.::REALITYRECALL::.

Western Digital has quietly revealed the Elements Play on their site, which combines pared-down playback features of the WD TV series with up to 2TB of internal storage right out of the box. It’s about time, considering competitor LaCie has offered integrated drives in its LaCinema line for more than a year, though we wish WD would have included the Netflix streaming capabilities of the WD TV Live Plus here — or any streaming at all, for that matter. If an unconnected box with 1080p playback via HDMI and fabulous codec support (including Monkey’s Audio!) is appealing to you though, then this latest offering might be worth your while — especially if it’s priced in line with its “value conscious” featureset, a fact we haven’t been able to verify. To be competitive, it’ll have to cost below LaCie’s LaCinema Classic HD, which throws in UPnP / DLNA server support on top of similar features for as little as $229. If you’re curious, find the user’s manual (including a full codec list) at our more coverage link.

[Thanks, Steve]

WD’s Elements Play media streamers bring internal HDDs at a presumably good price originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Aug 2010 01:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Brandon Morrow came within one hit of entering Toronto Blue Jays history when he struck out 17 on the way to a 1-0 victory over the Tampa Bay Rays.

Want Flash on your iPhone 4 something fierce? Great news, flash lover, for it is now possible thanks to these simple steps: More »

New Zealand based firm “Swiftpoint” is trying to revolutionize the way you use your laptop mouse from tomorrow with its new product, an ultra-portable, fast charging laptop mouse.

The revolutionary device is tiny, held like a pen and designed to be used on a laptop’s palm rest, but can even be…

Following in the footsteps of Google Chrome, Mozilla is planning to make updates for Firefox 4 behind-the-scenes. The feature is “on track” for the latest version of the browser.

Two betas have been released for Firefox 4 in the last 4 weeks with a 3rd update due next week. The ‘silent’…

Google knows a lot of stuff, but sometimes the most fascinating is what it knows about you. This page reveals just how it identifies social search results based on its understanding of your friends (and their friends.) [Google via BoingBoing] More »

Farmers in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta stand to lose up to $3 billion due to heavy rain and flooding, analysts from the Bank of Montreal say.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

HP Chairman, CEO and President Mark Hurd resigned from his positions in the company on Friday after sexual harassment claims were brought against him by a former HP contractor.

“As the investigation progressed, I realized there were instances in which I did not live up to the standards and principles of trust, respect and integrity that I have espoused at HP and which have guided me throughout my career. After a number of discussions with members of the board, I will move aside and the board will search for new leadership.” Hurd’s official statement said Friday. “This is a painful decision for me to make after five years at HP, but I believe it would be difficult for me to continue as an effective leader at HP and I believe this is the only decision the board and I could make at this time. I want to stress that this in no way reflects on the operating performance or financial integrity of HP.”

An investigation found that Hurd did not violate HP’s sexual harassment policy, but did violate HP’s Standards of Business conduct.

HP Chief Financial Officer Cathis Lesjak has been assigned as the interim CEO of the company following Hurd’s departure. Board members Marc Andreessen, (founder of Netscape and co-founder of Ning) Lawrence Babbio, Jr., John Hammergren and Joel Hyatt will lead the search for a permanent replacement.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010















Mark Hurd – HewlettPackard – Marc Andreessen – Sexual harassment – Joel Hyatt

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

HP Chairman, CEO and President Mark Hurd resigned from his positions in the company on Friday after sexual harassment claims were brought against him by a former HP contractor.

“As the investigation progressed, I realized there were instances in which I did not live up to the standards and principles of trust, respect and integrity that I have espoused at HP and which have guided me throughout my career. After a number of discussions with members of the board, I will move aside and the board will search for new leadership.” Hurd’s official statement said Friday. “This is a painful decision for me to make after five years at HP, but I believe it would be difficult for me to continue as an effective leader at HP and I believe this is the only decision the board and I could make at this time. I want to stress that this in no way reflects on the operating performance or financial integrity of HP.”

An investigation found that Hurd did not violate HP’s sexual harassment policy, but did violate HP’s Standards of Business conduct.

