Computers

Noted philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky wants nothing to do with Google Glass. Check out this video clip from "The Laura Flanders Show" in which he blasts the device and predicts it will bring on an Orwellian future. Join the conversation about this story »

Frugal shoppers know it's all about finding the best price. Traditionally, online retailers have provided the greatest discounts to consumers, thanks, in part, to having less overhead and avoiding sales taxes.

John McAfee Makes Crazy Video On Removing McAfee. Possibly #NSFW -

Intellectual Ventures, a large patent-licensing firm, has filed a second patent-infringement lawsuit against Motorola Mobility while its first patent lawsuit is still pending in a Delaware count.The patent-licensing firm filed its second lawsuit against Motorola in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, the company announced Wednesday. The second lawsuit alleges that Motorola, owned by Google, has infringed seven different patents than the six named in the Delaware lawsuit.Intellectual Ventures "has been unable to reach an agreement with Motorola" in the Delaware case, the company said in a statement.The company also filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against banking firm Capital One in Virginia, Intellectual Ventures aid.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel said Wednesday that is has joined the board of directors of the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP), a consortium developing technology for wirelessly charging electronic devices. However, Intel said last year that Ultrabooks capable of wireless charging would arrive in 2013—a promise the company has yet to make good on. Virtually all of the major chipmakers have now joined A4WP, a spokesman for the group said, including Broadcom, Qualcomm, and Samsung, among others. A4WP uses near-field magnetic resonance technology to charge a nearby device, like a cell phone, if both the power source and the target device support the technology. “Intel believes the A4WP specification, particularly the use of near-field magnetic resonance technology, can provide a compelling consumer experience and enable new usage models that make device charging almost automatic,” said Navin Shenoy, vice president, PC client group and general manager, mobile client platform division at Intel, in a statement. “In joining A4WP, we look forward to working alongside other member companies and contributing to standards that help fuel an ecosystem of innovative solutions capable of simultaneously charging a range of devices, from low-power accessories to smartphones, tablets, and Ultrabooks.” At its Intel Developer Forum last year, the company said that it would add wireless charging capabilities to its Ultrabook platform sometime this year. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Jeffrey Dean, the man who developed or co-developed some of Google’s biggest infrastructure innovations — such as MapReduce and BigTable — told attendees at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco that the best approach to infrastructure is to focus on one problem at a time. Google was forced to come up with its own software and hardware solutions, Dean said, because it was growing so quickly and had such huge data needs, and this helped it to focus on the important problems that needed to be solved right away and to come up with some innovative answers. MapReduce, for example, came about because the company needed software that would scale, that would be robust and that could also run “across as many machines as we wanted to throw at the problem,” he said, and that led to designing a system that would allow for scalable abstractions. In a similar way, the company’s BigTable database software came about because Google had a lot of datasets with a number of different attributes — such as its web-crawling index of URLs, combined with what language the page is in, its PageRank etc. — and needed a better way to manage them. A more recent example of designing something to fit a specific problem, Dean said, was the development of what Google calls Spanner, which is software that allows programmers to replicate data across all of the company’s data centers — and to specify where exactly they want copies of that data to be stored, so that they can work on it more effectively. “So we have one global namespace for data and you can specify how you would like that replicated at a fairly high level,” he said. “You could say you want two copies in Europe and one in North America, and so on.” Dean added that with any infrastructure problem, “there’s always this tension… you could try to solve all problems for all people, but that usually ends up not being good for anyone.” So the best approach, he said, is to focus on one problem and work closely with the team that has the most need for what you are building. Newer companies also have the luxury of being able to use Amazon’s AWS and other cloud services to scale, he said, instead of having to create those physical resources themselves. As for problems he is working on right now, Dean said he has been focusing on building machine-learning systems that are “biologically inspired,” in the sense that they are built layer by layer — so an image-recognition system has been built with layers that do simple things like recognize an edge or a corner, and eventually progressed to higher-level abstractions. Dean says the system can now recognize images that contain cats without ever having been taught what a cat is. Check out the rest of our Structure 2013 live coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below: Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprisesQuality of the cloud: best practices for ISVsDissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future

