Tag Archives: Google
SD#44 Imperial RIM Destroyers
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Especially the ones made in Kentucky. American electronics made in Korea are OK.
We have a guest panelist on this week’s episode! RIM proves its corporate culture has killed all hope, Hollywood doesn’t want to know how to fix things, and we’re all fascists!
Rupert Murdoch is a Relic Who Needs to Shut Up
UPDATE: I have been corrected by another writer, Dave Simmer II; the White House did in fact give an official response to SOPA legistlation . . . they don’t like it. I have updated the post to reflect that. Cause as a blogger and podcaster, I have no problem correcting myself when it turns out I was mistaken. You know, unlike . . . others.
In case you didn’t know, there is a real life Montgomery Burns. He doesn’t own and operate a nuclear power station, however. Instead he runs Newscorp and is the 38th most wealthy person in the United States. He is Rupert Murdoch.
- He founded Fox News with the sole purpose of swaying the American public.
- His company hacked the voicemail of a murdered girl, thereby throwing investigators off (making them believe she was still alive and deleting her voicemails).
- He is a dinosaur.
In today’s world of “faster than you can comprehend” information, Murdoch is a throwback to the older days of yore. Days when a single newspaper magnate could sway the opinion of an entire nation. And he’s dangerous.
SD#42 Inverted Mute Buttons
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Image Courtesy of Penny Arcade
We cover CES for you, Zuke tries (and fails) to forget his Kinect experience, and Schmidty can’t figure out his mute button at all.
SD#40 Zohner Control Your Puppies
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It’s the 2012 prediction show! We predict 2012 will happen. There, that was easy!
Superman’s New Enemy
This has been making the rounds on the internet today. What kind of bloggers would we be if we didn’t jump on the Superman vs. Google+ bandwagon?
Google I/O 2011 – Day 2
The second day of Google’s I/O developer conference seemed to lack in content compared to the first day. It seems as though the first day was geared more towards the direct consumer where the second day was more Developer-centric. However, there were still some items of note that I’d like to mention in this summary.
Google Chrome
Opening up the Keynote was a demonstration of Google Chrome and its upcoming improvements. There is a definite performance boost with more HTML5 and WebGL support. This was demonstrated by running the Fish IE Test on a non-WebGL version of Chrome vs. a WebGL-laden Chrome. This test was created to show off the speed of IE9, and was used yesterday to show off the speed of WebGL with Google Chrome. We see an immediate performance improvement when 1000 fish are rendered at 25 fps. WebGL also opens up the possibility for 3D rendering; we may start to see more graphically-intensive games in Chrome.
Chrome OS
We can’t talk about Google Chrome without also talking about Chrome OS. There are major improvements to the browser’s OS brother and it is starting to look and function more like a real Operating System according to what we are used to. There is now a File Manager so you can browse the local file system, as well as USB flash drives and external hard drives. However, there was no mention on whether or not you could browse network drives.
Native Music and Video playing was added and media will play in a separate window as you continue to browse. This is separate from Google’s Music cloud player that was demonstrated the previous day, and it wasn’t clear if the native music player supported the Google Music Beta or not.
Chrome OS also supports famous web streaming apps out of the box: Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, etc.
Chromebooks
Google Chromebooks were announced to be released June 15th. Currently, there are two manufacturers that have models being released on that day. Both Samsung and Acer will be offering Wifi only and Wifi + 3G models, with Verizon stepping in as the 3G provider. Both manufacturers are powering their Chromebooks with Intel’s Atom Pine Trail platform with a dual-core N570 processor. They both come with a 16GB SSD mSata hard drive and they both weigh 3.26 Lbs. They both come with an HD webcam: Samsung’s is 1MP, Acer’s is 1.3MP. Samsung is touting a 12.1″ WXGA display with a resolution of 1280×800 and Acer’s has an 11.6″ WXGA screen with 1366×768 resolution. Both models will boot in about 8 seconds and have a battery life of about 6 to 8 hours.
