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Or maybe she just want to make sure employees have good mobile devices since they're, you know, the future.* Maybe she recognizes how horribly Flickr missed their opportunity on mobile and doesn't want that to happen again.

* and the present.

And do you really want to be flying in a fighter plane when the nose just falls off because of those cut corners? Reminds me of this building.

Does anyone know what these better batteries are called?
Sounds pretty damn interesting to me.

Here's a link... but no name that's easy to Google for:
http://gizmodo.com/5889295/new-electric-car-battery-could-double-capacity-and-halve-cost

All I have is "Envia". Is this the one?
http://enviasystems.com/

If you're like me you're probably rapidly Googling to see whether we can shoe-horn this from a car battery into a phone battery ASAP

"2.1 The Envia Systems cells are prototype lithium pouch rechargeable cells. The cells have a capacity of 46 Ah and an energy density of 400Wh/Kg. The cell's dimensions are approximately 97 mm wide, 190 mm long and 10 mm thick. The cell's approximate weight is 365 grams. Cell serial numbers are 400WhK-07-005-111205 (designated as 005) and 400WhK-07-006-111205 (designated as 006).

5. Conclusions

5.1 One of the highest energy cells used in consumer applications is the NCR18650A manufactured by Panasonic, which can be used as a comparative asset to the Envia cells. The NCR18650A cell specification claims 3100 mAh capacity, 3.6 V average and weighs 45.5 grams. The calculated energy density of this comparative cell would be approximately 245 Wh/Kg.

5.2 The test results from the prototype cells tested at Crane were in line with the results obtained from the manufacturer. The claims of 400 Wh/Kg were substantiated through the cycling tests performed at Crane. This is a 160% energy density increase over the industry standard indicated in paragraph 5.1. "

these "floatable" hard drives for (covered previously on slashdot) skateboards will now be able to "catch some rad air"? :)

But but, Steve Jesus Jobs said "3.5 inch was the MOST PERFECT EVAAAR phone size"... and all you fanbois were falling over each other bashing Samsung and Android for large screen size. whatever happened to that????

First, Steve is no longer here to save us from ourselves.

Second, what is most interesting to me is how little it changed (still the same width).

Third, given the resulting aspect ratio this tweak seems to have been done for the benefit of media playback.

Fourth, all the apps still work and the black bars (which I am not thrilled about, I was hoping for a multitasking interface that was always up except when playing 16:9 content) are just like the ones I see on my HDTV.

The result is that I am much more comfortable with the resulting "new screen size" than I expected. However I still think it will be slightly less usable, just look at these arcs.

What girl wouldn't get excited by an iPhone with the appropriate apps http://gizmodo.com/5295987/myvibe-thighs+on-first-iphone-vibrator-app-approved-by-apple-nsfw ?

they may be aweful, but the hosted email has been damn decent for the 4+ years I've been with them. I've always sort of snickered at the shit anonymous did, but now their vendetta against a big company fucks us little guys too.

Please don't misconstrue this as support for Anonymous' actions. You seem to forget that SOPA would fuck the little guys, too. Perhaps you've forgotten who supported that legislation, and why Wikipedia and many others (including myself, a customer for over 10 years) have left GoDaddy.

Actually, they retracted that...

http://gizmodo.com/5941653/amazon-decides-to-let-users-opt+out-of-ads-on-the-kindle-fires-after-all

For a $15 fee.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/247321.php
http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/tools-toys/this-is-your-brain-on-fmri

http://gizmodo.com/5922208/scientists-invent-mind+reading-system-that-lets-you-type-with-your-brain

http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/high-tech-mind-readers-are-latest-effort-detect-lies

http://www.hlntv.com/article/2012/04/06/mobile-brain-scanner-ibrain-stephen-hawking

Do more research. It's already here even if you don't know about it.

The new connector itself is pure rumor.

Assuming this video is authentic, a side by side comparison does hint at a new, much smaller connector.

Yeah. And even more fun are case makers who are mass-producing cases based on rumors and mockups, and the shameless iPhone5-like Android clone that got unveiled recently. I'll be laughing out loud if Apple unveils a tear-drop design on the 12th, or if the clone joint sues apple over "their" design.

