iPhone 6 Plus vs. Nexus 6 - CNET

iPhone 6 Plus vs. Nexus 6 - CNET

How to find your car with Google Now - CNET

How to find your car with Google Now - CNET

The best Chromebook of 2014 | ITworld

"So which is the best? It's clearly the Toshiba Chromebook 2. For its specs, overall build and features, you can't do better. At $330, it's quite affordable -- and the 13.3-inch 1080p IPS screen is a beautiful display that you'd expect from a much more expensive machine. (Note: There are two versions of the Toshiba Chromebook 2, a $249 version with a 1366 x 768 screen, and the 1920 x 1080-pixel 1080p version for $330. The more expensive one is the one to buy.) Not only are the colors bright and bold, but it has a wide viewing angle. This is a Chromebook that you can truly use for watching videos as well as for work.

It's also got great Skullcandy speakers that you certainly don't expect on a Chromebook, and certainly not one in the low $300 range. So it's great for listening to music as well as watching videos.

Unlike many other Chrombooks, it comes with a full 4GB of RAM, which is important because its processor, like many Chromebook processors, won't knock your socks off. But the 4 GB of RAM gives the machine enough oomph to make up for that."
"

Retina 5K iMac: Powerful Proof of the PC Renaissance - NYTimes.com

"Enter Apple and the new iMac it unveiled in the fall, an expensive desktop with a beautiful, high-resolution screen. If Chromebooks are cars, the new iMac is the world’s best truck. It’s a device optimized for professionals, not casual users, and it blazes a path forward for the once-beleaguered PC industry.

Chromebooks run an operating system based on Google’s Chrome web browser, and their low prices have helped make them a hit.
MARK LENNIHAN / ASSOCIATED PRESS
As phones and tablets become more powerful and useful, and as they begin to occupy more of our time, PC manufacturers will have to create computers that take advantage of PCs’ shape, size and power. They’ll have to find new features that can’t be mimicked by smartphones. With a display unmatched by any other computing device you can buy today, the new iMac does just that. That’s why, of the dozens of new tech devices I tried this year, it was my favorite."

German researchers discover a flaw that could let anyone listen to your cell calls. - The Washington Post

NYTimes: U.S. Said to Find North Korea Ordered Cyberattack on Sony

Apple Wins Decade-Old ITunes Suit - NYTimes.com

" OAKLAND, Calif. — A jury took about three hours to reject an antitrust lawsuit — 10 years in the making — that accused Apple of using a software update to secure a monopoly over the digital music market.

The eight-member jury in federal court here unanimously determined that Apple had, in fact, used an update of the iTunes software that it issued eight years ago to deliver genuine improvements for iPods sold between 2006 and 2009. "



Apple Wins Decade-Old ITunes Suit - NYTimes.com

Book Review: “The Science of Interstellar” | Ricochet

"The Science of Interstellar by Kip ThorneChristopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar was eagerly awaited by science fiction enthusiasts who, having been sorely disappointed so many times by movies that crossed the line into fantasy by making up entirely implausible things to move the plot along, hoped that this effort would live up to its promise of getting the science (mostly) right and employing scientifically plausible speculation where our present knowledge is incomplete.

The author of the present book is one of the most eminent physicists working in the field of general relativity (Einstein’s theory of gravitation) and a pioneer in exploring the exotic strong field regime of the theory, including black holes, wormholes, and gravitational radiation. Prof. Thorne was involved in the project which became Interstellar from its inception, and worked closely with the screenwriters, director, and visual effects team to get the science right. Some of the scenes in the movie, such as the visual appearance of orbiting a rotating black hole, have never been rendered accurately before, and are based upon original work by Thorne in computing light paths through spacetime in its vicinity which will be published as professional papers."

Leaving Computers On Helps Them Last Longer - Scientific American

Amazon Kindle Voyage review: the best way to read since books - Features - Gadgets and Tech - The Independent

5his is a wonderful device,  I love it.  "The display on the Voyage is sensational, easily the best I’ve seen on an ebook reader. At 300 pixels per inch, it’s the highest-resolution eink screen yet, beating even the Kobo Aura HD. That’s still not quite as pin-sharp as ink on paper, but it’s pretty good.

And unlike paper, this ereader incorporates Amazon’s Paperwhite technology. Where conventional colour tablets have backlights which are tiring on the eyes after a while, this has a frontlight that comes from one side instead of shining in your eyes. Even better, there’s an auto brightness setting which measures the ambient light and adjusts the brightness accordingly. This works well and the light is reasonably power-stingy – even with the light on the battery lasts a good month between charges.
Like other eink readers, it has the considerable advantage over backlit colour screens that it’s easy to read in bright sunlight, even through sunglasses."

