Boot up: Android Wear examined, goodbye Goggles, life in MS-DOS

Google Goggles searches real world object and tells you what it ios and where you are. Or used to, until it was closed due to lack of interest. Photograph: Guardian Photograph: Guardian

A burst of 10 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Google has made an official statement found at https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/websearch-ja/tmFlGf1s-MY/r0Gi_2c1oDAJ

English translation: The Google Goggles feature (capturing images with the camera, to search) was a fun feature, but also a feature of no clear use to too many people. Therefore, in the Google search app for iPhone, iPad, the feature has been abandoned at this time of updating.

It's dead, Jim, along with Orkut.

Russell Ivanovic:

This is the promise of Android Wear, it liberates me from having to interact with my phone at all in most cases. If I had wanted to, I could also have configured an even smaller subset of notifications, because the Android Wear app on your phone lets you choose additional apps to ignore notifications for.

The watch also tracks my step count, and can read my heart beat. The step count seems fairly accurate and is a handy, interesting thing to know. The heart beat doesn't really excite me (har har) at all, but it's there and works. You can respond to text messages by voice, and being Google's implementation of voice recognition it works amazingly well. Personally I'm not comfortable talking to a watch in public, so I use it in a much more passive way. My pocket vibrates and I look at my watch, it's a text from my wife. Later when I sit down I respond to it. My pocket vibrates and this time it's a Twitter notification, so I just swipe once to dismiss it. My phone also clears the notification, since it knows I've dealt with it on my watch.

Jan Dawson:

I've been using a Google Wear device – the Samsung Galaxy Live – since I picked it up at I/O last week. I've tried a number of other smartwatches before now, and it's interesting to see the differences. As it's currently constituted, I see three flaws with Google Wear, two of which seem to be pretty fundamental, and one of which should be fixed soon.

Cards, Google Now and apps. See if you can figure out which is the one that can be fixed before you read what he says.

Michael Mace:

For online retailers, the single most frustrating thing about mobile technology, especially smartphones, is that it people using it don't buy a lot of stuff. They'll browse in your web store and use your shopping app, but when it comes time to buy they often don't purchase. The industry rule of thumb is that a good commerce site on a personal computer will convert about 3% of shoppers to buyers (in other words, for every 100 online shoppers you make three sales). The conversion rate for smartphones is a third of that, about 1%.

In an industry that would kill to improve conversion by a tenth of a point, that drop from 3% to 1% is horrifying. Many commerce companies have spent years trying to fix it, and through incredible effort and careful experimentation it is indeed possible to increase the mobile conversion rate. In my day job at UserTesting that's one of the things I help companies do. But it's a slow process of incremental fixes, and in the meantime mobile web use is growing explosively. Here's the nightmare scenario for an online retailer:

—What if the next generation of internet users moves to smartphones and wearables faster than we can figure out how to fix mobile shopping?

—What if, as people move to mobile, the conversion rate for our whole business drops from 3% to 1%?

He makes an excellent case - that the sales of the Fire Phone really don't matter. It's what the sales on the Fire Phone reveal that matters.

Admit it: The last time you sat down with a physician and revealed your medical history, did you fudge a bit? Were there certain incidents you were too embarrassed to admit? Did you gloss over certain behaviors that might make you look bad?

It's a serious problem for health professionals and patients alike. With less-complete information to work with, doctors are more likely to misdiagnose an illness, or prescribe an inappropriate drug.

Recently published research offers a possible solution to this problem: Virtual humans. In the journal Computers in Human Behavior, a research team reports patients are more comfortable discussing private matters with these computer-created entities, and this ease prompts them to disclose more information.

Ben Taylor of FindTheBest:

If you watched Google present Android Wear last week, you'd think the smartwatch was the hottest product on the market. What could be better than an intelligent timepiece that can take calls and understand voice commands?

It turns out nobody cares. At FindTheBest, we compared traffic and user engagement for dozens of product categories, from smartphones and laptops to printers and processors. The results? FindTheBest users are three times more likely to research fitness trackers than smartwatches, and over 40 times more likely to research smartphones. Even the godawful Bluetooth headset is more popular.

So we asked ourselves: why isn't the smartwatch as popular as its wrist-based cousin, the fitness tracker? Why hasn't the mainstream market bought in? Here are four reasons.

Pretty much impossible to disagree - especially contrasted with the benefits MP3 players and smartphones brought.

Sean Gallagher:

In tribute to the project's two decades (and to those brave souls who keep the DOS fires burning), I decided to spend a day this week working in FreeDOS. I set up a machine running the latest distribution of the OS along with software from the FreeDOS Package Manager repositories. I then added whatever other software I could scrape together—open source software, freeware, and "abandonware" found on the Web, plus some software graciously sent by Lee Hutchinson from his own personal reserve of DOSware. I wanted to know if it was possible to do modern Web-based work in DOS—and just how painful it might prove to be.

I was soon rocking my computer like it was 1994.

No names, but some of us were coping pretty well in 1991 with laptops containing Intel 80386s and sending text files via dialup acoustic modems. But you try telling that to kids today... (Thanks @GambaKufu for the link.)

Much of what was shared we already knew. According to the article (Google translation here), the sensor was created to mimic eyes, which led to several advantages.

The sensor's shape allows for cheaper smaller lenses with wider apertures while simultaneously getting rid of vignetting and aberrations. It also reduces the "dark current" of the sensor (more on that here), thereby reducing noise.

Since you're wondering, "dark current" is "the current that is flowing through pixels even when they're not receiving light".

If you use the word "fanless" in a product description I expect a device that does not use any fans in order to keep components cool. Fanless is not a buzzword you can use in place of "quiet operation" as it has a meaning, specifically: no fans are being used. But HP seems to have overlooked that fact in its new Chromebox.

The HP Chromebox runs a 1.4Ghz Haswell Celeron processor, 2GB RAM, and has 16GB of local storage. That Celeron processor has Intel HD Graphics on board and a max TDP of 15W, but it seems HP couldn't incorporate enough passive cooling to keep the chip within its operating temperatures. The large grill you see on the back of the Chromebox is where a fan inside forces hot air out.

Stupidless.

Cutts is Google's SEO king and spam-killer:

I wanted to let folks know that I'm about to take a few months of leave. When I joined Google, my wife and I agreed that I would work for 4-5 years, and then she'd get to see more of me. I talked about this as recently as last month and as early as 2006. And now, almost fifteen years later I'd like to be there for my wife more. I know she'd like me to be around more too, and not just physically present while my mind is still on work.

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