For teachers, it can be tough to tell when students are actually absorbing new information. They’re often so focused on the materials and on trying to keep the class alert that they can easily miss body language that suggests that a student is completely lost. Researchers at la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid have developed the Augmented Lecture Feedback System (ALFs), a HUD glasses interface that teachers can wear while giving a lecture. From the display, teachers can see little icons that appear above each student’s head, indicating their comprehension of the given lesson as well as an overall chart indicating how many students are “getting it” compared to the rest of the class. The symbols the system supports also include a request for the lecturer to slow down, and a notification that a student knows the answer to a question posed in class. Students are able to show their status by connecting their smartphones to a server where the system is installed, and select the symbols accordingly. The prototype was developed with a hacked Kinect, which utilizes recognition to place markers above the students head, and a heavier AR display connected directly to the computer system that runs software. “It is hoped that in the next few years new models will come onto the market and these will be suitable for use in class, as might be the case with the new Google glasses, which could be adapted to this system,” UC3M researcher Ignacio Aedo said in a university article on the project. For now, this is just a lab project — a proof-of-concept device, though the researchers have tried them in some university classes. But the project could point to an interesting use case for Google Glass — one that provides in-class help to students without disrupting the traditional lecture system or punishing those without a display. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Analyzing the wearable computing marketGigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

The MSI GE40 packs very powerful specs and long battery life into a lightweight 14-inch laptop, but it runs hot when gaming.

When Microsoft quietly released its own editor for Office documents on the iPhone last week, it left something out: a version for the iPad. If the iPhone screen is too small for you to consider viewing and editing important documents, no worries, you still have ways to do so on the larger screen of the iPad. Here are the currently available options that will allow you to view and edit your Office documents on Apple’s tablet. Mobile Office for iPhone, scaled up While it is true that the existing Office app does not have a custom user interface for the iPad, the iPhone version of Microsoft’s Mobile App can be installed and run on the iPad with 2x video scaling. This may seem a little awkward at first, but you can gain access to all of the features offered on the iPhone version of the app. While the Word document editor does not scale well by pinching and zooming using the iPad’s 2x video scaling, the Excel and PowerPoint editors do a much better job. You can zoom in an out of both Excel and PowerPoint documents to gain a better view of the document on the iPad. If you are an Office 365 subscriber, the main advantage in using this versus the web versions of Office apps is that you can store and access your files for offline editing. Unfortunately the features available in the native iPhone app are a bit lacking when compared to their Web App versions. Office Web Apps for mobile browsers Microsoft’s free Office Web Apps work just fine within Safari on the iPad. Better, in fact, since they have many features the official iPhone app lacks. For instance, the editor for Word in the web version has more features than the iOS native version.  Features like being able to change the font, adjust the document’s margins, insert tables, and even change the selected text’s style. The major problem using Microsoft’s web apps for Office is that you cannot access the apps, or any of the files for that matter, without an internet connection.  So you either have a more fully featured web app that requires internet access, or a lightweight native iPhone app that can work with your documents offline. A minor annoyance is that when you run Office on the web from within Safari, you still have Safari’s toolbar as well as its tab bar present at the top of the screen. This is true even when adding a shortcut link to any one of Microsoft’s web apps on the home screen. Someone needs to inform Microsoft how to set the Apple-specific meta tag keys to enable full-screen mode in online Office. Until then, there are browser alternatives like Atomic ($1.99 Universal),  Mercury ($0.99, Universal) and Dolphin (Free, iPad) that will allow you to enter into full- screen browsing mode with a single tap. It works very much like the iPhone version of Safari that does support full-screen browsing, in landscape mode only. SkyDrive app for sharing links Microsoft only supports SkyDrive as a storage option for iOS users that access either the mobile or web app versions of Office. If you are using SkyDrive as your document repository, the dedicated SkyDrive (free, Universal) app for iOS supports viewing Office documents. You can even download the documents for viewing when you are not connected to the internet. The one unique thing you can do from within the SkyDrive app is create links for sharing SkyDrive documents with others. Sharing links to documents can be a more effective means of sending documents as the URL can be passed along via private Twitter message, a Facebook message, or even an SMS text message.  The Office Mobile for iPhone app can only email the document as an attachment. If you are only interested in viewing your Office documents on your iPad, there are alternatives that support more than just one SkyDrive account. GoodReader ($4.99, iPad) will allow you to connect to multiple SkyDrive accounts as well as Dropbox, SugarSync, Google Drive, Box, and any other WebDAV, AFP, SMB, FTP or SFTP server.

In December, the SMS turned 20 years old. Over those two decades, texting became the dominate form of messaging, until now. CTIA, the wireless association, recently announced that Americans sent 5 per...