as the inside. More »
Revision3 Lands Penn Jillette For New Web Video Show
Revision3 might have finally found a star bigger than its own founder Kevin Rose (who co-hosts Revsion3's flagship show Diggnation). The Web video production house just signed magician/comedian Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller for a new show called Penn Point. The first episode will go up on May 24.The format will be a 3 to 7 minute rant by
Microsoft planning to support VP8 in Internet Explorer 9 – with a catch
Microsoft said on Wednesday that it plans to introduce support for the VP8 video codec in Internet Explorer 9. But there’s a catch, the user must have the VP8 codec installed on Windows.
Google announced a developer preview of WebM earlier today. WebM is an open, royalty-free media file format designed…
Google and VMware form joint Cloud venture
Google and VMware have teamed up to facilitate the rapid expansion of the lucrative Cloud computing market.
Google launches open WebM web video format based on VP8 (update: hardware partners and Microsoft statement)
Google’s plan to open-source the VP8 video codec it acquired when it purchased a company called On2 hasn’t exactly been a secret, and the company’s finally made it official today as part of a new format called WebM. The WebM container is based on Matroska, with VP8 video and Ogg Vorbis audio streams packed inside — Google says the format is efficient enough to support playback on lower-power devices like netbooks, tablets, and handhelds, while the encoding profiles are simple enough to limit complexity when you’re trying to create WebM files. WebM is open-sourced and licensed royalty-free under a BSD-style license, so all those H.264 patent licensing concerns shouldn’t be an issue — and as you’d expect, Mozilla is supporting WebM right off the bat, with support in Firefox nightly builds as of today. Chromium nightlies will also support WebM as of today, with Chrome early access builds getting support on May 24 — and Opera is listed as “coming soon.”
Google’s also going to be supporting the format as an option for YouTube playback, so that should drive adoption in a big way — if you’re running these latest Firefox or Chromium nightlies you can actually try it out now. The big question, of course, is whether Apple and Microsoft will roll WebM support into Safari and IE and onto their mobile platforms. We’ll see — Google definitely has the ability to push a format into the mainstream.
Update: Industry support announced at I/O — including Adobe, who’ll be rolling VP8 support into Flash Player. Take note of the hardware partners, though: AMD, ARM, Broadcom, Freescale, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and TI, among others. Missing in action? Intel.
Update 2: The always-reliable Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet says she’s heard Microsoft will be supporting WebM in IE9. That’s a big deal if it’s true, but we’ll have to wait for confirmation — IE9 isn’t due out for a year, so a lot can change in the meantime. Fingers crossed.
Update 3: Microsoft’s made an official statement on its blog — while the company is “all in” with HTML5, IE9 will only come with H.264 installed be default due to technical and IP concerns. HTML5 / VP8 playback will be supported, but users will have to download and install the codec separately, which doesn’t bode well for widespread adoption. Here’s the money quote:
In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows.
[Thanks, Sean]
Google launches open WebM web video format based on VP8 (update: hardware partners and Microsoft statement) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 May 2010 12:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Gartner: Android Smartphone Sales Now Exceed Windows Mobile
A new Gartner report shows that worldwide mobile phone sales grew 17 percent in the first quarter of 2010, to 314.7 million units. Of those, 54.3 million were smartphones, a 48.7 percent jump from the same period one year ago.
Significantly, Android sales jumped 707 percent during the same period, and now exceed sales of Windows Mobile devices around the world.
Symbian still leads the pack with 44.3 percent market share (down from 48.8 in Q1 2009). BlackBerry OS devices come in second at 19.4 percent (down slightly from 20.6), while iPhone OS rings in third at 15.4 percent (up from 10.5 percent).
After that, Android is now in fourth place at 9.6 percent (up from just 1.6 percent in Q1 2009), while Windows Mobile takes fifth place at 6.8 percent (down from 10.2 percent).
A new look for Google Calendar
Posted by Joe Ashear, User Experience Designer
When I came to Google four years ago, a small group of engineers was putting the finishing touches on a calendar application. A few of us started using it, and I remember thinking, “Wow! It’s so fresh and shiny and new!”
But over time the shiny new Calendar started to feel a little bit old, a little out of step with other Google Apps. So we rolled up our sleeves and we tweaked the layout, we twiddled the colors and we tuned the text…and this week we’re pleased to show off a fresh new look for Google Calendar.
If you use Tasks in Calendar, you'll discover another change: we've removed the old Tasks link. Now to turn Tasks on and off, just click the Tasks calendar in your calendar list. If you only want to see tasks with due dates — the ones above your calendar — you can hide the task list by clicking the tall blue bar that separates the calendar from the task list.
Are Anti-Bacterial Soaps Poisoning Our Water?
A common chemical found in antibacterial soaps is turning up in lakes and streams and could potentially harm wildlife and human health.
Bill Gates Told Steve Jobs About the iPad in 2007 [Ipad]
May 30, 2007. Watch Señor Bill Gates describing the future of computing, with Apple CEO Steve Jobs next to him: An iPad-like device being used alongside an iPhone-like device. Then watch Jobs saying that, actually, the future was the PC. More »
Howe to receive honorary degree in Sask.
The University of Saskatchewan plans to recognize National Hockey League legend Gordie Howe with an honorary degree at its graduation ceremonies next month.