Woz: No, Apple was not started in a garage - CNET

Woz: No, Apple was not started in a garage - CNET

'Cosmos' host Neil deGrasse Tyson's scope set on scientific literacy

"Well, I don't have to imagine what it is. There have been international tests to assess where our students are on various objective scales. And among industrialized nations we're consistently near the bottom of the list in every way that matters. That's just the fact. So the next question is: Does being so low on those lists come with consequences that matter...We've been very economically competitive even through several decades of these very low scores so maybe the scores are not the best indicator of what we are or what we will become in the future.

"However, some things are happening. I think we've lost our exploratory mojo. So, for example, my hat's off to the European Space Agency for landing a space probe on a comet. That is a space feat without precedent. But I grew up in an era when NASA was doing all of the space feats that had no precedent. So little signs like this are indicators that we are not on the frontier anymore. The Higgs boson, which received banner headlines in The New York Times, was discovered in Switzerland in a particle accelerator built by a European collaboration. And we would have discovered it back in the 1990s because we had a particle accelerator (partially built, then canceled by Congress)."

The only things that can stop the Chromebook are you and Google | News | TechRadar

" Home News by technology The only things that can stop the Chromebook are you and Google
The only things that can stop the Chromebook are you and Google
OPINION It's not the product, it's the perception

By Chris Phin  November 30th 2014

The only things that can stop the Chromebook are you and Google
The Chromebook are still waiting for the world to notice them
Related stories
Google unveils Classroom, its new learning management system
Chromebook sales to surpass 5m units in 2014, says Gartner
Seven new Android apps are now compatible with Chrome OS
For a long time, Chromebooks seemed like they would fizzle, and for just the reasons you might expect. People called them under-powered, said they didn't run the software they depended on, and that there was just no compelling reason to buy one over a cheap Windows or Linux laptop. For a while, we got one Chromebook at a time, made by different manufacturers - not unlike how Google's Nexus brand is applied to smartphones and tablets made by a succession of manufacturers.
But little by little, the Chromebook has gained momentum and diversified, and now ABI Research forecasts that a little over four million Chromebooks will be sold this year (compared to 300m conventional laptops). Four against 300 doesn't sound like much, but this would probably be a doubling of Chromebook sales over the previous year - while conventional laptop sales are predicted to fall from 316m according to ABI.
For the most part, Chromebooks seem to be being bought by the education market, and they're doing great things there. When even one of the smartest and strongest advocates for the iPad in education, Fraser Speirs, records an episode of his podcast called The Case for Chromebooks, you should be thinking at least that there's potential here.
The question still gets asked, though: what will it take for the Chromebook to go mainstream? It's a question that assumes Google has to change the Chromebook to make it attractive to the mass market, and I think that's the wrong perspective. I think the market has to change.
It's not them, it's you

A Chromebook is already a good option for the mass market. For home users, it's simple, reliable, robust and likely not as susceptible to viruses as a Windows machine. If most of us actually stop to think about it, the majority of what we use a computer for these days can already be done in a browser window. That's in part because of how much time we spend on websites (such as Facebook and Twitter), and in part because web versions of apps such as Word are finally rich and responsive enough to be usable.
What's more, many of those jobs that we currently don't do in a browser could be done in a browser with minimal disruption if we wanted to. Besides, some interesting things are happening such as the streaming version of Photoshop which brings the full, complete power of Photoshop to a Chromebook while doing all the heavy lifting on a server somewhere. It's trickier in some businesses, but for others - especially sole traders and SMBs who might be well served by or even already be using Google Apps for Work - a Chromebook could be not just a usable trade-off but actually the best tool for the job.
Still, you might say, why should I buy a Chromebook to do these things when I can just install Chrome on my PC or Mac and not have the same compromises? Well, it's true you won't have the same compromises, but you will have compromises. The system is more complex and so liable to failure, it's a bigger target for malware. And of course there's price: for the most part, Chromebooks just are cheap."

EXPERTS NOT BUYING IT

"In his first public interview this week, Darren Wilson, the white police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., was asked whether he could have done anything differently that would have prevented the killing.

His answer, broadcast on Wednesday, to the question from George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, was unequivocal: “No.”

But even as a grand jury decided this week not to indict Officer Wilson, the shooting of the 18-year-old, Michael Brown, has continued to raise questions about whether the officer handled the brief and deadly confrontation correctly. It also has become part of a broader national debate over police tactics and potential racial bias in policing."

Toyota Mirai: The 300-mile zero-emission vehicle

Wal-mart gets 40 percent of its electricity from coal, and only 3 percent from renewables

Recommended read from Salon.com: Report: Wal-mart's clean energy boasts are little more than greenwashing

Kubrick’s indestructible influence: “Interstellar’’ joins the long tradition of borrowing from “2001’’ - Salon.com

"Every sci-fi movie since Kubrick's 1968 masterpiece has echoed the original in certain unavoidable ways"

Google Nexus 6 Review