.::REALITYRECALL::.

The Dutch national museum said Thursday that one of its prized possessions, a rock supposedly brought back from the moon by U.S. astronauts, is just a piece of petrified wood.

Facebook has agreed to make changes to better protect users’ personal information on the social networking site and comply with Canadian privacy laws within one year, Canada’s privacy commissioner said Thursday.

While most of us don’t frequently find ourselves needing to translate our documents to various languages on-the-fly, Google Docs just announced a new feature that’ll be great for those who do: The service now automatically translates docs in 42 different languages with a few mouse clicks.

Translating docs is a breeze: Just hit up the Tools menu, select Translate document, then choose the language you want to translate to. Docs will open the translated document in a new window, then offer to replace the original document with the translation or copy the translation to a new document. It’s probably not for everyone, but it’s a nice feature, nonetheless, and yet another example of Google’s continued march toward integrating their various services.

Mary Jo Foley is reporting that Microsoft is planning a Windows 7 launch party on October 22 in New York City. Microsoft has been extremely secretive about the launch details but according to Foley company officials have begun sending out invites to bloggers and the media: "We also wanted to let you know that you will be receiving an invitation to a Microsoft event in NYC on October 22nd to celebrate the availability and launch of Windows 7. With Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer speaking and exciting new hardware from our partners, we're looking forward to sharing Windows 7 with the world." With Steve Ballmer looking after the launch it's bound to be a good show.

Read full story…

Owners of Sony eReaders, users of the Stanza iPhone book reader, and anyone else with a device that reads the ePub format can now grab more than 1 million works from Google Books’ archives. The books may contain some mistakes, as most were simply scanned and run through an OCR image-to-text process, but it’s free content in a free format, which is hard to beat. [Inside Google Books via ReadWriteWeb]

Royal Bank of Canada beat analysts’ expectations by posting a 24 per cent surge in third-quarter profits on Thursday.

Starting Friday, August 28th (tomorrow) the price of the Xbox 360 Elite is getting a one-hundred dollar price cut in the United States.

Here is how the new pricing breaks down:

Xbox 360 Elite	$399.99	now $299.99*
Xbox 360 Pro	$299.99	now $249.99*  While supplies last
Xbox 360 Arcade	$199.99	$199.99*
		* (ERP) Estimated retail price in the United States

Betcha didn’t see that coming…did you ?

 

In addition, we’ve rolled out some new packaging, that some of you may have already spotted in your local stores. I’ve uploaded pictures of the new packing images to my Flickr account you can take a peak.

 

Epson has been fined $26 million for its part in a price-fixing scam, says the US Justice Department.

One person and two companies are the first telemarketers to be fined by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission for violating its do-not-call list.

Hugely popular torrent indexer Mininova has been slapped with a debilitating ruling, in the Netherlands: Within the next three months, the site has to remove all links to infringing torrents, after which it’ll be fined 1000 Euros for each one. This means that Mininova will either A.) Become the premier torrent indexer for Linux ISOs and public domain FLAC music, or B.) die.*

With two major torrent sites all but snuffed out in the last few weeks, there are only a few decent alternatives left. Although if you’re of a hardier type, there’s always Usenet. [Torrentfreak]

*Spoiler: It’s B.

Hugely popular torrent indexer Mininova has been slapped with a debilitating ruling, in the Netherlands: Within the next three months, the site has to remove all links to infringing torrents, after which it’ll be fined 1000 Euros for each one.

Mininova’s been working on a copyright filter for a while, but with the stakes so artificially high, it would need to be almost perfect to make operating the site worthwhile. This means that Mininova will either A.) Become the premier torrent indexer for Linux ISOs and public domain FLAC music, or B.) die.*

With two major torrent sites all but snuffed out in the last few weeks, there are only a few decent alternatives left. Although if you’re of a hardier type, there’s always Usenet. [Torrentfreak]

*Spoiler: It’s B.

We’ve been playing hide and seek with this peskily mysterious Android MID for a few weeks now, and it looks like at last some light has been shed on the situation. The device is actually just a concept built by Rockchip to display its new RK2808 chipset, which is capable of decoding 720p and apparently squeezing into incredibly attractive, Apple-aping form factors. There’s some action video which reveals that the hardware perhaps isn’t so capable of pumping a smooth web browsing experience to its 5-inch screen, but sometimes you can forgive a bit of clunky when faced with this much sexy. No word on plans to put the RK2808 into a real product, but it sure seems off to a nice, buzz-filled start. Video is after the jump, but you’d better be prepared to rock out.

[Via pocketables]

Continue reading Mystery Android MID found out to be Rockchip-built concept, caught on video

Filed under: Handhelds

Mystery Android MID found out to be Rockchip-built concept, caught on video originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gmail’s auto-complete is convenient when you know exactly who you’re writing to, but adding lesser-known or oddly named contacts can be a pain. Gmail’s new pop-up contact chooser makes digging your contacts’ depths far less painful.

