Today Google announced “Google Instant”. An AJAX powered realtime search engine. While you’re still typing, Google will begin to show results without you having to hit enter. This is massive in scale, and the only thing even remotely close is when Bing and Google played around with including Tweets in a realtime stream. That’s nothing compared to the sheer vastness of the web.

Users should be thrilled, advertisers should be furious. Here’s why:

Instead of showing ads based on complete thoughts, Google Instant focuses on fragments. For example, a user might begin their search by entering the word “Tech” as seen below.

Maybe the user did want to find “TechNet” on Amazon, but what if “Tech” was just part of a fragment? Perhaps the user really wanted “Tech Support”. If the user was searching for “Tech Support” then Amazon just wasted that ad impression on a completely irrelevant query.

Meanwhile, Google gets to serve more impressions by letting the user complete their thought. More impressions = more money for Google. On longer queries I believe that Google Instant could multiply the amount of ads shown four times over.

After playing around with Google Instant all afternoon, I am thoroughly impressed with how quick it is for an end user, but certainly disappointed as an advertiser.

You can see our coverage from earlier today here.

You see, this is a way to show up to 4 times the amount of advertisements. Start typing a word and more text ads are displayed as the word is formed then before when you would simply search for the word and press enter. Its a wonderful way of searching, albeit a tad annoying at times.

Read Googles announcement here.

“Android’s share in the smartphone market is increasing, so if you want to strengthen your product line-up, it’s an operating system that you would normally want,” said Jin Sung Hae, a Seoul-based analyst at Hyundai Securities Co.

Editor’s note – I find it interesting that Samsung is talking about using Android, instead of Google TV.

Read more at lifehacker.

UPDATE: The update is now live. Open up iTunes to grab 4.1

This ought to excite or at least bring some bit of joy to anyone who’s still using the WebOS platform. I’ll admit it almost makes me wish I hadn’t sold my WebOS device already. No word on when this update gets pushed out.

via: engadget.

Like most nerds, I love to read. I’ve amassed small towers of literature all around my room. Some new, some ancient, some in great shape, some literally falling apart. This guide is a great tutorial on how to get a little more life out of an old paperback book by turning it into a hardcover.

Be sure to checkout the guide here.

Asustek Computer saw sales of its netbooks in the second quarter fall short of expectations mainly due to competition from Apple’s iPad, and has downward adjusted its target shipments for the third quarter, the traditional peak sales period, to 1.4 million units, according to company president and CEO Jerry Shen at an investors conference on August 13.

Because of decreased shipments of motherboards, notebooks and netbooks, Asustek’s financial performance for the second quarter declined on quarter. Asustek will continue to offer Eee PCs and will step into the tablet PC segment with its Eee Note and Eee Pad series, Shen pointed out.

Asustek has been gradually increasing outsourced production, with the proportion of total production expected to rise to 30% at the end of 2010 and further to 50% in 2011.

Read the full article and checkout the charts here.

Sticking with the Bret Michaels thing, a good first rule of thumb, one that should be obvious, is to avoid anything that is or remotely looks like Ed Hardy clothing. This rule should be unnecessary, but just in case anyone is in the dark on where Ed Hardy falls in the world of style, there it is. Big thumbs down.

Second, no flip-flops. Exception: If you are currently at the beach. This one is more difficult for me, because I live in a beach town, and it’s a lot easier to justify wearing flip flops as you leave the house if there is a remote possibility to of going to the beach later that day. You just never know when your friend might call you up and say, “WE ARE GOING TO THE BEACH NOW. NO TIME TO GO HOME AND CHANGE INTO FLIP FLOPS.” But I trust most of you don’t have the immediate lure of a nearby beach, and for you it can safely be said: If you’re going summer casual, get some docksiders. Nobody wants to see your toes. And for the confident nerd, espadrilles may also be acceptable, but are harder to pull off.

*extra note: Vibram Fivefingers belong in the Ed Hardy category of styleless awfulness. Unless if you are currently running in them, and seriously endorse barefoot running as a healthy alternative to running shoes, they should not be on your feet.

Third, no cell phone clips. Ever. Put it in your pocket or your awesome new bag.

Lastly, leather jackets. This is the one article of clothing that has the most potential to look amazing, but also to look unbelievable terrible. Before purchasing one, ask yourself, is this me? Does it fit my personality? Am I really just kidding myself? Have I ever been on a motorcycle in my life or do I have immediate plans to be? If you answered yes, yes, no, no, you may proceed with caution. Buy one that fits. It should be almost tight. Think Marlon Brando in The Wild One or Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button. And consider shelling out for a nice one. It’ll make all the difference.

The issue of leather jackets touches on an important element of developing your style: it’s yours. It’s good to notice what other people are doing and take notes, but it doesn’t always mean that what works for them will work for you, and what works for you may not work for them as well. Above all have confidence, and in time you’ll have developed a style all your own.

Morley Davidson, John Dethridge, Herbert Kociemba, and Tomas Rokicki have officially conquered the Rubik’s Cube officially proving man greater then machine (man meaning brains telling supercomputers what to do, and machine being a small plastic toy). They also mathematically proved that…

Every position of Rubik’s Cube™ can be solved in twenty moves or less.
With about 35 CPU-years of idle computer time donated by Google, a team of researchers has essentially solved every position of the Rubik’s Cube™, and shown that no position requires more than twenty moves.

“Okay”, You think to yourself, “I’m mildly impressed. I’ve never actually solved one of those before (although I tell my children that I have). But really, how hard could it be?”

“We partitioned the positions into 2,217,093,120 sets of 19,508,428,800 positions each.
We reduced the count of sets we needed to solve to 55,882,296 using symmetry and set covering.
We did not find optimal solutions to each position, but instead only solutions of length 20 or less.
We wrote a program that solved a single set in about 20 seconds.
We used about 35 CPU years to find solutions to all of the positions in each of the 55,882,296 sets.”

If you want to feel “stupider”, er, “more stupid”, checkout cube20.org.

Here’s a bonus. This tutorial will get you started to solve your own Rubik’s Cubes.
Hey, we won’t tell your kids you had to cheat.

If you’re still not sick of Rubik’s Cubes, checkout its history here.