As you probably already know, yesterday, off the coast of Japan, there was a large, 8.9-9.1 M_w earthquake, which then triggered tsunami warnings for many different areas, including Japan, Hawaii, and the whole West Coast of the United States.

However, due to the earthquake and following tsunami waves, which slammed into the east coast of the country, Japan suffered some major damage, killing hundreds of people, causing many others to go missing, as well as damaging many buildings and other areas.

When other countries have been struck with natural disasters or other devastating events, such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Japan often helps them out, so we should do our part to help the people of Japan during this time.

Yahoo! News has put together an article that includes links to donate to various services that are assisting and proving disaster relief services to the people of Japan, including The American Red Cross, GlobalGiving, Save The Children, The Salvation Army, Americares, Convoy of Hope, The International Medical Corps, as well as Shelter Box.

If you would like to donate to any of these organizations, you can either click on the link to the organization within this post or you can go to the Yahoo! News article, where you can find links to donate, as well as some information about each of the above organizations.

Another way that you can donate to the American Red Cross would be through the official Red Cross website, where you can choose from a variety of different causes to donate to, including the recent earthquake and the resulting tsunami off the coast of Japan.

Also, you can donate to the Red Cross by texting “REDCROSS” to the number 90999, which will donate $10 and will be added to your cell phone bill.

If you would like more up-to-date information about the recent earthquake off the coast of Japan, as well as the tsunami that was caused by this earthquake, you should visit a major news website, such as Yahoo! News or CNN.

As you probably already know, on March 2, 2011, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who is still on medical leave from the company, took to the stage at Apple’s Special Event to announce Apple’s newest version of the iPad, the iPad 2.

Perhaps one of the most anticipated features of the iPad 2 would be its two cameras – one on the front of the iPad and one on the back.

These two cameras can both be used for FaceTime, with the front camera letting users send live video of themselves to other FaceTime users and the back camera allowing users to show their contacts what’s going on around them. The back facing camera can record video in 720p HD and the front-facing camera can record video in VGA quality, at 30 frames per second. Both of these cameras are capable of being used to take snapshots using the PhotoBooth application.

The iPad 2 is also 33 percent thinner than the pervious model and is also lighter. The Wi-Fi version of the device has a height of 9.50 inches, a width of 7.31 inches, a depth of 0.34 inches, and a weight of 1.33 pounds. The version with combined Wi-Fi and 3G is a bit heavier, weighing 1.35 pounds and 1.34 pounds for the Verizon model.

The new version of the iPad also features a 1 GHz Apple A5 duel-core processor chip, which improves speed, but doesn’t use any additional power than Apple’s previous A4 chip.

Like the previous model of the iPad, the iPad 2 features an accelerometer, a 3-axis gyroscope, as well as a compass. However, now, all three of these features are capable of working together, which can be used to sense which direction the iPad is moving in, as well as how it’s moving. Due to this, gaming and using other applications, such as maps, will be easier, as well as more fun to use.

Another neat feature including with the iPad 2 is AirPlay, which allows users to wirelessly stream music, photos, and video to a HDTV, as well as speakers, which can be done using AirPlay enabled speakers or by using an Apple TV on a Wi-Fi network.

Similar to AirPlay is another neat feature called AirPrint, which, like you can probably guess, allows users to print webpages, e-mails, photos, and documents right from their iPad 2, provided they’re connected to a Wi-Fi network.

Also, users can now connect their iPad 2’s to a television or projector with a new feature called Video Mirroring. In order to share what’s happening on their iPad, users can simply plug a new 30-pin to HDMI adapter into their iPad and then they can plug an HDMI cable into the other end, which can then be connected to an HDMI capable device, such as a television. There is also a USB port on the 30-pin to HDMI connector so that users can charge their iPad at the same time.

Video Mirroring will also display exactly what’s on your iPad’s screen, even if you were to rotate the device from portrait mode to landscape mode or zoom in and out of pictures. This new feature is actually built into the iOS, which allows for slick, smooth, transitions.

With the new iPad 2 also comes a new cover for the device, called the iPad Smart Cover. However, unlike previous iPad covers, the Smart Cover actually secures to your iPad using two magnets, which also align the cover so that you don’t have to worry about how it looks.

The Smart Cover can also wake your iPad 2 up when you open it, and put it to sleep when you close it. In addition, the iPad Smart Cover can also be folded into a typing or movie stand. The Smart Cover comes in both polyurethane and leather, and each version comes in ten different colors.

As for the colors of the device itself, the iPad 2 will come in both black and white and both colors will be available when the device launches on March 11, 2011.

