Gaming 27 - The PlayStation Ryvita
Posted on 15th Jun 2011 at 07:41 by Podcast with 8 comments
Facebook use in the Arab countries is growing as such a rate that within a year, Arabic will overtake English to become the most popular Facebook language in the region, the Jerusalem Post reports.
The Arabic Facebook interface launched in 2009, growing to 10 million users within two years. As it stands, these users represent around a third of all Facebook users in the Arab world, with studies suggesting that two times as many people frequently use Facebook in the Middle East and North Africa rather than buy a daily newspaper.
Middle Eastern PR agency Spot On PR commissioned the study, indicating that Facebook?s Arabic interface has grown 175% a year, double the rate of the social network?s growth worldwide. Algeria saw the biggest rise, growing 423% annually.
The agency includes some interesting statistics:
The Arabic platform?s 10 million users make up about 35% of the region?s Facebook subscribers, up from 24% in May 2010.
56% of Facebook users in Egypt (3.8 million) opt for the Arabic language version. In the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, 41% use Arabic and in Saudi Arabia it?s 61%. By contrast, Morocco has 17% recorded Arabic users and at the bottom of the list is the United Arab Emirates, with its big expatriate population, with just 10%.
According to the MENA Facebook Digest, the Middle East and North Africa is home to approximately 10% of the world?s Facebook users with some 56 million subscribers. This includes some 19 million who joined during the past year, a growth rate of 51%.
The social network played a pivotal role in the Arab Spring, helping to organise protests and give oppressed citizens a voice when feeling pressure from autocratic regimes.
Despite the rise in use, Internet access in the region is still low and there is a high level of illiteracy, suggesting that the majority of users are middle-class and educated citizens.
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Posted on 15th Jun 2011 at 07:41 by Podcast with 8 comments
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bit-tech/blog/~3/twVcw9pIGrE/
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No contender for the Republican nomination has followed the conventional playbook more than Mr. Pawlenty, a former governor of Minnesota who began introducing himself two years ago during a prospecting trip to Iowa. Yet his path has been complicated by fresher faces, an unruly nominating contest and a handful of missteps that swallowed his summer momentum.
The voting will not open for at least six months, but Mr. Pawlenty knows that his performance at the Iowa Straw Poll on Aug. 13 ? fair or not ? will help determine whether his candidacy accelerates or lands in the annals of Republican presidential hopefuls like Elizabeth Dole, Lamar Alexander and Dan Quayle whose campaigns were extinguished here.
The sense of urgency was apparent as Mr. Pawlenty made the case to Republicans that an experienced candidate was preferable to an intriguing one. If Michele Bachmann, his fellow Minnesotan, was on his mind, he did not say so directly, but there was little mistaking his point.
In stop after stop, from a town meeting at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake to a speech at Hickory?s Hall in Ames, Mr. Pawlenty argued that the election of Barack Obama, a state senator-turned-United States senator, offered Exhibit A for why Republicans should choose a nominee with executive governing experience.
?He never ran anything, never did anything and we put him in the Oval Office and wonder why it?s not working,? Mr. Pawlenty said, speaking at a county Republican dinner here. ?It?s not working because he duped the country into thinking he was a reasonable candidate.?
Mr. Pawlenty, who stumbled at the first major presidential debate and has struggled to raise money, came to Iowa to refocus his campaign. After clearing his head during a Fourth of July fishing trip with his family in the remote Arrowhead Region of Minnesota, he settled in for a five-week stretch that is critical to his candidacy.
His television advertisements are on the air, reprising his role in cutting spending and shutting down the Minnesota government during a 2004 transit strike. Glossy brochures are arriving in mailboxes, declaring, ?Leadership isn?t about fancy speeches and empty promises.? A new slogan made its debut: ?Results not rhetoric.?
Few candidates make it to the White House without weathering a difficult period ? as President Obama could testify. But Mr. Pawlenty has an extra set of challenges: he is building the best ground-level organization of any campaign around, but has struggled to tap into the new grass-roots energy coursing through the Republican Party and finding it difficult to secure early commitments because the field is still developing.
