Tech Today w/ Ken May

Who ever said multiple personality disorder was a bad thing? Certainly not ViewSonic, whose Oak Trail powered ViewPad 10Pro — which does the dual OS dance with Windows 7 and virtualized Android 2.2 — just made its way through the FCC. The government's stamp of approval on its WiFi and AT&T-friendly WCDMA radios means it won't fry our brains, and it shouldn't be long before we see the 10Pro in stores. Of course, we still don't know the price of this device… or the psychiatric costs of its OS switching ways.

ViewSonic ViewPad 10Pro hits the FCC, feds don’t mind its split personality originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 17 Jul 2011 11:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This is one of the first-ever photos of the Bornean rainbow toad, which hasn’t been seen since 1924. More

Earlier this week, Pandora announced that it would finally be dropping its longtime support for Flash in favor of HTML5. The move is one piece of a big redesign for the site, one which will begin rolling out to Pandora One (the $36 / year premium version) subscribers in pieces, as part of a limited testing period before being made available to the service’s entire massive user base.

The timing could have been more ideal, of course. A day after the announcement, Spotify quickly grabbed the attention of those following the online music industry by formally launching in the US. It’s important to note right off the bat, however, that these two services are not really direct competitors, in spite of how some might spin it. Spotify is an all-you-can eat subscription service, making it more akin to the likes of a Rhapsody and Napster. Pandora, on the other hand, is built largely around passive music discovery. You log-in, you enter an artist, and you let the music come to you. This redesign takes that ease of use to a whole new level. Check out our impressions below.

Continue reading Pandora Radio’s HTML5 redesign hands-on

Pandora Radio’s HTML5 redesign hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Jul 2011 12:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, look what we have here: the Dell Latitude XT3, fresh from the all-seeing eyes of the FCC. It wasn’t under federal inspection on its own, mind you, but was merely tagging along with a Broadcom WLAN minicard that dropped in for certification. This notebook / tablet hybrid rocks a dual-core 2.5GHz Core i5-2520, 2GB of RAM, a sunlight-friendly 13-inch matte display, and of course, Broadcom’s own 802.11g WLAN card. Pricing and availability? Still no word, but check out our hands-on for a peek at the hybrid-slate’s multitouch capabilities.

Dell Latitude XT3 convertable tablet hits the FCC, sneaks in with Broadcom filing originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Jul 2011 04:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’ve got some bad news for you. All those A’s and B’s you received in college that made your parents so proud and boosted your self-esteem? Well—they were bogus (sort of).

Graph courtesy of Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, via NY Times

A new Economix blog post by Catherine Rampell of the New York Times discusses a recent study on grade inflation at U.S. colleges since the 1940s. Apparently, college professors have been handing out A’s and B’s willy-nilly in recent decades, with a substantial increase in overly generous grading in the past decade.

By the end of last decade, A’s and B’s accounted for 73% of all grades at public institutions, and 86% of all grades awarded at private institutions, a huge increase over past decades.

The report takes a couple of ideological stabs at explaining this phenomenon—namely, an increase in the “consumer-based approach” to education. But the real answer is probably more involved than that, and certainly more complicated than “students just work super-duper hard now.”

Do you think it’s noticeably easier to get “good grades” these days? I’m sure not many of you are lamenting the comparative loss/reduction of those cringe-inducing C’s, D’s, and F’s. Not that any flossers know what those look like.

[More on the Study: Where A Is Ordinary: The Evolution of American College and University Grading, 1940–2009]

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Give Me an A! Grade Inflation at U.S. Colleges

Internet Explorer 9's dual-pronged approach to blocking access to malicious URLs—SmartScreen Filter to block bad URLs, and Application Reputation to detect untrustworthy executables—provides the best socially engineered malware blocking of any stable browser version, according to NSS Labs' latest report. Internet Explorer 9 blocked 92 percent of malware with its URL-based filtering, and 100 percent with Application-based filtering enabled. Internet Explorer 8, in second place, blocked 90 percent of malware. Tied for third place were Safari 5, Chrome 10, and Firefox 4, each blocking just 13 percent. Bringing up the rear was Opera 11, blocking just 5 percent of malware.