"Good artists copy, great artists steal" - Steve Jobs, 1994

This is a misattributed quote. It should more correctly be attributed to either Pablo Picasso (an overrated artist) or Igor Stravinsky (an excellent composer).

Both of you are correct, pretty much. Pablo Picasso said "Good artists borrow, great artists steal" in 1934. And here is a link of Steve Jobs saying "Good artists copy, great artists steal" in 1996.

Funny how the profit motive so strongly affects the moral belief system.

Every component in Apple products should have a "Mad props to [x] for the most basic, simple underlying product that enables your device to be the AWESOME APPLE IT IS!"

You know, I wonder who should sue them for making a handheld electronic computing device made from plastic.....
 
Oh, wait, their plastic is white. Never mind..
 
</snark>

"Good artists copy, great artists steal" - Steve Jobs, 1994

This is a misattributed quote. It should more correctly be attributed to either Pablo Picasso (an overrated artist) or Igor Stravinsky (an excellent composer).

Both of you are correct, pretty much. Pablo Picasso said "Good artists borrow, great artists steal" in 1934. And here is a link of Steve Jobs saying "Good artists copy, great artists steal" in 1996.

Funny how the profit motive so strongly affects the moral belief system.

Those 68 percent aren't Google's customers, they just happen to be running open-source software that Google wrote. It's not like Google can force any demands over them. Android isn't even where Google make their mobile money.

I must strongly disagree. In my analysis, strong AI doesn't exist outside of science fiction novellas, and thus furthermore and therefore is a ridiculous accusation to make.

Your analysis is based on faulty conclusions not supported by neurology, and fails to take into consideration the ridiculousness of our own chauvinism when it comes to matters of sentience. The bar to pass beyond which a neural network is classified as sentient is merely an arbitrary distinction, possible only because we lack descent communication capacity with the lesser minds. Every such entity has a measure of awareness, and cognition. My cat does not operate merely on conditioned response, it senses decides and acts: I sense hunger. The food is inside, so I decide to be near it. I will meow loudly until my human servant opens the door, as I've trained it to do. We have achieved a neural network of such complexity, but we just haven't given it enough time to learn and think.

I urge you my dear and wonderful readers, to ignore the implausible and outlandish statements made by the anonymous coward in the parent comment. Every nuance of his or her preposterous claims only further their own inherent absurdity.

The above sentence is proof positive that the government's AI research is much further along than IBM's. Also, since much of the organic brain is not dedicated to cognition, instead it's dedicated to unrelated things like breathing or feelings, or pleasure, short vs long term storage, and redundancy, an artificial brain can become sentient using only a fraction of the neurons a human has -- In fact, I know of one case where a sentient human could exist with only HALF a brain!

Also note that the entire political arena operates primarily by AI. That's why politicians talk so much without saying anything: They're only Artificially Intelligent.

"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." ~ Steve Jobs 1996* Prior art wat? * http://gizmodo.com/5483914/steve-jobs-1996-good-artists-copy-great-artists-steal

At least the OP is schooled in math. Are you claiming that Samsung has only been selling smartphones and tablets for 3 months? Fact is, they've been selling Android smartphones since 2010, and only 2 years (8 quarters) of sales would constitute 160 million devices, using the low end of his claimed numbers. That's well below $10 per device.

Now, I don't know where he got those number, maybe they're worldwide and should be adjusted for just US sales, or adjusted just to the specific devices at issue, or adjusted for ramping sales, etc. But you said nothing to refute the numbers he gave.

$10 per device might be a reasonable for licensing an OS, or a large block of necessary patents. But that's not the case here. The two utility patents were for "pinch to zoom" and "bounce back" windows, neither of which is essential to core functionality. Additionally, it appears that the jury simply skipped over considering prior art, and that perhaps the patents should have been invalidated.

For example, the '915 patent covered "pinch to zoom," for which prior art was clearly demonstrated.

Without going and looking stuff up, can you, personally, name one innovation Samsung has brought to the table in the phone industry in the last 5 years?

Well the most obvious one is AMOLED. Perfect blacks and infinite contrast ratio which will spoil you and make it difficult to ever go back to an LCD (especially in applications where you have to wear polarized sunglasses).