In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Pawlenty said he saw no reason to retool his campaign. ?This is like a runway where you start to pick up speed and take off ? I think that?s what we?re doing,? he said. He declined to say whether he believes Mrs. Bachmann has the experience to be president, adding, ?She?s a fellow Minnesotan, so we?re not looking to say things or do things that are disrespectful to her.?
Mrs. Bachmann, who is serving her third term in Congress, is riding a new wave of excitement among conservatives and Tea Party activists and is also looking to break out at the straw poll.
Republicans are still waiting to hear whether Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska will run. Even if they did, neither would be judged by the straw poll, unlike Mr. Pawlenty, who decided months ago to double down on the event to jump-start his candidacy.
Mitt Romney, who won the event four years ago in his first bid for the White House, decided to skip the straw poll this year. So Mr. Pawlenty is largely replicating Mr. Romney?s 2007 strategy by building a sophisticated turnout operation, recruiting supporters to spend the day in Ames and to cast their ballots during a daylong carnival.
He asked voters to treat the straw poll with as much seriousness as Election Day.
?We want to make sure that the person that Iowa puts forward in this race is not just interesting in that moment,? he said, ?but is someone who can become the nominee and can defeat Barack Obama and serve at a historically important level and be president of the United States.?
The message resonated with George P. Foote, 68, who came to see Mr. Pawlenty at a stop in Ames on Wednesday evening. Mr. Foote said he was pleasantly surprised at the candidate?s depth and grasp of wide-ranging issues. ?He?s so real,? he said. ?I would like to vote for somebody like him.?
Mr. Pawlenty is seeking to demonstrate his preparedness by taking a nearly unlimited stream of questions from voters and reporters. He gave detailed answers on military engagement in Libya, the debt ceiling, immigration and other topics. He met with the editorial boards of The Des Moines Register, The Globe Gazette of Mason City and The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier.
Mr. Pawlenty is still working to shake the impression ? an incorrect one, he argues ? that he is not forceful or strong enough to challenge his Republican rivals and, ultimately, Mr. Obama. The storyline began dogging him after he declined to tangle with Mr. Romney over health care at a debate but later conceded he had not been tough enough.
At one gathering on Thursday, a man rose to offer vociferous praise of Mr. Pawlenty?s command of foreign policy and domestic issues, but urged him to adopt a tougher style
?The loudest guy or woman in a bar usually isn?t the toughest ? they?re usually just the loudest,? Mr. Pawlenty replied. He said he was striving to adopt a Ronald Reagan air of strength. ?You don?t have to be a jerk to be strong,? he said. ?You can be nice and strong.?
As he sipped coffee during an interview earlier in the day, he used almost the exact same words to answer a question about his reaction to the ?Minnesota nice? narrative that has settled over his candidacy. He said his record, which includes many stand-offs with Democrats in his state, provided plenty of evidence of his ability to fight.
?I concede that my entertainment quotient isn?t as high as Donald Trump?s,? he said, ?but compared to the people in the race who actually might be president, it?s at least as high as theirs.?
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=029cd7e4f00c2af31b3d3a45dce2364d
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Shuttle has introduced two new desktops to its pantheon of bite-sized performance machines today. Aimed at gamers and professionals, the H7 5800G Pro and H7 5800P Pro are comparably sized to shoebox at 190 x 208 x 326mm (7.48 x 8.18 x 9.29in), but they pack a furious punch courtesy of top-end parts from Intel, AMD and Nvidia.
Both systems are highly configurable and the base 5800G comes equipped with Intel's 3.06GHz Core i7-950, a GeForce GT 430 1GB, 4GB of DDR3 1600MHz RAM, a 500GB 7200RPM hard drive, a DVD burner, Windows 7 Home Premium, and Shuttle's "Integrated Cooling Engine 2" (I.C.E.2) heat pipe technology to keep your precious hardware cool.

If you have the coin to back your desires, that can be bumped up to a six-core Core i7-980X Extreme, a Radeon HD 6970 or GTX 580, 16GB of RAM, dual 2TB HDDs or an SSD/HDD combo, a Blu-ray burner, Windows 7 Ultimate and a liquid-cooling system. Maxed out, you can expect the 5800G's price to skyrocket from $1,300 to beyond $4,100.
