1. Microsoft May Pull It All Together With Windows 8
If you haven't upgraded your current computer setup to Windows 7 yet, hold your horses -- the landscape is about to change with Windows 8 now becoming the center of attention. Shortly after Microsoft released a pre-beta build of the operating system to select partners, screenshots have begun surfacing on Microsoft enthusiast sites. That shouldn't surprise anyone, but what may are the details revealed within the screenshots. For example, Within Windows exposed several images showing off a Microsoft Office-like Ribbon in Windows Explorer.
2. Your Gadgets and the Enemy Within
Your cellphone, your digital camera and your color laser printer may be betraying your privacy without your knowing it, Eva Galperin, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told a sparse audience at the Web 2.0 Expo Thursday. The EFF classifies software or devices that act behind the user's back to actively betray their privacy as "traitorware," Galperin said. "The EFF is particularly interested in the issue of traitorware because we are a digital civil liberties organization," Galperin stated.
3. Fresh new perspectives for your blog
Today we’re previewing five new dynamic templates in Blogger that you’ll soon be able to customize and use for your blog. These new views use the latest in web technology, including AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3, to deliver a host of benefits to you and your readers:
Infinite scrolling: read more posts without having to reload or click to a second page
New layouts: different views suited to different types of blogs
Speed: download images as you view them, not all at once in advance
Interactivity: there are now more ways to experience and engage with blog content
4. Google Counts On a New Social Strategy by +1's
Google has launched what many see as its answer to the growing phenomenon of social search in general and Facebook's "Like" button in particular: the +1 button. It is similar in concept, although in Google's case it will eventually be included in search results. When users see something they like on a Google property such as YouTube or a search ad, they can click the +1 button. The icon will start to appear in search results within a few weeks, said Google spokesperson Jim Prosse. For the moment, it is available only to a small group of people who have opted in on Google's website.
5. New imagery of Japan after the earthquake
It’s now the third week after the devastating 9.0-magnitude earthquake that struck northeastern Japan. Aid organizations have been hard at work and cities are starting to show signs of recovery, but the damage is beyond imagination and there are still thousands of people at shelters grappling with daily challenges. As a native of Sendai city, I’m still speechless seeing the destruction and damage that has been done to the places I love and care about.
We’ve been looking for ways we can assist in the relief efforts using Google’s map-related tools. A few days after the quake, we published updated satellite imagery of northeast Japan in Google Maps and Google Earth, which illustrated the massive scale of devastation in the affected areas.
Today, we’ve published imagery of the Sendai region at even higher resolution, which we collected on Sunday and Monday. The new Sendai imagery, along with satellite imagery from throughout the area, is now live in the base imagery layer of Google Earth and will soon be visible in Google Maps. We hope to continue collecting updated images and publishing them as soon as they are ready.
We hope our effort to deliver up-to-date imagery provides the relief organizations and volunteers working around the clock with the data they need to better understand the current conditions on the ground. We also hope these tools help our millions of users—both those in Japan and those closely watching and sending their support from all over the globe—to find useful information about the affected areas.
Posted by Keiichi Kawai, Senior Product Manager, on behalf of Google Japan and international Crisis Response teams
6. Historic Photos Reveal a Mercury Never Seen Before
NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft on Tuesday and Wednesday captured and delivered to Earth the first photographs of Mercury ever taken from within the planet's orbit. Taken at 5:20 am EDT Tuesday, the historic first photo was soon joined by 364 more of the solar system's innermost planet, and several of them were released on Wednesday. Photos were taken by MESSENGER's Mercury Dual Imaging System as the spacecraft sailed high above the planet's south pole, providing a glimpse of portions of Mercury's surface that had not previously been seen by humans. "The entire MESSENGER team is thrilled," said Principal Investigator Sean Solomon.
7. New KDE Polishes Linux but Leaves a Few Little Streaks
Having multiple choices of desktop environments is one of the Linux OS's strong points -- as well as its potential nemesis. This lack of a uniform desktop strategy means confusion for Linux newcomers and frustration for seasoned users. For example, the two most used desktop environments are GNOME and KDE. But the choices do not end there. Add to the fray Xfce and LXDE and more bare-bones systems such as FVWM and IceWM, among several others. And then you must factor in a handful of X Window managers that handle the windows that applications bring up within a desktop environment.
