Game Gripper continues its evolution with a new Epic 4G model, Genesis button layout (video)
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2010年11月24日星期三
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Sweet, sweet Game Gripper. You make smartphone gaming a rather less cramping experience, and now you're spreading joy to the fourth generation. Owners of Sprint Epic 4G can now get their Gripper on, and can do so with a lovely new Genesis-inspired layout that offers two rows of three buttons plus a D-pad -- and then another four buttons for good measure. It's rather excitedly demonstrated after the break and, like the earlier models, will set you back $14.99. Now, if only we could get handset makers to start adding shoulder buttons on their cellies.
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There’s a lot of hoopla right now that Google’s Chrome OS has been delayed and will miss the stated release date of “this year”. Much of this is based off of the comment that Google CEO Eric Schmidt made last week at Web 2.0 Summit, in which he said that Chrome OS would be available sometime in “the next few months”. So I asked Google today if they were still sticking with the “later this year” availability of Chrome OS — the answer I got? An enthusiastic “yep!”
But just in case, I decided to follow up and ask if that meant an actual shipping product was coming or some test version of the OS? The answer there was much more murky. “We’re not going into details at this point,” is what I was told.
Looking over the code issues in the Chromium OS forums, it looks as if work is still progressing to knock out a lot of late-stage bugs before the OS can be released. Many of these bugs are UI-related, but several seem much more serious, as well. That said, there are a few indications that a “beta” release of the OS may be drawing near. As you can see here, there are only six bugs labeled as “ReleaseBlock-Beta”. And almost all of them are related to the UI of buying a 3G plan from a Chrome OS-powered netbook. There’s also a “ReleaseBlock-Nominate” list, which features 38 bugs.
There are other indications that Google is removing certain features that contain “show-stopping bugs” in order to get a beta out there.
So, if I had to guess, I would bet that we’ll see some sort of Chrome OS beta launch in December. But that will disappoint many people, as we were originally told that ChromeBooks (Chrome OS-powered netbooks) would be here in time for the holidays. Unless some vendors are willing to ship a very beta product, that’s probably not going to happen.
But maybe there is hope. All About Microsoft’s Mary-Jo Foley says she talked to Google recently about the OS:
That said, there’s no denying that ChromeBooks and iPads are very likely to eventually go head to head in the market simply because both will likely cost around the same amount of money. And despite Schmidt’s comments, Google has been thinking about Chrome OS in the tablet space as well.
There’s a lot of hoopla right now that Google’s Chrome OS has been delayed and will miss the stated release date of “this year”. Much of this is based off of the comment that Google CEO Eric Schmidt made last week at Web 2.0 Summit, in which he said that Chrome OS would be available sometime in “the next few months”. So I asked Google today if they were still sticking with the “later this year” availability of Chrome OS — the answer I got? An enthusiastic “yep!”But just in case, I decided to follow up and ask if that meant an actual shipping product was coming or some test version of the OS? The answer there was much more murky. “We’re not going into details at this point,” is what I was told.
Looking over the code issues in the Chromium OS forums, it looks as if work is still progressing to knock out a lot of late-stage bugs before the OS can be released. Many of these bugs are UI-related, but several seem much more serious, as well. That said, there are a few indications that a “beta” release of the OS may be drawing near. As you can see here, there are only six bugs labeled as “ReleaseBlock-Beta”. And almost all of them are related to the UI of buying a 3G plan from a Chrome OS-powered netbook. There’s also a “ReleaseBlock-Nominate” list, which features 38 bugs.
There are other indications that Google is removing certain features that contain “show-stopping bugs” in order to get a beta out there.
So, if I had to guess, I would bet that we’ll see some sort of Chrome OS beta launch in December. But that will disappoint many people, as we were originally told that ChromeBooks (Chrome OS-powered netbooks) would be here in time for the holidays. Unless some vendors are willing to ship a very beta product, that’s probably not going to happen.
But maybe there is hope. All About Microsoft’s Mary-Jo Foley says she talked to Google recently about the OS:
I had a chance to ask the Googlers about Chrome OS recently, and was told that a preview version of Google OS is still going to hit this year and be available in test form on several new form factors.Of course, she also notes that “Google, like Microsoft, is not going to have a viable iPad competitor available in time for holiday 2010.” But Google is already distancing itself from the talk that Chrome OS is meant for tablets. At the same Web 2.0 Summit talk which featured Schmidt’s comments above, he also said that Chrome OS was meant for keyboards, while Android was meant for touch.
