2018 Wholesale Gold-Plated Jewelry blogs

Google wants to improve the Greasemonkey support, for example by confining particular Greasemonkey scripts to particular Web pages and letting the browser update its scripts as it’s running.

At this stage, enabling Greasemonkey requires people to use a cutting-edge developer version of the open-source browser and to launch it with a “–enable-greasemonkey” option set.

Greasemonkey, a Firefox customization tool popular among high-powered Web surfers, is coming to Google Chrome browser.

Aaron Boodman, a Greasemonkey author and a Google programmer who’s active in the Gears project, contributed Greasemonkey support to Chrome, and the Google Operating System blog picked up on the change.

Greasemonkey lets people run scripts that modify Web page appearance. For example, back when Google’s Gmail service lacked a “delete” button, people could add one by installing the Greasemonkey extension for
Firefox then downloading a particular customization script.

Related: Should Starbucks ban laptops?

Starbucks’ Wi-Fi is even free–although not infinitely. Customers (with Starbucks cash cards) get two hours for nothing, after which they have to pay. But if you have free access to Starbucks’ AT&T Wi-Fi via another avenue, such as your DSL account, they won’t eject you.

Ironically, it strikes me that the move by independent coffee shops to evict third place workers may just drive those people over to Starbucks and the other chains. Sure, all businesses need paying customers and not just window dressing, but my guess is that after turning away those people who have become freelancers and consultants by circumstance and not by choice, they won’t come back when their fortunes recover.

Starbucks’ official response to this movement: “We strive to create a welcoming environment for all of our customers. We do not have any time limits for being in our stores, and continue to focus on making the Third Place experience for every Starbucks customer.”

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that some New York coffee shops were pulling the plug on customers that park themselves at tables, open their laptops, and hang out for hours, buying perhaps only a single latte as their cafe rental fee.

While independent coffee shops that are struggling to make ends meet may see the need to flush out the low-revenue laptop users, the major chains are not so strapped. Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, in fact, was a big proponent of building a comfortable third place for people to work and socialize. (The first two places being home and the traditional office.) It’s part of the company’s mission.

A good point is also made by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, who writes that, “Dell may also be seeing customers who would otherwise buy a dual-core 13-inch or 14-inch Inspiron choosing the lower priced (and less profitable) 12 inch Netbook instead. That’s something they aren’t going to be happy about.”

Bottom line, if you’re a customer in the United States who wants a brand new Mini 9, you can order it from this link. Also, both the Mini 9 and Mini 12 are still available for U.S. customers through @DellOutlet. Click on the respective product links to see what configurations we’ve got on hand.

So, should you read anything into this as far as Dell’s commitment to the Netbook space? Nope. It really boils down to this: for a lot of customers, 10-inch displays are the sweet spot for Netbooks. That’s why we offer two different 10-inch Inspiron Netbooks for Mini 10 and the Mini 10v. And on the Latitude side, the Latitude 2100 Netbook is finding a home in schools all over the place. Portability is one of the key points for Netbook customers. Larger notebooks require a little more horsepower to be really useful. More to come from Dell on that later.

Will we see a move to bigger Netbooks in the future (11.6-inch models are starting to trickle out), or have we reached the perfect balance with the 10-inch screen? Or perhaps new developments such as Nvidia’s Ion GPU and Intel’s next-gen Atom processors will clear the way for a entire class of laptops of all sizes, powered by low-cost hardware. Weigh in in the comments section below.

Lenovo and Samsung also have 12-inch Netbooks (and HP has the Netbook-like HP dv2, with AMD’s Neo processor), but we’ve always felt that when a Netbook moves up to the 12-inch size, there’s a psychological difference in consumers’ expectations. When you have a chassis that gets closer to the look and feel of a regular dual-core laptop, you expect it to behave like a standard laptop, and the performance limitations of Netbooks are harder to overlook.

Of the Mini 12, which never really hit its stride, Dell says on its corporate blog:

Additionally, Dell saddled its Mini 12 with
Windows Vista–a kiss of death for a Netbook if there ever was one.

