Holiday Plans

For this holiday I'm probably going to my grandparents house for Christmas eve because in my family everyone opens there presents at 12:00 midnight. The next day for Christmas I'll probably be going to my dads parents house for Christmas day.

tech article 12/17

Yahoo layoffs: 600 jobs cut in long-rumored move

 Yahoo cut about 600 jobs Tuesday, the company confirmed, finally swinging the ax on layoffs that had been widely rumored for weeks.The layoffs represent a 4% reduction in Yahoo's global workforce, said a Yahoo spokesperson, although the company didn't specify which divisions suffered cuts. In an e-mailed statement, the company said its "personnel changes are part of our ongoing strategy to best position Yahoo! for revenue growth."The cuts were first reported by TechCrunch on November 11, saying 20% cuts were coming across the board. AllThingsDlast week with its own sources.Yahoo has struggled as it tries to reinvent itself beyond an Internet portal. The company has lost major market share in display advertising -- once its biggest stronghold -- to Google and Facebook. followed up later that day, claiming a 10% cut would come in the product sector only. Fortune reported the 10% figure 

 

http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/14/technology/yahoo_layoffs/index.htm

voki hw

tech article 12/10/10

A futuristic taxi with global ambitions

It's a long way from the streets of New York to the factories of Turkey, but this 5,000-mile journey could soon be made by all of the city's iconic yellow taxis.
A glass-roofed, eco-friendly vehicle designed by Turkish automaker Karsan is among the three finalists in New York City's search for a taxicab for the future.
New York launched the "Taxi of Tomorrow" competition to find a safe, energy efficient and accessible model. The winning design will be the exclusive New York City taxi for at least 10 years, according to city officials.
Karsan's V1 is the only model that was designed from scratch for the contest.
A reflection of the country's growing automotive ambitions, it would be Turkey's first high-profile branded vehicle if it wins.
So far all the cars Turkey makes are built under license for major manufacturers. Karsan, while not exactly a household name outside its homeland, makes vehicles for Hyundai, Peugeot, Citroen and Renault. The Karsan V1 would be wheelchair accessible, spacious enough to hold five passengers and a stroller, and have a glass roof to give passengers a view of New York's skyscrapers.
It could hold a gasoline, compressed natural gas or electric engine, depending on which technology is the greenest at any time.
Nahum said his ambition is to build taxis for other major world cities.
"We believe in the next 10 to 15 years, other cities will follow New York's lead in looking for a dedicated taxi responding to the needs of the city," he said.
The winner of the "Taxi of Tomorrow" contest will be the first ever custom-built New York taxi. There are 16 different vehicles from nine manufacturers in the current fleet of 13,000 licensed taxicabs.
There have been many efforts to design futuristic taxicabs over the years, but "this project marks the first time ever -- anywhere -- that such an exercise will be backed up by an automotive manufacturer that can turn these concepts into tangible reality," New York Taxi and Limousine Commissioner David Yassky said in a statement when the finalists were announced last month.
The winning proposal will be announced early next year and the first new vehicles are expected to be on the road in 2014.
The V1 isn't the only contender in the race to have a Turkey connection. Another finalist, Ford's Transit Connect, will be built in Turkey and adapted in the United States if it wins. Also in the running is a taxi design based on a Nissan van.
Turkey's prime role in the race to produce a new taxi might come as a surprise to New Yorkers, but the country is quietly becoming an automotive powerhouse. It's the 15th largest vehicle producer in the world, according to Invest in Turkey, producing around 900,000 vehicles a year.
According to Nahum, the industry is planning to increase its output to 2.5 million vehicles annually within the next three or four years.
As well as home-grown companies like Karsan, many international companies, such as Fiat, Ford and Renault, have established a presence in the country, often with local partners.
Renault announced last year that it would begin production on the electric version of its Fluence car in Bursa, the so-called "Detroit of Turkey," in 2011.
"The Turkish automotive industry has grown a lot in the last 10 years because manufacturers in Western Europe have seen it as a low-cost place to make cars and ship them to the European Union," said David Leggett, an automotive industry analyst at just-auto.
Fiat, Ford, Renault and many others have got together with local partners and made a lot of vehicles, mainly for export.