A click-to-pick contact chooser has long been a rare advantage of desktop email clients over Gmail in the interface department, and it's nice to see Gmail close that gap. Click on the To, CC, or BCC links in a compose window, and you can add contacts, or pre-sorted groups, to your message recipients—without having to save a draft, head to contacts, copy a name, then head back to drafts. Pick the wrong name? Click on the contact name again to remove them.

Most convenient of all is the search function in the contact chooser, and the ability to select all the results that come up from a particular search. That makes it easy to, say, pick everyone you know from the Rochester Institute of Technology by searching rit.edu and picking everyone who comes up.

The big irk that some are noting is that Gmail’s contact chooser opens in a new window, confounding Firefox users that have relegated new windows to tabs, and forcing those with pop-up blockers to set them to allow Gmail’s chooser through. If you’ve found a convenient work-around to the pop-up window, let us know in the comments.

Gmail’s auto-complete is convenient when you know exactly who you’re writing to, but adding lesser-known or oddly named contacts can be a pain. Gmail’s new pop-up contact chooser makes digging your contacts’ depths far less painful.

A click-to-pick contact chooser has long been a rare advantage of desktop email clients over Gmail in the interface department, and it's nice to see Gmail close that gap. Click on the To, CC, or BCC links in a compose window, and you can add contacts, or pre-sorted groups, to your message recipients—without having to save a draft, head to contacts, copy a name, then head back to drafts. Pick the wrong name? Click on the contact name again to remove them.

Most convenient of all is the search function in the contact chooser, and the ability to select all the results that come up from a particular search. That makes it easy to, say, pick everyone you know from the Rochester Institute of Technology by searching rit.edu and picking everyone who comes up.

The big irk that some are noting is that Gmail’s contact chooser opens in a new window, confounding Firefox users that have relegated new windows to tabs, and forcing those with pop-up blockers to set them to allow Gmail’s chooser through. If you’ve found a convenient work-around to the pop-up window, let us know in the comments.

A judge on Tuesday sentenced Chris Brown to five years’ probation, six months’ community labor for the beating of Rihanna and ordered him to stay away from his former girlfriend for the next five years.

Want an easy way to share documents, photos, and other files with people over the web?  Now you can with Opera Unite which is a new service to be included with the Opera 10 browser.  Today we take a look the new Unite feature and what it has to offer.

According to their website, “Opera Unite is a collaborative technology that uses a compact server inside the Opera desktop browser to share data and services.”  Essentially what this service does is turn your computer into a server where you can share documents and photos, stream music, create a chat room, host your own website and a lot more.  You can make files available to the public or with a password protected invite link and the really cool thing is the person accessing it can use any browser they want.

Installation

The first thing you will want to do is install Opera 10 which at the time of this writing we used Beta 3 Build 1708.  The Unite feature is still in the Alpha stage of development and needs to be installed separately from the Opera Labs site (we included the link below).  In fact at this stage of its development you can install just the Unite feature, but being a curious geek I figured seeing how it will operate with the new version of the browser would be best.

To start using Unite you will be prompted to create create an Opera account.

Customize settings and create a customized account based on where you will be using it from.

Advanced settings let you specify upload speeds, default port, and global visibility.

To complete the setup select a folder where you will keep the shared documents and files.

You’ll access it from the sidebar and clicking the Unite tab.  Here you can turn the service on and off and there will be a list of other services you can add like Fridge, Media Player, Opera Messenger, Photo Sharing, The Lounge, and Web Server.

 

Unite Features

File Sharing allows you to easily share files and other documents.

The Fridge is a neat place where others you invite can save notes on your computer.

Media Player lets you listen to your entire music collection anywhere there is an Internet connection.

Photo Sharing allows you to share photos with your friends and family without having to upload them to a separate service first.

Each additional service or feature requires a quick installation…for example here we are installing Opera Messenger.

The Opera Unite Homepage will have a list of services that are running and it is where you will find the URL for friends can access the site.

 

You will probably want to set up separate directories for each of the services that you run to keep things organized an secure.  For instance you wouldn’t want everyone to access personal information in your My Documents folder.

 

Here is an example of accessing another user’s Unite page where they’re sharing an eBook on their File Sharing page, you can view documents in the browser or download the file to your hard drive. 

Conclusion

Opera Unite is a very cool feature that will be added to the new Opera Browser.  It allows anyone to become their own webmaster of sorts and makes it extremely simple.  One thing that raised concerns about this service is its level of security. According to their site and the Terms of Service, “Opera Unite runs in a “secured sandbox”, where only the files or folders you select can be accessed; nothing else on your computer is accessible to anyone else. You grant access to specified files, such as a directory of data you want to share, without allowing access to anything outside the specified area.”  Also, they do not keep a log of what files your sharing and do not claim any rights to it.  It is essentially up to you not to share unwanted data.

Opera definitely doesn’t get much love in the tech world but you might want to revisit it and check out the newest version as another alternative to Internet Explorer.   

Download Opera 10 Beta 

Download Opera Unite

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The good news is that there were plenty of Genius Bar employees around to inform the Atlanta Apple Store that its warranty was out of date. [Thanks Jason!]