Dell’s Netbook line, creatively called the Mini, has seen a few lineup swaps recently. While most of the Netbook market has gravitated to 10-inch screens, Dell was one of only a handful of PC makers simultaneously hawking smaller 9-inch Netbooks, as well as (relatively) massive 12-inch ones. Now that 12-inch model has officially been given the boot, while the 9-inch, which had been pulled off Dell’s official list of systems in June, is still available in a handful of configurations (as noted a few weeks ago by our own Sharon Vaknin).

After you sign up for the site and choose a membership (it costs $24.95 per month or $197.95 per year), you can immediately start searching through the app’s listings of eBay products. When you find the product you’re looking to sell, it provides you with information on the item’s average bid, how much the average listing makes, and how page design affected profits. The app even provides you with information on which day is best to list the product and end your auction. It’s a powerful tool.

HammerTap features the number of listings and the keywords matching your query.

Photoblat allows you to upload images in no time.

Vendio lets you create a store in no time.

HammerTap is a useful tool, but beware that it costs $19.95 per month after a 10-day free trial.

Selling Manager lets you relist items quickly.

ListingTicker will show all your recent listings.

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

2. Vendio: Vendio has some offerings that should appeal to you.

My top 3

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Photoblat Photoblat is a neat utility if you want to save some money on adding photos to your eBay listings. The site allows you to upload photos to the service. From there, you can add those photos to your eBay listings page through tools like eBay’s Blackthorne Pro. All the photos are hosted on the Photoblat site. Photoblat charges $3.99 per month for access to its service.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

eBay Market Researcher Terapeek’s eBay Market Researcher tool is a fine way to determine how to get the most out of your listing.

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

ListingTicker ListingTicker is a simple tool that helps you post all your listings on your blog or Web site. The site asks you to input your eBay user ID. It then creates a widget to be placed on your site. It shows all your auctions that will be ending soon. It also provides your site’s visitors with a search box in case they want to find something else.

Auctiva is quite powerful. You can create side-scrolling galleries with pictures you upload to the site (you’re allowed 1GB of storage), change the color of your listing page, and issue invoices. It won’t help you determine if you’re selling products that eBay users want, but it will help you easily manage your auctions. Admittedly, Auctiva is for active sellers, but at $9.95 per month for so many nice features, it’s an affordable offering.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

3. ListingTicker: having the option of listing all your eBay auctions is quite convenient.

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

eBay tools

Auctiva helps you add inventory and track it on the site.

Toolhaus displays how users view you.

Toolhaus Toolhaus is a service that allows you to see the reliability of an eBay user. It lists all the feedback the user has received, including both positive and negative reviews. It’s not the most useful app in this roundup, since it basically lists information you’ll find on eBay, but it does come in handy when you want to quickly determine if you can trust users.

Vendio’s listing-creation tool lets you display images, set up promotions, and track all the items that were sold on eBay. The site also tracks customers, displaying their name, the last time they purchased products from you, when they bought those products, and more. Vendio is free to use, but it takes up to 1.95 percent of your sales that are generated through the service.

HammerTap HammerTap is another eBay market research tool that provides basic information, like the number of active item’s listings, how many times a product has sold, and the average sales price of those auctions. One of the app’s nicest features is its “will it sell?” offering, which displays a scale, showing the percentage chance of the product selling on eBay.

1. Auctiva: with so many options and a relatively affordable price, Auctiva takes the top spot.

Auctiva Auctiva is a full-featured product that allows you to use a variety of templates and modules to help you sell products more effectively on eBay.

Selling Manager eBay’s Selling Manager app is installed into the My eBay section of a seller’s listing page. The app allows you to manage all your listings in one place. You can also create customized e-mail templates to send to buyers who won your auction. If the buyer doesn’t pay, it automatically relists your item. If you want all these options, you’ll be forced to pay $15.99 per month. The free version of the Web-based app will let you create a professional listing and edit your listings in bulk.

eBay Market Researcher provides you with a variety of research tools.