"There's also a lot of demand coming from Turkey's domestic market, because the economy has boomed," he told CNN.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/12/06/turkey.taxi.future/index.html

Google Reader

Google Reader is a very useful for finding out information. It's good for me because i can find out tech information alot more quickly than usual.

Tech Article

'Zombie' virus attacks more than 1 million cell phones in China

More than 1 million cell phones in China have been struck by the "Zombie" virus, according to Chinese state media, CCTV and Xinhua.

It's called the "Zombie" virus because it transmits from phone to phone, just as in the movies, zombie bites turn people into the living dead.

The virus binds with a security application, which then transmits the user's SIM card details to a central server controlled by a small group of hackers. The hackers then will send messages or make phone calls that contain virus-ridden links for games and software, said CCTV.

Receivers who follow the link will find their phones infected, too, while at the same time providing a "click through" for the link itself, which typically translates into a payment for a party publicizing the links. CCTV said that the blame is likely to lay with intermediary distributors instead of the actual game or software developers that show up in the ads.

Zhou Yonglin, an official with the National Computer Network Emergency Coordination Center, told CCTV that "in the first week of September, nearly 1 million cell phones in the country were infected with the virus."

And although telecom providers are said to have taken steps to reduce the number of infected messages, Zou Shihong, a telecom expert at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, told CCTV that an updated virus might start sending fewer messages, making it harder for cell users to notice any suspicious activity.

Chendu Qimiao, the company behind the original infected security application, told CCTV that is has nothing to do with the virus, adding that it's difficult for users to tell which applications are infected and which are safe.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/11/11/china.cell.phone.virus/index.html

tech article

Mozilla launches F1, a new way to share links

 

Today, Mozilla's Messaging group launched F1, a Firefox extension that aims to make sharing content around the social web much easier..
F1 gives users an all-in-one frame above the content they're viewing. Once your accounts are connected, you simply click the tiny F1 icon in the toolbar to share the page you're viewing with friends on Facebook, Twitter and Gmail.
(Those three services were chosen as the first three supported sharing mechanisms for F1 because of their popularity and OAuth implementation.)
In an ideal world, if every web user was a Firefox F1 user, publishers wouldn't have to provide the usual slew of sharing buttons, and users wouldn't have to connect their social accounts and login credentials to scores of websites around the Internet.
Sharing would be more secure, simpler and (let's face it) a lot easier on the eyes than it is now.
As a Mozilla Labs project, F1 is still being expanded.
As Mozilla designer Bryan Clark wrote today on the company blog, "[Eventually], the system should know which sharing service you use, and offer to use those! That will require sharing services to advertise to the browser that they offer a sharing API and the browser to see which services you use.
"Furthermore, sharing is not a standardized activity, so some protocol is likely needed for user agents to offer users the service they want without having to know about all of them."
He also emphasized that publishers can also experiment with this feature; interested parties should check out the F1 wiki for details.
While we've seen similar cross-browser, all-in-one sharing frames and toolbars in the past, this offering from Mozilla is particularly well designed. In fact, we wish there was a cross-browser standard for social sharing; all these buttons have got to go at some point.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/11/11/mozilla.f1.mashable/index.html

Syndication

http://www.cnn.com/

http://www.cnet.com/

TECH ARTICLE

Microsoft is a dying consumer brand

Consumers have turned their backs on Microsoft. A company that once symbolized the future is now living in the past.

Microsoft has been late to the game in crucial modern technologies like mobile, search, media, gaming and tablets. It has even fallen behind in Web browsing, a market it once ruled with an iron fist.

Outgoing Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie called out Microsoft's lost ground in a blog post over the weekend.

"Our early and clear vision notwithstanding, competitors' execution has surpassed our own in mobile experiences, in the seamless fusion of hardware & software & services, and in social networking & myriad new forms of internet-centric social interaction," he said.