Meanwhile, the 5800P also kicks off at $1,300 with a similar base configuration, except it trades the GT 430 for a FirePro V3700. At its finest, the 5800P also breaches the $4,100 mark and it can be outfitted with an i7-975 Extreme, 8GB of RAM, a FirePro V7750 or Quadro 4000, while the rest of the specs match the 5800G, including the liquid cooling.
Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44596-shuttle-releases-two-new-high-performance-compact-desktops.html
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Like in the United States, Australia has always prohibited in-flight phone use, but that changed last July when the Australian Communications and Media Authority cleared airlines to allow flyers to use their phones on aircraft.
Flightglobal reports that Virgin Australia has fitted its most recent craft with AeroMobile connectivity suites that allow voice calls, SMS and 3G data in the air. Currently, the airline is using these units for crew communications, but it?s said that these units will be switched on for consumers soon after a delayed launch earlier this year.
It?s no surprise that Virgin is the first to jump on board in-air connectivity in Australia. They were the market leaders in bringing Wi-Fi to flights a few years ago in other countries.
While Australian regulators have beaten the United States to clearing in-flight phone usage, Americans have enjoyed Wi-Fi on aircraft for quite some time ? something still uncommon in Australia.
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The one thing that President Obama?s Twitter town hall was not? A test of his ability to answer in 140 characters.
For more than an hour, Mr. Obama took questions sent in via Twitter, but answered them the old fashioned way ? verbally.
Questions came over Twitter, submitted with the hashtag #AskObama. But they were read aloud by Jack Dorsey, Twitter?s co-founder and executive chairman, and answered by Mr. Obama as if he were being interviewed for a television news broadcast.
For Mr. Obama, that meant answers of hundreds, even thousands of characters ? a clear violation of basic Twitter etiquette, if not the specific rules of Wednesday?s town hall format.
It was clear from the early questions that Mr. Obama had no intention of trying to squeeze his answers down. He began his response to a question about the debt ceiling with a phrase that accurately suggested a lengthy answer.
?Let, me as quickly as I can, describe what?s at stake with the debt ceiling,? he started, and then started the rest of his answer with, ?Historically??
It took a while.
The questions focused primarily on economic factors, a reflection, Mr. Dorsey said, of the large interest in that subject among Twitter followers.
One asked about clean energy and jobs. Another asked what Mr. Obama would do differently, prompting an answer from the president about the difficulty of resolving the housing crisis. Several tweets followed up on the housing issue, urging the president to do more to help people in trouble with their mortgages.
?Most of this is going to be a function of the market slowly improving as people start having confidence in the economy,? Mr. Obama said in response to a question about the free market and housing. ?Given the size of the housing market, no federal program is going to be able to solve the housing market.?
Somehow among the tens of thousands of regular Americans, a couple of especially non-regular people got to ask questions.
House Speaker John A. Boehner got to ask Mr. Obama ?where are the jobs,? a question that he probably put to the president during a previously secret meeting at the White House over the weekend.
?Obviously, John?s the speaker of the house,? Mr. Obama said, smiling. ?He?s a Republican and so, this is a slightly skewed question. But what he?s right about is that we have not seen fast enough job growth relative to the need.?
And then there was a question from Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times, who asked why Mr. Obama did not get Republicans to agree to an increase in the nation?s debt limit during budget talks at the end of last year.
Mr. Obama called Mr. Kristof ?a great columnist,? but added gently that ?that wasn?t the deal that was available.?
Some ordinary Twitter followers were not happy at questions being posed by the powerful and well-connected.
?Kristof & Boehner questions poor judgment,? said one Twitter message. ?Do NYT reporters and Speaker of the House have too little access to POTUS??
Most of the Twitter queries were not very tough-minded and gave the president the opportunity to repeat his talking points.
He answered several questions about taxes by saying that millionaires and billionaires should be willing to see their taxes go up. He listed his administration?s efforts to help small businesses. And he talked about trying to help veterans coming back from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan find jobs at home.
At the beginning of the hour, Mr. Obama offered his own question, asking Twitter followers how they thought the government should help reduce the deficit. The answers were fairly predictable.