Also, the iPad 2 will be running iOS 4, which allows users to multitask, as well as other features.

The iPad 2 can be ordered from the online Apple Store, starting on March 11, 2011 or purchased from a brick-and-mortar Apple Store starting at 5:00 PM, starting on March 11, 2011. (Users who purchase the iPad 2 in-store will also receive free Personal Setup.)

For more information about the iPad 2, you should check out the iPad section of Apple’s website.

Recently, Apple announced their new MacBook Pro, which includes some upgrades, as well as new features.

The new MacBook pro still features a unibody aluminum case, which replaces multiple parts of a case with just one. Also like before, the MacBook Pro has a multi-touch trackpad, as well as a magnetic latch, rather than a clasp or other mechanism, in order to keep the computer closed.

The new MacBook Pro features Intel Core i5 and i7 processors, with the i7 being standard in the 15 and 17 inch models and and the i5 for the 13 inch version of the product. However, users can choose to have the Intel Core i7 processor in the 13 inch if they wish. These new Intel processors can perform up to twice as fast as the previous generations could.

Also included in the new MacBook Pro is a feature called “Turbo-Boost 2.0”, which enables users to perform processor intensive tasks, causing the processor to automatically increase the speed of the active cores to up to 3.4 GHz.

Another new feature that was included in this update to the MacBook Pro is called “Thunderbolt”, which is a fast I/O, or input/output, port, which was created after collaboration between both Intel and Apple. The new “Thunderbolt” port, which is located on the side of the MacBook Pro, similar to a USB port, enables users to plug in both HD displays and high-speed peripherals, such as an external hard drive or other device.

There are also adapters that users can use so that they can utilize the Thunderbolt port for peripherals that require the use of a USB cord or FireWire cable or even Ethernet or Fibre Channel networks. Since Thunderbolt is based on DisplayPort technology, users can connect any Mini DisplayPort display to the MacBook Pro, using the Thunderbolt port. Also, users can connect DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI, or VGA displays to their computer’s Thunderbolt port using an adapter.

In addition, Apple’s FaceTime users will be happy to know that the MacBook Pro now has a high definition FaceTime camera, capable of recording video in 720p HD. The FaceTime HD camera also supports an aspect ration of 16:9, which will allows more area to be in the shot.

The new MacBook Pro also has a SDXC card reader built into the 13 and 15 inch models, which supports up to 64GB memory cards. This feature will allow users to quickly and easily transfer images from their digital cameras, right to their computers.

Hyperthreading is another new feature, which is now standard on the MacBook Pro. Hyperthreading allows for two threads to run at the same time on each processor core, which means that the MacBook Pro will recognize eight virtual cores on a quad-core processor and four virtual cores on a dual-core processor. By doing this, the computer will be able to “balance” tasks throughout the different virtual cores, giving it better performance.

Another new addition to the MacBook Pro is the Intel HD Graphics 3000 processor, which allows users to do graphics related tasks, such as encoding video and using Apple’s new HD FaceTime camera more efficiently. In the 15 and 17 inch versions of the MacBook Pro, there is a new AMD Radeon graphics processor, which also allows for graphic intensive applications, such as gaming and video editing.

If you’re interested in purchasing a MacBook Pro, the 13 inch model starts at $1,199, the 15 inch model starts at $1,799, and the 17 inch model starts at $2,499.

For more information about the new MacBook Pro lineup, or to purchase one, you should check out the MacBook Pro section of Apple’s website.

Would you know what to do if you spilled something on your laptop or cell phone? Should you unplug the device, remove the battery, or simply wipe the offending liquid off? Below is a guide that should help you to answer these questions so that you can save your electronics should something spill on them.

If you happen to spill something on your laptop, cell phone, or other electronic device, one of the first things that you should do is to unplug your device. After your device has been unplugged or if it wasn’t plugged in to begin with, you should then remove it’s battery so that there is no electricity going into it, which could cause something to short out, as well as other problems.

Then, you should either turn the device upside down, in order to prevent any liquid from getting further into it and then use a towel to clean up the liquid and dry off your device.

After doing this, if the liquid you spilled is sticky or may cause more harm than water, you may want to consider opening up your device, if you’re able to, and then use a cloth dampened with regular water, in order to clean off any of the liquid that may have gotten into your device. If you didn’t spill anything that requires rinsing, you may still want to consider opening your device up and checking to see if any water got into it that would need to be wiped up.

Once you’ve cleaned up the spill and checked to be sure that it isn’t inside of your device, you should allow the device, still without any power, to dry for a while before trying to use it again.