It's not like Microsoft didn't foresee the changes ahead. With a staff of almost 90,000, the company has many of the tech world's smartest minds on its payroll, and has incubated projects in a wide range of fields that later took off. Experiments like Courier (tablets), HailStorm/Passport (digital identity), and Windows Media Center (content in the cloud) show the company was ahead of the game in many areas -- but then it either failed to bring those products to market, or didn't execute.

Some influential analysts think not. Several have downgraded Microsoft's stock in recent weeks, as PC sales continue to slow and Microsoft struggles with its tablet strategy. The company's stock is down more than 17% this year.

What's wrong with Microsoft

A rundown of Microsoft's major consumer projects finds trouble in almost all of them.

Internet Explorer's popularity has been waning for years, and one recent study showed that for the first time in more than a decade, more people are using alternative browsers. The browser is becoming the single most critical piece of software on a device -- potentially eclipsing the operating system -- but all of the major innovations of the past few years, like tabbed browsing and add-on extensions, came from outside Microsoft.

Windows Phone 7 has promise, but Microsoft dug itself an enormous hole with the subpar Windows Mobile platform. With its market share currently sitting below 5%, developers are taking a "wait and see" approach.

Microsoft's media platform Zune was dead on arrival.
Bing is growing, but substantially all of that growth has come at the expense of its business partner, Yahoo -- not its archrival Google.
Microsoft's attempts to build a social network through Windows Live have failed to gain traction. It has no real answer to Facebook.

Six months after Apple's release of the iPad, Microsoft still has virtually no presence in the tablet market. And its strategy for taking on Apple -- Windows 7 on a tablet, rather than a tablet-specific operating system -- is leaving potential partners cold. Lenovo's technology director recently told PC Mag that his company won't be building around the platform: "The challenge with Windows 7 is that it's based on the same paradigm as 1985 -- it's really an interface that's optimized for a mouse and keyboard."

With Xbox, Microsoft succeeded at innovating: It created a competitive video game brand for hardcore gamers. But even Xbox was outdueled by Nintendo with the Wii, which outsold Xbox by appealing to casual gamers.
Then there's the epicenter of the Microsoft universe: Windows. Microsoft likes to point out that its operating system is its biggest consumer brand and Windows 7 has been selling rapidly. Its new version has sold 240 million licenses in a year, making it the fastest-selling OS in Microsoft's history.
But Windows' momentum isn't from consumers. In fact, consumers are a worry for the Windows division, because they have dramatically slowed their purchases of PCs in recent months.
Rather, the fast sales are coming from businesses, which significantly delayed their purchases of new Windows licenses because Windows Vista was bug-ridden mess. Then the recession hit. A years-overdue corporate PC refresh cycle is now happening all at once.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's executive suite is in turmoil. CFO Chris Liddel, entertainment unit head Robbie Bach, device design leader J Allard and business division chief Stephen Elop have left within the past year. Ray Ozzie joined the exit parade last week.

Consumers matter

As Apple has proven, success in consumer products can fuel explosive growth. Apple surpassed Microsoft's market value earlier this year, and is on pace to eclipse the company in sales for 2010.

And if Microsoft cedes consumer ground, it risks its enterprise stronghold. Businesses are becoming more willing to allow employees to use their personal devices for work purposes, and a growing number of those gizmos are Macs, iPads, iPhones and Android smartphones.

So it's up to Microsoft to turn that around by being a leader, rather than a follower, in the consumer market.
Windows Phone 7 is a good start. Internet Explorer 9 has some exciting new features that other browsers lack. And Xbox's controllerless Kinect -- the first of its kind -- is coming this holiday season.

Microsoft just has to hope it's not too late. 

