For the Love of God, Twitter!

May 18th, 2013 — 7:20pm written by Doug Simmons

Well, the latest high-profile Twitter hacking incident went down Friday by the Syrian Electronic Army which compromised multiple sites including The Onion and the Financial Times, including the FT’s website and its Twitter feeds. The FT’s Twitter account was used for something, albeit political, that was categorically horrific and uniquely puke-inducing. Even if your skin is thick I would advise against trying to dig up more on that, and if you have any related links, please do not post them in the comments.

There have been more in between, but this comes on the heels of the Associated Press’s account which tweeted a presidential assassination scare that smashed the Dow down 200 points. These incidents, which include other presidential assassination tweets years back, make up a rather long and colorful list which will continue to grow briskly.

The frequency of these incidents would have been greatly mitigated had Twitter implemented two-step verification. Not a new concept, large-scale implementations arrived years ago. It’s a nuisance most Outlook.com and Gmail users would prefer to live without, but major Twitter accounts of the AP and other media outlets and celebrities, accounts that can be hijacked for a political platform or to cause panic, many of those account holders would be willing to take the extra step to log in if it means fending off the likes of these folks. Without that feature, evidently, having a Twitter account associated with your organization is a significant liability both to you and to everyone, one worth reconsidering.

There have been rumors for months that Twitter is rolling this multi-step authentication system out to those who want it but there is still no sign of it, just talk. Especially given what has already happened, this is an obviously urgent feature to roll out and then to educate users about aggressively. However complicated it may be to pull that off, taking years to continue to fail to figure it out and make it happen is weirdly negligent and by any measure simply unacceptable.

Doug Simmons

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Finally – a Surface ad that talks about the device

May 18th, 2013 — 8:26am written by David K

I’ve never been a fan of the Surface ads. If you want to sell a product that consumers aren’t familiar with then I don’t see how a bunch of dancing works. Well the critics have been heard and finally there’s a new Surface ad that talks about capabilities and actually describes the product…and it works. Check it out:

Here’s their description of the video:

Surface Imagine shows you a device that can finally do it all.  It has the power of  a laptop with the portability of a tablet.  It has a USB port and a click-in keyboard and the power to run Office.  Check out why Microsoft Surface lets you do so much more.

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  • Jim Szymanski: The dancing ads were designed to attract attention. But a more informative ad like this should have followed closely behind. ...

1 comment » | 140, Windows Phone, Windows Tablets, Youtube clips

Made in U.S.A

May 17th, 2013 — 2:19pm written by Ram Uppugunduri

When I was kid and living in India, I had one stapler, which was made in USA. I liked its quality and from then onwards I wished I had access to made in USA goods. Of course they are not affordable for most of Indians. After migrating to US, I seldom saw made in U.S.A goods. Now it is almost close to zero. You go to any store, made in USA goods are not at all visible, even if they exist. Now I think we are going to see made in USA products happening more often, because Apple, the trendsetter, is bringing some. Winking smile. Apple’s chief Tim Cook shared more about the Mac that they are building in the USA. He also said they are planning to move the entire production to onshore and are investing $100M for that. Cook says it is going to be the first Mac after 1994 to built completely in the U.S . Once they release it I will buy one definitely. “Be American, Buy American.”   Would you buy one, once they release it here?

Source: Mac User

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  • Jim Szymanski: Well, that would be a hard pill for me to swallow, although I agree with you in principle. Let's just ...

1 comment » | 140

HTC ramping up HTC One production to meet demand

May 17th, 2013 — 11:21am written by Ramon Trotman

HTC ramping up HTC One production to meet demand

In what is certianly the biggest battle of their brand’s History, HTC has reportedly dialed up the production of the famed HTC one. With Samsung quickly dominating the market, the HTC One was met with some production issues. The first was said to be a shortage of parts needed for the Ultra Pixel camera, and there were also rumors of issue producing the beautifully crafted metal casing.

Said to almost double production, the HTC One puts up a remarkable fight against the new kind, the SG4, so it is good to know they won’t be tossed out of the race simply because they couldn’t keep up with demand.

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Beam Me Up Bing

May 16th, 2013 — 10:32pm written by Ram Uppugunduri

Go to Bing.com and type Beam Me Up and hit enter and see how Bing.com page transforms into. Way to go Microsoft.

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  • herg62123: try - Energize
  • Ram: Cool finding.

