Gmail users will be able to use some of the webmail app's functions while offline. The feature, which Google says is still experimental, is designed for users who don't necessarily have constant access to WiFi or 3G networks but still want to write and manage e-mail wherever they are. Their actions are saved on the computer and updated to Gmail's servers once a Web connection has been established.
Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) More about Google has officially taken Gmail offline. No, the search giant has not put the kibosh on the popular e-mail service; it's added offline functionality, the company announced Tuesday.
While Web-based e-mail services that are accessible from any computer with a Web connection and a browser are convenient, the applications are sometimes hindered by their Internet tether, Google said. Unless users are at a WiFi hotspot or using a smartphone over a snappy network, accessing Web-based email can be a challenge.
The new offline Gmail functionality is an experimental feature in Gmail Labs. Once they add the feature to their Gmail accounts, users will be able to use parts of the Web-based e-mail service offline.
"It should be no surprise to anyone that Google felt compelled to develop an offline version of Gmail. The entire world isn't wired, and for businesses and consumers, they want to work offline sometimes," Matthew Caine, an analyst at Gartner (NYSE: IT) More about Gartner, told TechNewsWorld.
Gearing Up Gmail Offline
To bring Gmail to the offline world, Google uses Gears, a set of programming tools designed to enable Web developers to create offline versions of Web-based applications. Gears downloads a local cache of a user's e-mail. While a subscriber is connected to the network, the cache is synchronized with Gmail's servers.
When the connection is lost, Gmail will automatically switch into offline mode using the data previously stored on the computer's hard drive rather than data sent across the network. That way, users can continue to use the application.
They can read messages, star and label them, and do many of the same things they are accustomed to doing while using their webmail online, according to Google. Any messages that are sent while the application is offline are placed in the user's outbox and sent automatically when Gmail detects an Internet connection.
For users who are "borrowing" their Internet connection from a neighbor or just have a slow or unreliable connection, there is a so-called flaky connection mode. It uses the local cache as if the user is disconnected, but still synchronizes e-mail with the server Linux MPS Pro - Focus on Your Business - Not Your IT Infrastructure. $599.95/month. Click to learn more. in the background. The goal, Google said, is to provide nearly the same browser-based Gmail experience regardless of whether a user is using the data cached on the computer or talking directly to Gmail's server.
Google cautions users that while the company has been using Offline Gmail internally for a while, it is still considered an experimental feature. It will be available in the U.S. and the UK over the next few days.
"You could use a POP or IMAC client on the back end, but what's interesting is that this is an in-browser client and requires very little fuss and bother to set up. It has the potential to bring [Gmail] to the masses offline," Caine said.
"It's a slightly different paradigm -- you're still working in the browser and that architecture, plus the ease of installation will make it attractive compared to the old paradigm of finding Thunderbird and setting it up," he added.
Coffee can do more than just fuel you through an afternoon slump. It might also power your car.
That's the idea behind a new study that turned used coffee grounds into biodiesel fuel. Coffee will probably never replace petroleum, but discarded cappuccino scraps might someday help reduce our impact on the environment, say the study's authors. They imagine a day when the byproducts of your latte end up in the gas tank of your car -- with hardly any waste left behind.
"It's a very simple two-step process," said Susanta Mohapatra, a chemical engineer at the University of Nevada, Reno. "We can definitely make a big impact on our environment with fuel made out of nature."
Scientists have known for decades that coffee beans contain oil. Mohapatra and colleagues, however, were the first to analyze coffee grounds.
Used grounds usually end up in landfills, though gardeners sometimes use them as compost material. The scientists collected used grounds from Starbucks, which gives bags of grounds away as part of the company's "Grounds for your Garden" program.
To prepare the grounds for analysis, the team first dried them in an oven. They mixed the resulting powder with a combination of solvents that caused the oil to separate from the solution. They extracted the oil, saving the solvents for the next round of processing. The remains could still be used as compost, ethanol feedstock, and fuel pellets.