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Vendio Vendio is an online shopping platform. If you want to sell products on your site, it will help you out. But Vendio’s real value is in its marketplace tools that help you improve your listings on eBay.

After Amazon experienced some difficulties last week with its selling options in the Amazon Marketplace, it made me wonder if anyone decided to start selling some of their merchandise on eBay. If so, they would join thousands of others who are using the online auction site to make a few extra bucks. If that’s your goal, check out some of these services for eBay sellers.

It would also be a surprise if Apple didn’t update its
iPod Touch line, or at least cut prices to match the pricing of Microsoft’s new Zune HD, which goes on sale September 15. It’s also reasonable to think that some of the features from the
iPhone 3GS, such as its video camera, might make their way over to the iPod Touch.

Expect a next-gen digital album experience, including cover art, from Apple in September, music insiders say.

And there’s plenty of speculation that Apple CEO Steve Jobs will make an appearance at the September event.

Whatever else Apple intends to announce at the still not officially announced event, expect Cocktail to be part of it. An Apple spokesman declined to comment on Friday.

The music industry is trying to reinvigorate the digital music experience while at the same time encourage people to buy albums, or at least pay more for packaged songs.

(Credit:
Polydor/Jimi Hendrix: Bold As Love)

Some are still holding out hope that Apple will introduce a tablet, which many think will be akin to a large iPod Touch. However, that is appearing less likely, with several Web sites saying a 2010 launch is more reasonable.

Peter Kafka at All Things Digital reported Thursday that Apple is planning to make a major announcement the week of September 7, and that was a big scoop.

Music fans once enjoyed poring over liner notes or album art from their favorite acts. The idea now is to offer some of the same kinds of experiences but use digital technology to modernize it.

But much of the substance of Apple’s announcement–at least as it relates to music–is old news, according to multiple music industry sources. Last month, the Financial Times broke the story that Apple is working on the next-generation album cover, code named Cocktail.

CNET staff writer Ina Fried contributed to this report.

Update: Also of note, Apple has current promotion that offers educational buyers a free iPod Touch with purchase of a
Mac runs. And that promotion just happens to run through Sept. 8. Hmmm….

Cocktail will feature interactive material, including photos, lyric sheets, liner notes and clips from music videos, according to the Financial Times. As first reported by CNET News, the labels are planning a revamped digital album experience called CMX, which would be offered to other online music stores.

If you’re wondering how the familiar term “gas mileage” translates to a car that runs partially on electric batteries, you’re not alone.

Plug-in hybrids run almost exclusively on battery power for the first 20 or 40 miles, with the battery working with the gasoline engine after that. Driving mainly off the battery will be cheaper in part because electric motors are relatively efficient. So the fuel economy for a 40-mile drive will be substantially better than when a person drives 200 miles in a plug-in hybrid, since the bulk of the driving will be fueled by the gasoline engine, Gonder explained.

The annual fuel cost of Idaho National Labs’ plug-in Priuses ranged from $987 a year–in the case of an aggressive driver who never recharges from an outlet–to $478 per year with the driver charging about every 30 miles and seeking to maximize fuel economy. The average came to $789 per year with daily charging, from the equivalent of 55 mile per gallon mileage.

Industry group SAE International plans to recommend that the Environmental Protection Agency use “electricity per mile” in addition to the familiar miles-per-gallon rating for plug-in electric vehicles, according to a member of the SAE committee tasked with the job. The EPA is working on mileage ratings for plug-ins, which are poised to enter the market, and reviewing its rules for displaying fuel economy on car stickers.

To address that issue, NREL researchers devised a formula to convert plug-in hybrid car performance on dynamometers to reflect actual driving performance, he said.

But labels aren’t the only problems that new auto technologies introduce. The automated tests used to measure fuel economy before vehicles are sold need to be adjusted as well, according to NREL researchers.