Many phones use Samsung CPUs, most use Samsung memory (both RAM and flash). Lots of innovation improving the performance of those. I've heard they're also heavily involved in the wireless communications technologies, though I haven't looked into that myself. Supposedly that's where the FRAND patents they sued Apple for relate to.

If you extend it beyond phones, AFAIK Samsung was the first company with a handheld device with an all-glass front and touch-sensitive controls. A prototype of that was leaked in 2005 btw.

They also came out with the flat display, rounded corners, silver bezel look before Apple. I'm surprised they aren't applying Apple's threshold for suing and crying foul that Apple basically ripped off the front of their digital picture frame's design to make the iPad.

Interestingly, your picking up on Ronald being a potentially unreliable source mirrors another Gizmodo article from a year back regarding Apple retail stores. They posted a contest asking for "Genius Bar Horror Stories", and accepted them via comment or e-mail, but apparently didn't bother to fact check any of them before publishing them. Besides the fact that the entire premise of the contest sets them up for accepting fictitious stories written by users wanting to get a chuckle or free pizza, someone else did a teardown analysis of each story, considering the various factors in determining just how likely the story actually was.

Long story short, they have a history of not bothering to check sources, particularly when they are self-serving.

Interestingly, your picking up on Ronald being a potentially unreliable source mirrors another Gizmodo article from a year back regarding Apple retail stores. They posted a contest asking for "Genius Bar Horror Stories", and accepted them via comment or e-mail, but apparently didn't bother to fact check any of them before publishing them. Besides the fact that the entire premise of the contest sets them up for accepting fictitious stories written by users wanting to get a chuckle or free pizza, someone else did a teardown analysis of each story, considering the various factors in determining just how likely the story actually was.

Long story short, they have a history of not bothering to check sources, particularly when they are self-serving.

Simply out of my own curiosity, can you clarify this for me? You were that upset by a harmless although juvenile stunt of turning off televisions you put a tech blog on your s-list? Don't misread my question. I am not advocating their behavior, or any actions as they relate to CES or unlawful possession of an iPhone.

Reference:
http://gizmodo.com/343348/confessions-the-meanest-thing-gizmodo-did-at-ces

My understanding is there is in fact full encryption of the contents of the iPhone, i.e. you can't access the data without knowing the key.

Not according to Tim Cook.

I seriously doubt that the anonymous you were answering too is Tim Cook.

Um, some of those "Professionals" work for Apple. Do you really think they don't know what "Pros" need?

The point is not that they do not know, but that they do not care.

Not according to Tim Cook.

Eventually the patents will expire and it will no longer be a problem; we just have to (not) make the mistake of not choosing an encumbered standard NEXT TIME once h.264 is obsolete.

Yeah, that would be a shame.

I guess you've never been to the UAE or Abu Dhabi.

Well... firstly, they live in a waste land. You can't grow crops there, the soil is no good. Currently all their food is imported from overseas. If there's ever an energy crisis due to peak oil, big populations in these countries will quickly become unsustainable.

Secondly, these projects are all 4 years out of date property boom hype, like this...

http://gizmodo.com/5065406/the-plans-for-the-155+mile+high-skyscraper-in-you-guessed-it-dubai ...the eco city is just yet another pie in the sky property development, all of which after some research you'll find are probably already canned. The only one of these super projects ever to see the light of day is a massive flop...

http://www.arabianbusiness.com/occupancy-levels-rise-as-burj-khalifa-celebrates-first-birthday-371164.html

So... you google and facebook future employees as part of the hiring process, and inadvertently learn their age / sex / race / orientation / marital status / religion basically all the stuff you can be sued for. You can lose quite a bit of money if you make an employment decision based on a candidates religion, for example.

There exists third party services that do the Googling and Facebook checks for you, and you get back a report containing only the information that's public, and even the photos are blacked out so race/age/sex information are hidden, giving you a completely "clean" report.

Mat Honan details one such report he obtained on himself. As an employer, if you're doing these things, offloading it to a third party is probably the best way to do it as the third party filters out the things you can't ask for as well as irrelevant things, and you have a physical report to which you can defend yourself.