"We're not wasting anything," Mohaptra told Discovery News. "It's a recycling process."
The study showed that used grounds contain about 15 percent oil by weight, depending on the type of coffee. That's not too far off the proportions in soybean, rapeseed, and palm oils, which are also used as sources for biodiesel. And coffee oil is more stable than these other sources because of its high antioxidant content, found the study, which appeared in December in the American Chemical Society's Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
Around the world, growers produce more than 16 billion pounds of coffee each year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The scientists estimate that spent grounds could add 340 million gallons of biodiesel to the global fuel supply.
Mohapatra envisions a streamlined coffee recycling system, in which the same trucks that deliver beans to Starbucks could pick up the brewed waste and head to a biodiesel plant. The plant would be close by, to save on transportation costs and emissions.
Coffee grounds appear to produce high-quality oil, granted Robert McCormick, an engineer at The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. But, he said, coffee probably won't be a practical solution to the world's energy needs.
For one thing, the country's main sources of biodiesel -- cooking oil and animal fat -- are 100 percent oil, compared to coffee's 15 percent. And even when a cafe brews a large amount of coffee, relatively few grounds are left behind. It takes 50 gallons of spent grounds to produce just 1 gallon of oil, Mohapatra said.
Still, McCormick commends the researchers for thinking outside the box about the world's energy issues.
"Anything that takes a waste product and makes a fuel out of it is really a positive," he said. "This is pretty cool."
Two photographs of Madonna set to appear in a Christie's auction next month will probably sell for at least $10,000 each, according to estimates posted on the company's Web site.
One, a full-frontal nude black-and-white photograph of the singer, was taken in 1979 by celebrated American photographer Lee Friedlander for a series of nudes he was working on, said Milena Sales, a spokeswoman for the auction house.
Madonna was about 20 when the photograph, one of several, was taken.
A handful from the shoot appeared in Playboy magazine in 1985, Sales said. Christie's put price estimates for the photograph at $10,000 to $15,000.
The second photograph of Madonna was taken in the 1980s by Helmut Newton.
In the Newton photograph, which is in color, Madonna is wearing a short dress and black stockings with garters. The circumstances behind the photo shoot were not immediately clear.
The auction will take place in New York on February 12.
From the noisy and lovable Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to the time-traveling DeLorean in "Back to the Future," flying cars have been a fixture of movies and science fiction that never quite cut it in the real world -- until now.
A flying car devised by a British inventor and a team of engineers took off from London on Wednesday on an epic journey to Timbuktu, Mali, in West Africa -- a trip they hope will prove the fantasy has become reality.
The "Skycar" is a road-legal all-terrain buggy with a huge rear propeller and a fabric wing, the result of 18 months of design and research.
"We started with a car rather than starting with an aircraft and made a car into an aircraft," said Skycar's creator, Giles Cardozo. "It's a really exciting piece of kit to drive but of course, it also flies."
The Skycar's 3,720-mile (6,000-kilometer) trip will take it through France, Spain and Morocco, then the Western Sahara, Mauritania and Mali to the famously isolated city of Timbuktu.
Its design gives it the performance of a motorbike while also allowing it to fly over impassable terrain and the sand seas of the Sahara, the designers said. They hope to fly over the Straits of Gibraltar.
In propeller mode, the engine makes a lot of noise. The two-person seat is a tight fit with room for a driver and a passenger who controls the car in flight.
Experienced adventurer Neil Laughton is the designated pilot of the craft on its epic journey.
"I'm a bit nervous, but that's what adventure and exploration's all about," Laughton told CNN.
Although some eccentric-looking flying cars have been attempted before, Cardozo and his team of engineers say advances in flexible wing technology have made their car more practical, with more precise handling and increased safety over traditional rigid wings.
The flexible wing is folded and packed in the back of the car when driving on the road and can deploy immediately when it is ready to fly.
The car, which runs on biofuel, has a takeoff speed of 73 km/h (45 mph) and requires a distance of less than 200 meters (220 yards), meaning it can take off on a beach or in a park.