Because efficiency for gas-electric hybrids is far more tricky than gasoline-only vehicles, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory recently said that it has developed a method researchers say accurately reflects real-world mileage of plug-in hybrids, which can vary greatly with driver behavior.

Within six months, an SAE committee plans to recommend to the EPA that plug-ins come with fuel-economy stickers that show both miles per gallon and electricity per mile, said Jeff Gonder, a research engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and a member of the committee.

To get real-world mileage for a plug-in hybrid, researchers have come up with a formula to convert standard tests for a chassis dynamometer, seen here at Argonne National Laboratory, into mileage ratings.

To come up with a mileage rating today, cars run a course on a machine called a dynamometer–essentially a treadmill fitted for cars and trucks–and the results are converted into miles per gallon. The current conversions don’t work well because plug-ins operate in two modes–the first 20 or so miles when the car runs mainly on batteries and then in the “charge sustaining” mode for longer rides, said Gonder.

“We’re trying to set appropriate expectations for what vehicles will get over a long period of time,” said Gonder. “We’re trying to predict the average (mileage) based on how often they drive between recharging.”

The data also made clear that the cost of operating a plug-in hybrid will vary significantly based on driving style and frequency of charging.

Updated on October 6 at 11:30 a.m. PT with corrected credit on photo caption.

“There are two different fuels that are being used so you need to report what the usage is for those two fuels,” said Gonder. “If you combine them into one (number) artificially, you can’t derive a final output like annual costs” or annual greenhouse gas emissions from a
car.

That’s particularly important with plug-in electric hybrids–essentially the same type of vehicle as today’s hybrids with bigger batteries–because actual mileage will vary significantly based on driving conditions and how often a car is recharged.

Recalibrating your dynamometer

With multiple alternatives and a lot at stake, it’s unlikely that the question over how to represent fuel efficiency on a sticker will be resolved quickly. Sedans such as the Chevy Volt, Nissan Leaf, and plug-in Toyota Prius are scheduled for release over the next two years.

Having a rating for electricity per mile allows a consumer to figure out how much it costs to run a car per mile by using the local per-kilowatt-hour electricity cost, he added.

(Credit:
Argonne National Laboratory)

Researchers found that the expected results matched actual mileage of a fleet of Toyota Priuses converted to be plug-ins operated by Idaho National Laboratory. Gonder said the methodology needs to be tested with other cars, but should be able to be adjusted for different types of plug-in vehicles, including the range-extended Chevy Volt.

In addition to cost per mile, there are a number of other proposals to measure fuel efficiency for electric cars. They include an electric car’s range–a big limitation of all-electric vehicles–or miles per gallon equivalent based on the energy in liquid fuels and batteries.

Government agencies and automakers have been studying the question of mileage for gas-electric vehicles for years. But the issue rushed to the forefront in August when General Motors said that its forthcoming Chevy Volt will get 230 miles per gallon in the city and “triple-digit” combined city and highway mileage driving based on a draft of the EPA’s methodology. The EPA has not verified GM’s claims, as the tests have not been completed.

Hard-hitting, but true. Open source embraces interoperability, whereas free software takes a hard line that even Microsoft, despite its preference that customers use its complete software portfolio exclusively, won’t take.

To go mainstream, free software needed to become open source.

The path forward is open source, not free software. Sometimes that openness will mean embracing Microsoft in order to meet a customer’s needs. After all, fierce partisanship and an unwillingness to compromise in software accomplishes is just as pointless, distasteful, and useless as it is in government.

Let me explain.

Free software demands one way. Open source encourages many ways.

While free-software advocates provided the early backbone of the larger open-source movement, the market has been made by open-source backers. Free software makes for great headlines (”Miguel de Icaza is basically a traitor to the Free Software community”), but it is far too demanding, and of largely the wrong things, to capture mainstream interest.

For that reason, Perlow further writes:

commentary

But some people, particularly our free software leaders, are so mired in their hatred of Microsoft and proprietary systems that they will use only free and open source software for the sake of ideological reasons alone….Stallman and the FSF [Free Software Foundation], like his Cretaceous ancestors 65 million years ago, isn’t evolved enough to see that his reign is about to come to an end. The open world needs interoperability, not shut itself off from other standards just because they originate from proprietary sources.