The study only looked at sites that depended on tricking users into installing malicious software; anything that used browser flaws to run wasn’t included in the test. The focus was also exclusively on malware targeting European users, though Internet Explorer 9 has also scored highly in other tests by the company with a global purview. The URLs visited were harvested from spam e-mails, instant messages, and social network posts.

The essentially identical performance of Firefox, Safari, and Chrome is because they use the same source data for their URL blacklisting: Google's Safe Browsing system. Some differences in lag were noticed—Firefox appeared to block bad URLs a little quicker than the other browsers—but overall performance was the same. Opera uses a service operated by anti-virus vendor AVG. Though it scored poorly, its 5 percent nonetheless represents an improvement on the zero percent it used to achieve, prior to integration of that feature. Opera was also substantially slower at blocking sites, averaging 48 hours to block, rather than 13 hours for the other browsers.

Internet Explorer’s SmartFilter URL scanner yielded substantially better results than the other browsers tested. The Application Reputation feature then picked up any malicious executables that the URL scanner didn’t trap. This shows the potential value of the Application Reputation feature; applications earn reputation by being downloaded regularly. An executable that nobody else has ever downloaded has no reputation at all, and so Internet Explorer 9 warns about the file. This means that its behavior is the reverse of the other filtering options in both Internet Explorer and other browsers: they default to permitting access to unknown URLs (as to do otherwise would break the majority of the Internet), only blocking locations that appear problematic. Application Reputation defaults to blocking.

Though this clearly bolsters Internet Explorer’s safety, it comes at a cost, in the form of false positives. Unsigned and unusual downloads generate a warning, even for harmless programs. A Microsoft add-on for Visual Studio fell foul of this problem, for example. Even with the false positives, Microsoft’s approach appears to be more secure.

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Internet Explorer 9 utterly dominates malware-blocking stats

For over half a century, Hollywood has been making computers do whatever they damn well please. Routinely featured on television and in movies, supercomputers, desktop rigs, and laptops are all too often granted near-magical capabilities. Deceit! Here are the top ten lies Hollywood tells about computers, for your amusement and scorn. More

It’s finally here: a 6Gb/s mSATA SSD, rocking those highly coveted SandForce speeds. RunCore’s new T50 series offers maximum sequential reads of 550 MB/s and writes of 470 MB/s, with the help of SandForce’s SF-2281 controller (formerly relegated to the big boys). The little guy’s being marketed for high-end portables and offers 60GB for $198 or 120GB for $358. The outfit’s also touting the new I50 line, serving up more modest 280 MB/s reads and 270 MB/s writes based on SATA 3Gb/s. The I50’s targeted at tablets and laptops, and ranges from $178 for 60GB to $308 for 120GB. We’ll hold our final judgement for when we see these things hit the market in late July — until then, you can peep the full PR after the break.

Continue reading RunCore outs T50 6Gb/s mSATA SSD, SandForce speeds included

RunCore outs T50 6Gb/s mSATA SSD, SandForce speeds included originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Jul 2011 20:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Short Version: The Dragon Go app from Nuance basically takes your average voice search and gives you seven relevant paths to choose from. With Nuance’s natural language processing technology, Dragon Go can understand what it is you’re trying to get out of the search, instead of just throwing a string of words at Google and saying a little prayer. Based on your search, Dragon Go chooses the best possible sites to match your request, complete with social network integration. I found the UI snappy and smooth, and no matter how hard I tried, I was unable to trick the voice detection. Overall, I give it a solid A.