It works. It really works.

And why? Because it now also searches Google. No mention of Google Voice Search.

Now, who's making stuff up? Siri doesn't use Google results according to this SEO.

The second article is basically just the video from the first.

My bad. I lost the original article I wanted to link to. That article contained about a dozen questions where Woz compared the iPhone Siri against Google Voice Search.

Here is a completely different article with the same kind of test. This one is not performed by Woz but Gizmodo, but it's actually much more comprehensive with 1600 questions! Enjoy.

1600-Question Test Shows How Bad Siri Really Is
Jesus Diaz

Pitting Google search against Siri using a monster 1600-question test shows how useful Siri really is: not at all. Google answered correctly 86 percent of the time. Siri achieved just 68 percent accuracy. At that point, it's not much better than a crystal ball.

We knew that Siri isn't very good. But this intense test shows just how ridiculous the gimmicky voice assistant could be.
The fact is that even Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has been saying this since the day Apple introduced the iPhone 4S with Siri. It just sucks. Siri as an independent product, before Apple acquired it, the Woz told us at the Gizmodo Gallery:

It was really accurate, but now it's full of marketing-driven answers that are not correct.

How bad is it now? Here are some good examples from the test, which was conducted by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, a character who is well-known for his pro-Apple view of the tech world:

When did the movie Cinderella come out? Responded with a movie theater search on Yelp.

What spices are in Lasagna? Responded with a Yelp search with lasagna on the menu.

I want to go to Lake Superior? Responded with directions to the company Lake Superior X-Ray.

Clearly, Woz is right: Apple's version of Siri is tainted because it's marketing driven, giving preference to commercial sites like Yelp or companies over actual, useful results.

Of course, you can argue that Siri is labeled as beta by Apple. But, to Woz's point, how did it end up being worse than it was as a standalone app available at the App Store? The one Apple bought when Steve Jobs was still running the company?

Which brings me back to a earlier point. Jobs' authorized biography says that he was at diminished capacity when Siri was being tested, too weak to come into the office. He only tried the current form of Siri at his last board meeting. He briefly played with it and, understandably given the moment, didn't show much interest. That was it. It's hard to believe that he would have let software with 68% accuracy to ever be installed in a shipping product.

A new version of Siri is coming in the new iOS 6. It looks a lot more useful, but I just hope that Apple ditches the commercialism in favor of giving the answers you actually need. [Fortune]

Spectrum is not the issue, it's cell density. When you have 3 cells in a triangle, and you put another cell in the center of the triangle, you reduce traffic per cell by 1/3, and they serve a smaller radius.

Their argument that "no one wants ugly cell towers because of NIMBY" is specious, since they can be placed on the top of any building inside a weather dome, and even if they're not in a dome, they don't have to be ugly:

http://gizmodo.com/304357/ericssons-tower-tube-give-cell-towers-a-touch-of-scandanavian-design

So, I just get done reading this, and come across this story on Gizmodo about a successful social engineering attack on Apple Tech Support that killed things he had in the cloud, in less than 5 minutes for journalist Mat Honan.

Seriously?

After calling out Tim Cook personally, getting Gawker Media involved, Gizmodo also carrying the story written by a different editor, Cnet carrying the story, and Mat posting under his own name, you are still going with the denial angle?

The Nexus 7 looks cool, but what I really wanted was the canceled Microsoft Courier. A dual screen paperback book form-factor with hand-writing recognition. Something I could easily hold in one hand and take notes with, or browse the web with, or compose emails with. If Microsoft had made the Courier, it would own the enterprise tablet market, and possibly the college kid market.

You can't cancel something that never really was...

The Nexus 7 looks cool, but what I really wanted was the canceled Microsoft Courier. A dual screen paperback book form-factor with hand-writing recognition. Something I could easily hold in one hand and take notes with, or browse the web with, or compose emails with. If Microsoft had made the Courier, it would own the enterprise tablet market, and possibly the college kid market.

I just went and googled up some of the stories about the Courier and its cancellation. One reason Gates was unimpressed was that apparently the Courier team chose to punt on implementing things like email, believing Courier users would already have other devices (like smartphones) to use for email.