3 comments » | 140

Everything.me Dev Maintaining WebP-Enabled Firefox

May 16th, 2013 — 5:31pm written by Doug Simmons

If you thought part of the big WebP adoption holdup by Mozilla had anything to do with implementing its support involving a significant undertaking to code it in, nope; it seems that’s not the case at all, judging from Shay Elkin’s contribution to one of the multiple Mozilla bug threads on the topic. Shay offers simple instructions to make yourself a fresh build below.

Mozilla is approaching their third year of WebP debate. Take your time fellas! What’s “just a few kilobytes of savings” across the stupid clueless web worth anyway, right? When you run out of things to debate and daft insults to hurl, before making any devastating decisions you’ll surely regret, no problem, just wait for another player like Facebook to adopt WebP somehow and then you can debate the fallout from their users’ complaints for at least another five months, then repeat that forever while you watch your base of users just slowly fade away. Don’t worry, I’m sure some of them don’t care about progress.

Shay Elkin, 2013-05-12 09:10:18 PDT, Comment 66

I try to maintain a webp-enabled and updated version of mozilla-central (the patch is the same as the one in this bug)

You can find it at https://github.com/EverythingMe/mozilla-central Assuming you have a configured build environment, the following will get you a Firefox build with webp support:

git clone –branch webp git@github.com:EverythingMe/mozilla-central.git
cd mozilla-central
./mach build

Really frustrating fellas. Perhaps Matt Brubeck could swing by and offer me some clarity again, perhaps starting with Fennec’s lack of WebP support, the only Android browser I can find that doesn’t seem to support it.

Doug Simmons

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Who is developing for Google Glass?

May 16th, 2013 — 5:27pm written by Marti M

WP_20130413_001.jpg
Evernote.

Naturally, THEIR example is a grocery list, but we all know Simmons will be taking girlie pictures with his.

 

From the Evernote blog:

First Look: Evernote for Google Glass

 

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  • MartiM: Happy to oblige!
  • Ram: Marti, you made me laugh so much, tears are coming out.

5 comments » | 140

Hey, I found a pretty good Microsoft ad

May 16th, 2013 — 1:02pm written by Doug Simmons

Damn, someone tipped off the Google fanboys: 
scroogled-ad-youtube-comments-lols

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  • Doug Simmons: Btw, if you like Chrome, but you don't want to get "scroogled," but don't like IE, try Chromium, basically Chrome ...

1 comment » | 140, Youtube clips

MobilityLeaks: Shame on Microsoft

May 16th, 2013 — 11:17am written by Doug Simmons

David K: Does Google really think that its Android lead is so effing precarious that a decent Youtube app on Windows Phone could jeopardize it? If only MS used the YouTube API that Google was so nice in supplying so that the ads would display…wait what? Oh Microsoft had to do a work around because Google won’t let Microsoft use the API and that’s why there’s no ads? Oh evil evil Microsoft – for shame. If Google blocks an API that means you can’t play in the sandbox and shame on you for trying.  Simmons, any thoughts?ram-poopy-foot

Ram:  David, LOL — Simmons, the PAL of Eric Schmidt, won’t care and in fact says its Microsoft’s fault. Damn effing fawnbuys. They buy into their divas and in fact they are ready to Lend their Personal Ass. Simmons, if you are still wondering what is a PAL, I just gave you the definition. :)

Doug Simmons: I don’t know or care whose fault it is, what I want is their stuff on more platforms. Likewise, I’d like to see Microsoft’s stuff on other platforms — EG Office on iOS and Android. Google’s claimed repeatedly that what they want to be platform-independent. This isn’t WebOS, WP is a viable platform, why try go out of their way to shaft it. Shooting everybody in the feet. Perhaps you’d likewise be “pals” with Ballmer if he, I don’t know, didn’t sweat as much, and other little things like not letting the company go sideways on his watch. The thing I’m pals with is progress. Don’t break my balls just because one particular company incidentally tends to have more overlap in that industry than another.

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  • Ram: @Sean +1
  • Sean D.: Ok, just my opinion but to me this is another example of google playing childish games. No doubt this too ...

12 comments » | Android, MobilityLeaks, Windows Phone

Game changer?

May 16th, 2013 — 9:15am written by Jim Szymanski

Acer-W3-Windows-8-PC1-348x300.jpg
What’s that. Microsoft (as well as their partners) is launching an 8″ Surface RT in June for $249-$299. Market shift, here we come.

2 comments - Latest comments by:
  • Smitty: I'll believe it when I see it.
  • Doug Simmons: Them's getting-acquainted prices. Nice. Bring on the competition baby, makes the world go 'round.

2 comments » | 140, Windows Tablets

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