That said, there’s no denying that ChromeBooks and iPads are very likely to eventually go head to head in the market simply because both will likely cost around the same amount of money. And despite Schmidt’s comments, Google has been thinking about Chrome OS in the tablet space as well.
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Talk about timely. We've been waiting for months (with bated breath, might we add) for Pleco 2.2 to finally hit Apple's App Store, and after dealing with a few launch day bugs last week, we can finally say it's out and ready to dominate any Chinese homework you've been hastily procrastinating on. The Pleco Chinese Dictionary is now available in the app store at version 2.2.1, supporting both fullscreen handwriting input and live camera-based character recognition. Have a peek at the video past the break if you're still curious as to what this app can do for you, and feel free to toss your experiences with it down in comments below. Here's hoping this is only the first of many languages Pleco decides to tackle -- not that we're much on tossing out subtle hints.
Pleco Chinese Dictionary iPhone app now handling real-time image translations
What are the Long Tail Effect and Streisand Effect? How are they related to Web 2.0? Give real-life examples how they take place in Web 2.0 age.
What are the Long Tail Effect and Streisand Effect? How are they related to Web 2.0? Give real-life examples how they take place in Web 2.0 age.
What is Long Tail, according to the Wikipedia, long tail refers to the statistical property that a larger share of population rests within the tail of a probability distribution than observed under a 'normal' or Gaussian distribution. The term has gained popularity in recent times as a retailing concept describing the niche strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities – usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities. [1]
Maybe the concept of the Long Tail is a little bit complicated to you, I will show you a real wold Long tail example. First of all, we should understand 20%-80% rule, that is to say 20% of retailer’s products will account for 80% of their sales. How could it be happened? Most of time, people will buy just about anything you offer them.However, if people are given large-scale choice then the situition will be changed, the left 80% of retailer’s products will also being successful. Such as some online stores(Amaszon), which give sufficient people coming to it then people are diverse enough for their interests to diverge significantly. That is to say, if you provide a broad range of products to costumer, you will find that the most unpopular product will still have chance to outweigh the total sales of the top 80%. For any retailer who can aware of this point then they can make a great profits on their busniess.
With the advant of the Web 2.0, more and more people accept the online shopping gradually. The online shopping provide broad range of choices to the customer, some unpopular products may be very popular in the online shopping, it is highly subversive to the 80-20 rule in the real life. It can be changed to 50-50 in the Web 2.0 system. For example, Amazon.com make it changes happened. I found that there is a phenomenon that's being called Web 2.0 that effectively uses human interactions to create associations on the net. Amazon are already doing this with their recommendations which uses a customer's previous purchases to inform them of things that they might like. The way that people buy things are also used by Amazon to group similar items together. This can actually link a book that's not selling well with a bestseller and sometimes the poorer-selling item, due to reccomedations and reviews can out-sell the bestseller. Without this kind of association many kinds of items would not be sold on Amazon. [3]
After introducing the Long tail effect, let's focus on the other import concept which is Streisand effect. According to the Wikipedia, The Streisand effect is a primarily online phenomenon in which an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of causing the information to be publicized widely and to a greater extent than would have occurred if no censorship had been attempted. It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, following a 2003 incident in which her attempts to suppress photographs of her residence inadvertently generated further publicity. [2]
In our real life, curiosity is a natural instinct of the human mind. People always want to find out the reality that be blocked information by somebody. The curiosity is the main reason that causes the streisand effect. Showing you a simple example to explain streisand effect. If you want to let somebody knows something, you just tell him do not figure out this thing, then he will try everyway to find the reality. It is the same principle apply to Web 2.0 era, if you want everyone knows your information on the web, just block it. I just list a real life example to illustrate what is the Streisand effect.