Several suggested cuts in defense spending and ethanol subsidies. They said the government should keep spending on education, and they offered that Mr. Obama should stop sending money to corrupt governments. One suggested ending welfare programs.
For the most part, Mr. Obama agreed, though he defended the government?s role in helping people and said defense spending should be cut carefully.
In the end, Mr. Obama?s questions were pretty typical.
But one thing that did change: the length of the questions. Washington is a town where reporters are famous for their sometimes rambling, three-part questions during presidential news conferences. Maybe if they had to ask their questions in 140 characters, more questions could be asked.
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=974dfc5ed91be43759f9ed5816b23e4f
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Google introduced Priority Inbox last year to much fanfare from those with bottomless inboxes, and today announced that it is taking the sorting options it provides to users a step further in the coming weeks.
The new sorting options include Classic (that?s what you?re used to right now), Priority Inbox, Important first, Unread first, and Starred first.
While Unread first and Starred first are self-explanatory, Important first sounds a lot like Priority Inbox. The difference is that Priority Inbox shows important unread messages first, whereas Important first orders by importance but not by read state.

The tabs you see in the screenshot above will disappear after you settle on a style and use it for around a week, but you?ll always be able to change your sorting style using the Inbox label drop down menu.
Source: http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/07/08/google-to-roll-out-new-inbox-sorting-options/
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Researchers at Stanford University have demonstrated a set of materials that could enable solar cells to use a band of the solar spectrum that otherwise goes to waste. The materials layered on the back of solar cells would convert red and near-infrared light?unusable by today's solar cells?into shorter-wavelength light that the cells can turn into energy. The university researchers will collaborate with the Bosch Research and Technology Center in Palo Alto, California, to demonstrate a system in working solar cells in the next four years.
Even the best of today's silicon solar cells can't use about 30 percent of the light from the sun: that's because the active materials in solar cells can't interact with photons whose energy is too low. But though each of these individual photons is low energy, as a whole they represent a large amount of untapped solar energy that could make solar cells more cost-competitive.
The process, called "upconversion," relies on pairs of dyes that absorb photons of a given wavelength and re-emit them as fewer, shorter-wavelength photons. In this case, the Bosch and Stanford researchers will work on systems that convert near-infrared wavelengths (most of which are unusable by today's solar cells). The leader of the Stanford group, assistant professor Jennifer Dionne, believes the group can improve the sunlight-to-electricity conversion efficiency of amorphous-silicon solar cells from 11 percent to 15 percent.
The concept of upconversion isn't new, but it's never been demonstrated in a working solar cell, says Inna Kozinsky, a senior engineer at Bosch. Upconversion typically requires two types of molecules to absorb relatively high-wavelength photons, combine their energy, and re-emit it as higher-energy, lower-wavelength photons. However, the chances of the molecules encountering each other at the right time when they're in the right energetic states are low. Dionne is developing nanoparticles to add to these systems in order to increase those chances. To make better upconversion systems, Dionne is designing metal nanoparticles that act like tiny optical antennas, directing light in these dye systems in such a way that the dyes are exposed to more light at the right time, which creates more upconverted light, and then directing more of that upconverted light out of the system in the end.
The ultimate vision, says Dionne, is to create a solid. Sheets of such a material could be laid down on the bottom of the cell, separated from the cell itself by an electrically insulating layer. Low-wavelength photons that pass through the active layer would be absorbed by the upconverter layer, then re-emitted back into the active layer as usable, higher-wavelength light.
Kozinsky says Bosch's goal is to demonstrate upconversion of red light in working solar cells in three years, and upconversion of infrared light in four years. Factoring in the time needed to scale up to manufacturing, she says, the technology could be in Bosch's commercial solar cells in seven to 10 years.
Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=74075d710545a86a5639ab2544831718
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An unusual sea creature is emerging from Loch Ness in Scotland: a monster-sized floating doughnut.
Wave energy startup AWS Ocean Energy recently tested this novel wave power device on the surface of the famous lake. Now, thanks to a recent investment from Alstom, a large French power equipment manufacturer, a 60-meter-diameter version could soon produce megawatts of power as it bobs in the open ocean.
