Yeah, we know. Although experts have been congratulating Apple on how competitive the iPad prices are, when you actually have to part with 500 bucks or more (if you want 3G which is a must-have for such a device), it hurts.
There is a solution that won’t cost you a dime, though. It also won’t get you an iPad, but you can perhaps fool someone with poor eyesight you have one, at least for a second. Yes, we’re talking about a paper iPad.
To make one yourself, you’ll need these two PNG files: the front and the back. Print them, cut them out, and voila – your brand new paper iPad is ready to…well, it can’t really do anything except sit on your desk, but considering the price is zero, we won’t hold it against it.
Tags: diy, Fun, ipad, paper
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Yeah, we know. Although experts have been congratulating Apple on how competitive the iPad prices are, when you actually have to part with 500 bucks or more (if you want 3G, which is a must-have for such a device), it hurts.
There is a solution that won’t cost you a dime, though. It also won’t get you an iPad, but you can perhaps fool someone with poor eyesight into thinking that you have one, at least for a second. Yes, we’re talking about a paper iPad.
To make one yourself, you’ll need these two PNG files: the front and the back. Print them, cut them out, and voila — your brand-new paper iPad is ready to… well, it can’t really do anything except sit on your desk, but considering the price is zero, we won’t hold it against it.
Tags: diy, Fun, ipad, paper
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Orli Yakuel noticed that Google has quietly added a new icon in the ‘Compose Mail’ window of its free webmail service Gmail, enabling users to run search queries from within the interface and insert results and URLs straight into drafted e-mails or open chat conversations.
This is an expansion of a Google Labs feature, simply dubbed ‘Google Search’, that was introduced back in April 2009 as an optional setting in Gmail.
The first iteration of the labs feature added a ‘Web Search’ box next to the main column (left side on the screenshot) that provides much of the same functionality, only you needed to remember to go to the side column to run a search. Now, enabling the feature also adds an icon to the top toolbar in the ‘Compose Mail’ window, where you can also customize colors and fonts for your message, add links and emoticons and more.
It’s unclear when the icon was added, but we can’t retrieve any mention about this on the Gmail blog and today marks the first time we’ve seen it.
The icon opens up a search box at the bottom of your screen and lets you run a search like you would using the regular Google search interface. A small arrow opens up a limited menu where you can paste results, paste URL and send by e-mail (which is kind of redundant in this case, since you’re already in a new e-mail). If you have a chat conversation open in Gmail, you’ll also get an extra option to send search results to your contact.
Obviously, this isn’t a ground-breaking feature, but if you’re a Gmail user you might want to (re-)enable the Labs feature in Settings. Guaranteed to save you quite some time.
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Oracle's plans for Java and the proposed Sun Cloud public computing platform became clearer Wednesday, with Oracle executives giving another big thumbs-up to Java but a thumbs-down to Sun Cloud.
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[Editor: This is the fifth of a five-part series on virtualization
and cloud topics from Ivo Dujmovic, an architect in our Applications
Technology Integration group.]Breaking news: you can now
achieve live migration of E-Business Suite instances on Oracle VM
(OVM). This is the High Availability and Fault Tolerance Holy Grail.
In an environment configured to support live migration, end-user
sessions running on one node in a virtual machine server can be
migrated transparently to a different node on a different virtual
machine server. You have asked for this functionality for more than a
dozen years and many Oracle partners offer solutions to achieve this.
After all these years, Oracle can provide you a solution for E-Business
Suite environments using Oracle VM.
Why was this so hard for
Oracle E-Business Suite? Well, the short answer is that we have
hundreds of products using many different technologies as part of the
E-Business Suite, and many of them had complicated session state
handling (some in the database, some on the middle-tier), caches that
needed to be kept synchronized, and so on. While all technical
problems are soluble, this one was just not feasible to solve within
E-Business Suite itself.
Virtualization Changes Things
In
an conventional (non-virtualized) architecture, the failure of a
specific application tier node would force a logout of all end-users
with sessions on that particular node. Any transactions that were
mid-stream on that application tier node would have been lost. On a
virtualized platform, end-user sessions can be migrated from one
machine to another without the end-user noticing.
OVM's live
migration feature has some requirements, including the need to have
look-alike machines on same subnet. These requirements are discussed
in detail in:
Oracle
VM also currently restarts the VM if the Virtual Machine Server fails,
which would mean the end-user session does need to be restarted. We
expect that these behaviors should improve over time.
In addition to the great live migration feature, OVM also has cloning functionality, which work seamlessly work if you use our
EBS templates or
virtualization kit.
Your Feedback is WelcomeThis concludes my mini-series on virtualization and the E-Business Suite. We're
extremely interested in hearing about your use cases and your
experiences with our new templates and virtualization kit. Tell us
what you think via our new
OVM Templates discussion forum.