With what they are offering, and with the improvements to the Chrome OS, these Chromebooks appear to be powerhouses for cloud computing. It may be a while before we see this hardware being bogged down.
Chromebooks for Business and Education
Google is offering a subscription model for Businesses and Schools. With a 36-month commitment, businesses can purchase Chromebooks at $28 per month per user, whereas schools can purchase them for only $20 per month per user. This subscription includes full warranty support and free hardware upgrades. Since this if offered by Google and not the Manufacturers, I believe that this subscription model will apply to all future Chromebooks that are released.
Angry Birds
We can’t forget the most important announcement of them all. Angry Birds was released for Chrome and is now available in the Chrome Web Store. It includes a special Chrome level, so if you use Chrome, and you are an angry bird, then you MUST check it out.
Conclusion
The Google I/O conference definitely left me feeling overwhelmed. There is so much to take in, and I probably missed a chrome-load of announcements; I’ll try to make up for that with upcoming posts.
Here are a few other items that were talked about during day 2. Let me know if you’d like to know more about any of them:
- New Google Tasks API
- In-App Payments for Chrome Web Store
- Java Port of ROS
- Google Chrome Box
Google I/O 2011 – Day 1
Wow. Yesterday was quite the day for Google. I’d like to quickly summarize everything that was announced yesterday, but there was so much, I might miss something. So let’s get started and hope I get it all:
Google Music Beta
Google’s music cloud service was not only announced, but released yesterday (go here to request your invite). Those of you who listen to our podcast know that I was excited when Amazon announced their MP3 Cloud Player, so it is no surprise that this really has me going. However, unlike Amazon’s service, Google does not offer a way to purchase music (… yet).
Initially, this beta is only available for invitation, of which I have not yet received, so I am forced to sit by the wayside and read reviews until I’m blue. Once I get the invitation, I will be able to write a full review. The idea is that you upload your entire music collection (up to 20,000 tracks) and never have to worry about managing your music physically again. It comes complete with a web interface for playing music and creating playlists, which eerily resembles a famous competitor’s interface, plus there is a music player available for download on the Android Marketplace for mobile devices.
On the downside, from some reviews that I have read, the upload time is really slow; about 50 tracks per hour, which works out to about 4 MB per minute; to upload 20,000 tracks would take you more than half a month. Also, once you upload your music, you have no way to download them again. So if you lose your local copies, and Google’s servers get wiped out, you’re out of luck.
On the bright side, 20,000 songs is roughly 60 GB to 100 GB of storage, which greatly trumps Amazon’s initial offering of 5GB free.
More on Google Music later. Moving on…
Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0?)
Up until now it appears that Google has split it’s Android OSs between mobile phone devices and tablet devices. According to the key-note yesterday, Ice Cream Sandwich will resolve that apparent issue. This version of the OS will target both handheld and tablet devices and eventually also be supported on netbook and laptop devices.
Ice Cream Sandwich will include Honeycomb-like features, zippier multitasking, a new launcher, and more inherent features for home screen widgets.
There’s really not much more to say about Ice Cream Sandwich except for… HURRY UP!
Android Open Accessories
This was another exciting announcement. The Android Open Accessories API will add support for USB to Android devices. This API will be included in the Honecomb 3.1 update, as well as the Gingerbread 2.3.4 update. This will allow many types of external devices to directly interact with the OS, including but not limited to audio devices, input devices, storage devices and communication devices.
Along with this, we get…
Open Accessories ADK
The new development kit for Open Accessories will allow developers more control of their software’s interaction with hardware. Google teamed up with the Arduino open source hardware interface which also opens up the avenue for more custom hardware to be built for android. This kit is currently only offering USB support, but will soon support Bluetooth protocols.
Android 3.1
The Honeycomb update was also released yesterday for Motorola Xoom customers and comes with a few hefty upgrades. The biggest hitter in this upgrade is the inclusion of the new Android Open Accessories API. Other upgrades include native resizing of homescreen widgets and support for the Google TV upgrade coming later this year (see below for info on this).