Another tip for someone who has spilled water on a smaller device, such as a cell phone, would be to place the phone into a bowl of dry rice, in order to try and draw out any moisture that may be in the device.

For more information about how to save your electronics from spills, I would suggest that you check out this article from Engadget, as well as this article from eHow, on how to save your laptop from a spill, and this article, also from eHow, on how to save a cell phone from a spill.

If you’re a FaceBook user, you may have recently noticed that when you click on someone’s photo, a black box appears, showing the photo that you selected, rather than the photo being displayed on a new page within FaceBook. This is actually a part of some recent enhancements to FaceBook’s photo sharing experience.

Back in September of last year, FaceBook published a blog post, saying that they would be updating some things involving their photo sharing features, which included higher resolution images, a better photo viewer, as well as easier photo tagging and uploading.

However, on February 11, 2011, FaceBook posted an update to this blog post, saying that the new photo viewer would be rolling out to everyone over the next few weeks. Also, users would now be able to browse through photos faster than before and would not have to lose their place on FaceBook while doing so.

When users click on a picture now, a black frame, called a “lightbox”, will appear with the selected image in the center of it. This new feature will allow users to both view and comment on pictures without having to go to a new page, as the lightbox simply appears over the page that they’re currently on.

Also, users can view the previous and next photos in an album by clicking on arrows at either side of the image being displayed. Clicking on the image will also bring the user to the next photo in an album, like before. When users are ready to return to the page that they were on before clicking on a photo, all they need to do is click on the page in the background, or click on the “x” located at the top of the right side of the lightbox.

For more information about FaceBook’s recent photo updates, you should check out this blog post from Facebook’s blog. If you’re interested in how the new photo viewing “lightbox” was developed, you should check out this post from FaceBook’s Engineering Blog.

If you haven’t already heard, tonight on Jeopardy!, there will be a rather “different” looking contestant named Watson.

The reason that Watson is different than all of the previous Jeopardy! contestants is because he’s not a human, but a supercomputer, which was developed by IBM and is capable of answering questions that are posed in a natural language.

“Watson”, named after the founder of IBM, Thomas J. Watson, is made up of a cluster of 90 IBM Power 750 servers, in addition to some other hardware components, and contains a total of 2,880 POWER 7 processor cores and also has over 16 Terabytes of RAM. Running on this supercomputer will be IBM’s DeepQA software.

Already, “Watson” has been able to beat Jeopardy! contestants in practice rounds, so it will be interesting to see how this computer matches up when he goes up against two of Jeopardy!’s champions – Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

There will be three episodes of Jeopardy! featuring “Watson”, which begin tonight at 7:30 PM (Eastern) and last through Wednesday, February 16, 2011.

For more information about IBM’s Watson supercomputer, you should check out IBM’s website about “Watson”, as well as this article on Wikipedia.

Recently, Google announced on their blog that they have developed an advanced security features for Google Accounts, called “2-step verification”, which provides more security than just using a password alone, as “2-step verification” helps to verify that the person trying to log into a Google Account is the account’s actual owner.

The reason that this new authentication method provides more security is because it requires two independent factors for users to access their accounts, which are your password, as well as a code that you can obtain from your phone.

According to Google, over the next few days, users will see a new “Using 2-step verification” link on the Account Settings page of their Google Account. Clicking that link will bring users to a setup wizard, which will guide them through the process of enabling “2-step verification”. This includes setting up a back up telephone number, as well as creating back up codes, just in case a user were to lose access to their primary phone.

After completing the setup wizard and enabling “2-step verification”, users will see an extra page when logging into their Google Account, which prompts them to enter a code and after the user enters their password, they can choose to either receive a phone call or text message with the code.

Alternatively, users can use an application for iPhone, Android, and and BlackBerry phones, in order to generate the code themselves. After the user has entered their password and the code that they received, they will be able to access their account.

This new method of verification is more secure because would-be hackers would have to know someone’s password, as well as have their phone in order to log into a Google Account.

However, users have the choice of choosing a “Remember verification for this computer for 30 days” option, so that they do not need to enter in a code as often, which will cut down on the time it takes to access an account, should a user do so multiple times a day.

This new feature was actually made available to Google Apps users a few months ago, but is now being offered to all Google Account users so that they can better secure their accounts. However, this feature is optional, so users who do not wish to use “2-step verification” don’t have to.

For more information about Google’s new “2-step verification”, you should check out this post from Google’s official blog, as well as this article from Google’s Help Center.

