As of May 3, the software giants new research lab began work in a city known just as much for its vibrant educational and intellectual status as for its cultural diversitieswith institutions such as Columbia University and New York University among a host of others. Microsoft Research began two decades ago at the companys Redmond, Wash., headquarters and has become a global research force with 13 labs across four continentsall devoted to advancing the state of the art in computing research and contributing cutting-edge advancements to Microsoft products.

Jennifer Chayes will now be managing director of both Microsoft Research New England, which she founded in July 2008, and Microsoft Research New York City. The new lab is based in Manhattan

The addition of Microsoft Research New York City reflects the companys long-term investment in basic research, Rick Rashid, Microsoft chief research officer and head of Microsoft Research, said in a statement.

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One of the pressing concerns of many smartphone buyers is not only will it be upgraded to the latest software in the future, but how does its battery fare under real world conditions?  The Samsung Galaxy S III is definitely a great phone on paper, but can it be separated from its charger for more than a couple of hours when using LTE and running multiple tasks?

The guys over at GSMArena were recently able to run some tests on the device in order to gauge how well its battery could perform.  The results are promising, but it is important to remember the smartphone being tested is not LTE and runs on an Exynos quad-core processor, instead of the United States GSIII variants Qualcomm dual-core processor.

In continuous 3G talk time, it had a battery life of 10 hours and 20 minutes, which was 4th among leading smartphones.  In video playback, it performed for 10 straight hours and a minute, falling second to the DROID RAZR MAXX.  In web browsing, it lasted just 5 hours and 17 minutes, which is near the industry average.  Th

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SEATTLE–A new company that plans to track millions of retail shoppers through a unique ID emitted by their smartphones says it wants to be privacy-friendly.

Will Smith, co-founder and chief executive of Euclid Elements, showed up at the PII privacy conference here today to say that identifying repeat visitors by these unique IDs — the so-called MAC addresses broadcast when Wi-Fi is turned on — shouldn’t be an issue.

“We put a sensor in the store,” Smith said. “It passively detects smartphones that come near the store.”

Euclid, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif. and launched last November after raising $5.8 million, charges merchants $200 a month for simple installations and more for complex ones.

Instead of asking shoppers to choose to opt-in, the company adopted an opt-out model, which means visiting a page on Euclid’s Web site. MAC addresses are stored for 18 months and only aggregate data is made available to the retailer, which is required to post a notice telling shoppers what’s happening.

But that still means a company, however well-intentioned, will keep detailed logs about the movements of millions of Americans around cities and shopping malls.

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A number of rightwing organisations, including Americans for Prosperity, which is funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, are attacking Obama for his support for solar and wind power. The American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), which also has financial links to the Kochs, has drafted bills to overturn state laws promoting wind energy.

Now a confidential strategy memo seen by the Guardian advises using “subversion” to build a national movement of wind farm protesters.

The strategy proposal was prepared by a fellow of the American Tradition Institute (ATI) – although the thinktank has formally disavowed the project.

The proposal was discussed at a meeting of self-styled ‘wind warriors’ from across the country in Washington DC last February.

“These documents show for the first time that local Nimby anti-wind groups are co-ordinating and working with national fossil-fuel funded advocacy groups to wreck the wind industry,” said Gabe Elsner, a co-director of the Checks and Balances, the accountability group which unearthed the proposal and other documents.

Among its main recommendations, the proposal calls for a national PR campaign aimed at causing “subversion in message of industry so that it effectively because so bad that no one wants to admit in public they are for it.”

It suggests setting up “dummy businesses” to buy anti-wind billboards, and creating a “counter-intelligence branch” to track the wind energy industry.

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Enda McGrath

Hi fellow community members, I’m Enda McGrath.

I’m excited to be leading our developer relations effort and I want to thank you for being the best developer community in the world, bar none. It has been a privilege working with you over the past several years and I look forward to the next chapter. Time and time again I am amazed at your loyalty, the awesome apps you publish to the catalog, the new widgets being submitted to the Enyo gallery, and the contributions from the open source community .