The Streisand effect is very common online phenomenon. It also happened during the Web 2.0 era. In the Web 2.0 era, people can express their own opinion, post their pictures, articles and anything they like. Every one wants to be the host of the Web 2.0 and actually they make it by nowadays. Every one has the right to express their views unreservedly. When some articles and information be blocked in the internet, this will rouse people’s curiosity. The article will quickly became one of the most popular pages on the site. For example, In January 2008, The Church of Scientology's unsuccessful attempts to get Internet websites to delete a video of Tom Cruise speaking about Scientology resulted in the creation of Project Chanology. Similarly, the church attempted to remove a series of Operating Thetan document leaks from Wikileaks. Wikileaks responded by vowing to "release several thousand additional pages of Scientology material next week", a threat which was followed through.[2] The Streisand effect was able to make it because the feature of the Web 2.0.
References:
[1] Long Tail, [online], last accessed on 18 November, 2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail
[2] Streisand effect, [online], last accessed on 18 November, 2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
[3] Understanding the 'Long Tail' Effect, [online], last accessed on 18 November, 2010 http://www.celtnet.org.uk/info/long_tail.php
What is YAML? What are its advantages over XML? Give examples on how an XML document can be represented by a YAML document.
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What is YAML? What are its advantages over XML? Give examples on how an XML document can be represented by a YAML document.
YAML Ain't Markup Language. According to the Wikipedia, the YAML is a human-readable data serialization format that takes concepts from programming languages such as C, Perl, and Python, and ideas from XML and the data format of electronic mail.
Comparing with the XML, first, the grammer of YAML is much easier than the XML, Representing simple, hierarchical data tends to be more gracefully done in YAML; Secondly, XML is meant to be a markup language and YAML is really more of a data format; YAML largely eliminates the latter's perceived line noise such as brackets and braces. I will give a code example to compare XML with YAML. YAML is more readable than XML. YAML is expressive and extensible and it is easy to implement and use.
Showing a simple example of YAML, the following file name is Tim.YAML. This fragment of the code is very readable, it describes the Tim Zhao is 55 years old and has a 50 years old wife called Gimmy, they have two children one is Jimmy Zhao and the other is Jenny Zhao.
Block sequences indicate each entry with a dash and space ( “
- ”), the “– name” is the block sequence. Mappings use a colon and space (“
: ”) to mark each key: value pair. “Name: Tim Zhao” is the Mapping values. name: Tim Zhaoage: 55spouse: name: Emmy age: 50children: - name: Jimmy Zhao age: 25 - name: Jenny Zhao age 22YAML also has some disadvantages eompare with XML, such as If you need to transform an XML document to another format (HTML) you can use XSLT while for YAML you have to write a program; Only a few major programming languages have a proper support for YAML; Java and Python have XML support in the standard libraries. YAML (for Java and Python) requires an external dependency;
The XML document can be represented by a YAML, I wll list a simple example to illustrate it.
The XML code:
<?xml version="1.0"?><club> <players> <player id="kramnik" name="Vladimir Kramnik" rating="2700" status="GM" /> <player id="fritz" name="Deep Fritz" rating="2700" status="Computer" /> <player id="mertz" name="David Mertz" rating="1400" status="Amateur" /> </players> <matches> <match> <Date>2002-10-04</Date> <White refid="fritz" /> <Black refid="kramnik" /> <Result>Draw</Result> </match> <match> <Date>2002-10-06</Date> <White refid="kramnik" /> <Black refid="fritz" /> <Result>White</Result> </match> </matches></club>The above XML data representation is fairly clear. It is not all that difficult to modify the document with general purpose tools like a text editor. Semantically, my proposed XML has all the problems discussed. Players appear ordered. And the player list appears to precede the matches list. Player attributes are unordered, but since match "attributes" cannot fit as XML attributes, XML imposes an artificial order.[3]
The YAML code: The YAML format simply matches the data structures of dynamic languages better.
players: Vladimir Kramnik: &kramnik rating: 2700 status: GM Deep Fritz: &fritz rating: 2700 status: Computer David Mertz: &mertz rating: 1400 status: Amateur matches: - Date: 2002-10-04 White: *fritz Black: *kramnik Result: Draw - Date: 2002-10-06 White: *kramnik Black: *fritzResult: White There are a number of nice things about this format. The YAML Web site gives exact specifications, but this brief sample gives a pretty accurate idea of the basic elements. YAML is terse, and readable. Moreover, quoting is minimal, with data types being inferred from patterns. You can use references to any named target. And, significantly, YAML maintains the distinction between ordered and associative collections. As an added bonus, you can very easily edit YAML in a text editor.[3]
I just listed some obvious and simple concept and advantages of the YAML, there are still a lot of good features not be covered in this essay. YAML is a human-friendly, cross language, Unicode based data serialization language. It has some advantages that XML doesn’t covered, but YAML cannot replace the XML right now. We expect that the YAML could make a good progress in the future.