If you’re a FaceBook user, you may have already heard that today is FaceBook’s seventh birthday, as the company was launched on February 4th, 2004 from Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard University dorm room using the domain name thefacebook.com.

However, as we’re all aware, FaceBook has since grown, quite impressively, into a social networking website with close to 600 million users. At the time of this writing, the San Francisco based start-up has over 1,700 employees, with offices in 12 countries.

In order to celebrate FaceBook’s 7th birthday, the company has posted a status message on the their profile saying “To the 1.5 million of you who share our birthday today – Happy Birthday!”. Also included in this status message is a picture of a blue number 7 with a candle sticking out of the top of it. This particular status message has received 55,000 “likes” and over 9,000 comments so far.

With new users joining FaceBook every day, the website is continuing to grow. It will be interesting to see where FaceBook will be in the future, but congratulations to FaceBook on a great 7 years!

Happy birthday, FaceBook!

If you’re a FaceBook user, you may have already heard that today is FaceBook’s seventh birthday, as the company was launched on February 4th, 2004 from Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard University dorm room using the domain name thefacebook.com.

However, as we’re all aware, FaceBook has since grown, quite impressively, into a social networking website with close to 600 million users. At the time of this writing, the San Francisco based start-up has over 1,700 employees, with offices in 12 countries.

In order to celebrate FaceBook’s 7th birthday, the company has posted a status message on the their profile saying “To the 1.5 million of you who share our birthday today – Happy Birthday!”. Also included in this status message is a picture of a blue number 7 with a candle sticking out of the top of it. This particular status message has received 55,000 “likes” and over 9,000 comments so far.

With new users joining FaceBook every day, the website is continuing to grow. It will be interesting to see where FaceBook will be in the future, but congratulations to FaceBook on a great 7 years!

Happy birthday, FaceBook!

As you may have already heard, recently Google and Microsoft have been involved in a “fight” over whether or not Bing, a popular search engine, created by Microsoft, is displaying search results that were taken from Google.

According to a post on Google’s official blog, this “battle” began with a search for “torsorophy”, which was a misspelling of “tarsorrhaphy”, a rare surgery that is performed on eyelids.

When this search, using the incorrect spelling, was performed on Google’s search engine, the misspelling was corrected and results were returned for the correct spelling of this surgical procedure. Google says that at the time of this search query, Microsoft’s Bing search engine did not return any results for the misspelled query.

However, later that summer, according to Google, Bing began returning the same result that appeared first in a Google search, but did not offer a corrected spelling for the word. Eventually, this began to occur more and more for many different kinds of search queries, including results that Google considered to be mistakes of their algorithms.

Due to Google’s suspicion of Bing copying their search results, Google decided to set up a “sting” operating, which they did by creating about 100 “synthetic queries”, which included words or strings of text that they did not expect a user to enter into the search engine. Then, for each of these “synthetic queries”, Google matched it with a legitimate webpage, which did not have anything to do with the original search text. This legitimate webpage would then be displayed as the top search result for one of the made up queries.

After doing this, Google gave 20 of their engineers a laptop, with a fresh install of Microsoft’ s Windows operating system, and using Internet Explorer 8, with the Bing toolbar installed, asked their engineers to enter the “synthetic queries” into Google and click on the results that Google matched with the query.

After a couple of weeks, Google stated that their results began to appear in Bing, using the same “synthetic queries” that Google created.

In a quote from the official Google Blog, Google states:

“As we see it, this experiment confirms our suspicion that Bing is using some combination of:

• Internet Explorer 8, which can send data to Microsoft via its Suggested Sites feature
• the Bing Toolbar, which can send data via Microsoft’s Customer Experience Improvement Program

or possibly some other means to send data to Bing on what people search for on Google and the Google search results they click. Those results from Google are then more likely to show up on Bing. Put another way, some Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results—a cheap imitation.”

However, Microsoft denies that they are stealing Google’s search results and in an blog post entitled “Thoughts on search quality”, Harry Shum, Ph.D., the Corporate Vice President of Bing, said:

“We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users.

To be clear, we learn from all of our customers. What we saw in today’s story was a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking. It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we’ll take it as a back-handed compliment. But it doesn’t accurately portray how we use opt-in customer data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience.”

This is something that will be interesting to see how everything turns out. It appears as though both companies have their own side to the story, but what is really happening between Google and Bing?

For more information about this, you should check out this blog post from TechCrunch, this blog post from SeachEngineLand.com, as well as Google’s blog post regarding this issue, and Bing’s blog post regarding this.

What do you think about this issue? Please feel free to state your opinions in the comments!