He admits the Skycar has trouble in high wind or turbulence, but it has some safety measures.
"It will be easier and safer to fly than any other aircraft, as it has no pitch control and (is) therefore impossible to stall or dive," the inventors say. "Should the engine fail, the pilot would simply glide down into the nearest field or strip of sandy desert. In the event of catastrophic wing failure, car connection system failure or mid-air collision, an emergency ballistic reserve parachute can be deployed."
The expedition hopes to help out some charities along the way, and if it is successful the car's creators hope to market it commercially.
"If people see the fun in this and it catches on, I think it could be a great fun toy," Cardozo said. "It's not your everyday means of transport by any means, but it's a great, fun alternative way of getting around -- like a quad bike, like a Jet Ski, like anything like that."
Cardozo hopes his "toy" will arrive in Timbuktu by late February, proving that flying cars aren't just the stuff of movies or children's stories anymore.
Watch Video
Fans of kung fu legend Bruce Lee will soon be able to take a tour of the star’s residence.
Hong Kong property tycoon Yu Pang-lin has been given the green light to transform the two-storey town house into a museum honouring the film icon.
The 5,700 square-foot, two-storey town house in a Kowloon suburb where Lee spent the last months of his life is currently a love motel which provided hourly room rentals.
Bruce Lee fans have been struggling for years to save the house from such an inglorious fate and Yu finally made a surprise decision last year to donate it to the city where the martial arts master first shot to fame.
“Both sides have now reached a consensus to go ahead and essentially proceed with this good plan,” Yu told reporters after a meeting with government officials.
“I’m 88 years old now and hope that while I’m still alive I’ll be able to see this Bruce Lee museum completed,” he added.
Hong Kong’s Commerce and Economic Development Bureau has agreed to preserve the “original outlook of the building and its features”, recreating parts of the home to revitalise it as a long term sustainable tourism attraction.
Yu said that he wants the site to include a library, martial arts centre and a movie theatre to fully commemorate Lee’s life a philosophy.
Born in San Francisco, Lee was widely regarded as the most influential martial artist of the twentieth century. His movies “Fist of Fury,” “Game of Death” and “Enter the Dragon” changed and influenced martial arts films in Hong Kong and the rest of the world.
Hong Kong’s Bruce Lee fan club welcomed the breakthrough plan, and expressed hopes that the residence will prove to be as big a draw as other global memorial sites such as the Beatles Story in Liverpool and Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion in Tennessee.
It wasn't a very Happy New Year for owners of Microsoft's Zune.
Thousands of the MP3 music players froze on New Year's Eve around the world due to what Microsoft described as a bug in the device's internal clock.
The bug only affected the original, 30-gigabyte version of the music player that was introduced by the Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft in 2006 as its answer to Apple's wildly popular iPod.
Later devices with 80GB and 120GB of memory were not affected.
Microsoft was alerted to the problem when Zune forums and discussion boards lit up overnight with complaints from Zune owners around the world that their devices players had stopped working.
Many of the messages were signed "Victim of the December 31st 2008 Zune 30 Meltdown!" and the mass Zune stoppage gave rise to puns such as "Zunesday" and "Z2K," a reference to the millennium Y2K bug.
Microsoft initially put out a statement saying owners of the 30GB Zune may experience "issues" when booting up the device, asked for patience and apologized for the inconvenience.
Several hours later, another statement on Microsoft's zune.net explained the problem and said it would essentially self-resolve.
"There is a bug in the internal clock driver causing the 30GB device to improperly handle the last day of a leap year," Microsoft said.
"The issue should be resolved over the next 24 hours as the time change moves to January 1, 2009," it said. "We expect the internal clock on the Zune 30GB devices will automatically reset tomorrow.
"By tomorrow you should allow the battery to fully run out of power before the unit can restart successfully then simply ensure that your device is recharged, then turn it back on," it advised users.
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)