One of the most inspiring things I’ve witnessed in my 10-plus years in open source is its gradual embrace of pragmatism. By “pragmatism” I don’t mean “capitulation,” whereby open source comes to look more like the proprietary world it has sought to displace. Rather, I would suggest that the more open source has gone mainstream the more it has learned to make compromises, compromises that make it stronger, not weaker.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and a staunch proponent of open source, with a penchant for free software, suggested as much in his LinuxCon keynote in which he argued that Linux ‘desktop’ developers need to be far better at meeting real customer requirements, not simply scratching their own, developer-focused “itches” (to use the Eric Raymond-inspired vernacular).

There have long been two camps within what we typically refer to as “open-source software.” The first is led by free-software advocates like Richard Stallman (who, importantly, largely eschew the term “open source” as not being sufficiently concerned with freedom), while the latter is led by no one, but was formally organized in 1998 by Tim O’Reilly, Eric Raymond, and others in Silicon Valley.

It’s certainly not a line that open-source advocates should take, as it cuts against the very idea of open source: choice. Sometimes, after all, an open-source project is absolutely the wrong choice for a customer (just as sometimes a proprietary product may not be a good fit). There is no one-size-fits-all for either software approach.

Open source also makes for great headlines (”Open Source Code Worth US$ 387 Billion”), but its real value is not in generating controversy but rather in alleviating it, turning the focus from open-source personalities to open-source code, and the value that companies and individuals can derive from it.

Free software has lost. Open source has won. We’re all the better for it.

To get there, open source has softened its elbows and opened its arms. Jason Perlow recently wrote on ZDNet that he, like most of the world, has to work with both open-source and proprietary software, and can’t afford to dogmatically cling to one or the other. (It’s a message that even Steve Ballmer begrudgingly repeats, suggesting that Microsoft must support those that “for whatever crazy reasons don’t want to be on Windows, might want to be on Linux.”)

In other words, the Facebook app is nearly dead, and good riddance to it. Users don’t like adding entire apps to their profile anymore just because some random friend sends them a link. Instead, the new way to leverage Facebook is to use the Facebook network, but within destination sites.

(Credit:
Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The Friend Radio player lives inside your Facebook session, and stays with you as you move from page to page inside the site. I’m not exactly sure why this service needs to live in Facebook, since the Facebook Connect data would make a standalone site (like Pandora or Last.fm) possible. But conceptually, it works: You stay in Facebook, listening to music your Facebook friends like.

Threads just announced that it’s raised $1.2 million in a round led by First Round Capital.

For example, the pick of the Demo Day is Thread, a dating site that uses Facebook Connect. You log in with your Facebook ID, and then you can troll — sorry, search — the available friends of your friends. If you like what you see in the lineup, you can ask the friend who connects you both for an introduction. It’s like LinkedIn for dates. The site is free now, but may charge at some point for extended search capabilities or some such. Traditional dating sites like Match.com and eHarmony show that there is a lot of revenue potential in this model.

Other interesting services that use Facebook Connect from the Demo Day include RentMineOnline, a service that rental property managers can use to get referrals to open units from tenants (tenants on Facebook recommend units in their building to their friends), and GroupCard, a site that lets networks of friends create booklet greeting cards from entire groups to particular friends.

It’s good to see Facebook, and Facebook app developers, take what works about the open Facebook platform — the network of friends — and run with it. And it’s to Facebook’s credit that the company let developers out of the walled garden of Facebook itself. While I do feel that many of the social apps that use Facebook Connect are not much more than shavings off the main social tree, some of the ideas here will flourish, and it’s thanks to Facebook’s open social network that they’re able to get off the ground at all.