References:
[1]. YAML, [online], last accesssed on November 17, 2010 http://www.yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html
[2]. YAML compared to XML, [online], last accesssed on November 17, 2010 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1308536/yaml-compared-to-xml
[3] YAML improves on XML, [online], last accesssed on November 17, 2010 http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-matters23.html
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2010年11月19日星期五
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Actually, it is hard to define a precise concept of what is Web 3.0. Maybe we have already heard of Web 3.0 for a long time, but we have not finished Web 2.0, the Web 3.0 has arrived. We even do not have enough time to feel the Web 3.0 that change our life dramatically.
I think that Web 3.0 is built on the Web 2.0. Some of the ideas and technology in Web 2.0 is introduced to Web 3.0, and Web 3.0 is an extension of Web 2.0. As known to all, Web 2.0 is a kind of user centric web, that is to say user can join in the web creation and interaction. The one of the most successful Web 2.0 application is Wikipedia, it can allow user to create the entries in which they interested. People also can post their idea in their own Blog. Although these applications raised questions in security and social problems of web technology, all of this Web 2.0 indeed enriches our life. After discussing the web 2.0, we turn to our focus on Web 3.0. What is Web 3.0? From my personal point of view, I think the Web 3.0 has three main features. First, Web 3.0 has very fast network access speed. Second, all the websites of Web 3.0 will be more open and could provide application programming interfaces (API) to the public. Thirdly, Web 3.0 is regarded as semantic web, that is to say the machine can understand the data and process data directly and indirectly.
There are some main technologies that will make it happen:
1. Artificial intelligence
2. Automated reasoning
3. Cognitive architecture
4. Composite applications
5. Distributed computing
6. Knowledge representation
7. Ontology (computer science)
8. Recombinant text
9. Scalable vector graphics
10. Semantic Web
11. Semantic Wiki
12. Software agents [2]
The Web 3.0 will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users.[2]
Web 3.0 is a place where machines can read Web pages much as we humans read them, a place where search engines and software agents can better troll the Net and find what we're looking for. A prime example of a Web 3.0 technology is 'natural-language search'.[2]
I think the semantic web is the most significant one in Web 3.0. As Wikipedia sates that Semantic Web is a group of methods and technologies to allow machines to understand the meaning - or "semantics" - of information on the World Wide Web. The most applications of Web 2.0 that they do not focus on semantic web. For example, Google just focus on searching data, but Google cannot understand the data meaning, which was searched by it. For example, we search “master” with Google. The “master” may be has the different meanings in the context, however, the Google does not understand it. Google just focus on matching the key words in the context.
Along with the advent of the Web 3.0, all of these data in the web sources will be assigned to different meanings. The semantic web will also know the meaning of these data. For example, the figure 8848 is pointless in the context, however, we put this figure in to the Geographic areas, that is mean the height of Mount Qomolangma. Web 2.0 may not get the meaning of 8848 stands for the height of Mount Qomolangma in the Geographic areas, but the web 3.0 will deal with it. In our real life, we might encounter problems that we cannot find the information that we need through the search engine, because the Web 2.0 technology cannot get the meaning of the data that user need. The web 3.0 will figure all of these problems out. The Freebase website is a good example of early age of Web 3.0. Most of people know Wikipedia, but just few people hear of the Freebase. This website is similar to Wikipedia, but the Freebase pays more attention on the organization of information. It stores the data by different attributes. For example, storing one person data, it divides the data into several attributes, like name, sex, date of birth and nationality, etc. User can assign the values to the attributes or add new attributes to the entity. As a result, each attributes that user inputs will recognized by computers. All of these data will understand by computers as well. The Freebase has explained the concept of the semantic web, and I think that the semantic web like freebase will be more and more popular in our daily life.
Reference:
[1] Malik Muhammad Imran Pattal, LI yuan and ZENG Jianqiu.(2009) Web 3.0: A real personal Web. 2009
[2]Web 3.0 Technology, [online], last accessed on November 17, 2010. http://www.articleforfree.com/Articles/Technology/Web-3-0-Technology-380190732.aspx