Also, I'm not convinced Courier was as real as the marketing material which circulated might have led you to believe.

Except they are not government-regulated, it is just prohibitively expensive for a competitor to run cable on the power company (a gov't regulated monopoly) poles. Which is why the Internet is so disruptive to these entrenched businesses.

http://gizmodo.com/5830956/why-the-government-wont-protect-you-from-getting-screwed-by-your-cable-company Apparently there used to be exclusivity but that was repealed. Probably in the guise of "de-regulation" that everyone is so fond of.

The Nexus 7 looks cool, but what I really wanted was the canceled Microsoft Courier. A dual screen paperback book form-factor with hand-writing recognition. Something I could easily hold in one hand and take notes with, or browse the web with, or compose emails with. If Microsoft had made the Courier, it would own the enterprise tablet market, and possibly the college kid market.

After a bit of Google I found this to illustrate my point

If you're into the funny/weird/strange check out the designs the OSS (CIA world war 2 forerunner) came up with. The cigarette "gun" from jame bond is real, they made it.

Here's a starting point: http://gizmodo.com/392406/resistance-isnt-futile-explosive-edible-flour-cigarette-guns-and-other-wwii-oss-tricks

I found what I originally saw last week http://gizmodo.com/5553765/are-cameras-the-new-guns Apparently the ruling was in 2001 and covered a conviction of Michael Hyde. Guess since then they actually figured out the correct ruling.

Apple blacklisted Gizmodo after they bought a stolen iPhone prototype a few years ago and refused to give it back before doing a full disassemble and report on every little detail. Since then, they've been left as the only major blog or news outlet that can't do firsthand reporting on the keynotes and product announcements, which has left them a little bitter. Small wonder that Gizmodo (Jesus Diaz in particular, of recent) has been saying all sorts of nonsense about Apple ever since.

Even if we ignore the chip on their shoulder, their reporting is shoddy and slimy, with them sometimes substantially altering their articles after they're posted. For instance, Briam Lam's account of returning the iPhone makes it sound like they got a letter from Apple's legal team and they sent it right back. What you don't see in that version of his account is that Brian received a personal phone call from Steve Jobs, asking for it. Brian responded with an e-mail in which he refused to return it until Apple went on record, then altered the online version of the e-mail he sent to Apple's legal department, since the original version made him look like an ass. The original reporting also contained a rosy accounting of a lot of those facts, but even that was later edited out in an effort to sweep it under the table as the original text of his correspondences leaked from other sources.

And that's far from being the only incident, though it is the most famous. RoosterTeeth lampooned Gizmodo and their "reporting" a few years back. They're a bunch of classless jackasses who treat facts as malleable ideas for their own benefit and cannot be trusted.

http://gizmodo.com/5928783/mountain-lion-review-os-x-needs-a-new-vision

"It feels like Apple has run out of ideas. Or worse, that Apple is too afraid to implement new concepts, fearing it will kill the company's golden goose. "

It's kind of funny, really. The Mac users are all, "Oh no, they're trying to change everything and turn the Mac into an iPad!" and the folks that don't own a Mac are like, "Huh, they moved a few things around and they call this an OS upgrade?"

"It feels like Apple has run out of ideas. Or worse, that Apple is too afraid to implement new concepts, fearing it will kill the company's golden goose. "

A quick glance around Google will find a completely different set of cherry picked "before iPad/iPhone" and "after iPad/iPhone" images that show that, hey, their design isn't actually all that original

Cue the usual search for earlier unsuccessful attempts at touch devices--unsuccessful precisely because they did not come close to implementing the full set of features that made Apple's products a hit (and that Google is now arguing is essential for a usable touch-based tablet or phone)--which may happen to resemble Apple's products in one or two superficial respects, but do not even come close to reproducing the combination of many physical, interface, and even packaging details that are covered by Apple's design patent.

And then you have things like the LG Prada that you conveniently forget.

Actually, I think the LG Prada is a good example of my point, that there is a lot more to an iPhone (and Samsung and other makers of iPhone knockoffs have copied a lot more) than just the shape and the concept of a touch phone.