Google TV to Android
It was announced yesterday that Google TV will become a fully supported Android device. Currently, it is based on the Android platform, but does not have access to the Android Market, and does not support most Android apps. This summer, current Google TV devices will receive an OTA update for Honeycomb 3.1 and will include access to the Android Market. We will also see new Google TV devices from Logitech, Samsung, Sony and Vizio.
YouTube Movies
Last, but not least, the ability to rent movies on YouTube was released yesterday. They opened with 3,000 movie titles and will continue to add more each week. Rental prices range from free to $4.99, with most new releases priced at $2.99. Google has signed license deals with Warner Brothers, Sony Pictures, Universal and Lionsgate. You can even ‘pin’ a rented movie for offline viewing later on. Android device viewing will be available shortly and will come to tablets first.
Conclusion
The first day of Google I/O was indeed a whirlwind of information. Here is a quick mention of all the other items that were covered during the 1st day:
- Preview of Google +1 button for publishers
- Google App Engine 1.5
- Google Books API
- Android @Home
- Project Tungston
- Style maps and more customization for Fusion Tables
- Google Storage for Developers
- Google Plugin for Eclipse 2.4
- ChromeVox screen reader for Chrome and Chrome OS
- New charts and features in Google Chart Tools
- Improved Google Prediction API
- Announcement of upcoming P2P NFC protocol
- Google Places API
- Improvement to Google Web Fonts
Let me know if you’d like me to write more information on any of these topics.
SD#2 The Zohner Show
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We have apologies to the wife, Zuke goes SQUEE, Zohner takes over, and we really REALLY like Green Lantern. Special thanks to everyone who gave feedback last time (be it on Twitter, Facebook, email, or the comments); we tried to follow a lot of what you suggested. Let us know how we’re doing by the comments below, the feeds to the right, or [email protected]
Hosts:
Zuke, Schmidty, Stark, Zohner
Topics:
April Fools – Gmail Motion, Toshiba Spectacle, 1996 Hulu, 35mm digital film, Nathan Fillion cancels Castle.
PSA – You may be getting a lot of emails that are trying to steal from you!
Sony’s Playstation Home Network becomes all Italian.
Miscrosoft makes pigs fly. Then the FTC joins in on the fun!
The death of the cloud begins; Grooveshark pulled from Android Market.
Green Lantern is so awesome it makes Zuke squee.
Gary Oldman really sucks at being subtle or coy.
Can DC be Captain America, or will they just be Wolverine?
Netflix is now buying first run syndication rights to TV series.
Tesla sues over review from Top Gear, apparently didn’t realize they were on Top Gear.
SpaceX announces the Falcon Heavy rocket. Not as cool as the USS Red Greene.
Halo Mutiplayer Voice is not who you’d think. And you can get more of his soundclips!
If you’re a big fan of Lady Gaga AND Vulcans . . . good for you, I guess?
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Google’s Doing Social Again, Google +1 Review
Google +1 Icon
Those of us who have tried Google Buzz may cringe when we hear that Google is still trying to make this Social thing work. There may be many reasons for that, but one observation was that it wasn’t user-friendly. They just plopped it into our gMail accounts whether or not we wanted it, and made it difficult to disable. And even when you disabled it, somehow you still had a Buzz stream available for others to see.
It appears that they have learned somewhat from their mistakes. Their newest social product may be a bit more friendly. Google +1 was officially announced via Google’s Blog on March 30th, 2011. It is slowly being rolled out to the public, but if you are anxious to try it out before it is rolled out to you, you still have the option to enable it as an experimental feature. Even when it is rolled out, it seems that you need an active Google Profile in order to use it. Google Profiles isn’t new, but they have been slowly shape-shifting it over the past few months, and now it very closely resembles a Facebook profile page, minus the Wall, and minus the notifications of wandering cows.
The Circle Is Complete
I normally don’t post on a Saturday (SMV’s are scheduled in advance), but I saw this over at Joy of Tech and thought it’d be fun to share!
Courtesy of Joy of Tech
