Mayur's Posterous

Google Rolling Out 'Priority Inbox' for Gmail | News & Opinion

 

Days after introducing voice calling within Gmail, Google on Tuesday unveiled a "priority inbox" feature within Gmail intended to highlight important messages.

Priority Inbox will automatically filter incoming Gmail messages to place the most important messages up top, followed by starred e-mails, and then everything else underneath. Priority Inbox can be customized, however, to display the categories of your choice.

Once enabled, there will be a link on the left-hand bar for "Priority Inbox" atop the "Inbox" link, so users can switch back to their regular view if they choose. Users can also choose whether Google takes them to Priority Inbox or regular Inbox upon sign-in.

 

What type of messages will end up in the Priority Inbox? The system is constantly evolving, Rajen Sheth, a senior product manager for Google Enterprise, said in a phone interview, but if there is a thread to which you respond very frequently or certain types of messages that you often read very quickly, they would likely end up designated as priority.

"They start to be useful to people right away," Sheth said.

If Google flags something as priority and you do not agree, you can use the plus and minus buttons atop the page to notify Google that that e-mail is less important.

Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users in the next few days. When it hits your inbox, there will be a "New! Priority Inbox" link on the top, right-hand corner of your Gmail inbox, which you can click to activate.

The idea behind Priority Inbox was to combat inbox information overload, Sheth said, pointing to the extra time the average employee takes to sift through mountains of e-mail. Google has been testing Priority Inbox for "quite awhile" internally, Sheth said, and "testers are spending 6 percent less time managing their e-mail, [which] translates to over a week of additional time each year."

"This is the next evolutionary step in making the inbox more intelligent and letting people deal with information overload," Sheth said. "Over the past 20 years, the inbox has just been a chronological list [of e-mails], and this breaks out of that paradigm."

Google envisions this being useful for the average Gmail user as well as its Google Apps customers, who will be able to access Priority Inbox if their admin has selected "Enable pre-release features" in the control panel.

"Obviously e-mail is tremendously critical to business users, and being able to save time is very, very valuable," Sheth said. "And literally time equals money in the business context, [so] we think this is going to be a great feature for our Google Apps users overall."

"But we also think it's going to have a great impact on our consumer users," he said, pointing to the level of organization Priority Inbox has brought to his own Gmail account.

Given Google's experience with producing relevant results via its core search product, Sheth said taking that to the inbox was a natural progression.

"Google is very well-suited to do this in that we're all about providing you with relevant information," he said. "[We thought that] if we could bring Google.com-like relevancy to your inbox, it would make your inbox a lot better."

 

 

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Exclusive: First Official Pictures T-Mobile G2 | T Mobile News & Phone Reviews From Cell Phone Signal

Exclusive: First Official Pictures T-Mobile G2

By: t-marco August 31st, 2010

We did it again, same as we were the first ones of obtaining the official pictures of the Samsung Vibrant, now we give you the first official pictures of the T-Mobile G2. As you know the T-Mobile G2 is going to be the first HSPA+ phone running speeds up to 11mbps. We believe the G2 will only come in one color.. silver, a completely different way when T-MO launched the Slide 3G or G1.

CPS-official G2

CPS-official G2_1

CPS-official G2_2

The T-Mobile G2 will feature:

  • Android OS w/ HTC Sense
  • 3.7″ Active Matrix OLED display
  • 1 GHz Snapdragon Processor
  • Landscape slide-out QWERTY keyboard
  • 5MP camera with autofocus.
  • 3G HSPA+
  • WiFi + Hotspot capabilities
  • aGPS
  • Bluetooth 2.1 + Enhanced Data Rate

Stay tuned for more information about this phone

Filed Under: Featured, T-Mobile News

I really like this phone. I hope it gets good reviews.

I feel guilty because I also love my N1 to bits :/

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This needs to be made.

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You just read that in his voice.

Cleaveland_thats_nasty
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Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium - Telegraph

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There is no certain bet in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have barely begun to crack the potential of solar power.

Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday - produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.

Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. "It’s the Big One," said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.

"Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels," he said.

Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.

After the Manhattan Project, US physicists in the late 1940s were tempted by thorium for use in civil reactors. It has a higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed. It does not require isotope separation, a big cost saving. But by then America needed the plutonium residue from uranium to build bombs.

"They were really going after the weapons," said Professor Egil Lillestol, a world authority on the thorium fuel-cycle at CERN. "It is almost impossible make nuclear weapons out of thorium because it is too difficult to handle. It wouldn’t be worth trying." It emits too many high gamma rays.

You might have thought that thorium reactors were the answer to every dream but when CERN went to the European Commission for development funds in 1999-2000, they were rebuffed.

Brussels turned to its technical experts, who happened to be French because the French dominate the EU’s nuclear industry. "They didn’t want competition because they had made a huge investment in the old technology," he said.

Another decade was lost. It was a sad triumph of vested interests over scientific progress. "We have very little time to waste because the world is running out of fossil fuels. Renewables can’t replace them. Nuclear fusion is not going work for a century, if ever," he said.

The Norwegian group Aker Solutions has bought Dr Rubbia’s patent for the thorium fuel-cycle, and is working on his design for a proton accelerator at its UK operation.

Victoria Ashley, the project manager, said it could lead to a network of pint-sized 600MW reactors that are lodged underground, can supply small grids, and do not require a safety citadel. It will take £2bn to build the first one, and Aker needs £100mn for the next test phase.

The UK has shown little appetite for what it regards as a "huge paradigm shift to a new technology". Too much work and sunk cost has already gone into the next generation of reactors, which have another 60 years of life.

So Aker is looking for tie-ups with the US, Russia, or China. The Indians have their own projects - none yet built - dating from days when they switched to thorium because their weapons programme prompted a uranium ban.