Features:

• Voice search with relevant results
• Social network integration
• Price: Free

Pros:

• Extremely accurate voice detection
• Fresh, smooth UI
• Ability to launch native apps

Cons:

• Google is default engine
• We want to see more supported sites
• Unnecessary tutorial upon launch: the app is self-explanatory



Long Version:
Nuance has come out with the third in its Dragon series of applications, and each time the experience gets better and better. The latest app, Dragon Go, takes Nuance’s voice recognition software to the next level, and adds a way of understanding not just the words spoken, but the intention behind the voice query, through a system called natural language processing. Once the query is digested, Dragon Go spits out results across seven different relevant paths, whether it be YouTube, Ticketmaster, Milo, Yelp!, etc. Wikipedia and Google are always displayed, no matter the search type.

So for example, if I search for “reservations at Del Frisco’s,” the first tab that will come up will be OpenTable, along with tabs from Yelp!, MenuPages, Google, and Wikipedia. If I search for Dallas Mavericks, I’ll get hit with ESPN, Yahoo! Sports, and other relevant tabs. When I search for Dallas Mavericks tickets, I’ll see Ticketmaster pop up first, then StubHub, Google results, etc. If you’re shopping for a new pair of Vans shoes, the fact that you mentioned a product name indicates to the app that you’re shopping, and will serve up eBay, Amazon, and Milo. The same is true of news queries. If I search for “presidential candidates 2012 – New York Times,” the prominent page will be the Times, but the alternate tabs will also show USA Today, CNN, and other news sites’ coverage of the presidential candidates.

Another cool features is that it can launch native applications. A lot of what we search for can be better served through an app. For example, if I want directions from my current location to Penn Station, the best way to get that information is through Google Maps, and Dragon Go knows that. In fact, it won’t just launch the Maps app, it’ll drop the pins and all you have left to do is press Start. It’ll also launch the media player if I say “My Humps by Black Eyed Peas.” I can go a step further and say “Black Eyed Peas on Pandora,” and Dragon Go hooks me up with a Black Eyed Peas channel on Pandora.

Overall, the Dragon Go app is a pretty impressive little search engine, but I believe it’ll be best for queries with a clear destination in mind. This isn’t your average “surfing” search, where you just throw out queries based on curiosity. That’s not to say that you can’t ask some random questions to Dragon Go and get the results you’re looking for, but I wouldn’t see that as a primary use of this app. Rather, I see Dragon Go becoming a sort of planning application. Since it features social media integration and sharing through Facebook, Twitter, email, and SMS, you could basically search for movie showtimes, tickets, reservations on the fly, and blast out your plans to friends within seconds. In short, Dragon Go reduces clicks, and that’s exactly what we want out of search.

I found the actual voice detection itself to be incredibly accurate, even when I tried to throw it off with a few non-English words like Le Pain Quotidien. The interface is easy to use and pretty smooth: relevant tabs are on a carousel up top, and the share tab slides up from the bottom without blocking the page you’re sharing. I also enjoyed the fact that Dragon Go includes Twitter search results within most of your searches, so you can see what people are saying about The Green Hornet, or Lady Gaga’s latest outfit.

I did get a bit frustrated a couple times when my search results defaulted to Google. It mostly happened when I asked questions, rather than giving a direct command. For example, when I asked questions like “How do you cook rice?” or “Where do babies come from?,” Google was my prominent page. This is where I feel like Yahoo! Answers or other forum sites should come into play. Obviously, that takes some contract-signing on the parts of the suits at both those sites and Nuance, but it would be nice to be served maybe the top site on Google’s results page for those queries, instead of just Google. The whole point is to speed up the process, so the better Nuance gets at taking my question and bringing back an answer, the happier we’ll be. Oddly enough, the search for “how to make a baby” brought back results on a map, which is incredibly curious to me.

Either way, the app definitely gets the job done, and I’d say that this is Nuance’s best Dragon app yet. The Dragon Go app is available now as a free download in the Apple App Store for the iPhone, iPod touch, and the iPad.

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App Review: Nuance Dragon Go iOS App