Other standalone apps here include RunMyErrand, which connects people who need stuff picked up with those willing to do so. Again, it uses Facebook Connect to point users to people in their social network to run errands, to improve the trust factor. It’s like have a bicycle messenger network where you actually know the messengers. Frankly I don’t see it as a business with legs (sorry…but I mean it) but it is a great example of how, with Facebook Connect, you can build a social product that would be utterly impossible otherwise.

I’m at the Facebook Fund Demo Day event in Palo Alto, listening to COO Cheryl Sandberg blithely dismiss the entire Facebook Platform that the company launched in 2007. Since 2008 the big thing has been Facebook Connect, the utility that allows developers to build sites that can be logged in to using Facebook IDs. More importantly, Facebook Connect allows developers to access Facebook users’ social networks in their own Web sites.

One of the few companies I saw here that’s actually building a Facebook app: Friend Radio. It scours your friends’ music preferences from their profiles, and then uses that data to stuff your playlist with tunes. You can include or exclude specific friends, and the list of friends is ranked by music taste similarity (assuming you’ve entered your own music preferences in your profile; only about 35 percent of users do). When you hear something you like, you flag it to refine your future results.

ZimRide is similar: It lets users find carpool buddies. Workstir uses Facebook connections to refer people to professional service providers. Again, it’d be nearly impossible to get any scale quickly with services like these without a pre-built social network.

Thread co-founder Brian Phillips pitches at the FBFund demo day.

As I said, Thread is not a Facebook app. It’s a destination site that uses Facebook’s “social graph in the cloud” (as FBFund adviser Joe Beninato calls it) to short-cut the hardest part of building a social connection site.

Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Although users could add updates to the site, their tweets were not apparent to others on the site, according to several users contacted by CNET News, as well as our experience here in the newsroom.

After two Twitter outages this week, the service is encountering another issue Wednesday afternoon as many users are reporting they can get to the microblogging site, but their feeds are not being updated.

The problems seem to have begun around 4 p.m. PDT. There is nothing to indicate that the site has suffered anything similar to the denial-of-service attack that knocked the site offline for an extended period last week.

Panasonic and NEC announced nine new cell phone on Tuesday that use the open-source, Linux-based mobile operating system called LiMo.

Still, Nokia, the number one handset maker in the world, leads the market with its Symbian software platform.

The announcement of the new Panasonic and NEC phones is seen as a positive sign that handset makers are starting to support the new software. Other handset makers, such as Samsung and LG Electronics, are also members of the LiMo Foundation. But so far these companies haven’t introduced phones using the LiMo software. In 2008, Motorola introduced some devices using LiMo.

Apple set the bar high with its iPhone, which uses a form of Apple’s own proprietary operating system used in its computers. Other companies have followed suit with advanced software of their own, namely Google with its Android mobile software. Like LiMo, Android is based on open source Linux. So far only two devices have been introduced running the Android software, but several handset makers including Motorola and Samsung are expected to release new Android-based devices.

Meanwhile, most of the world’s largest cell phone makers, including Samsung, LG, Nokia, and Motorola, have said that they will soon introduce phones using the Android operating system.

Still, LiMo does have support from some of the world’s biggest mobile carriers, including Vodafone, France Telecom SA’s Orange, Japan’s NTT DoCoMo, South Korea’s SK Telecom, Telefonica and U.S. operator Verizon Wireless, which is jointly owned by Vodafone and Verizon Communications. LiMo also said Japanese mobile carrier KDDI Corp and touch screen company Immersion Corp have joined the not-for-profit foundation.

As the mobile phone market evolves, software is becoming more crucial to handset development.

Now Linux is coming to the mobile market, where it promises to help lower costs for handset makers. The LiMo foundation, which is made up of a consortium of companies, has been shepherding development for mobile devices in the hopes that it can become one of the major operating systems used in the handset market. So far, LiMo has not been a huge success, as competition from other software and handset makers has been fierce.

Linux is the most popular type of free or open source computer software available. And it has had some success in the computer environment where Linux suppliers are earn revenue by selling improvements and technical services to support Linux. This is a very different model from Microsoft, which licenses its Windows operating system and does not share its code openly with developers.