Similarly, did you know that Android has always been designed to run on a full touchscreen? Here's a bit of history [osnews.com] to cure your ignorance. Added bonus is the bit about Google voluntarily withholding the pinch-zoom gesture at Apple's behest.

I notice you don't cite the same author's follow-up article in which he admits that the article you cite was inaccurate, and that the pre-iPhone Android did in fact resemble the Blackberry

Let that 75% provide fuel for the robots.

Too late.

Generally Nintendo seems to be the patent troll-killer these days... but they did sue Nyko in a design look-and-feel patent that sounds pretty similar to Apple's issues with Samsung...

http://gizmodo.com/5016278/nintendo-suing-nyko-over-wireless-nunchuk

They need to combine this with the Crocodile Keyboard to minimize mistaps. The patent might get in the way, though.

>>(...) evolution has been an insanely successful theory. We literally wouldn't have today's understanding of biology without it.

If you and the previous commenter give some documented examples, you might make me believe in macro-evolution again. I already believe DNA allows certain variation within species ( micro-evolution ).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroevolution

>> You seem to be terribly confused. First, there has been no "retraction", just publication of two papers which disagree with the original one.

I'll trust you on that one

>> the actual claim was "We found this bacterium living in an arsenic-rich environment on earth , (....) That never meant "OMG BACTERIA CAN GROW ABSOLUTELY ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE!!!!!".

You're quite alone in your opinion. I googled hundred of major magazines, newspapers and blogs. They somehow made the same association I did:

Time magazine: “Scientists who hope to discover alien life someday”
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2034601,00.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8174040/Life-as-we-dont-know-it-discovery-could-prove-existence-of-aliens.html
http://news.yahoo.com/scientists-nasas-form-life-untrue-015324767.html
http://gizmodo.com/5704158/nasa-finds-new-life

>>You're parroting a really stupid creationist lie () that Zadel's fraud had anything to do with evolution or abiogenesis.(...)nobody outside of creationists ever thought Zadel's paper had any implications for abiogenesis.

On the hoax, the reputable Science magazine stated:
"they initially hailed the result, which appeared to have major implications for the pharmaceutical industry as well as for understanding of the origins of life."
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/pdf_extract/265/5168/21

>> failed fruit fly experiments ( ) you've grossly misinterpreted the meaning of the results as a fatal failure for evolution. (The abstract you linked pretty clearly indicates that evolution took place!)

The abstract states: “We conclude that, at least for life history characters such as development time, unconditionally advantageous alleles RARELY arise, are associated with SMALL net fitness gains or CANNOT FIX because selection coefficients change over time.” [ emphasis mine ] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20844486

>> nothing more than an example of creationist quote mining

I did not mine for quotes. I was informed of many problems of abiogenesis at a presentation by Dr. Wing Sung. Such as lack of protection from UV damage in reducing atmospheres and from oxidation reactions in atmospheres like ours.

Background on Dr. Sung: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoVZe1NhmOI

I still have photocopies of his presentation slides with sidenotes in Mandarin. I can scan and email them to you if you like.

>> (...) have to expect from people who have decided that anything which contradicts their interpretation of a religious text must ipso facto be false. (...) They're not in it to discover reality, they're in it to preserve their delusions.

Before seeing Dr. Sung's presentation, I used to be a theistic evolutionist. I accepted your “reality”, sir. I accept the gap theory.

Don't use Lion, do you? It is moving very much in the direction of iOS. Read this article. It is rather inflammatory, but the guys makes an interesting point. There is no VP for OS X development listed in Apple's leadership team after Serlet left. He was the one responsible for OS X versions 10.4-10.6, which were the best ones (IMNSHO). If you spend some time talking with long time OS X users, you'll find tepid enthusiasm for 10.7 at best and worst, rabid hatred. Read the comments in this OS X hint on disabling the new autosave in os x. A lot of people don't like the changes in 10.7.

Everybody stands on the shoulders of giants, even Apple.

Nokia video 2006 (slide to unlock, gestures)

http://www.phonearena.com/news/Here-is-how-Nokia-imagined-touchscreen-phones-in-2006_id28668/

Samsung F700 (Korean design patent, December 2006)

http://gizmodo.com/235112/apple-iphone-vs-samsung-f700-which-is-touchscreenier