The device is divided into cells, each consisting of inflatable rubber diaphragm and a bidirectional air turbine. Each cell faces toward oncoming waves. The diaphragm of each cell contracts under pressure from passing waves, forcing air through the turbines to generate electricity. The air is then fed either into a central collection chamber, or into the diaphragm of another cell elsewhere on the ring. Each time air passes through a turbine, whether exiting or entering a cell, electricity is generated.
"There is an exchange of air between cells which are out-of-phase," says AWS chief executive Simon Grey. "This exchange is taking place via at least two turbines, exiting from one cell and entering another, and the ring main, at any given time."
On June 21, Alstom made a "multimillion" dollar investment that will allow the Inverness, Scotland-based company to scale up AWS-III, it's current generation of this wave energy device.
"AWS-III will generate two kilowatts for every ton of steel," says Grey. "No other device comes within a factor of four of that."
Philippe Gilson, ocean energy director for Alstom, says the size and modular nature of the device made it an attractive investment. "You get economy of scale and redundancy," he says. "If one module fails, the others are still operating."
AWS completed tests with a prototype of the wave-power device in Loch Ness in July 2010. The recent investment will allow the company to test a full-size, single-cell device in ocean waters in 2012. Grey says the hope is to then deploy a 60-meter-diameter floating ring with 12 wave-cell absorbers by the end of 2014. The full-scale device should generate 2.5 megawatts of power, more than twice as much as other wave energy devices deployed to date.
Vicky Coy, a senior consultant with the London-based engineering firm Arup, says the size of the planned device could be a liability. "There are only one or two places in the U.K. that can build something that big," she says. "You would also have to have a large vessel to tow it into position, and finding ports that could accommodate it for servicing would be challenging."
Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=33c14941e46c81638c4b632bfd9fe39e
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Researchers at Stanford University have demonstrated a set of materials that could enable solar cells to use a band of the solar spectrum that otherwise goes to waste. The materials layered on the back of solar cells would convert red and near-infrared light?unusable by today's solar cells?into shorter-wavelength light that the cells can turn into energy. The university researchers will collaborate with the Bosch Research and Technology Center in Palo Alto, California, to demonstrate a system in working solar cells in the next four years.
Even the best of today's silicon solar cells can't use about 30 percent of the light from the sun: that's because the active materials in solar cells can't interact with photons whose energy is too low. But though each of these individual photons is low energy, as a whole they represent a large amount of untapped solar energy that could make solar cells more cost-competitive.
The process, called "upconversion," relies on pairs of dyes that absorb photons of a given wavelength and re-emit them as fewer, shorter-wavelength photons. In this case, the Bosch and Stanford researchers will work on systems that convert near-infrared wavelengths (most of which are unusable by today's solar cells). The leader of the Stanford group, assistant professor Jennifer Dionne, believes the group can improve the sunlight-to-electricity conversion efficiency of amorphous-silicon solar cells from 11 percent to 15 percent.
The concept of upconversion isn't new, but it's never been demonstrated in a working solar cell, says Inna Kozinsky, a senior engineer at Bosch. Upconversion typically requires two types of molecules to absorb relatively high-wavelength photons, combine their energy, and re-emit it as higher-energy, lower-wavelength photons. However, the chances of the molecules encountering each other at the right time when they're in the right energetic states are low. Dionne is developing nanoparticles to add to these systems in order to increase those chances. To make better upconversion systems, Dionne is designing metal nanoparticles that act like tiny optical antennas, directing light in these dye systems in such a way that the dyes are exposed to more light at the right time, which creates more upconverted light, and then directing more of that upconverted light out of the system in the end.
The ultimate vision, says Dionne, is to create a solid. Sheets of such a material could be laid down on the bottom of the cell, separated from the cell itself by an electrically insulating layer. Low-wavelength photons that pass through the active layer would be absorbed by the upconverter layer, then re-emitted back into the active layer as usable, higher-wavelength light.
Kozinsky says Bosch's goal is to demonstrate upconversion of red light in working solar cells in three years, and upconversion of infrared light in four years. Factoring in the time needed to scale up to manufacturing, she says, the technology could be in Bosch's commercial solar cells in seven to 10 years.
Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=74075d710545a86a5639ab2544831718
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