America should have fewer inhibitions than Europe in creating a leapfrog technology. The US allowed its nuclear industry to stagnate after Three Mile Island in 1979.

Anti-nuclear neorosis is at last ebbing. The White House has approved $8bn in loan guarantees for new reactors, yet America has been strangely passive. Where is the superb confidence that put a man on the moon?

A few US pioneers are exploring a truly radical shift to a liquid fuel based on molten-fluoride salts, an idea once pursued by US physicist Alvin Weinberg at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee in the 1960s. The original documents were retrieved by Mr Sorensen.

Moving away from solid fuel may overcome some of thorium’s "idiosyncracies". "You have to use the right machine. You don’t use diesel in a petrol car: you build a diesel engine," said Mr Sorensen.

Thorium-fluoride reactors can operate at atmospheric temperature. "The plants would be much smaller and less expensive. You wouldn’t need those huge containment domes because there’s no pressurized water in the reactor. It’s close-fitting," he said.

Nuclear power could become routine and unthreatening. But first there is the barrier of establishment prejudice.

When Hungarian scientists led by Leo Szilard tried to alert Washington in late 1939 that the Nazis were working on an atomic bomb, they were brushed off with disbelief. Albert Einstein interceded through the Belgian queen mother, eventually getting a personal envoy into the Oval Office.

Roosevelt initially fobbed him off. He listened more closely at a second meeting over breakfast the next day, then made up his mind within minutes. "This needs action," he told his military aide. It was the birth of the Manhattan Project. As a result, the US had an atomic weapon early enough to deter Stalin from going too far in Europe.

The global energy crunch needs equal "action". If it works, Manhattan II could restore American optimism and strategic leadership at a stroke: if not, it is a boost for US science and surely a more fruitful way to pull the US out of perma-slump than scattershot stimulus.

Even better, team up with China and do it together, for all our sakes.

 

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BBC News - Facebook alternative Diaspora eyes launch date

Facebook alternative Diaspora eyes launch date

Diaspora logo Many believe that it will be difficult to challenge Facebook

An open alternative to Facebook will be launched on 15 September, the developers of the project have said.

Diaspora describes itself as a "privacy-aware, personally-controlled" social network.

The open-source project made headlines earlier this year when Facebook was forced to simplify its privacy settings, after they were criticised for being overly complex and confusing.

The project, developed by four US students, raised $200,000 (£140,000).

"We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th," the team wrote on their blog.

The team said they had spent the summer "building clear, contextual sharing".

"That means an intuitive way for users to decide, and not notice deciding, what content goes to their co-workers and what goes to their drinking buddies. We know that's a hard [user interface] problem and we take it seriously."

The project was started by three computer scientists and one mathematician from New York.

Their idea of building it gained momentum earlier this year during an intense period of criticism of Facebook, the world's largest social network

"We want to put users back in control of what they share," Max Salzberg, one of the founders, told BBC News at the time.

The team turned to the fundraising site Kickstarter to raise the $10,000 they thought they would need to build the network.

In the end the team raised $200,642 from nearly 6,500 people.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, reportedly donated to the project.

The initial release on 15 September will be to "open-source" Diaspora, meaning that the team will make the underlying code available for anyone to see and modify.

Many believe that it will be difficult to challenge Facebook, which now has 500 million users and is currently estimated to be worth $33bn.

 

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Coming Nuclear Flashpoint | The Diplomat

If the West has had any success in Afghanistan, it has been in encouraging India to make a massive investment there of economic aid, infrastructure projects and national prestige. New Delhi is the largest regional investor in the country, and ranks second among all donors. With the West’s looming defeat in Afghanistan, however, India’s success will prove Pyrrhic, and may well set the stage for another, perhaps nuclear, confrontation between Pakistan and India.

In their usual ahistorical manner, Washington and its NATO allies believed their 2001 occupation of the major Afghan cities signified not only the complete defeat of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but also an erasure of two millennia of Afghan history and religion that afforded an opportunity to start the country anew. In this context, they looked for other countries to share the enormous cost of nation-building, and India stepped up to the task without having to be asked twice.

And what has India been up to? Mostly infrastructure projects, such as a 250-kilometre highway from Zaranj near the Iran-Afghanistan border to the town of Delaram on the road that connects Kabul, Kandahar and Heart. Indian firms and Indian-government funding are also rebuilding the Salma Dam power project in Heart Province; building the new Afghan parliament house in Kabul; and constructing a power line that will use 600 transmission towers to bring electricity from Uzbekistan, over the Hindu Kush, to Pol-i-Khumri, and thence to Kabul. These and other projects now employ up to 4000 Indian nationals in Afghanistan. In addition, Indian firms are investing in Afghan agriculture and mining, and New Delhi is providing student scholarships, medical aid programs and training for Afghan police and civil servants.

Clearly, Afghanistan’s battered infrastructure needs this help and much more. Like all foreign aid, however, India’s aid has come with accompaniments the Hamid Karzai regime fully accepts, but which tend to drive Pakistan’s government—and especially its general officers—to distraction and deep strategic worry. New Delhi, for example, has built one of its biggest embassies in the world in Kabul, and with it has built four consulates—some media reports say as many as seven—two of which, in Jalalabad and Kandahar, face Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. In addition, New Delhi has deployed nearly 500 men from the Indian Army’s Border Roads Organization to assist in highway construction, and as many or more paramilitary soldiers from its Indo-Tibetan Police force to guard Indian diplomatic facilities and construction projects.

"India’s role in Afghanistan is hailed as a triumph of soft power. In fact, it has just made conflict with Pakistan more likely."

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Build_it
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Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

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Foxtrot 08/29/2010

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