HP Chief Financial Officer Cathis Lesjak has been assigned as the interim CEO of the company following Hurd’s departure. Board members Marc Andreessen, (founder of Netscape and co-founder of Ning) Lawrence Babbio, Jr., John Hammergren and Joel Hyatt will lead the search for a permanent replacement.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010















Mark Hurd – HewlettPackard – Marc Andreessen – Sexual harassment – Joel Hyatt

We’re excited to announce we’ve acquired Slide, a social technology company with an extensive history of building new ways for people to connect with others across numerous platforms online.

For Google, the web is about people, and we’re working to develop open, transparent and interesting (and fun!) ways to allow our users to take full advantage of how technology can bring them closer to friends and family and provide useful information just for them.

Slide has already created compelling social experiences for tens of millions of people across many platforms, and we’ve already built strong social elements into products like Gmail, Docs, Blogger, Picasa and YouTube. As the Slide team joins Google, we’ll be investing even more to make Google services socially aware and expand these capabilities for our users across the web.

While we don’t have any detailed product plans to share right now, we’re thrilled to welcome Max and his very talented team to Google, and we can’t wait to work together to give people more and better tools to communicate and connect.

Posted by David Glazer, Engineering Director

It’s no Courier, but Toshiba’s dual-screened Libretto W100 is about as good as we’re going to get and, if you’re in Japan, the getting is about to get good. The key-free lappy is due to start shipping there on August 11, which means you’re just a few days (and, possibly, a few very long flights) away from getting your fingerprints all over one. If, however, you’re not so much into the importing scene, you’re going to have to wait a bit longer for this $1,100 curiosity to hit US shores through normal retail channels. How much longer? Toshiba promised a summer release, and let’s just say that the days aren’t getting any longer.

Toshiba’s dual-screen Libretto W100 hits Japan next week originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Aug 2010 11:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yesterday, Alexander Yee and Shigeru Kondo announced that they had set a new Pi world record, calculating it to five trillion digits—some 6TB of data—using a single custom built computer. The five trillionth digit? It's a 2. More »

It’s pricey at a tenner per download, but anyone who’s played Splinter Cell Conviction on the iPhone can vouch for the quality of the Xbox 360 port. More »

We knew the Chinese were serious about doing this whole high-speed railway thing, but we had no idea they were this serious. As Engadget reports, researchers at Southwest Jiaotong University are currently putting together a prototype maglev train that can average a speed of 500 to 600 kilometers-per-hour (310 to 372 mph), as well as a second, smaller train that will reportedly top out at a handsome 1,000 kph (621 mph). The underground train, which will run through a frictionless vacuum tube, is expected to be completed within just two to three years. Of course, all this Chinese speed won’t come for free. Early estimates show that each kilometer of the tunnel will cost nearly $3 million more than the country’s current high-speed rails, meaning that the government will need about $118 billion to lay down 6,000 kilometers of track over the next two years. It’s a hefty price tag, for sure, but, as long as the investment can put a dent in China’s grotesque pollution cloud, it certainly seems worth it. [From: Engadget and Bloomberg]

China’s Proposed Maglev Train Will Reach Speeds of 1,000 kph originally appeared on Switched on Thu, 05 Aug 2010 17:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’re thinking about going the Media Center DVR route but can’t or won’t get hooked up with a CableCARD don’t forget there’s another option available to pull in those premium channels now that the $199 Hauppauge HD PVR is supported as a TV recorder in Windows 7. There’s been a few updates since the feature was added in beta back in June, which lets users select programs via the Media Center guide to be captured and encoded in MPEG-4 over the device’s component video inputs (HDTV resolutions up to 1080i and 5.1 surround sound are supported) while the PC controls connected satellite or cable TV set-top boxes with an included IR blaster. There’s still a limit of one tuner per PC and a thread over on TheGreenButton reveals the experience can still be a bit glitchy, but if you’ve just got to have Windows Media Center and NFL Sunday Ticket then some compromises will be necessary.

Continue reading Hauppauge officially announces HD PVR support in Windows Media Center

Hauppauge officially announces HD PVR support in Windows Media Center originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Firefox 4 Beta is out with a revamped UI, Google Chrome continues to gain popularity, and Opera has a slick new version. Let’s take a look at which browser uses your screen the best without wasting space. More »

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