My Weekend

This weekend i just hung out pretty much with my friend and went to rutherford. That's pretty much it.

tech article 10/15/10

Google is testing cars that drive themselves 

Google announced Sunday that it has developed cars that drive themselves automatically in traffic, and that it has been testing them on the streets of California for months. It might seem like an unusual project for Google, but it could actually have big benefits.We're not just talking about cars running Google Android. This is the stuff of science fiction. The only accident that has occurred so far: One of the cars was rear-ended by a driver at a stop light. Human error!The vehicles have been tested on 140,000 miles of California road, from Silicon Valley to Santa Monica.Each car is manned during the tests. One person sits in the driver's seat, ready to take control of the vehicle instantly by grabbing the wheel or touch the brake should something go wrong with the system. The person in the passenger's seat is an engineer who monitors the software operations on a computer.Google (Google) hired engineers who previously participated in competitions and races involving automated cars -- important turning points in the development of the technology, which has been coming into its own since around 2005 according to The New York Times.If your first concern is one of safety, Google would argue that you're going about it all wrong.Safety is one of the the project's purposes. Google believes that the technology could nearly half the number of automobile-related deaths because computers are supposedly better at driving than humans in the right circumstances.There are other hypothetical pluses, too. The vehicles' instant reaction time and 360-degree awareness would allow them to drive closer together on the highway than humans can, reducing traffic congestion. They could be more careful when operating the gas, reducing fuel consumption.But the biggest benefit for Google would be the hour or so of daily commute time the car owner would save. Instead of driving, he or she could either be productive or entertained in the vehicle, doing work on a wireless Internet (Internet) connection or watching television.Google doesn't say it explicitly, but TechCrunch was quick to notethat this time could be spent using Google products and absorbing Google-run advertising.The most optimistic projections put this technology at least eight years away from market, though. Legal hassles are among the myriad problems; all of the current traffic laws assume that a human driver is present in the vehicle.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/10/11/google.testing.cars.mashable/index.html

My Weekend

This weekend i hung out at the mall with my friend and went to borders the whole time. On sunday my friend drove me and my two friends around because my one friend got a new car. That was my weekend.

tech article 10/7/10

Firefox's direct pipeline to Google search results is Mozilla's dominant revenue source, but the next version of the open-source Web browser will also get Microsoft's Bing as an alternative.

Google will remain the default search option in Firefox, and Yahoo will be second, but Bing will become a third for English-language users when Firefox 4 is released, Mozilla announced Wednesday.

"Bing...offers a user experience that we think users will find valuable, and with its significant rise in popularity over the last year, we will also be including Bing as a general search option for English language users," said Jay Sullivan, Mozilla's vice president of products, in a blog post.

Microsoft has had a search engine for years, so why only add it now? "Until Bing launched last year, we didn't have many users asking us to include a Microsoft search engine in the search bar," Sullivan told CNET. "Since then, we've heard a lot of positive feedback about Bing, and based on our own analysis, we thought it offered a valuable user experience."

Those who delve into a dialog box already can add Bing and other search options to Firefox, so it's not as if Bing fans have been shut out. But the new option will build it in, a notable change given the fierce rivalry over the last decade between Microsoft and Mozilla when it comes to browsers.

The browser landscape is changing, though. After years of relatively sluggish change, Microsoft is back in the game with IE9, now in beta testing. The software includes support for many Web standards that Mozilla and others have been trying to establish for months or years, making IE now also something of an ally as well as a competitor.

Mozilla garnered $79 million in revenue in 2008, the lion's share from search ads on Google that appear next to search results. When Firefox is used to initiate the search, Google shares the resulting search revenue with Mozilla.

Mozilla's search partnership with Google is set to expire in 2011, but it won't necessarily end. The last search-ad partnership ended in 2008, but the two extended it. The announcement came just days before Google launched its Chrome browser.