If you haven't upgraded your current computer setup to Windows 7 yet, hold your horses -- the landscape is about to change with Windows 8 now becoming the center of attention. Shortly after Microsoft released a pre-beta build of the operating system to select partners, screenshots have begun surfacing on Microsoft enthusiast sites. That shouldn't surprise anyone, but what may are the details revealed within the screenshots. For example, Within Windows exposed several images showing off a Microsoft Office-like Ribbon in Windows Explorer.
2. Your Gadgets and the Enemy Within
Your cellphone, your digital camera and your color laser printer may be betraying your privacy without your knowing it, Eva Galperin, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told a sparse audience at the Web 2.0 Expo Thursday. The EFF classifies software or devices that act behind the user's back to actively betray their privacy as "traitorware," Galperin said. "The EFF is particularly interested in the issue of traitorware because we are a digital civil liberties organization," Galperin stated.
3. Fresh new perspectives for your blog
Today we’re previewing five new dynamic templates in Blogger that you’ll soon be able to customize and use for your blog. These new views use the latest in web technology, including AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3, to deliver a host of benefits to you and your readers:
Infinite scrolling: read more posts without having to reload or click to a second page
New layouts: different views suited to different types of blogs
Speed: download images as you view them, not all at once in advance
Interactivity: there are now more ways to experience and engage with blog content
4. Google Counts On a New Social Strategy by +1's
Google has launched what many see as its answer to the growing phenomenon of social search in general and Facebook's "Like" button in particular: the +1 button. It is similar in concept, although in Google's case it will eventually be included in search results. When users see something they like on a Google property such as YouTube or a search ad, they can click the +1 button. The icon will start to appear in search results within a few weeks, said Google spokesperson Jim Prosse. For the moment, it is available only to a small group of people who have opted in on Google's website.
5. New imagery of Japan after the earthquake
It’s now the third week after the devastating 9.0-magnitude earthquake that struck northeastern Japan. Aid organizations have been hard at work and cities are starting to show signs of recovery, but the damage is beyond imagination and there are still thousands of people at shelters grappling with daily challenges. As a native of Sendai city, I’m still speechless seeing the destruction and damage that has been done to the places I love and care about.
We’ve been looking for ways we can assist in the relief efforts using Google’s map-related tools. A few days after the quake, we published updated satellite imagery of northeast Japan in Google Maps and Google Earth, which illustrated the massive scale of devastation in the affected areas.
Today, we’ve published imagery of the Sendai region at even higher resolution, which we collected on Sunday and Monday. The new Sendai imagery, along with satellite imagery from throughout the area, is now live in the base imagery layer of Google Earth and will soon be visible in Google Maps. We hope to continue collecting updated images and publishing them as soon as they are ready.
We hope our effort to deliver up-to-date imagery provides the relief organizations and volunteers working around the clock with the data they need to better understand the current conditions on the ground. We also hope these tools help our millions of users—both those in Japan and those closely watching and sending their support from all over the globe—to find useful information about the affected areas.
A riverside neighborhood in Sendai from our newly released imagery
6. Historic Photos Reveal a Mercury Never Seen Before
NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft on Tuesday and Wednesday captured and delivered to Earth the first photographs of Mercury ever taken from within the planet's orbit. Taken at 5:20 am EDT Tuesday, the historic first photo was soon joined by 364 more of the solar system's innermost planet, and several of them were released on Wednesday. Photos were taken by MESSENGER's Mercury Dual Imaging System as the spacecraft sailed high above the planet's south pole, providing a glimpse of portions of Mercury's surface that had not previously been seen by humans. "The entire MESSENGER team is thrilled," said Principal Investigator Sean Solomon.
7. New KDE Polishes Linux but Leaves a Few Little Streaks
Having multiple choices of desktop environments is one of the Linux OS's strong points -- as well as its potential nemesis. This lack of a uniform desktop strategy means confusion for Linux newcomers and frustration for seasoned users. For example, the two most used desktop environments are GNOME and KDE. But the choices do not end there. Add to the fray Xfce and LXDE and more bare-bones systems such as FVWM and IceWM, among several others. And then you must factor in a handful of X Window managers that handle the windows that applications bring up within a desktop environment.
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