For those of you that I haven’t worked with in a support capacity, I look forward to meeting you and getting as much feedback as my inbox can handle.

I first joined Palm at the end of 2000 when they acquired a startup I was working at, ThinAir Apps. At the time I was an application developer creating 3rd party apps for PalmOS, the most successful of which was for weightwatchers.com. Since then, I’ve filled a few different roles as the company has evolved, and I’ve enjoyed every one of them.

About 6 years ago I found my home in Developer Relations as a Developer Technical Support engineer and eventually rose to become head of DTS. Initially

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Today we take a look at the newest cooler from Noctua. This time Noctua is showing the Small Form Factor users some love with their new NH-L12 extra low profile CPU cooler. The NH-L12 is a low-profile cooler for Small Form Factor cases and HTPC environments. Join us as we see just small this cooler is and how the new Noctua NH-L12 performs.

Quote:
“The NH-L12 from Noctua was a little surprise for me.  I felt the little guy wouldn’t hold up to the heat. It did, and for users that have a smaller/narrower case and not interested in the least to overclock then the NH-L12 would be rather perfect. Top it off with Noctua’s 6 year warranty and awesome build quality, the NH-L12 has win all over it…”

Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1920/1/

For Internet mistakes you’d like to forget (like the wholly regrettable theme on your MySpace page) and social sites that are putting a serious dent in your daily productivity (you know the ones), Erasey Page will let you erase it all, one website at a time.  At least after a fashion.

The web-based project offers to give Internet prisoners their lives back – just put in the address of the website you want to remove from your life and erase away with the giant eraser.  Of course, you’re really only erasing an image of your least favorite or most time-consuming site – those websites will still be there when you choose to return.  But Erasey Page does provide a reminder that life does exist outside of the web, if you’re brave enough to face it.

While Erasey Page is currently offline as it features in Miami Beach’s Bass Museum of Art, it will be available to web users as early as April 6.  Until then, we’ll have to settle for the less-cathartic version of turning off the Internet noise – closing the web browser.

If you have been finding yourself annoyed that you need to login to your Netflix account every single time you launched the iOS app you probably want to fire up the App Store and download the latest update. This update will bring the Netflix app up to version 2.1.2 and it comes with just one change it fixes the login problem that impacted some users.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Delancey Underground, the proposed park beneath New York’s Lower East Side, is the way James Ramsey and Dan Barasch plan to light it. A system of fiber optic cables would collect sunlight above ground and funnel it down into the abandoned trolley station, providing real sunlight that would allow plants to grow.

I got to meet James and Dan this week, and learned a bit more about how the technology. What impressed me most, as someone without a science or tech background, is that I understand (mostly, and maybe) how it works. It’s a pretty straightforward system. Unlike most solar technology, no energy is produced, the sunlight is merely transported to where its needed.

A dish that looks like a flatter mixing bowl sits above ground. All of the sunlight that hits it is funneled toward its center and into fiber optic cables. The cables run through the ground and end at a similar looking dish with a bulb, which distributes the light.

James notes that this system would not be the only one lighting the Lowline. First of all, it provides light only when it’s sunny- not on cloudy days, not at night.

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The focus of the study was to understand what you were thinking about when considering customer data, CRM, and how that’s integrated with the rest of your business operations. There was one statistic that was a bit of an eye popper for me.

Only 15% of you have fully integrated CRM or customer facing systems. 15%. That’s pretty low.

On the one hand, that’s a great opportunity for integration vendors like Scribe. On the other hand, that tells me that we have a lot of work to do to make integration accessible to businesses large and small. One of the things that also stood out in the study was that business got the value of data integration but it was a bit harder to figure out how to make it happen. As I read the results of the study, I was asking myself what is it about integration that businesses are having a hard time figuring out where to start and how to implement?