ReferencesRelated Articles
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Apple today introduced iPad, a revolutionary device for browsing the web, reading and sending email, enjoying photos, watching videos, playing games, reading e-books, and much more. Its high-resolution Multi-Touch display lets you interact with content — including 12 innovative new apps designed especially for iPad and almost all of the 140,000 apps available on the App Store. At just 0.5 inches thick and 1.5 pounds, iPad is thinner and lighter than any laptop or notebook. iPad will be available in March starting at the breakthrough price of just $499.
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Remember the dustup last summer over Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice app for the iPhone? Everyone was pointing fingers and even the FCC got involved. Michael was so upset that he quit the iPhone rather than give up his Google Voice. Well, now he can come back because Google Voice is finally on the iPhone via its browser, and Apple can’t really do anything about it..
Google Voice will become available today for both the iPhone and Palm Pre/Pixi via a new mobile Website which will go live later today at http://m.google.com/voice. The new Google Voice mobile site shows your inbox with transcribed calls, which you can play from the browser. You can also send SMS messages or dial from the browser. The application ends up making a local call through your cell phone to Google Voice, which then routes your call through its own lines. When someone gets the call, they see your Google Voice number instead of your AT&T number. And when you get a voicemail, a notification even pops up on your iPhone with the transcribed message (through SMS).
It is built on HTML5 with most of the functionality of the original iPhone app, except that it cannot access the local contact list in your iPhone’s address book. It lets you manage a separate Google Voice contact list which is kept in the cloud instead. Google Voice voice routes your calls through its servers and acts as a new hub through which you can manage calls and forward them to various phones. You can also manage your settings and various phone numbers. The HTML5 makes it very fast, allows for local caching of data, and supports the voice tags necessary to play the audio voicemails through the browser.
Mobile apps like Google Voice really show what can be done in the browser and point to an alternative way to build sophisticated apps for the iPhone without going through the gatekeepers in Cupertino. VoiceCentral, one of the third-party Google Voice apps that was also pulled from the App store, created a similar browser-based version of Google Voice for the iPhone. Both of these apps went the browser route because they didn’t have any other choice, but you can hardly tell them apart from regular apps. Once mobile phones allow access to deeper phone functions such as the local contact list from the browser, there will be even less reason to create a device specific app. The Web, after all, supports many different platforms. With a few tweaks to the UI, the mobile Google Voice site also works on Palm phones.
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Google just launched a nice feature on Google Reader: the ability to keep an eye on pages for changes. This works even if the page doesn’t have its own RSS feed. This sort of thing is very handy. You could use it to spot new things on a privacy policy page or watch for changes in the executives page at another search engine.
Check out the blog post, but it’s easy to use: just add any url to Google Reader.
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One of the most-needed missing features in the Google Wave preview rolls out this week: user access permissions.
Now, rather than everyone being able to edit everyone else's blips in a total free-for-all, the creator of a wave can add users and groups and give them either full access to edit everything, or read-only access. The binary choice is still too limiting, but GOOG says that "Reply only" access is on its way.
To limit a contact's access to a blip you created, click on their icon on the top of the wave and choose "Read only" from the drop-down, as shown. You can give both individual users and groups read-only access; though individual access permissions trump that of the groups. (For example, if the public group has read-only access, you can grant a single user full access to edit, even though that person's part of the group.) You can only set permissions for waves you have created.
Along with this first iteration of access permissions, the Wave team also added a "Restore" button to Wave's playback feature. If a wave gets destroyed beyond easy repair, you can use playback to roll it back to a former version of itself.
Even though this means quite a bit of revision to the book, it's great to see Wave evolving into something much more usable. I've also updated the Wave vs. the Rest chart to reflect this new feature.
Smarterware is Lifehacker editor emeritus Gina Trapani's new home away from 'hacker. To get all of the latest from Smarterware, be sure to subscribe to the Smarterware RSS feed. For more, check out Gina's weekly Smarterware feature here on Lifehacker.
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It’s official: the European Commission has granted regulatory approval for Oracle to acquire Sun Microsystems for approximately $7.4 billion, without further conditions. In a statement released moments ago, Oracle says it expects unconditional approval from China and Russia as well and intends to close the transaction shortly.
Oracle will host an all-day live event for customers, partners, press and analysts on January 27th, 2010 at 9:00 AM Pacific time at its headquarters in Redwood Shores, California.
Just in case you weren’t planning on attending or following the major Apple event.
The approval comes after an in-depth antitrust investigation opened in September amid concerns that Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL would stifle competition in the database market. In August 2009, the Departement of Justice had already given the deal green light.
From the press release:
The Commission’s in-depth investigation showed that although MySQL and Oracle compete in certain parts of the database market, they are not close competitors in others, such as the high-end segment.
Given the open source nature of MySQL, the Commission also assessed Oracle’s ability and incentive to remove the constraint exerted by MySQL after the merger and the extent to which this constraint could, if necessary, be replaced by other actors on the database market.
“I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned. Oracle’s acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products,” said Neelie Kroes, the European antitrust commissioner.
The database market is highly concentrated with the three main proprietary database vendors – Oracle, IBM and Microsoft – accounting for approximately 85% of the market in terms of revenue, the commission added.
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