Chrome is new competition for Firefox, to be sure, but don't expect Google to freeze out Mozilla just because it's got its own browser to promote now. For one thing, Mozilla remains a significant force in advancing Web standards Google believes in; Mozilla was the most prominent organization to endorse Google's open-source, royalty-free WebM video format, for example. For another, Google's bread and butter remains search advertising, and shutting down sources of search traffic isn't in Google's overall interests.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20018700-264.html?tag=cnetRiver

tech article 2

Twitter's number of monthly unique visitors finally surpassed that of MySpace in August. Though it ranked third among social networking sites, Twitter ranked #50 in the list of top 50 properties overall. The numbers were crunched by the marketing research firm comScore.

Twitter's lead over MySpace was marginal -- 96 million versus 95 million -- but the trend over time paints a prettier picture of the microblogging service. Between August 2009 and August 2010, Twitter grew 76 percent while MySpace dropped 17 percent.

It's apples and oranges, though. Twitter is now a social publishing and news discussion platform more than anything, and MySpace is attempting to position itself as a destination for young people to discover new music, movies and games. Both appeal to brands that want to reach new people, but they're very different tools for very different kinds of brands.

Both sites look quite small next to Facebook, which reached 598 million monthly uniques in the same month. It grew 54% over the past year. The second most popular social network, Windows Live, managed 140 million uniques, putting it closer to Twitter than to Facebook.

Twitter has been moving quickly to capitalize on this growth. First it announced a new version of the front page that will make it easier to access photos, videos and other information without using other websites or programs. Many of Twitter's users rarely visit the website at all; they instead use desktop software or third-party interfaces on other websites to access their tweets.

For that reason, Twitter's actual reach might be higher than the numbers from comScore imply. A revamped website could lead people to use Twitter.com instead of whatever they're using right now however, increasing the number of unique visitors the site receives now and in the future.

Twitter already cashed in on its numerous users with Promoted Tweets, and now it will reach out to businesses with the "Promoted Accounts" system, which allows companies to buy visibility among their target market's "Who to Follow" suggestions.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/09/28/twitter.myspace/index.html

My Weekend

This weekend was very eventful for me i guess. Friday i celebrated my dad's birthday and on saturday i went to my bestfriends dad's house to celebrate his birthday. That's pretty much all i did this weekend.

Tech Article 1

Panasonic's mascot robot Mr. Evolta is known for amazing stunts like climbing out of the Grand Canyon, but his latest feat will take him through the middle of Japan on a 300-mile march from Tokyo to Kyoto.
Mr. Evolta has appeared in various incarnations under the guiding hand of robot designer Tomotaka Takahashi. His current form is a small humanoid robot pulling an medieval-style daihachiguruma two-wheeled cart.
The 7-inch-tall, 2.2-pound humanoid walks in a rotating plastic cylinder like a hamster wheel, pulling his battery cart. He's remote-controlled and runs on 12 AA Evolta batteries, with a top speed of 2-3mph. He's expected to reach Kyoto on December 10, after 49 days on the road.
Mr. Evolta will be trekking along the legendary Tokaido high road, an ancient path linking Tokyo and Kyoto, the old capital. Traditionally traveled on foot, its once picturesque post stations as well as views of Mt. Fuji were celebrated for centuries by artists such as ukiyo-e master Utagawa Hiroshige.
In the Edo period (1600-1868), it would take travelers roughly 10 days to go from Edo (old Tokyo) to Kyoto, the seat of the emperor's court.
Long eclipsed by highways and railways, the Old Tokaido Road is still walkable today, especially near the hot springs resort of Hakone, though some sections of the original footpath are difficult to find. Mr. Evolta will have to use National Route 1 in some sections of the journey.
The footloose droid left Nihonbashi Bridge in Tokyo bound for Sanjo Ohashi bridge in Kyoto. Under the rules of the event, he will only travel during the daytime, try to get at least to the next post station by day's end, and only recharge his batteries once a day. He won't walk in the rain. His progress can be monitored via a Ustream page.
We have high hopes that Mr. Evolta will make it to Kyoto on schedule. His previous stunts, including an endurance course at Le Mans, have earned spots in Guinness World Records, and I wouldn't be surprised if he becomes the first humanoid to walk the old Tokaido too.

First Post

Senior at WRHS i go out alot.