There are a few factors that likely play into this: media hype, cost, complexity of integration itself, and many, many integration options, techniques, and products.

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The threat landscape has changed radically since 2007, when the previous version of Symantec’s endpoint security software was released, SEP 11. Back then it and most competing products relied heavily on frequently updated databases of virus signatures to spot malware when it arrived on a computer. With a total of just about 250,000 viruses to watch out for, this approach was practical and effective.

But in the last few years the rate of malware creation has increased dramatically: About 55,000 new ones appearing according to Symantec. Many of these are created using malware authoring kits which can generate thousands of variants of a single instance of malware — each with a different signature.

The result is that any given virus may only be distributed to a handful of end user computers, and 75% of malware infects less than 50 machines.

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Sprint and Virgin Mobile were previously rumored to offer the Optimus Elite as a replacement for the aging LG Optimus S. Images of this upcoming phone for Sprint and Virgin Mobile have surfaced giving us an early look into the device before it becomes formally official.

Interestingly, the images show that the physical design of the device is different from the LG Optimus Net. The Optimus Elite is expected to be a NFC-enabled Android smartphone with a 3.2-inch 480×320 touchscreen, an 800 MHz processor, and a 5 MP camera with LED flash. The leaked renders show that the handset will ship with Android 2.3 Gingerbread on board. 

The LG Optimus Elite for Sprint may arrive as soon as April for around $100. Virgin Mobile’s prepaid version should hit the stores in early May. 

Do you think that this device will make a good cheap Android phone option? 

Yahoo, Google, AOL, and Microsoft try not to let copyright-infringing Web sites sign up. Their advertising network contracts currently prohibit it.

But that isn’t stopping the White House from pressuring those four companies to do more to satisfy Hollywood and other copyright holders who are peeved about online piracy — in this case, that presumably means addressing piratical Web sites that cover their bandwidth costs through ad revenue.

A White House report released today singles out those four companies by name, arguing that they and others should “act as checkpoints for infringing activity and reduce the distribution of infringing content.” Here’s an excerpt:

Ad networks and exchanges, including Google, Microsoft , Yahoo!, and AOL are being encouraged to develop best practices for online advertising networks and exchanges, in order to ensure that they do not place any advertisements on infringing Web sites, and to remove such Web sites from their ad networks.

This apparent strong-arming follows other enforcement deals that were technically voluntary and not mandated by law.

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It looks like the folks over at Square have done some rebranding in terms of their mobile apps. The affected apps include both Square and Card Case, or as they are now dubbed, Square Card Reader and Pay With Square.

The change from Square to Square Card Reader is in effect for iOS and Android, though the change for the Android app arrived a few weeks back. In terms of the iOS app update, the app is now sitting at version 2.2.6 where it remains a universal app with support for the iPad and iPhone.

In terms of the Pay With Square app, this change is recent for both Android and iOS. The Android and iOS apps have both gone to version 2.0. In terms of the changes that come along with the Card Case to Pay With Square rebranding, those include the following for iOS and Android;

• ‘Card Case is now ‘Pay with Square.
• Brand new UI to make paying with Square faster and simpler.
• Discovering merchants you love is now easier than ever. Browse a map to see what businesses are near you. Or search by typing the name of a business.
• Add businesses you love to your Favorites list. Sha

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Facebook will go IPO in May. The amount of money they will be pulling in will be astronomical. What are is Zuckerberg doing with the billions? Killing Google? There is a report on BusinessWeek that… Full Story below

Update: 15

Source: PRWeb

A Facebook group is another way to reach out to the online community. There are thousands of Facebook groups out there, specializing in different niches. However, because of the immense number of Facebook groups, creating one can sometimes be a drag. Gro … Update: 14

Source: Global Voices Online

Myanmar has been implementing a lot of reforms in the past years which included the release from prison of democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, the suspension of a controversial dam project and the unprecedented release of hundreds of political prisoners. An …

Link:  http://rbmods.com/amd-a8-3870-fm1-cpu/