Charlie Sheen staying on ‘Two and a Half Men’
Charlie Sheen has renewed his deal with “Two and a Half Men.”
Full story at The Live Feed
Rumor: Tiered PSN service coming to PS3
After years of lambasting Microsoft for charging users to access premium online services on the Xbox 360, Sony may finally break down and start doing the same thing on the PS3.
Study Funded by Cell Phone Industry Says, ‘No Cancer’
The first results of the long-awaited, 10-year, international Interphone study finds little evidence that cell phones cause either glioma or meningioma, the two most common types of brain cancer.
Official: Acer will not launch Chrome OS devices at Computex
Oh, what’s this? Acer officially saying it will not launch a Chrome OS device at Computex or in the “short term,” just like our sources told us a few days ago? Unfortunately, that’s exactly what’s going on. Like we said last week, Google’s other operating system just doesn’t look like it’s ready for prime time yet, and it’s a little premature to expect devices running Chrome OS to “launch” in just two weeks — although we’re sure we’ll see someone throw an early Chromium build on a new tablet or netbook, and show it off at the upcoming Taipei computer show. Of course, we are expecting Android tablets and smartbooks to be in full force at the show, and we’ll be there hunting down the best ones. Hit the break for Acer’s official Chrome comment.
Continue reading Official: Acer will not launch Chrome OS devices at Computex
Official: Acer will not launch Chrome OS devices at Computex originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 May 2010 14:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Hollywood injunction forces Pirate Bay offline
An official injunction has forced Pirate Bay to temporarily take its controversial file sharing site offline.
GM makes first profit in 3 years
General Motors has reported its first quarterly profit in almost three years.
YouTube, now a cultural phenomenon, streams 2 billion videos every day
On its five year anniversary, popular video streaming site YouTube announced it streams two billion videos every day.
“What started as a site for bedroom vloggers and viral videos has evolved into a global platform that supports HD and 3D, broadcasts entire sports seasons live to 200+ countries,” it said in the official YouTube Blog on Sunday. “We bring feature films from Hollywood studios and independent filmmakers to far-flung audiences. Activists document social unrest seeking to transform societies, and leading civic and political figures stream interviews to the world.”
On Friday, audience metrics company Nielsen posted its report of Top Online Video Sites in the U.S. for April 2010, and YouTube had 97.1 million unique viewers for the month, a 1.1% month-over-month growth.
YouTube’s closest competitor in the Neilsen rankings, Yahoo! video, had 27.6 million unique viewers for the month, so the size of YouTube’s audience is staggeringly higher than the rest of the market.
But YouTube isn’t really competing with other video sharing sites, and it’s not competing with television either, because viewing habits on YouTube are very different from traditional television viewing.
“The average user spends 15 minutes a day on YouTube, that’s tiny compared to the five hours a day people spend watching TV,” YouTube’s blog post said.
Even though the site hasn’t been a profit machine for Google, it has had a huge impact on the way we share information as a community.
Just last night, I experienced something that really cemented the importance of YouTube in our culture that I thought I’d share.
Indie Singer/Songrwiter David Bazan is currently touring the United States playing only limited-capacity shows in people’s living rooms, and we booked his Baltimore show in one of our apartments. I had set up my video camera partially to test the audio capture of Bazan’s busker-style setup (no vocal amplification and a tiny practice amp to monitor his guitar sound) and partially to record just for posterity.
After the show was over and I started to break down my camera, I was approached separately by a dozen people (nearly a quarter of the total audience) who each asked for my YouTube screen name. Some wanted to share the show with friends who couldn’t make it, some wanted to use the video for their blogs, but they all asked for YouTube first.
When I was video taping shows twelve years ago, I would only be asked for copies on the rarest occasions. Now because of YouTube and tiny, high quality cameras, sharing video is part of the experience of an event.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
YouTube – Google – United States – Television – Streaming media
"House" Finale Shot on a Canon DSLR
Canon reported on Monday that the season finale of “House” has been shot entirely on a high-end digital SLR, the Canon EOS 5D Mark II. The episode marks the “first network prime-time drama” to be shot on a digital SLR.
Based on a preview clip I saw, the finale involves some sort of disaster trapping House and the case beneath a building. I’m not entirely sure if the video actually plays a role in the plot or not, or if it’s strictly incidental.
In any event, shooting a high-profile show like “House” on a digital SLR should validate the HD video capabilities that manufacturers like Canon have begun adding to their high-end and even mod-range cameras – even if Canon didn’t specifically say that the video shot was in HD.
In
addition to shooting the episode on the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Canon EF lenses
were used for a complete Canon workflow for image capture, Canon said. “Recording every
second of footage to compact flash cards, the crew for HOUSE took full advantage
of a completely digital workflow and was able to complete filming the entire
episode in just 10 days,” the company said.
The finale ends tonight at 8:00 PM ET/PT on Fox.
Capture Full Page Screenshots Entire Web Pages as a Continuous Image [Screen Captures]
Snapping a screenshot of a web page is simple enough, but capturing the entire page if it extends beyond the borders of a single screen is a hassle. Capture Full Page screenshots entire pages, no manual editing required. More »
Screen Capture – Web page – Windows – Screenshot – Shareware